Getting a Grip on
Thomas Merton’s Murder
Null Set
Decent, intelligent, and a journalist,
You know what’s occurred to me?
In what has become of America,
It’s impossible to be all three.
It’s a rare thing for a book to receive a
major review almost five years after its publication, but that, in effect, is
what happened on the evening of Tuesday, February 14, 2023.
The book in question is the one written by Hugh Turley and me entitled The Martyrdom of
Thomas Merton: An Investigation.
The book was published on March 7, 2018, which happened to be the 50th
anniversary year of the mysterious death of the very influential antiwar
Catholic monk in Thailand, which was virtually in the heart of the U.S.
military’s Vietnam War theater of operations.
The Phoenix Program, which involved
wholesale assassinations of suspected Vietcong and Vietcong sympathizers was
being conducted by American and American-backed operatives in nearby South
Vietnam.
Merton had been found dead around 4 pm in
the room of his guest cottage at the Red Cross retreat center near Bangkok on
December 10, 1968, after he had eaten lunch in the wake of the presentation
that he had given there. A faulty
Hitachi stand fan was lying diagonally across his supine body near the pelvic
area. The body was clad in the bottom
part of short summer pajamas. There was
a wound observed by witnesses in the back of Merton’s head that had “bled
considerably,” but it was not mentioned by the Thai police investigators, who
concluded, without an autopsy, that Merton had died of “heart failure” and was
already dead from that natural cause before he encountered the fan. That head wound was not mentioned in any of the
news reports, either.
The occasion for the belated “review” of
our book was an installment of a webinar series entitled “Tuesdays with
Merton”
that is put on by the International Thomas Merton Society (ITMS) on the first
Tuesday of each month. My co-author and
I had greatly anticipated this one because the featured guest was to be the
retired TV news anchor and journalism
professor,
Bob Grip, who is a past president of the ITMS. We
mention Grip in four pages of our new book, Thomas Merton’s
Betrayers: The Case against Abbot James Fox and Author John Howard Griffin. Most notably, we find Grip’s name invoked by
Bonnie Thurston, another past president of the ITMS, who is featured in our
“Lesser Betrayers” chapter:
Finally, Thurston concluded by stating
that Robert Grip has done research and concluded that the [Merton] death was
accidental. In other words, Thurston’s
proof is, “because Robert Grip said so.”
If Grip has published any evidence, Thurston did not say where it might
be found, and we have not discovered it. (pp. 190-191)
Our Valentine from
Grip
We watched the interview in the hope that
we would find out what Grip knows about the Merton death case that has caused
him to come to a conclusion so radically different from the one that we have
reached. It is no exaggeration to say
that Grip greatly exceeded our expectations, and he ended up giving us what
amounted to a very big Valentine’s Day present.
Even though the subject of the presentation was “Washington Watches the
Monk II,” with a short explanation that he would explore the question, “Did the
U.S. government monitor the actions of Thomas Merton?” which Grip did and
concluded in the affirmative, but, in fact, he devoted a very large part of his
presentation to our 2018 book. It really amounted to an oral and visual
review of the book by a man who has spent his entire career in the oral and
visual medium of television journalism, as well as teaching about it at the
college level.
Of course, as one might expect, he is not
at all complimentary toward the book, but he makes it abundantly clear that he
has done virtually no independent research on Merton’s death and that what he
might know about the actual details of the tragic event he could only have
learned from our book. The closest he
has come to independent inquiry is to ask the famed New York Times reporter,
Seymour Hersh, who broke the My Lai massacre story, if he knew anything about
the possibility of foul play in Merton’s death and Hersh responded that he
didn’t. We are to conclude from that, we
may suppose, that if the press’s accidental-electrocution story was presumably
good enough for the skeptical-minded Hersh, then it should be good enough for
the rest of us. We shall have more to
say about Hersh later.
Apart from the invocation of Hersh in the
breach, Grip, as we have suggested, gives us nothing as a critique of The
Martyrdom of Thomas Merton that begins to reflect any original
research. So how, one might wonder,
with so little contrary information to offer, did Grip manage to spend his time
running down our book?
