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The conspiracist

Gay-rights crusader Paul Kuntzler turns a sharp mind for detail to the JFK assassination
January 11, 2007 12:19:43 PM

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“Assassination-conspiracy theorist” is a relatively recent addition to Paul Kuntzler’s résumé. For much longer, he has been one of Washington, DC’s most prominent gay firebrands. Over the phone following a lunch meeting near his Capitol Hill–area office, he pinpoints the important moments of his activist career as if flipping through a mental calendar.

“On the first Tuesday in April, 1962, I was elected to the Mattachine Society executive board,” he says, referring to the oldest homophile group in America. “On Saturday, April 17, 1965, I was a participant in the world’s first demonstration for gay civil rights in front of the White House. In January of 1966, the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club” — the still-extant mouthpiece for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Democrats in DC — “was founded in my living room.”

In March of 1971, Kuntzler managed the congressional campaign of Mattachine president Franklin E. Kameny — the first openly gay candidate running for Congress — who was seeking a non-voting seat representing the District of Columbia. In April of that year, he helped found another equal-rights group, DC’s Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance (GLAA), the US’s oldest continuously active gay and lesbian civil-rights organization.

Kuntzler, 65, has near-total recall of the momentous dates in his life. (Within three minutes of meeting him at his office, he’s told me the date and day of the week of his birth, and the Grosse Pointe, Michigan, hospital in which he was born. Later, navigating the wide avenues around Capitol Hill, he tells me that he first arrived in DC two days after his 20th birthday, on Thursday, December 28, 1961. And that he met Stephen Brent Miller, his late partner of 42 years, “on Friday, March 28, 1962, at 11 o’clock pm.”)

But in recent years, Paul Kuntzler has been fixated on another point in time: 12:30 pm, November 22, 1963 — the moment President John F. Kennedy was mortally wounded by gunshot in Dallas, Texas. For the past year and half, the long-time gay-rights activist has been waging a one-man, self-financed campaign to publicize what he believes was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, as well as the media’s complicity in covering it up.

In a four-page letter sent last April to Washington Post chairman Donald E. Graham — and subsequently reprinted in its entirety as a four-page ad, purchased for $4000, in the LGBT weekly the Washington Blade — Kuntzler laid out his sweeping, Byzantine theory.

“President John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” he contends, “was murdered by Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson in a widespread, incredibly complex and brilliantly planned conspiracy that involved the Federal Bureau of Investigations directed by J. Edgar Hoover, the Central Intelligence Agency directed by David Atlee Phillips, the Secret Service, the United States Navy, General Curtis LeMay of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Ford Motor Company, the Dallas Police including Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, big oil of Texas, the Texas political establishment, the mafia, and the anti-Castro Cubans.”

Since May 2005, in a ceaseless flurry of typed letters, scrawled faxes, printed e-mails, and underlined photocopies sent not just to Graham but to New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., Kuntzler has lobbied to get his theory some ink in the country’s two most important newspapers. His crusade so far has been met, perhaps predictably, with almost deafening silence.

Still, he continues his quest. It’s the “morally correct thing to do. I always wanted to make a contribution,” he says.

When asked why he cares so keenly about this issue, why he’s devoted so much time and money to something most people just shrug away with a rueful frown, his normally even-keeled voice rises considerably. “Because it changed the course of history. The last 43 years! There would have been no Vietnam war, where 57,000 Americans died and 300,000 were injured, including my brother. Two million Vietnamese. Nixon wouldn’t have been president. There wouldn’t have been any Bushes. There wouldn’t have been an Iraq War. It’s a matter of integrity. I think the American people, once they learn the truth, will take a big broom and clean house.”

Birth of an obsession
Paul Kuntzler became president of Miller Reporting Co. in 2004. Founded in 1960, and bought in 1980 by Kuntzler’s late partner, Stephen Miller, it is one of the largest court-reporting and transcription services in the world, stenotyping congressional testimony and the proceedings of other high-profile federal agencies.

In 1998, the company transcribed the records of the Assassination Records Review Board, which served as a dragnet for the gathering and release of government records concerning the JFK assassination. It was Kuntzler’s work on this project that, in part, turned what had been a subject of keen curiosity into a near obsession.

