Hidden History
A transcript of the Lew Rockwell Show episode 449 with Donald Jeffries.
December 23, 2016
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ROCKWELL: Well, good morning. This is the Lew Rockwell Show. And how great it is to have as our guest this morning, Mr. Donald Jeffries. Donald is the author of one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read. It’s called Hidden History: An Expose’ of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-ups in American Politics. So not only does this book cover everything from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to current crimes and conspiracies of the American regime, it does it in a very small compass, just 375 pages, yet it does it thoroughly, and just a tremendously well-done narrative. I mean, this is not a difficult book to read. In fact, it’s a difficult book to put down once you pick it up. I can’t recommend it strongly enough. If you’re interested in the real history of our time, if you’re interested in what you’re being lied to about and what the truth is, get a copy of Hidden History.
And it’s so great to have the author on with us this morning. Don Jeffries, when he was 19 years old, went to work for the great Mark Lane, author of the first revisionist work on the Kennedy assassination. The man, of course, was persecuted for that.
He’s been researching the Kennedy assassination for 40 years; teaches a course in it. He’s also an expert in a whole bunch of other things, whether it’s the assassination of Martin Luther King, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr, the truth about the killing of bin Laden, 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing. I mean, we could just go down the list of all the things that have riveted us as Americans over these years, ever since Kennedy was assassinated. This is the book to help guide you through what actually happened, and to explain to you just how rotten the American regime is. I mean, that’s another great thing about this book.
So, Don, what got you interested in the Kennedy assassination? Why did you go to work for Mark Lane? You were 19. What got you interested in all this?
JEFFRIES: Well, thanks for all the kind words, Mr. Rockwell.
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I became politically aware during Watergate, ironically enough, and as a teenager. And I just happened to read a book called, They’ve Killed the President. It actually turned out to be not one of the better books on the Kennedy assassination, by Robert Sam Anson. Then I read Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane and Accessories After the Fact by Meacher, and all the early works of the whitewash series from Harold Weisberg. And I heard about the Citizens Committee of Inquiry, which was near – I’m in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. still, and I was then. And Mark Lane had his office in D.C. and that was the headquarters for trying to lobby Congress. And so, it was sort of natural for me to gravitate to that.
And it was an exciting time. It was just off the Watergate era and there was a sense of reform in the air. And it was just terribly disillusioning for a lot of us when the House Select Committee on Assassinations ended up being such a disappointment. It wound up supporting all the Warren Commission conclusions and, at the last minute, they had the introduction of some acoustic evidence that was really dubious compared to the other evidence, and just kind of concluded that it was probably a conspiracy. Most of us were very disappointed about it.
But at that time, I was gung-ho and idealistic and I thought I could be one of the next Woodward and Bernstein and uncover all these scandals that I was discovering. And it was terribly disappointing to find out that the mainstream media was one of the main culprits in all this and the reason why so many people don’t know the truth.
ROCKWELL: You mentioned Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate. You also tell us the real story about that, which, of course, like all these events, is not exactly the one that’s peddled by the mainstream media and academia and big corporations and, of course, the government itself, the entire regime that oppresses us.
JEFFRIES: Yeah. Really, in Watergate, you know, going back over what I wrote in the book, Nixon actually comes off pretty well compared to most of the other presidents. I actually had less on him than any of them. There wasn’t really a body count that I could find compared to the other presidents, other than a lot of people related to Watergate. But I think Kologny (?) and other people have talked about it. I think Watergate was basically – it really was kind of a two-bit burglary.
And it was amazing to see how that was really the only time in my lifetime that the press worked the way it’s supposed to work, where they went after the president gung-ho, and they had Deep Throat and had Woodward and Bernstein and had front-page stories every day in The Washington Post. But it was later when I realized these are the same people that are still covering up the Kennedy assassination and –
(LAUGHTER)
— that have gone after nothing. And Ben Bradlee, who was supposedly JFK’s best friend, and then you find out later his childhood friend was Richard Helms. They grew up together. And there’s such an overlap there.
And The Post has covered up through George Lardner Jr for years, all the way down to, you know, when they leaked an advance copy of Oliver Stone’s JFK script. Ironically, from Harold Weisberg, yet another of the critics, who leaked it to George Lardner Jr. And the press just never told the truth.
