David Andrews

I don't think so. It's part of the assassination culture experience, and has shaped the perceptions of readers and researchers who have lived through fifty years of Kennedy books and period culture. Is it useful to know about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings? I think that, if brought up, the material ought to be researched. Several of JFK's purported liaisons affect the character of his presidency. I'll point out, though, that, a Bobby-Jackie romance is chronologically not one of them.

According to Don Wolfe's book on Marilyn Monroe (and it is a very good book, written by a careful researcher) RFK was here in Los Angeles that night, and that is not a rumor or an urban legend. Wolfe's book starts with the incident of RFK and two others being pulled over on Sunset Boulevard for speeding (RFK was a passenger). Of course, that is just an assertion by an author, and so I followed up on the matter. Matters changed for me when I met the law partner of one of the car's passengers. I have known him for about a decade now and he is perfectly credible. His law partner, now deceased, was in that car. With Bobby. The officer pulled them over for speeding, saw that it was Bobby Kennedy, and let them go. Wolfe's book starts with this incident. And it moves on from there. (FYI: Don Wolfe had no idea that this corroboration existed when he wrote his book. Wolfe was relying on the police officer interviews that he had; and I assume that you are aware that there are one or more police officers who maintain that to be the case). Make of all this what you will. I am no "Marilyn Monroe" expert. But I don't see how the combined accounts of both the police officer(s) and the attorney, whose partner was in the car, can be easily discounted. Rather, I am somewhat skeptical of the RFK friend, in northern California, who was used as an alibi witness to place him up there, that entire evening. DSL 1/30/11; 1:15 PM PST Los Angeles, CA I am equally against disinformation and hagiography. I would like to goad the research community toward separating the two and quashing both, as Jim DiEugenio began to in his article. Jim Di: I'm checking sources for the responsible one that that says that RFK was with Peter Lawford and John Frankenheimer in LA on the Monroe death night. I'll get back to you.

The Acton Syllogism: a.) Power corrupts b.) Absolute power corrupts absolutely c.) The Kennedys were not absolutely corrupt

