David Andrews

Maybe he did it twice on the road, two different cities, the way I heard it and the way Joe heard it. Maybe also there was a Lenny Bruce imposter out there. Yet a third version: 'And Lenny Bruce provided the perfect epitaph by opening his first performance after the Kennedy assassination with the line, "Man, is Vaughn Meader f****d!" The crowd reportedly exploded with laughter.' https://deadspin.com/5829643/dead-comedian-of-the-week-vaughn-meader-assassins-victim

All versions of Windows above XP are pointless frippery.

Just after the assassination, Lenny Bruce did a gig that had been postponed that weekend out of respect. The audience couldn't wait for his commentary. Bruce came out, went to the edge of the stage, and stood a long time in silence, as if brooding. Then he threw up his arms and yelled, "VAUGHN MEADER!" Everybody cracked up in schadenfreude - the poor guy was over.

The Enquirer's horoscopes suck, too.

"I believe that Oswald, operating alone, killed President Kennedy. I can't prove it, and I have about a two or three percent doubt in the corner of my mind about that it's conceivable, possible maybe, in a very remote circumstance that [...conspiracy is...] an exceedingly marginal possibility and I only raise it because I can't absolutely rule it out." Was a man ever less pregnant?

A lot of people discount Loy Factor because he seems to have been manipulated into agreeing with the story propositions of the people who wrote The Men on the Sixth Floor.

There really should have been collectable action figures! Dan Rather, Cyril Wecht, David Atlee Phillips, William Colby, Carlos Bringuier, Oreste Pena, Robert McKeown, and more in The American Assassins, Parts I and II (1975, CBS) - with vintage commercials: Parts III and IV cover King, RFK, and Wallace.

One suspects that off-the-books assassination squads and assassination projects at CIA and OSS well predate 1961. Is the dating of events in QJWIN and WIROGUE histories a paper cover intended to throw shade on the Kennedy administration? Or can we say, more benignly, that these histories only exist because of (in response to) the assassination? Are there histories of "execution squad" activities in the 1950s?

Why did the Agency hang the Hunts out to dry, Doug? Was his mission not to bring down Nixon?

Here's the hilarious companion piece to the Hunt interview, in which Buckley chases his fellow Catholic, G. Gordon Liddy, around the set with a catechism addressing Who Is Morally Justified To Be A Rat. Who would pay Buckley to do this, and why? The absent target seems to be Hunt, but it's Liddy who gets the St. Sebastian treatment here. Suffer those slings and arrows, someone said:

In the Watergate thing, Hunt must have missed the days when he had Allen Dulles's protection. That wasn't always something every officer could count on (see Frank Wisner), but there must have been something - perhaps only a turning point in their relations - that caused Helms to put him in the White House and then hang him and his wife out in the wind. What brought the Hunts to a point where they knew they could no longer count on the Agency? On the Buckley show, Hunt starts complaining about it from the minute he begins speaking - almost explicitly tipping that he was still Agency at the White House. He's willing to tip Francis Gary Powers by comparing their cases, which also tips that Hunt was on domestic duty for CIA. Yet, of course, neither Buckley nor any other interviewer of the hour was willing to ask Hunt what the CIA was doing inside CREEP, leaving Hunt's mission at the burglary and the dirty tricks (so, leaving him under Nixon's command). One would think that the Nixon blackmail was Agency-directed to embarrass the President, but the financial and legal pressures on the Hunts seem to have been very real. This is like the nastiest parts of John Le Carre. Who'd have thought one could dredge up any sympathy for the Hunts?

Just a stray thought: being that Dealey Plaza narrows into a reversed triangle, with the base at Houston Street and the apex at the underpass, wouldn't it make logistical sense to have the field of fire arranged in roughly an hourglass shape, with the base of the bottom, upright triangle at the underpass, the apexes overlapping. It couldn't be a perfect, symmetrical plan, owing to topography and available firing platforms. But - whatever other shooter positions there were at the grassy knoll, TSBD, Dal-Tex, the southeastern building rooftops - the final line would be two shooters at either end of the underpass, one in the north end storm drain, and one at the south end bridge top. The last line of offense, blocking escape. Is there a matching storm drain at the south end of the underpass that could be used instead of the bridge top? Or not, because the north side of Elm is the lowest ground for rainwater flow? The east base (Houston Street) would be at the top of this diagram adapted from another purpose. The west base (triple underpass) would be at bottom. The plan would be also effective had the limo taken the Main Street route. When we think of triangulation of fire...we ought to think of two triangles, though there might have been a northward concentration of firing positions (TSBD, grassy knoll) since the finalized route would use the Elm Street dogleg to slow the limo. Was the Main Street entrance to the Plaza blocked off at all?