And to anyone who reads my book, if there’s an underlying theme with it, it’s just if we had some real – you know, some of those old reporters – you know, the cigarette dangling out of their mouth and the shot of bourbon next to them and pecking away on the typewriter – if we had those kinds of guys we saw in the old days maybe these things would not happen because they would be destroyed. But instead, you have to depend on people on the Internet, which is great, because that’s where the real journalism is now; people out of their basements, you know, putting on great YouTube videos and so forth.
But the mainstream media – you know, you could see it in this presidential campaign – they’ve become so transparent where they don’t even try to say they’re journalists anymore. They’re just cheerleaders for this corrupt state we have.
ROCKWELL: The late Murray Rothbard, who was a strong advocate of what you call good conspiracy theories – there are bad conspiracy theories and there are good conspiracies theories; it’s up to the scholar to tell the difference. But he thought it extremely important. The good conspiracy theories were extremely important. And he included it in his historical writing. And certainly, was very interested in the Kennedy assassination and all these sorts of things, and would he have loved this book.
But you mentioned Watergate and you also write about the shooting of George Wallace. Was that a Republican deal? What happened there? We all know that wasn’t just a lone nut, right? It’s always a lone nut. Turns out never to be a lone nut.
JEFFRIES: No. All these things are just explained away in such a tidy way. I mean, America is the only nation where politicians get killed or get removed from office and we’re supposed to believe it’s not a conspiracy?
(LAUGHTER)
And we’re always asked to believe this.
In the case of Wallace, I think he was still representing perhaps a semi-threat to the establishment. I don’t know. He was kind of a renegade out there. You know, I didn’t have that much on that in the book. But certainly, Arthur Herman Bremer, he was a three-namer, like so many of these assassins are, which I find humorous. But certain people in the CIA were seen, you know, going to his apartment or whatever right after the – there were too many people there that had dubious backgrounds and they just kind of swept that under the rug. He’s one of these guys that – I believe he’s still alive – and I’ve never seen an interview with him. You would think somebody might want to talk to people like that.
(LAUGHTER)
But we really didn’t see an interview with John Hinckley for a long time. He’s finally been released. But he really stayed under the radar. And you would think these people would be – they certainly interviewed Charles Manson enough. But they don’t interview these guys for some reason. I would expect that that would be something – in fact, I believe John Hinckley was begging to be interviewed. I mean, for some reason, they just wouldn’t do it.
But that’s the kind of press we have. There’s no curiosity there. And the only skepticism they have is towards people like me or you that are questioning these things. They question the questioners. They say, “What do you mean? Why do you think this?” We saw it recently in all the WikiLeaks. I mean, the thrust of the argument on the part of journalists everywhere is who leaked it. Was it Russia?
(LAUGHTER)
Did Trump have anything to do with it? And nothing about the fact that the leak reveals that the Democratic Party’s primary process was completely corrupt and it was overtly stealing the nomination from the peoples’ choice, Bernie Sanders, and giving it to Hillary Clinton. But nobody cares about that. Instead, it’s, well, who leaked it.
Just like Bradley Manning, Chelsea Manning, whatever, is sitting in prison for decades for simply revealing the horrendous conduct of our troops overseas. And the same thing with Snowden, where he’s in exile because he can’t come back because in the West they want to prosecute him for revealing that our government was spying on us.
I really don’t know how we can get anything done without – when the media is really just – I know Pravda, I guess, and TASS were bad back in the days at the height of the Soviet Union, but I can’t believe they were much more overtly spokespersons for the state than our own mainstream media is at this point.
ROCKWELL: No. I have a friend, Yuri Maltsev, who was an economist in the Soviet Union, and he said the difference is, in the Soviet Union, nobody believed Pravda or TASS.
(LAUGHTER)
They always assumed they were lying. He said, I come to America, and everybody is believing the mainstream media.
JEFFRIES: Yeah. That’s the saddest part. I don’t know how many times it has to happen where – they can go back to the Gulf War where that CNN reporter was faking a scud attack and, you know, oh, my god.
