(Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Photo UPI.)
Willow has fine seafood, but no oysters. I asked last night, sitting next to Navy John and Marsha at the packed bar. There was plenty to talk about; I am headed for Toronto for a wedding in the morning; Marsha is retired now, like Navy John, and exploring the concept that she is free for the first time in her adult life to just pick up and go when and where she wants.
We talked about simplifying life, too, since it is so complicated to pick up after other people when they can no longer do it for themselves.
“I am not going to do it to my daughter,” she declared, looking at the five dollar neighborhood bar menu.
“Me neither,” I said hopefully. “I am going to miss the memorial service tomorrow,” I said. “I sent flowers to the funeral home. No closure.”
“Suicide is a difficult thing,” said Marsha, then we went on to talk of other things.
I wonder why Willow doesn’t have oysters. Tracey O’Grady’s seafood is always of the highest order; she is concerned about stability of the biomass in the ocean, and maybe that is the reason the tasty little rascals are not featured. I sometimes get a craving for a dozen on the half shell. It is something I won’t do at home, since they are so hard to open and so perilous in the endeavor, that sharp knife and the twisting motion that could out the blade into a wrist.
Better to have someone else do it, like the Presidents used their Spooks. It avoids getting blood on things- or at least, it is supposed to. Sometimes it does not work out that way.
John D. Rockefeller was the richest man in the world in his time, and he is credited with commissioning the creation of an oyster dish in his name at Antoine’s down in New Orleans, popularly known as the oldest restaurant in America, and where Jim Garrison claimed Clay Ford held the secret to the JFK killing.
What we know as oysters Rockefeller was created in 1899 by Jules Alciatore, son of the restaurant’s founder.
(President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who created the OSS had Oysters Rockefeller at Antoine’s in 1937. New Orleans Mayor Robert Maestri commented to Roosevelt “How you like dem erstas?”)
The original recipe is a secret, the sauce is known to be a puree of a number of green vegetables other than spinach, probably parley and scallions, with bread crumbs baked over oysters on the half shell. I was thinking about that because of what happened after Seymour Hersh published the summary of the CIA’s Family Jewels in December of 1974.
Nothing was gong to be the same after word got out about what had been going on in Spookland, and there was so much to tell that was going to be really bad.
Accordingly, a Blue Ribbon Panel was deemed to be in order. Perhaps by spinning things out the real secrets could be protected, the ones that might actually unhinge the Republic. President Ford considered his options, and decided to get out in front of the public outrage.
Un-elected President Ford directed appointed Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller to establish a Commission to investigate the activities of the Executive Branch, essentially having the President investigate himself. The body came to be known as the Rockefeller Commission.
It issued a single report in 1975, which delineated some CIA abuses including mail opening (HT-LINGUAL) and surveillance of domestic dissident groups (Operation CHAOS). It also conducted a narrow study of issues relating to the JFK assassination, specifically the backward head snap as seen in the Zapruder film, which was first shown publicly by Gerlado Rivera in 1975.
The head snap is perfectly rational and requires no contortions of logic if you ignore the absurd “single bullet theory.” If you look at the film, it is apparently that President Kennedy is hit almost simultaneously by a shot from above and behind (snap forward) and from a frontal angle (snap back).
The presence of additional shooters at Dealey Plaza would invalidate the “deranged lone gunman” and “magic bullet” solutions of the warren Commission, but there was so much more to tell.
The Commission also addressed the popular suspicion that Watergate figures E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis were in Dallas the day of the assassination.
The Rockefeller Report is seen by many as a “whitewash,” but may have succeeded in some limited mis-direction, since bad as the implications of the intelligence activity overseen by both Republican and Democratic administrations was, it did not result in a change of government.
The files of the Rockefeller Commission are available to review now- many are on line, and 50,000 pages of the following declassified Church Committee documents now publicly available at the National Archives.
That is what changed the whole way we do the business of intelligence. Or at least it did until 9/11.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com