At this point, if you are pressed for time
or don’t think you have the stomach to watch the man who could have been the
inspiration for the Ted Baxter
character
for 53 minutes, you might simply go read “Professor Secretly Trashes Merton Book,” which was my
response to the brief review that Dr. Gregory K. Hillis, a professor in the
Department of Theology and Religious Studies of Bellarmine University, posted—and
has since taken down—on his very active Twitter page—a page to which he has now
denied me access. In his few words,
which we reproduced in full in our response, Professor Hillis manages to say
almost everything that Grip does in the ample time that the latter was
given. Like Hillis, Grip characterizes;
he does not specify. He avoids
mentioning any of the facts of the case that we present as evidence for
Merton’s murder, a case that the prominent folk singer Judy Collins found so
persuasive that it is embodied in her song, “Thomas Merton,” in her new
album. Grip tells us about Collins and
her lyrics to which he takes exception as the jumping off point for talking
about our book.
Of course, all Grip’s characterizing of
the book is negative, but as a veteran of the boob tube, he is
able to do it in a way that Hillis couldn’t, even if Hillis were making
a similar audio-visual presentation.
When Grip mentions those foul authors of the book he looks as though he
might have just driven by the fresh roadkill of a skunk or taken a big bite out
of a lemon. “What abominable people those
two guys must be!” the viewer is supposed to conclude. It’s all histrionics, utterly lacking in
substance. Otherwise, exactly like
Hillis, Grip relies almost exclusively upon nos. 2, 5, 6, 7, and 11 of the “Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression.”
Vince Foster
At this point, permit me a brief
digression. Since he only makes it to
#11, he is drawing from a list that only made it up to thirteen in number when
I first posted it in March of 1998. It resulted
from my following with great care, along with my co-author of the Merton books,
Hugh Turley, of the Vince Foster death case.
The gulf between what Turley and I know about that matter and what Grip
knows, I can assure you, is far greater than in the Merton death case, but
toward the end of his presentation, Grip manages to do some world-class
implicit mischaracterizing of the Foster
case. He tells the viewers that right up
in the front of the book we bring up that subject and his “antennas went up,”
and he makes an antenna with his hand over his head to emphasize the point.
American journalist to the core, Grip
is confident of the selling job that his crowd has done in convincing the
American public that the notion that Bill Clinton’s deputy White House counsel,
Vincent W. Foster, Jr., was murdered is only entertained by a few crazy
right-wingers. Didn’t the sober and responsible right-wing
conservative Republican independent counsel Kenneth Starr lay such suspicions
to rest with his report? The fact of the
matter, though, is that the cover-up of Foster’s obvious murder has been a
thoroughly bipartisan affair.
What Grip, in his very dishonest fashion, fails
to say is that we bring up the Foster case in the
foreword to our book to explain how Turley and I got together in the first
place. Most importantly, we inform
readers that John Clarke, the lawyer for Patrick Knowlton, the dissident
witness in the case, was able to get the three-federal-judge panel that
appointed Starr to order Starr to include as a
part of the report Clarke’s 20-page letter that completely demolishes the
suicide conclusion. Turley and Knowlton,
as we point out, worked with Clarke to prepare that letter.
The big reason why Grip can get by with
referring to doubters of the government in the case with such disparagement is
that his American journalism community completely blacked out the existence of
that letter in Starr’s report. Not a
single news organ across the political spectrum reported on the existence of the
letter in the report. In Part 3,
published in the wake of Starr’s report in 1997, of my 6-part series, “America’s Dreyfus Affair: The Case of the
Death of Vincent Foster,” I call it “The Great Suppression of ’97.”
To understand the bipartisan nature of the
cover-up, one only need know that President George W. Bush made federal judges
of two members of Starr’s team, Brett Kavanaugh and John Bates, and President
Donald Trump made Kavanaugh a Supreme Court Justice, and he did it upon the
recommendation of the journalistic leader of the supposed conservative opposition
to the government in the affair, Christopher Ruddy. Trump also made another member of Starr’s
team, Alex Azar, his Secretary of
Health and Human Services.
To get up to date on the Foster case, see
my articles “Ken Starr’s
Contempt for Your Intelligence” and “NPRavda Features Double Agent Ruddy.” Even better, read The Murder of
Vince Foster: America’s Would-Be Dreyfus Affair, published in 2020.
Saint Patrick Hart
Fittingly, no. 1 in the “Seventeen
Techniques” is “Dummy up.” No. 2 is “Wax
indignant.” It is the cornerstone of
both the review by Hillis and the presentation by Grip. To believe our “alternative theory,” as Hillis
calls it, one must accept that the “deeply respected” monk, Brother Patrick
Hart, among others he names, was a “conspirator.” Not only was the now late Br. Patrick
universally respected, per Hillis, but he was also Hillis’s friend. Hillis, in effect, offers himself as Br.