(LAUGHTER)
And they know he did, and his career didn’t miss a blip. He’s still doing things. And during the Treyvon Martin/ Zimmerman fiasco, they edited tapes to make it sound – to try to make it appear that Zimmerman was bringing up race. MSNBC admitted it. Nothing happened. Recently, Katie Couric had some kind of a little special on gun control and the entire thing was edited to make it look like the people who were pro-Second Amendment were just sitting there stupefied where they couldn’t answer her ridiculous talking point. Of course, they had edited it, when they actually had answers that just blew her arguments away. But these people are still in a lot of the public eye, and that’s the problem we have. More and more people are becoming awake but the ones that are asleep, they’re in comas. I mean, you can’t wake them. No matter what, they just give you that look. It’s very frustrating because, without people becoming awake and aware, it’s hard to really get rid of this corruption.
ROCKWELL: But do you think there’s a reason for hope in the conduct of the media right now because – well, Rothbard, he always loved the fact that in the 19th century, it was clear who the newspapers were for. It was clear in their ideological orientation and, therefore, the reader could judge what they were saying from knowing what their point of view was. He said, then, in the 20th century, they all pretended not to have a point of view. They’re just merely disinterested journalists who just want to bring you the truth and they’re just investigating the facts and they don’t actually have a point of view. Well, of course, that was a lie. But now, maybe for the first time, it seems to me it’s becoming evident to regular people that the media are just a scam, that they’re just a con job, that they just have one point of view and they suppress other points of view, and they’re just a bunch of corrupt propagandists. Certainly, the polls seem to indicate that fewer and fewer people believe them. Maybe this is an opening for the kind of journalism you do, for all the other great work that’s happening on the Internet. Is it possible that this could be a turning point for us, discrediting the mainstream media, and bringing new interest to those who are actually telling the truth?
JEFFRIES: Well, I hope so. But what we’ve seen so far – I mean, really, I liken it to finally people are seeing how the sausages are being made in both of our major parties. Because we saw it in the Republican primary process where the leaders were overtly trying to steal the nomination from the front runner, Donald Trump, and everybody knew it. I mean, at one point, I believe it was Reince Priebus who said on national TV, yeah, you’ve got a really good point there, I really don’t know why people are voting. Why are they voting if the party chooses the delegates? And he says, yeah, you’ve got a good point, I don’t know why. And in the case of Bernie Sanders, I mean, he was drawing rallies of 30,000 people, signs everywhere, young people, enthused, behind him, and Hillary Clinton couldn’t fill a room. And you’re seeing that now with Trump having those kind of rallies and Hillary. So, people, again, that are awake or buying into it.
But what my fear is, with the massive voting fraud we’ve had, and we saw so much in the primary season, that I just don’t know, even if people wake up, because we have the dichotomy to consider that not only does the media have an approval rating at like 6% but our congressional representatives have an approval rating around the same thing, 6%, 7%, 8%. Yet, every election, we’re supposed to believe that these same people who hate them re-elect 96% of the incumbents. So how does that happen? And they try to brush that off as, well, people, they hate Congress but they love their own congressman. I’ve never met anybody that loves their congressman!
(LAUGHTER)
What are you trying to –
(LAUGHTER)
ROCKWELL: We all hate our congressman if we know anything about him.
JEFFRIES: Yeah. If anything, you should hate your own congressman more.
(LAUGHTER)
But that one argument makes no sense.
But, people who have read my book know I have a long section on both scandals where the Collier brothers just did a great job of showing that back in the ’80s, that this stuff was – I mean, capturing on videotape the League of Women Voters messing with the chads and counting the same votes over and over again. It’s even easier with the electronic voting. And so, it’s hard to trust the process. That’s why I place so much emphasis on what kind of crowds – and we saw this during 2012 with Ron Paul. I mean, I went to some of his rallies. My son and his friend were very involved with his campaign. And they’d be wrapped around the buildings and they had to turn people away. Then, they tell you that Rick Santorum, who would have like 10 people at a rally —
(LAUGHTER)
— was beating him. It doesn’t pass the eye test.