Please delete post, thanks.

One interesting thing - and I forget what book I read this in - was that the two passenger-side doors had large vertical dents in them. You can see the dents in photos of the car being raised from the pond. The book's author claimed that the car couldn't have gotten these parallel dents from going into the water and landing on its roof. The author theorized that the car skidded on dry land and struck a pair of trees on that side before going into the water. Wish I could remember the book, as it impressed me at the time - part of its thesis is that Ted wasn't in the car, and the car was pushed off the bridge with Kopechne in the back seat.

Where was that picture taken?

Did I get the name wrong (H. H. Davis)? The guy in the natty, checkered sport coat with the soft shawl collar, which I'm sure put him in good with the ladies. In contrast, "Bush man" looks like he's in a suit jacket, and his hair is relaxed and down on the forehead. Sport coat man has hair swept up in front with a little Brylcreem hold to it. The resemblance was posited out in another, earlier thread, but I'm not made sure.

I understand that H. H. Davis has been tentatively ID'd as "George H. W. Bush man," but there's something about the suit lapels and the front hairline that I can't make completely match. Not that that's necessarily Bush, just that it doesn't seem necessarily Davis in both pics.

There's a photo of Angleton carrying Dulles's ashes out of the chapel after the ceremony - the sole pallbearer. Clover Dulles was perhaps the most critical. She locked Dulles's bedroom door and threw a party while he was dying - suffocating from pneumonia, if I recall. Concerned Agency types at the party broke open the door and called an ambulance. Clover later died in an old age home. I wonder what the intervening years were like for her.

Jim DiEugenio, what was Kennedy's first, uninfluenced reaction to the idea of a covert invasion of Cuba? Were there any recorded statements?

It's a free download now, including the CD of documents. Look for an older post from B. A. Copeland that has the links. Look for my post complaining that I couldn't download them with Windows XP (I got them later on another OS). +++ The actual answer, of course, is that there is no "Lee" and never was Lance, if you do some fact checking, there are irreconcilable discrepancies with the Oswald family's living addresses, with Marguerite Oswald's employment records, and with Oswald's conflicting service records. The FBI displayed quite an interest in quashing duplicate school records. John Pic, in his WC testimony, challenged facts and photos presented him. Something was up, if not everything posited. It might be one thing to assume that Oswald's tax returns are classified because he did work for FBI and CIA. But why are Marguerite's classified? One answer for both is that employment records for "mother" and "son" would reveal too many lacunae and lead to unexplained duplicate histories.

Helms is obviously covering for General Walker, mastermind of two hemispheres. No, wait - I meant David Rockefeller.

Watch the beginning. He's like a kid smiling through the outrageousness of his lies. We've all done it - you have to work to put a straight face back on regardless of your own absurdities.

Posting at work (PAW) - wrong decade. "You are correct, sir!"

Nagell's 1967 prison letter to Arthur Greenstein ("Arturo Verdestein") puts Oswald firmly in the patsy category, and an apparent pawn of David Ferrie. But how much Mark Lane-Jim Garrison-style research had filtered through to him by this time? Was he parroting the new party line for his own benefit? There have been suggestions along the way that Nagell, once out of prison, was induced to contact Garrison. One thing about Nagell: his war and espionage experiences led him to oppose authority through comic absurdity and tricksterism - which makes him an attractive character (almost a 1960s-film antihero), but also frustrating to deal with research-wise. Somebody didn't like him; he ended up taking a beating in his last weeks and then dying suspiciously before HSCA could get to him. But there were a lot of Somebodies with conflicting agendas around him.

Nagell initially thought he was being tasked to look into Oswald by someone with CIA connections but later determined that person to be a double actually working for the Russians and believed that he had been compromised and that for a span of time at least could have been charged as working for a foreign power. Given the further circumstances of the case, which Larry ably and briefly outlines in his post. you have to wonder how much of Nagell's worries about being "compromised" (and open to blackmail by the KGB, forcing him to consider killing Oswald for them) would really stand up in the eyes of US intelligence as something that would be held against Nagell. Or were "we" blackmailing him too, on this account? One of the problems of the Russell book is that we never understand who Lee Harvey Oswald was and who was really running him, and for what purposes. Russell, being closest to the Nagell case, could do a great service by writing a article defining Oswald as completely as possible from Nagell's understanding (as much as Nagell revealed this). P. S. - The court-appointed attorneys who finally represented Nagell in the original bank robbery trial and for later appeals were Joseph A. Calamia and Gus Rallis. Nagell had previously dismissed other court-appointed attorneys.