Late on Election Day in 2008, and again in 2012, the walls of my home reverberated with the sound of fireworks and horn beeping and people screaming and—this being an urban Democratic neighborhood—the inevitable gun shots.
In 2016, I could not risk a repeat. So I signed up for a two-week, in-home French refresher course with a retired prof. Since I would be staying into November, I chose Nice, a city in the south of France. Before leaving, I voted absentee and commissioned my favorite PI, Susan Daniels, (look up her Substack) to get me the home address of Jim Kallstrom, the FBI honcho who oversaw the TWA 800 investigation.
The year 2016 was the twentieth anniversary of the Paris-bound 747’s mysterious destruction off the south coast of Long Island. Earlier that year Regnery had published my book on the disaster, and I had been inundated with correspondence from knowledgeable insiders and from family members of the deceased.
In 2016 Kallstrom was serving as the national security consultant for Fox News. In that capacity, he could not hide his contempt for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. In the registered letter I sent to his home, I told Kallstrom how certain family members of TWA 800’s victims seethed when they saw him on Fox, knowing that if he told the truth about the disaster, he could upend Hillary’s ambitions. She and husband Bill had orchestrated the clumsily improvised cover-up of the crash’s real cause.
One evening, about a week before the election, I was sitting on a bench overlooking the Mediterranean when my cell phone rang. The caller ID said “Connecticut.” It was Kallstrom. I had heard he was a profane bully. He more than lived up to his reputation, making me a veritable Dresden for his many F-Bombs. He could not bear the thought that the TWA 800 family members disrespected him.
When I got him to settle down a little, he asked me if I were one of those people who though a terrorist missile had downed the plane.
“I wish I were,” I said. “I’d be more comfortable with that explanation than the truth, which is that our own Navy shot the aircraft down by accident.” {For the latest update, please see “What We Now KNOW About TWA Flight 800,” by far the most read of my Substack articles.]
Now Kallstrom really went off. “You sound like that f***ing Pierre Salinger,” he snapped. “That f***ing guy held a press conference on the f***ing French Riviera spreading that same bullshit.” I couldn’t help but laugh, thinking, “Thank God, he doesn’t know where I am.”
Pierre Salinger in the Kennedy White House
Pierre Salinger, JFK’s legendary press secretary, had remained a loyal enough Democrat to sit on his information until it lost its political punch. He broke his silence at an aviation conference in the French resort city of Cannes two days after the November 1996 election.
There, Salinger told the assembled executives that he had “very important details that show the plane was brought down by a U.S. Navy missile.” He added the obvious: “If the news came out that an American naval ship shot down that plane it would be something that would make the public very very unhappy.”
The media pushed back hard. On November 24, 1996, for instance, just four months after the crash and a year before the FBI closed its investigation, the New York Times ran an all-too-typical article by George Johnson headlined “Pierre, Is That a Masonic Flag on the Moon?” This was one of four Times articles with headlines that mocked Salinger just that November.
Pierre, Is That a Masonic Flag on the Moon?
Johnson was particularly merciless. “It was all linked to Whitewater,” Johnson scoiffed, “unless the missile was meant for a visiting U.F.O.?” Johnson’s reference to “Whitewater” was not uncommon. He made slighting allusions as well to Waco, Ruby Ridge, Arkansas state troopers, Vincent Foster, and other fonts of amusement in Clinton-era newsrooms.
What Johnson was attempting to do, and he was hardly unique in so doing, was to paint TWA 800 as one wacky anti-Clinton conspiracy out of many. What he did not do—what no one at the Times did —was speak to any of the 276 FBI witnesses to a likely missile strike.
A day later, I got another call. It was Kallstrom’s number. For a moment I thought he was going to fess up. Silly me. “Who is this?” he snarled when I picked up. “Jack Cashill,” I said. “Oops, sorry,” he said. My inquiry ended not with a bang but with a butt dial. Kallstrom died five years later, taking his secrets to the grave.
Kallstrom may have died, but the case lives through two viable law suits. Love to hear from anyone with serious inside information, jackcashill@yahoo.com.
Does anyone remember when the media's job was to hold the powerful in politics accountable, no matter their party affiliation? Yeah, neither do I.
When I was growing up in the Philippines in the 1950s and 1960s, I sat at many a table in the company of career diplomats, intelligence operators, and captains of industry.
I was just a kid, but I remember them as steady men.
What a disappointment their successors have turned out to be.