And we’ve seen the same thing, I think, with Hillary Clinton where she clearly has very little support. And the only support she has is because the people that are still buying into that narrative in the mainstream media are just hating on Trump and they’re trying to stop him. But very, very few people, I think, are actually excited about voting for her. But, you know, once again, Ron Paul did not make enough of an issue of it as he should have back in 2012. Trump talked a little bit about it. But Bernie Sanders really should have made an issue about it. I think he told the people that are getting run over and are getting screwed over by the process, until they actually make an issue of it, the Bernie flog is going to continue because the mainstream media is never going to question it. They don’t care. They’re just going to tell you, yeah, you know, Hillary Clinton, she won. There’s not a sign in the entire district but, somehow, she won that district. No bumper stickers, she had to cancel rallies because nobody’s there, but somebody is voting for her. But some of us out here don’t buy it.
ROCKWELL: No. So, do you think she’ll end up stealing this election?
JEFFRIES: Well, it’s hard to tell what’s going on with this mysterious illness of hers. At times, she doesn’t even look alive. And there are conspiracy theories all over the Internet, she’s been replaced by a double, and others. I mean, she looks like she has to be propped up. She has coughing fits. She’s passing out. She’s certainly who they want. And unless this is the greatest psy-op of all times, they’re really opposed to Trump.
I never in a million years thought that I would like someone like Donald Trump, but he’s got all the right enemies. Sometimes you have to look at, well, you know, the entire establishment is aligned against him. I mean, really, it’s amazing. Whether he’s the real deal or not, I don’t know. But we know Hillary isn’t the real deal. And I’ve voted so many times for third-party candidates and I just – they’re not going to count their votes and we know they’re never going to win. So, I would either vote for Trump or sit the election out.
But at this point, I don’t know what to expect. I can’t imagine if Trump is the real deal that the establishment will let him become president. If he did somehow win the election, I would expect the Supreme Court to come up with some kind of decision that he wasn’t qualified to become president or something. But I’m sure the media would say, yeah, you know, this has always been this way.
ROCKWELL: Or is there a chance, if he’s for real – and I don’t know if he’s for real or not, although it’s heartening that all the right people hate his guts. I mean, I like that.
But is it possible that there will be a lone nut? We already had one guy apparently attempt to kill him. Of course, when you think of the hate campaign going on –
JEFFRIES: Yeah.
ROCKWELL: — it might even stimulate an actual lone nut. But my guess is it would be all planned.
JEFFRIES: That would certainly seal the deal. You know, then we’d know he was the real guy.
I don’t know. They haven’t assassinated anybody – that was all in vogue in the ’60s. But you mentioned Wallace. And then, of course, the assassination attempt on Reagan in 1981 was really the last attempt at a major politician that we could look behind it for political reasons. I don’t know. That doesn’t seem to be the way they operate now. They have smear campaigns, which they’ve certainly tried so hard on Trump. But the thing I think that’s backfiring on them is the more they try the predictable tactics against him, the more support he gets because people hate the media so much. And as you mentioned – and I believe it, too – I’ve lost so many friends on social media because of saying good things about Trump. But I said, look, he’s an awful candidate in many ways. I mean, he talks like a third grader half the time and can’t formulate his sentences. He’s like a WWE guy half the time, too. So, he could clearly be a phony. And with his background, who knows. But his most attractive feature is the hatred he draws from everybody.
(LAUGHTER)
ROCKWELL: I know.
JEFFRIES: That’s his most attractive quality. Well, god, if all the big bankers hate him and the people of Bohemian Grove and the entire mainstream media! He’s the first candidate in my lifetime that I know of that is not getting money from the Goldman Sachs and the predictable people that usually back both candidates so they know they’ve got a winner either way. In this case, nobody’s backing him, so.
ROCKWELL: In fact, Goldman Sachs actually ordered all its employees not to give him any money.
JEFFRIES: Yeah. I mean, that’s –
(LAUGHTER)
ROCKWELL: And that wasn’t even controversial.
(LAUGHTER)
JEFFRIES: But it is hard. I don’t know anybody that is supporting him. I think he represents something symbolically at this point. You know, it’s kind of a big, giant middle finger to the establishment.
ROCKWELL: That’s right.
JEFFRIES: Yeah. I don’t know what he would do. But we know what Hillary Clinton would do, or any other Democrat that they’d put in there. If he just simply rolled back – if he just stopped TPP, if he did something to try to bring industry back to the country, I mean, that would be – that’s a major plank of globalism – if he could do something like that. I don’t like his rhetoric certainly talking about torture and Guantanamo Bay. But on the other hand, he’s also talked about we’ve wasted trillions on these wars, and he seems to have been against most of our occupations. He’s the only one that doesn’t want to go to war with Russia. So, I don’t know. At this point, I think he’s our only choice.