And it’s on Miller Reporting letterhead that Kuntzler writes most of his letters to the editors and publishers at the New York Times and the Washington Post. (According to a July article in the Washington Times, Kuntzler racked up nearly $25,000 on his corporate credit card in relation to a Kennedy-assassination roundtable that he sponsored this spring at the famous Willard Hotel, in Washington.)


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COMMENTS

As a former employee of the court reporting company inherited by Mr. Kuntzler after the death of Steve Miller, I must correct the writer's assertion (probably it was Kuntzler's assertion) that the company is one of the world's largest - at least not since most of its employees quit last summer because our paychecks were bouncing. It seems this supposedly self-financed obsession was one of the many problems Mr. Kuntzler has that led to his destruction of a beloved company.

POSTED BY Susan Harris AT 01/10/07 9:01 PM
Paul Kuntzler responds to The Boston Phoenix article: Miller Reporting Company did the reporting for the Assassination Records Review Board. Congress created the John F. Kennedy Records Act in 1992 that created a five-civilian member board entrusted with the responsibility to review and declassify documents held by the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, etc. President Bill Clinton made the appointments to the board. On Monday, November 9, 1998 the National Archives released to the public all the working files of the Assassination Records Review Board (AARB)and its staff, covering the recently completed 4 year effort of that independent Federal agecy to find and release goverment records related to the Kennedy assassination. Among the internal records released that day was a 32-page reseach paper written by the AARB's Chief Analyst for Military Records, which provide compelling evidence that there were two different brain speciments examined following the autopsy on the body of JFK--President Kennedy's brain, as was expected; and a fraudulent substituted brain speciment at a later date--and that the brain photographs in the National Archives today in the so-called 'autopsy collection' are not the images of President Kennedy's brain, but the images of someone else's. All photographic records of President Kennedy's brain have disappeared, since its pattern of damage was consistent with being shot from the front; the images of the substituted speciment show damage generally consistent with the official version of what happened, of being shot from above and behind. The final shot that killed President Kennedy came from the front, from an assassin in the storm sewer to the right of limousine, entered his right temple and exited from the back causing a massive hole in the back of Kennedy's head. The small hole in the right temple was covered up, and in the forged photographs, a soft-matte insert was put into place to cover up the massive hole in the back of his head. On April 4, 2006, my staff and I delivered to Mr. Donald E. Graham, Chairman of the Board of The Washington Post a massive document supporting the fact that that there was a government-wide conspiracy that murdered President John Fitzgerald Kenndy on Friday, November 22, 1963. The document summaries the 10 major discoveries of The Conspiracy and the document now numbers 177 pages and has a three-page bibliography, including 44 books, 17 videos, and 6 DVD's. Among the findings is this: The reason that President Richard Nixon authorized the break-in in the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Complex during the night of June 16-17, 1972 was that Nixon was fearful that National Chairman Larry O'Brien might have documents in his files indicating that Nixon was involved in the murder of Kennedy--he was. I outlined the evidence in two letters to Michael Powell, Bureau Chief of the New York Bureau of The Post in letters of March 28,2006 and April 14, 2006. The reason that the lid has been kept on this extrordinary crime for more than 43 years is that much of the elite media were infiltrated by the Central Intelligency Agency. Life Magazine, for example, in a story written by Thomas Thompson in its November 29, 1963 issue wrote that the Dallas Police were "comparing his (Lee Harvey Oswald's) palm-marks with the one found on the murder weapon." Thompson wrote this story over the assassination weekend of November 23-24, 1963. In fact, the F.B.I. got the palm print from Oswald's dead body on Monday morning, November 25 and then announced that they had found the palm print on the weapon. Gerald Posner, the author of the book, "Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald the Assassination of JFK" wrote book reviews for The New York Times. Posner's book was written for an elite audience, primarily journalists, predisposed to believe the government's false version of events. The book is a fraud. Editor Robert Loomis of Random House solicted Posner to write this book with the promise of full CIA cooperation. (See page 524 of Joan Mellen's book, "A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination and the Case That Should Have Changed History." Potomac Books, 2005.) Last January 13, 2006, Milton Coleman, Deputy Managing Editor of The Washington Post arranged for me to meet with Michelle Garcia, Post reporter of the New York Bureau in my suite at the Waldorf=Astoria in New York. That afternoon, I gave Ms. Garcia a number of items related to the Kennedy assassination, including the two censured videos: "The Men Who Killed Kennedy, The Final Chapter, Volumes I and II." Subsequently, I began having conversations with Michael Powell, Bureau Chief of the New York Bureau. On March 27, I met with Michael Powell in his office on West 57th Street. In October I found it necessary to retain the services of John J. Janiec, whose offices are in the Empire State Building and to sue The Washington Post for the purpose of regaining my property. Not until John Janiec actually filed papers in the New York courts did The Post relent and returned most of my property. The Post still has not returned the critical video, Volume I of "The Men Who Killed Kennedy." The SOMMONS of the Supreme Court of the State of New York was issued to The Washington Post on October 27, 2006. Sincerely, Paul Kuntzler, President Miller Reporting Company 735 8th Street, S.E. Washington, D.C. 20003 202/546-6666 202/546-1502 paul@millerreporting.com

