Let me ask you something. What if the presidents your history textbook told you were the greatest ones, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, were ranked that high precisely because they were the most useful to the people who write the rankings? What if the scorched earth tactics American soldiers carried out across Mexico, the American South, the Philippines, Dresden, and Fallujah were never aberrations, never the fog of war, never isolated incidents, but standing orders that got passed down from one conflict to the next and never rescinded? What if the man history handed you as the father of the New Deal was simultaneously building the first modern censorship apparatus in American political history, pressuring radio stations, newspaper editors, and magazine publishers to remove anyone who dared criticize his administration? Donald Jeffries has been asking those questions since he was a teenager sitting in Mark Lane's townhouse, lobbying Congress to reopen the Kennedy assassination investigation. That was the mid-1970s. He never stopped. In the 50 years since, he has built a body of work that no establishment institution will acknowledge and that hundreds of thousands of people have sought out anyway. Ten books. Hidden History. Survival of the Richest. Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics with a foreword by Ron Paul. Bullyocracy. On Borrowed Fame. Pipe the Bimbo in Red, his deep investigation into the New Orleans network at the center of the Kennedy assassination, co-written with the foremost expert on the medical evidence in the case. And now American Memory Hole: How the Court Historians Promote Disinformation, published by Skyhorse in 2024, the most comprehensive reckoning with what the official historical record actually is and who it actually serves. Tonight we go to the U.S.-Mexican War, where American troops first turned civilian targeting into official doctrine. We go to the Civil War, where primary source letters from Union officers brag about the gold and silver they stole from Southern women on the march to the sea. We go to Woodrow Wilson, the first public eugenicist in American political history, whose physician in charge of forced sterilization programs later appeared inside a Nazi concentration camp. We go to World War I, reframed not as a response to the death of Archduke Ferdinand but as a currency war that elevated the dollar above the British pound and killed millions of men to do it. We go to Joseph McCarthy, the man history handed you as a villain, stripped tonight of the Hollywood blacklisting he had nothing to do with, restored as a decorated combat veteran, as the first public figure to say Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor was coming, as a man who died at 48 in a naval hospital with no autopsy and no explanation that holds up. We go to James Forrestal, the first prominent critic of Israel, pushed out of a window at Bethesda Naval Hospital, with McCarthy publicly naming it as murder, before McCarthy checked into that same hospital and never came back out. And we go to Dallas. To the document McGeorge Bundy drafted on the day of the assassination, before the president was dead, reversing Kennedy's Vietnam withdrawal order. To the 9:39 PM phone call in the JFK Jr. case, confirmed on unedited Coast Guard footage and then scrubbed from the official record. To the New Orleans network of Dean Andrews and Clay Shaw and David Ferrie, and the ground-level conspiracy that Jim Garrison spent his career and reputation trying to expose.
