David Andrews

Thanks, DJ - that's good to know. I wonder if a cameraman was behind the rear colonnade window openings, where Mr. Hester ran once the shooting was over.

Has anybody ever attempted to film Elm Street from inside the west enclosure of the north pergola? Could a cameraman get a view of the corner turn and the underpass escape from that windowed pillbox? Could the result be matched to any memories of the "other" film?

And while he writes well, what he writes raises more and more questions but does not supply any answers either. Is this another example, like so much of Judyth's tale, where the claimant's self-verification is all there is? Well, in which camp we can also lodge Madeleine Duncan Brown and Barr McClellan, unfortunately.

If you read just a trifle more carefully, I didn't say JFK was in the CFR. Nor did I specify that any president other than Carter was. I said there was a pattern in candidate selection and party agenda. In the case of Carter, the selection can be related to the CFR.

Important to remember that Carter was a member of the CFR prior to his campaign, and was something of a protege of Zbigniew Brzezinski. Carter did not appear out of nowhere, but is one in a line of state government-associated intellectual-humanists anointed as the corporate face of the Democratic Party since 1913: Wilson, FDR, Carter, Clinton, Obama...John F. Kennedy, the renegade? LBJ, the giver of New Deal-influenced civil rights, the taker of Southeast Asia? There's a conscious strategy and templating here.

If Spartacus' body was never found, and it was not, then he almost had to have fallen in battle, right? But if it was never found, then Spartacus could not have volunteered himself to Crassus, and then had Antoninus say "I am Spartacus". And of course the last sword fight was completely fabricated. ...he says most historical films would be boring if they did not use wide dramatic license. Really? For one, the actual course of Spartacus' slave rebellion as it happened is much more dramatic and exciting then what is traced in the film. ANd in my view, if the script would have followed that outline, the movie would have been even better. The things Spartacus did with his rag tag army against dozens of Roman Legions is really remarkable. To name one, Spartacus actually broke down a siege wall made by Crassus to keep him bottled up in the toe of Italy. If I recall correctly, this was the first time this had ever been done. As for Siegel,whatever one thinks of the man, no one can say his life was dull. I mean are you serious? I believe that the script was falsified because Beatty and Bening wanted their characters to be more glamourized and romanticized. They didn't want to be in a Scorsese type picture. Only Robert DeNiro is so honest an actor as to not care much if his character is a pig. Remember - films are structured on deals and source material and the compromises between them. Hire hot actor Tony Curtis to play Antoninus, a character that the important leftist novelist Howard Fast invented to show the less brutal side of Roman slavery, and you have to give this character significant drama and screen time. If Howard Fast invented the sword fight, and Spartacus's self-sacrifice, then he did that in what he felt was the service of dramatizing elements of slavery, revolt, and heroism. And then Kirk Douglas as producer - or the studio - agreed that this would be good for Curtis and for the box office. So he paid blacklisted good lefty Dalton Trumbo to put it in the script. An aside - People interested in the development of left-wing ideals in Hollywood, and in novels and in plays up to the Kennedy years, should check up on the careers of writers like Howard Fast (Spartacus) and Clifford Odets (Waiting for Lefty, The Sweet Smell of Success), and also Bertolt Brecht's career in America. Like Trumbo, all these fellows had run-ins with anti-communist congressional committees. NB, Robert De Niro personally wrote important changes into the Raging Bull script, telling the studio that he refused to play Jake LaMotta as "a cockroach," as he felt Jake had been originally written. There was even more domestic violence in the earlier draft that De Niro read.

I can see the PH snip as an obsessive harvesting for tracing Oswald's house-to-house movement, if needed. I can see, hypothetically, how the PH sample might have been ordered to compare to samples gathered from multiple Oswalds. But can someone remind me why the WC needed Mrs. Ruby's plates, and why it put them in the Report?

