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.