Blackmail couldn't be blamed on Castro. Neither could poison or a small plane crash or (to quote Nixon) "so forth and so on." Shooting from a distance with high-powered rifles, now that sounds like Castro (or the Russians or so forth and so on). Blackmail also doesn't send any message to others, other than don't play around or take bribes. Sorry not to have gotten back to this earlier. Ron Ecker is, of course, quite right on every point. That's what happened. My distinction was: At the "ultimate" moment, bullets were chosen over blackmail, or over the ballots that would be swayed by revealing the Kennedys' blackmail-attracting conduct. Why? I've said, in posts past, that I don't believe that JFK and RFK were innocents of any sort, except in their perceptions of the danger cast by the forces and personalities arrayed against them. I believe JFK was a serial adulterer making political hay from an arranged marriage, and that he may, in his youth, have married another woman and had it annulled by mutual consent of their families. He was never known to bring home the first-lady type of woman, and vetting a bride for him from among the Kennedy circle was a part of his grooming. Even without Seymour Hersh, or books by the Giancana descendants, there is too much reportage and anecdote to believe in Family Man Jack - some of it by or about Dave Powers, some in Jackie's biographers, and other of it appearing in literary sources such as Gore Vidal's work. Anecdotally, RFK is placed suspiciously close to the Marilyn Monroe death scene, by wiretappers and Teamster sources and a food chain of opportunistic authors. Jackie may have loved Jack, but after her miscarriage and purported disenchantment with his infidelity, she took long, spiteful vacations in the Mediterranean with Gianni Agnelli and Aristotle Onassis (their marraige being the QED). These interludes, under-reported at the time, leave a taste unlike that of visiting quilting bees and Bible circles in West Virginia. We have no evidence that they did - but after losing Jack, would either RFK or Jackie have scrupled at having an affair within the moral latitudes created by Old Joe's example and the climate of assassination? It would have happened under the sort of blend of nihilism and compassion, mutual regard and narcissism, in which the participants can imagine that a dead husband and brother would approve of the affair. But it could not have happened - because we have so much more verifiable product of research into what happened. And it happened for the reasons Ron Ecker describes, and because an assassination not only provides revenge but allows tacit policy changes, such as the reversal of Kennedy's Vietnam action, to appear seamless over the change of regimes. Knocking JFK and Bobby out with a sex scandal would not only reset the bar for reporting the considerable peccadilloes of their opponents, but make any successor seem even more like a reverser of policy than LBJ was perceived as being. Cuba disappeared as a front-burner issue, and a war in Vietnam became a necessary development under the cover of a nuclear threat-avoiding democratic transference of power. You couldn't pull that off through blackmail or scandalous revelation at that time and with that executive: the best outcome would not be a Kennedy reversing himself on Vietnam, but a Kennedy refusing the nomination in 1964, and then left outside the tent to micturate inward forevermore. One would think that, on lesser grounds than the Hershes and Heymanns recount, this family could have been taken down like so many Gary Harts, even in a way that set bad precedent for the culture of adultery in politics. The feasibility of that move is more complicated, the variables too threatening to the perpetrators. What they wanted was a smooth and timely transition into war - out of the Caribbean and back into Asia. They weren't secure about their chances of getting it through blackmail. And they hated JFK, and attracted associates who hated him - shall we say - locally rather than globally, and so wanted him dead in their backyard. While I am never prepared to accept the Kennedys as moral icons, I am very interested in separating the lies, canards, and propaganda regarding the Kennedys' moral vulnerability from establishable facts. Jim DiEugenio struck a formidable blow against the Kennedy smear industry in his two-part article. Any ad hoc committee of researchers could create a top-ten list of Kennedy slurs and myths to be investigated - Monroe, Mary Meyer, Judy Campbell, Onassis as assassination sponsor. This, though, would distract us from what happened.

Note that the 25th-anniversary commemorative JFK: In His Own Words is now showing on HBO, and can be seen free anytime on HBO On Demand (if you have HBO). http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/jfk-in-his-own-words/index.html

In all the years of exploding bullet theories, has anyone tested whether the front temple entrance wound could have been followed by a simultaneous rear and right-side blowout? After all, there wasn't just cavitation at the right rear, but shattering and lifting of the cranium also. Note also that Ayoob's findings (see bold text below) are not necessarily based on witnessing any rear cavitation and rear disjecta in the Z-film: "The explosion of the President's head as seen in frame 313 of the Zapruder film is simply not characteristic of a full metal-jacket rifle bullet traveling at 2,200 fps or less. It is far more consistent with an explosive wound of entry with a small-bore, hyper-velocity rifle bullet traveling between 3,000 and 4,000 fps, and probably toward the higher end of that scale..."

Any forensic evidence value to the suit and hat, absent the "Greer dunnit" theory?

If everybody was so absolutely blackmailable - then why were bullets ultimately necessarily? Why? Why? WHY?

(Presumably Jackie herself, based on the use of a decoy casket, went along with having an empty casket.) Not arguing, just questioning why Jackie would want to sit beside an empty casket in the back of the plane for so long. If she knew there was an actual casket and an empty one, or if Robert Kennedy knew, then is it possible that Kennedy family concerns for the health discoveries to be found upon an autopsy were exploited? Or was a combination of that and assertions that bullet tracking, etc., that would lead to the discovery of conspiracy could be best performed with a casket switch used on the family? Or - as in the case of LBJ calling Bobby on the constitutional swearing-in procedure (giving LBJ an excuse to be sworn in before returning to Washington)* - was a fast one pulled on a grieving widow and an absent brother? Maybe it's worth looking at the psychological mechanics of LBJ's swearing-in query call to RFK as a reflection of how many things, including a casket switch, were accomplished in the heat and tears. *Discussed in the recent History Channel documentary, The Kennedy Assassination: 24 Hours After.