POSTED BY Paul Kuntzler AT 01/11/07 4:25 PM
I would like to thank Mr. Kuntzler for trying to bring the truth to this matter to the surface. I have been a student of the assasination for over thirty years and have been frustrated over the lack of our national media to expose the truth. The History of our country would be much different had this murder not taken place. Thank you Mr. Kuntzler. I would do anything in my power to help you in your quest for the truth.

POSTED BY Joseph anthony AT 01/15/07 3:26 PM
Long before Oliver Stone made JFK, I spent several years reading every book I could find on the assassination, starting with the Warren Report, which appeared to make a credible case for the lone man assassin theory. How gullible I was, and how little I knew. Though I admire the work Mr. Kuntzler is doing and his drive to expose "the truth", the painful truth is that at this point, it really matters little who killed President Kennedy, who covered it up, or why. It happened, and it changed history, unfortunately in both cases. With so many with motives, and so many mysterious deaths following the event, we can never know the truth. It's simply not possible. After my years of studying the case and the different theories each book espoused (one even claimed an SS man in the following car accidentally shot him), I finally concluded that if the Lord himself (or herself) were to dictate from above the truth about what actually happened surrounding the assassination and the events thereafter, people wouldn't find that version of events any more or less credible than the existing theories. I'm certainly glad interest in the case is still alive, but there were likely many high level players involved, and others who knew about it and did and said nothing. But we will never know for certain who really pulled of the true Crime of the Century.

POSTED BY Steve S AT 01/17/07 12:46 AM
//jfkmurdersolved.com/spooks.htm SPOOKS, HOODS & THE HIDDEN ELITE A chilling account of top secret "black operations' conducted during the Cold War at the behest of the Secret Government. This provocative new release unveils the true face of the hidden elite and their excise of power from behind the shadows. CIA contract agent and underworld figure ,Chauncey Holt, takes you inside the deadly world of "black ops." Holt exposes the means by which the Secret Government uses the intelligence community and organized crime as cover for their nefarious control over U.S. policy while maintaining plausible deniability for themselves. This DVD also chronicles an assassination paper trail: private correspondence between agents and assets of the Secret Government regarding the logistics of removing President John F. Kennedy from office in 1963. This is the story that was never meant to see the light of day...as told by one who was in Dealey Plaza on the day that JFK was assassinated.... Spooks, Hoods and the Hidden Elite This provocative new DVD takes you inside the Secret Government's plot to remove President John F. Kennedy from office. CIA contract agent and underworld figure, the late Chauncey Holt, recounts his participation in deep cover black operations run by the intelligence community during the height of the Cold War. Holt carefully connects how these "black ops" were turned against JFK leading up to his assassination in 1963. Agents and proxies who did the bidding of the 'shadow government' are unmasked for the first time. The Secret Government's unseen hand in the coup is laid bare by a private assassination paper trail that has never surfaced until now. You won't find these documents in the National Archives or the redacted files of the Assassination Records Review Board. Chauncey Holt divulges his role in the incestuous relationship that he says existed between the intelligence community and organized crime and shows how these groups were co-opted by a hidden elite to dispose of a president who challenged their power... //jfkmurdersolved.com/spooks.htm

POSTED BY Wim Dankbaar AT 01/18/07 3:21 AM
The guy has gone over the edge. What a waste of newspaper space to print the (unoriginal) ravings of a sick man.

POSTED BY jimxxx AT 01/19/07 7:22 PM

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