Patrick’s character witness.
Brother Patrick Hart, we should mention,
was the monk at Merton’s home Gethsemani Abbey in
Kentucky who had been made one of Merton’s three secretaries shortly before Merton
began his long trip that ended up in Thailand.
Before that, he had been the long-time secretary to the previous abbot,
Fr. James Fox. After Merton’s death Br.
Patrick was put in charge of Merton’s voluminous papers and is always referred
to as “Merton’s secretary,” with the impression created that he was very close
to Merton and that he was the only such secretary. There’s a famous photograph of the two men
standing together that burnishes the image of their closeness. It is representative of the general
dishonesty that surrounded Br. Patrick and the reputation that was created. Br. Maurice Flood, who is standing by
Merton’s left shoulder in the original photograph is cropped out. The photograph was taken by the other
secretary, Philip Stark, with Merton’s camera, to use up the remaining film in the
camera so it could be developed just before Merton left on his fateful
trip. One can see the original,
uncropped photograph on page 169 of Thomas Merton’s Betrayers.
Grip, like Hillis, reminds us of his own association
with Brother Patrick and vouches for the man’s unimpeachable character,
embellishing it with examples of the Gethsemani
monk’s great humility. What scoundrels
Turley and Martin are to speak ill of the man!
How dare we!
What we did was to establish beyond any
possibility of doubt that Br. Patrick Hart was the originator of the story that
Merton was wet from a shower when he encountered the faulty fan. He wrote that in his postscript to The
Asian Journal of Thomas Merton in 1973 despite being told that he could not
write that by John Moffitt because there was no evidence for it. Moffitt had
read over Br. Patrick’s draft, which we found among Moffitt’s papers at the
University of Virginia. Moffitt, the
poetry editor of the Jesuit America magazine was one of the four people
who had a room in the cottage where Merton had died, although he was absent at
the time. Neither of the two witnesses
in the cottage said that Merton had showered.
One, in fact, Fr. Celestine Say, who is a rock-solid witness in our
estimation, was certain that Merton had not showered. He was awake in his room a few feet away from
the shower and from Merton’s room, and he heard no sound from either place over
the approximate two hours that they were in the cottage together.
The Thai police report mentioned nothing
of a shower. Up to Br. Patrick’s
confident, authoritative-sounding statement that Merton “proceeded to take a
shower” upon his return to his cottage from the main building where he had had
lunch after giving his talk, the only person to say that Merton had showered
was a French nun who was at the conference, but she also wrote that Merton
subsequently took a nap before the fan incident so it would have been
irrelevant to the shock he received. The
purpose of Brother Patrick’s shower invention was obviously to further the
notion that Merton was electrocuted by the fan because of the known
conductivity of electricity by water.
That is certainly how it has been taken by the believers in the
electrocution story. Furthermore, the
nun was not a witness and was clearly simply repeating someone’s conjecture.
The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, which Br. Patrick
co-edited, included as an appendix a letter purportedly to have been from the
remaining Trappist monks at the conference, none of whom was a witness. That letter had previously been sent by the Gethsemani Abbey to a limited mailing list of members of
the Gethsemani “diaspora.” Doubtless, the reason for publishing it
widely for the first time was that it contained speculation that Merton might
have taken a shower. It seemed
farfetched because they described the dead Merton as being “in his
pajamas.” To rid themselves of that
problem, Br. Patrick and his co-editors snipped out “in his pajamas.”
Grip makes the shower perform a double
duty, going beyond the other “standard account” believers,
saying, “I can imagine [Merton] stepping on a wet terrazzo floor, losing his
balance, reaching for the first thing he saw, which, unfortunately, was a floor
fan that was plugged in, and that was the end of him.”
But even if Merton had taken a shower, it
would have been in a bathroom that was off the vestibule. It wasn’t even adjacent to Merton’s room,
where his body with the fan on him was found.
There would have been no reason for the floor in Merton’s room to have
been wet, and there is no evidence that it was.
