The Day The Dream Died

Today I am casting my bread upon the waters. TDTDD – I enjoyed writing that, it reminds me of TWTWTW – is a documentary screened, only once, on Channel 4 in 1988.

It was directed by conspiracy theorist Chris Plumley who has an alarming number of conspiracies in his quiver. It’s fine to uncover one conspiracy but if they keep popping up round every corner it makes the discoverer seem rather like the boy who cried “Wolf”.

His other conspiracies, we will get back to TDTDD in a sec, are about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, 9/11, the death of Louis Renault and the US war against Nicaragua, paid for with drugs money. I’m especially intrigued (a word I use sparingly) by Renault.

The Day The Dream Died delves into the assassination of JFK and was the inspiration for Oliver Stone’s JFK. What got Chris hooked on conspiracies and the Kennedy assassination?

I went to the U.S to write a book about the assassination. When I got there, I started tracking down witnesses and I found a piece of film which just blew my mind; it changed everything. I always knew there was doubt; I just didn’t know how significant it was until I got there. I then sent this piece of film to Channel 4, with the intention of making a programme about it. Much to my surprise, they wrote back saying they were going to commission me to make it and asked how much it was going to cost. I told them about £200,000, being a bit silly, and they wrote back and said: “Ok, go for it!”

I suppose the US government were delighted to receive your assistance?

The CIA sought an injunction to prevent its broadcast- so it was never advertised in the papers as being “on.” All they could do, I forget the wording now, was say “programme to be decided on.” They had to release that to all the papers, so no one knew it was going to happen, because there was this injunction looming. And right at the last minute, Channel 4 (much to their credit), called me and said “right, we’re gonna take a chance and go with it.” Literally, on the morning of broadcast they decided to do that.

Can you just say in a very few words what the conspiracy was?

 It’s all about arms. They didn’t want a peacemaker in the White House; they wanted a warmonger in the White House. The president is the mouth piece of corporate America: largely the arms industry. I think his undoing was when he sacked Richard Helms, the head of the CIA, over the Bay of Pigs invasion. This is something which had never been done before. The CIA virtually runs the world, so he made some serious enemies. It was all crystallized by him when he announced that he was going to withdraw the troops from Vietnam; that was the final thing that killed him. (Interview extracted from ricenpeas.com)

Of course he is wrong about the CIA running the world; we all know that AT&T ran the world in those days. Nevertheless, material about Kennedy’s assassination that should have come into the public domain this year were embargoed and that has certainly breathed fresh life into Chris Plumley’s theory.

I am casting my bread upon the waters in the hope that he might stumble upon this blog and write here more fully about his investigation.

2 comments

  1. Christopher:
    Speaking of the CIA….as you might know Trump blasted the former heads of the CIA, NSA and FBI while in Asia and last night Jim
    Brennan, the former head of the CIA, said on CNN: It’s an honor to
    be criticized by this man. If I was Trump, I’d be very careful about making so many enemies among our intelligence agencies….we can only hope…
    and as for conspiracy theories if the US government would stop lying to its people, maybe we’d stop making them the enemy….

  2. I have a distinct memory of Alan Dulles resigning after the Bay of Pigs fiasco…Helms,whom I met in Washington ,was suitably glacial in public but was a font of OSS stories occassionally ..Oh So Social was largely true,Yale versus the Nazis etc. Was tight lipped about Stuart Preston in a way that seemed to tip his hand but it was was probably streetcraft of rare form. The late Cardinal Dulles was always sympathetic about his uncle getting so many Cuban Catholics killed…saw the invasion I suspect as a new Cristero rising…but this is sumise on my part.

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