So therefore, [one] of the best scenes in the film, the famous "I am Spartacus!" chant, [is fictional]. Spartacus is thought to have died in battle - his body was never identified by the Romans, since he dressed like his men. Plutarch, writing more than 150 years later, either originates or repeats from earlier accounts the famous "I am Spartacus" chant. Plausibly, it happened, since some 6,000 rebel slaves were crucified, and not one is recorded as having saved himself (or the lot) by giving up Spartacus' body. But Plutarch is not a historian according to twentieth-century standards or beyond, and is instead concerned with biography as moral example. The Romans, however, were famous for making inflated legends of their vanquished enemies, including Hannibal, for in doing so they could exaggerate their own power and cunning. It's hard to see, though, what ennobling a slave revolt would have done to further Roman society - we did rather the opposite in this country. The recent and controversial miniseries The Kennedys reminds us that JFK loved Kirk Douglas's Spartacus.

huh? At this very moment Fred Thompson is out there selling *reverse mortgages* (on television-cable). To seniors yet! I doubt you'd see Ventura selling that kind of financial clap-trap... I'm just sayiing - similar showbiz/political background. Jesse should look to a future contract selling "conspiracy-free" mortgages in his golden years.

Just say the words and I'll be only too happy to make this thread invisible. A death to this thread.

From Jackie Wilson, former Detroit Catholic school boy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvITGrZqWCk A hard life, with moments of intense ecstasy.

Reagan was the first overt announcement that the fix was in. He made possible the charade of the G. W. Bush administration.

Robin, I'd love to know where it came from. I've asked people to give opinion based solely on interpreting Connally's and Kellerman's reactions. I think that could be useful too.

I can't see anyone aiming through the windshield. Any hole there was the result of a miss, imo. The throat shot was a perfect hit. Why shoot someone in the throat on purpose, if desiring a perfect hit? I'm wondering if the throat wound source is the north end of the railroad bridge, and if from that position the shot came off at the last possible moment to strike Kennedy through the windshield, while the car was following the decline of the street. Kennedy's head and neck were "framed" between the dashboard and the top of the windshield frame. Thus, as the limo descended with the street, the top of the head was disappearing rapidly from the shooter's view during every second it took for the shooter to acquire the target through the windshield. JFK was also blocked from view by passengers, and obscured by the rearview mirror and the crossbar of the passenger compartment. Altgens, though standing downslope, has some of the same problem with the head being obscured amid the windshield framework: See how the top of JFK's head is blocked out at Altgens' POV, but the throat is centered? What if a shooter on or near the railroad bridge had a similar experience? From the shooter's elevated perspective (compared to Altgens'), Kennedy's crown, brow, and eyes may have been disappearing from view as the limo approached and descended. So, what if he fired at the head just before Kennedy's face was lost amid all that "framework," but only hit the throat? Doug Weldon has some videos up showing a bridge shooter's perspective on approaching traffic, useful for comparison. I'm thinking it's a good hit, but not the perfect hit the shooter wanted. But what if that was his only moment from that position, and he was counted on to make the kill shot there, so the later head shot from another position did not have to be made?

Did I say drastically otherwise? It was always stocks and securities that dominated - hence the SEC position.* Kennedy was a kind of Carnegie on Wall Street, but his talents lay in going deeper into finance for his money and place. Unlike Carnegie, his defining enterprises away from speculation failed or plateaued: films, liquor...the Ambassadorship. When we speak of bootlegging, remember that Kennedy had a lock on some of the biggest supplies of quality Scotch whiskey, in the UK and Canada. So it was a specialty market, upscale prices and limited distribution. If any portion of the product was let out to be adulterated and resold by associates, well...the cost of doing business.... *I am now growing curious about banker Joe's relations with the Federal Reserve.

We can learn a lot about causality from discussing why phenomena occur, and occur in relation to each other - though a strict phenomenologist would sniff at the idea of questioning Why. Apropos of this, perhaps we should wonder why the back wound wasn't placed even higher on the back than it was in the autopsy photos. Why not make things even easier? What stopped it? Will this resolve important discrepancies? No, but we might better understand why they exist.