Grip connects that conjecture of his to
another fable that Br. Patrick continued to push almost up to his dying day,
that is that Merton was hopeless around mechanical devices. The woeful evidence for that traces back to a
joy ride he once took with the abbey’s jeep, and he managed to get it covered
with mud. He never had a driver’s
license and didn’t even know how to drive a car, you see. The conclusion that that episode shows how
klutzy he was simply demonstrates the cultural ignorance of the abbey
residents, who grew up in the same automobile culture as most Americans. Merton did not, having grown up in France,
reaching adulthood attending a private boy’s school in England, going to
Cambridge University for a year and then to Columbia University in New York
City for the rest of his education. In
none of those places was it incumbent upon him to know how to drive. The jeep drive would have been difficult for
almost anyone who hadn’t done it before, and it says nothing about his
mechanical aptitude. The fact that he
managed to drive this vehicle with not just a straight gearshift but with
4-wheel drive is more a positive than a negative demonstration of his
mechanical aptitude. But most
importantly, if the fan was lethal to the touch, Merton’s skill with machinery or
his supposed clumsiness is utterly irrelevant.
Back to Br. Patrick’s shower story, the
very best evidence that he had no evidence to support it comes from his own
mouth. In the book, we report on a telephone
message from him to Hugh Turley from Br. Patrick (p. 129) in which he told
Turley that there was no direct evidence that anyone said that Merton took a
shower but that it was “hot and steamy” in Bangkok around noon, and he “must
have taken a shower.” As noted in the
footnote, the message came in at 2:14 pm, May 31, 2017. In short, Br. Patrick’s very influential
declaration that Merton “proceeded to take a shower” is nothing more than the
product of his imagination.
The man is just as unreliable in that
postscript when it comes to question of whether that faulty fan might have been
lethal to the touch. He wrote that one
of the witnesses, Abbot Odo Haas, received a “severe
shock” when he attempted to remove it from atop Merton’s body.
As a part of his television presentation,
Grip plays a short clip of an interview with Fr. Rembert Weakland,
the abbot primate of the Benedictine Order at the time who presided over the
conference and who had arrived at the death scene shortly after the initial
three witnesses. In that clip, Fr. Weakland said that Fr. Haas received a “slight shock.” Sister Edeltrud Weist, who was also a medical doctor, who arrived at about
the same time as Fr. Weakland, wrote in her official
witness statement that Haas got only a slight shock. The witness Fr. Celestine Say saw Fr. Haas
recoil from the shock and when he asked him how strong it was, Fr. Haas had
told him that it was not very strong.
Brother Patrick also turned out not to be
consistent concerning the Hitachi stand fan’s shock of the witness. On page 176 of The Martyrdom of Thomas
Merton, which Bob Grip claims to have read, we have the following passage:
It is a very interesting fact that Brother
Patrick, the inventor of the shower story, who in the same essay in 1973 said
that the abbot who attempted to move the fan off Merton’s body had received a
“severe” shock, changed his account in 1998.
In his introduction to The Other Side of the Mountain, which is
Volume 7 of The Journals of Thomas Merton, which he edited, he repeats
almost verbatim his story from 1973 of how Merton was killed, except this time
he describes it as a “slight” electric shock.
But the “severe shock” story had already
served its purpose of enhancing the story of Merton’s accidental electrocution.
Brother Patrick was just as deceptive
regarding the key question of why no autopsy was performed on Merton’s
body. In that 1973 postscript he said
vaguely that “international red tape” had prevented an autopsy from taking
place, as we note on page 72 of The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton. In 1980, as we note further on the same page,
he fleshed out that “international red tape” in an assertion that appeared in a
front-page article of the Louisville Courier-Journal. He made the absurd claim that there was a
Thai law that required that the body would have had to be buried in Thailand if
an autopsy was performed in Thailand.
The fact of the matter is that even had
there been such a ridiculous Thai law and if there had been some international
red tape to cut through to have an autopsy done, the question was as irrelevant
as Merton’s aptitude with machinery or appliances. For reasons never explained, the U.S.
military had violated normal protocol in such matters and taken possession of
the body of the private citizen Merton at the conference center shortly after
midnight and had whisked it away to a nearby U.S. military hospital, and
Brother Patrick surely knew it. From
that point on the disposition of Merton’s body became a U.S. intra-national,
not an international matter. Apparently,
the abbey made no attempt to get the doctors at the military hospital to
perform an autopsy. According to Brother
Patrick, they were just eager to get the body back to Gethsemani. Reading between the lines, though, it is
evident that the abbey’s leadership had no interest in finding out the cause of
death.
More Truth
Suppression Techniques Employed
Number 5 is “Call the skeptics names like ‘conspiracy
theorist....’ You must then carefully
avoid fair and open debate with any of the people you have thus maligned.”