ROCKWELL: Well, Don, what’s going on right now that’s not included in this book that you’re maybe going to put in your next book?
JEFFRIES: Well, I’ve got a lot of projects going on. In fact, I’m working on Hidden History, II, which is going to be pre-1963 conspiracies.
ROCKWELL: Oh, tremendous.
JEFFRIES: Yeah. And it’s probably going to be a little harder to get published because it’s got a lot of – I’m sure you know. I know you’ve published the work of Thomas DiLorenzo. A great admirer of his. It’s got a long section on Lincoln. So, it’s not going to be something the court historians will like. And they probably won’t like my section on FDR and –
ROCKWELL: Don’t forget there’s Amazon and CreateSpace. You can publish it yourself and circumvent all these creeps.
JEFFRIES: Well, yeah. If I had to, I would do that. But I think, at this point, Hidden History has done well and I’ve already committed to the next book with Skyhorse, so I think they’ll stick with me. We’ll see. Hopefully. Maybe some of it has to be toned down a little bit. But I want people to recognize it.
I’ve had people say, you know, it didn’t begin with the Kennedy assassination. I say, yeah, I realize that, but in my lifetime. I was 7 when he was assassinated. I just draw a line, like if you had a graph. On November 22, 1963, in a lot of ways, America was at its peak. Life was good. You had jobs for anyone who wanted them, pretty much. We had the post-war boom that was still going on. The suburbs were flourishing. But from that moment on, I think it – mainly, it’s because they sold the people such a lame explanation that very few people ever bought. And we had this tremendous change. And then, psychologically, going to this LBJ character who was just such a hokey, hack-party politician, where you had this eloquent guy who could speak well before, I think, psychologically, that just had a lot of impact and it lead the way to the rest of the ’60s. But I don’t want people to think it’s just – I’m going to try to concentrate on all of the things that happened before then, from the Revolutionary War, forward.
ROCKWELL: Excellent.
But wasn’t the Kennedy assassination also a coup? I mean, it wasn’t just killing this one guy. It did mean a change in the regime, a significant change, much for the worse, of course, as you point out.
JEFFRIES: Yeah. I think there’s been an effort for a long time, especially among the left – Kennedy – as you know, if you read my book, I just castigate the left. The left absolutely hates Kennedy. And they hate the Kennedys, period. And he was a voice for peace. He was an actual idealist who believed – he was more of a classical Liberal. And he was trying to do things he thought were right. But the main reason they hated him was because he was trying to do things on his own. Just like abolishing the CIA. He was going after the mafia. He knew about the Federal Reserve. And his father, I’m sure, told him all about the bankers and the Federal Reserve, so he had to have heard a lot of talk about that. Between him and his brother, these were, you know, rich outsiders maybe as much – maybe Trump would be that way, too. I don’t know. The only kind of outsider we’re going to get in America is going to be a multimillionaire or a billionaire because average people, they’re just kept outside the gates of power. The system is just not going to allow them in there. So, all we can hope for is a renegade like a Trump.
But it certainly was a coup. And as I said, I don’t think we’ve ever recovered from it. And they’ve had to kill several other Kennedys since then because blood is thicker than water and I think they realized the friction with John F. Kennedy Jr. I expose the fact, from talking to people, that he had a quest to find out who had killed his father. Unlike the rest of the Kennedy family, he wanted to know. And he was about to enter the world of politics.
ROCKWELL: Donald Jeffries, thanks so much for coming on today. Thanks for writing this great book, Hidden History: An Expose’ of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-ups in American Politics. We look forward to your next book and to all the work you’re doing. We’ll link to your blog, Keeping it Unreal. And I hope you’ll come on again when your next book comes out.
JEFFRIES: That would be great. Any time. And thanks so much for having me.
ROCKWELL: Thank you. Bye-bye.
Well, thanks so much for listening to the Lew Rockwell Show today. Take a look at all the podcasts. There have been hundreds of them. There’s a link on the LRC front page. Thank you.
Podcast date, September 23, 2016
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