What do we make of no blood on the collar and shirt front in the extant Zapruder? Even Jackie didn't report any.

Quote: If the neck wound was an entrance, where did it go? I go with dissolved. It's what the autopsists suspected the night of the autopsy. Cliff, do you have an opinion on whether a dissolving round could (or did) go through the windshield first? Separate issue for all: When we see Connally swatting reflexively at the bullet, does his motion suggest he's reacting to a shot from the front, or from the rear? Can we infer anything from Kellerman's reaction? If a wasp had flown past them, which way would it have been flying? Call it strictly from their reactions, if you will. Interesting to compare Connally's and Kellerman's reactions in this edit:

I'm thinking that the staining makes sense. More right back/right shoulder staining on the jacket from initial woundings. Left side staining on the shirt because he fell to the left and lay there, while blood soaking into the jacket followed gravity and welled on the left, where it saturated the shirt. The jacket reinforcement fabric (stiffened white mesh under the inner silk lining?) might have kept the right exterior blood from soaking the right back of shirt - you can see a "fade-in" of blood near the back wound hole, with massive soaking leftward,where gravity directed the fluid. Why no more blood soaked into the left shirt back when he was placed on the hospital gurney is unexplained. The strange resemblance of the shirt stain to the map of Southeast Asia is also inexplicable.

I'd read it anyway, regardless of Oswald. I enjoyed the prose excerpts I read online. It has what one wants in its "Kennedy survived" scenario - new ways of imagining and understanding Kennedy. The worst assassination novel I ever read (by a researcher) had excruciatingly correct facts, but earned for itself no further recommendation than a good history book might have. So why did I read the hundreds of pages of that novel?

Is there any sort of photo enhancement that enables us to see the blood on the suit jacket? The photo in post #368 seems to show more blood on the right shoulder and back of the jacket than is on the shirt.

If Fred Thompson was out there doing Jesse's gig - would we believe him?

Harry, how did Oswald know Hall and Howard? When you say that Gabaldon dispatched Hall and Howard to "enlist Oswald in CIA" in August-September 1963, would you say that was Oswald's first "enlistment?"

Harry, I'm really interested in what - or who - caused or permitted Gabaldon to impersonate a CIA officer to Oswald. So I'm interested in reading about his contacts. David Atlee Philips? Was he known by Richard Case Nagell in Nagell's investigation of Oswald? I'm thinking Gabaldon was highly connected, secretive enough, and reliable of motve - which is why he got to survive to 80 and be something of a public figure. Others didn't make that. Gabaldon strikes me as a less brutal David Morales, prompted by similar motives.

I think that the debate about film alteration centers around what we can see, in terms of JFK's head wounds, versus what the medical personnel in Dallas reported, and what the photos and x-rays show. I know that was one of my early questions; why does it appear, to the naked eye, that the side of JFK's face was blown off, yet witnesses reported no real damage in that area? I think that Don Jeffries raises an important point that's getting lost. How do we reconcile the right front "flap" of hinged skull that we see in the autopsy photos with the "blob" shown in Zapruder? In the HSCA-Groden rear autopsy faked photo posted earlier in this thread, the "flap" is left dangling open rather provocatively, while the pathologist pinches closed the enormous flap of rear scalp, hiding missing bone and bone slivered in the cranium. The circumference of the right front temporal bullet wound, after all, does not border on the "flap." Did the "flap" exist before pre-autopsy alteration? Is the Z-film "blob" meant to confirm that it did? Is the rumored ear damage left unaltered in the HSCA-Groden rear-of-head fake posted earlier? Is it possible that the too-brief frontal explosion of matter from the "blob" site in Zapruder could have been the rear spray removed from the extant film, rotated and rotoscoped onto the front of the head? (I altered this from its original posting, so I deleted and bumped.)