Grip is a bit worse than Hillis in this
regard. Grip slings around the
pejorative “conspiracy theorist” charge promiscuously. Hillis simply says, “The authors are
specialists in raising questions about suspicious deaths (this is not their
first such work) and they clearly enjoy raising such questions. That
is their prerogative. But no one should think that this book
represents anything more than the conjectures of two authors who have made a
hobby of writing conspiracy theories.”
We’re just some sort of perverse
hobbyists, you see, doing this for kicks.
As long as he’s merely engaging in characterization, he might just as
well have said that we were honest, independent seekers of truth. My guess is that most people approaching the
book with no agenda of their own will come away from it with the same
impression that Judy Collins received.
That’s certainly what the numerous published favorable reviews and the 92 raters
on Amazon, at this point, who have given the book an average of 4.3 out of 5
stars.
Concerning the avoidance of debate, when
Hugh Turley visited Bellarmine University, Professor Hillis refused to meet
with him, and as noted, he has banned me from his Twitter account. For Grip’s part, and the part of the ITMS, please
notice that on YouTube the comments on his presentation are turned off. They are not inviting any sort of healthy
debate on the matter.
Here is number 6 of the “Seventeen
Techniques” in full:
Impugn motives. Attempt to marginalize the
critics by suggesting strongly that they are not really interested in the truth
but are simply pursuing a partisan political agenda or are out to make money
(compared to over-compensated adherents to the government line who, presumably,
are not).
We see it from Hillis, who fashions Turley
and me as just a couple of crackpots who get our kicks spinning out crazy
conspiracy theories. To Grip, we are
practitioners of the art of “yellow journalism,” which, as he notes, sells
books. I suppose that it’s possible that
he might even believe his charge. After
all, it must be really difficult for a man of his ilk and
his experience to comprehend or identify with people whose motivation is simply
pursuit of the truth. Where might he
have encountered such a person in his line of work?
Number 7 of the “Techniques” is “Invoke
authority.” As we note in our response
to his review, the authority that Dr. Gregory Hillis, Ph.D. invokes is his own
exalted self. People have sought him out
for him to render his judgment on this new book that they have heard about.
“Should we read it? Please share your
wisdom with us.” His answer is a
resounding, “No.”
Grip does Hillis one better on this one. He invokes the review of our book that
appeared in the 2019 issue of the ITMS publication, The Merton Annual. It was written by the man whom we fashion as
the captain of the ITMS varsity in the foreword to Thomas Merton’s
Betrayers. That foreword gives an
overview of the (overwhelmingly favorable) reaction to The Martyrdom of
Thomas Merton, including that of Judy Collins, while noting that the ITMS
has been alone in reacting negatively, and they have been a virtual monolith in
that regard. The reviewer that Grip
invokes is the noted Canadian scholar, Michael W. Higgins, who has a quite
extensive Wikipedia page. Grip represents the Higgins review as a total destruction of our work, and as manifestly
intellectually challenged as he is, he might even believe it. As we note in our foreword, though, when it
comes to matters of substance, Higgins has so many good things to say about the
book in his masterful tightrope-walk of a review that with selective quoting we
have used it to promote the book on the book’s web
page. We note there, though, that he
still manages to endorse the standard “accidental electrocution” story. In the foreword we quote the most negative
things he has to say, and we sum it all up by observing that he uses that same
collection of truth suppression techniques as Hillis, substituting #14 for
#11. No. 14 is “Lightly report
incriminating facts and then make nothing of them.”
That brings us to no. 11, which is,
“Reason backward, using the deductive method with a vengeance.” In deduction, one begins with a known,
accepted fact, and uses it to explain an event, going from the general to the
specific. That may be contrasted to
induction, in which one begins with collected specific facts which one might
use to arrive at a generalization.
Hillis reasons backward pretty much throughout his review, but the best
example of it, as we point out in our response, is in this paragraph:
Third, as interesting as it would have
been to have Thomas Merton so loathed by the CIA that it would devise an
elaborate plan involving an apparently shifty Belgian Benedictine monk, as well
as a cover-up involving the U.S. embassy in Thailand, the entire American press
corps, as well as Merton’s friends and monastic brothers, such a narrative is
just not believable, at least to me.
Upon more careful examination of the
record, in Thomas Merton’s Betrayers we have taken the U.S. embassy off
the hook, even though U.S. embassies around the world are known to be laced
with CIA operatives, and there was never universal acceptance of the accidental
electrocution story among Merton’s friends and monastic brothers. In the sequel we show how they were deceived
like the rest of us from the beginning by the tiny cabal of the Gethsemani leadership, which included Brother Patrick
Hart. That leaves us with “the entire
American press corps.”
There you go. I rest my case.
As for Bob Grip, it’s not the fact that
the entire press corps said so that makes the case for accidental electrocution
but that the intrepid journalist Seymour Hersh hasn’t run across anything that
would make him question it. Setting
aside the obvious point that Hersh could hardly be expected to know and report
everything of significance in Southeast Asia at the time, we might remind
readers that neither Hersh nor anyone else in the American mainstream press has
written the first thing about “The Largest Known Vietnam War Atrocity.” I have tried for years to interest them in
the story, and only retired USAF Lt. Col. W.J. Astore has picked it up in his
blog, Bracing Views. You can hear
retired USAF Brigadier General James “Cotton” Hildreth tell his tragic first-hand
story of the event here.
Grip, like Hillis, also gets in the jab
that the book was self-published.
Concerning that point, the general reception that the book has received—much
better than the average book from a major publisher I should think—speaks for
itself. Furthermore, publishing
companies, like the mainstream press, we might be reminded, are very much a
part of what I call the NOMA, the national opinion-molding apparatus.
Nevertheless, as I point out in my
response to Hillis, we did have a contract offer from Trine Day but turned it
down for various reasons explained in my Hillis article. For the record, Trine Day is scoring a major
success these days with its two-volume One Nation Under
Blackmail: The Sordid Union between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to
Jeffrey Epstein
by Whitney Webb. (a graduate of Davidson College like Vince Foster and me, for what it is worth) Webb has revelations that I dare say go far
beyond the ken of either Grip or Hillis, demonstrating a whole world of sordid
goings on at the highest level that our fine press has generally kept us in the
dark about. One absorbing only a small
part of what Webb reveals would have no problem believing our revelations
concerning Thomas Merton’s obvious assassination.
Finally, Grip dismisses our extensive use
of the reports of the witnesses in the case.
“Eyewitness accounts,” he tells us toward the
end, “are typically not that trustworthy.”
Never mind that we also unearthed the two
photographs that Fr. Say took of the dead Merton with the fan across his body
because they thought the scene was so peculiar, and we discovered official
reports that had been kept hidden for almost a half century, we would ask Bob
Grip what evidence he has for accidental electrocution that is better. It would appear that he would prefer to
believe the proven lies of his late friend, Brother Patrick Hart.
Officially, as we have noted, according to
the Thai police report, Merton died of heart failure and was already dead
before he touched the faulty fan. In his
presentation, Grip reads from the initial New York Times by Israel Shenker that said that Merton had been “badly burned by a
shock he had apparently received from a standing electrical fan that toppled
over on him. The cause of death was
officially listed as heart failure.”
What I’m sure Grip doesn’t know, but could
learn from reading our new book, is that the wire service version of the Merton
death story that The New York Times sent out, though, said that there
was “no indication of the cause of death.”
Michael Mott, in his 1984 authorized
biography, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, devoted seven pages to
Merton’s death, and although Brother Patrick set the bar really high, Mott
might surpass him in his dishonesty as he tries his
best to sell the accidental electrocution story. And while Mott has certainly been
influential, the die had really been cast from the beginning by the initial
Associated Press report from Thailand, not the New York Times report
that Grip references. The key portion of
the AP story, written by John T. Wheeler, which we reproduce on page 42 of Thomas
Merton’s Betrayers, is as follows:
Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who wrote
“The Seven Storey Mountain” and other best sellers
was electrocuted Tuesday when he moved an electric fan and touched a short in
the cord, local Catholic sources reported....
Merton’s body was found late in the
afternoon on the floor of a room he was occupying during a visit to
Bangkok. A doctor who was summoned said
the monk’s heart failed after the electric shock. A priest at the Church of St. Louis said
Merton was missed when he failed to show up for lunch.
That story might just as well have been
written in advance of Merton’s death.
All the sources are anonymous, and the facts are wrong. Merton was not in Bangkok but a conference
center in Samutprakarn, some 15 miles south of Bangkok; he was seen by everyone
at lunch; and the Thai police, after consulting with their doctor, concluded
that Merton was already dead from heart failure before he fell, with the fan
somehow coming to rest on top of him.
In the final analysis, retired Mobile,
Alabama, TV news anchor and former ITMS president Bob Grip is going with his
fellow journalist, the AP’s Wheeler, instead of the work of a couple of veteran
independent researchers.
David Martin
February 23, 2023
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