Does no bone edge of the right side flap border on the circumference of the right temple bullet hole? (As I understand it, no - just asking for general clarity.)

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Did it happen in Dallas strictly to increase the visible culpability of those culpable at a certain middle-level (LBJ, Connally, Texas oil)? Or simply because Tampa and Chicago didn't work out, and the cover-up was the most easily controllable there? Would fewer witnesses and investigators have died had it happened elsewhere?

Is the purpose of this "sex freak" thing to make us look bad, by dividing us or otherwise?

Regardless of whether it is premiered on US TV, a big financial deal with expensive stars in it has to make back money somehow, so it will go to DVD in this country. Because it will, that will lead to...eventual US premium cable network TV showings, only without any network taking it under its PR aegis. Thus, showings through licensing, not purchase of the series rights, once the heat simmers down and the legal requisites prohibiting a broadcast "event" are obeyed. Look for the DVD in stores by fall.

I've never believed in the frontal dart to the throat by TUM. If at all, a flechette rifle would have made the back wound. An umbrella weapon would only work at close quarters between pedestrians. We're looking at kill shots on Elm Street. I believe that Elm Street is a workplace for riflemen, with landmarks to hit Kennedy and Connally by. There's no room for testing drawing-board weapons science.

Why is all the fencing on the north end of the underpass top trimmed in the full Altgens 8 (Contact Sheet, post #12)?

Come on! You know he didn't finish Ben-Hur. 06/01 Murder Investigation (respected Chicago-New Orleans journalist) The Huey Long Murder Case Hermann B. Deutsch 1963 180 06/15 I don't know how well this book addresses the possible Long assassination patsy, Dr. Carl Weiss, but for a couple of reasons, this is the most provocative selection on its face. Like Oswald, Weiss is argued to have not fired on Long, having been lured to the state capitol to be shot after Long's bodyguard killed its boss. If I read about Weiss, had defected to Russia, and found myself assigned to the TSBD...I'd worry about being gunned down as a ready-made outsider. I wonder about the way Oswald's defection (or the defection attributed to the DPD Oswald) fit into his own conception of what he was doing in the TSBD. The DPD Oswald, as much as anyone imitating him, was such a persistent self-incriminator as a would-be communist organization infiltrator (FPCC, etc.) that I cannot imagine how he would not have tipped earlier that this was contributing to his ultimate setting-up in Dallas. Perhaps, like Richard C. Nagell and other operatives, Oswald came to no longer find foreign association and residence unusual, and became oblivious to the ways that the press and other disinformationists could use it against him. Or perhaps we should consider the implications of Nagell's advice that Oswald was "in it up to his neck." Nagell said we should make no mistake about it.

I could not get it to download. Jack Full disclosure: I looked at the preview, hoping to download later. I have the other version Robin put up recently. Perhaps like Jack, the typed-in code words didn't work for me when I did try to download. Has anyone ever plotted Altgens' position against the Z-frames following the Stemmons sign, to see if the distance traveled/number of frames between the Stemmons sign and frame 313 Z-film corresponds to the spatial representation of the street and the shadows in Altgens 6? I ask because - though I know focal length and ground declination and other perspectival-technical issues are involved - it seems strange to see the Brehm-Hill-Moorman shadows so close to the limo in Altgens 6. It's odd that the shadows are so near the curve in the south side curb in Altgens. And then when you look at Zapruder, the "sea of green" lawn between the sign and Hill-Moorman seems even more impossibly long in duration (= frames) than one suspected it was before.

Nice of you, thanks.

Hitler’s Nazi Party was actually the "National Socialist" party, and we all know LHO's proclivity for that stuff, even though it was all part of his haphazard "intelligence" work, like his phony defection to the USSR. Oswald's entries any relation to the General Walker assassination scare? A second set of targets? (I make no assumptions about the motive or involvement of Oswald in the Walker shooting or scare job...yet.)

He seems to be reaching toward Jackie in Altgens 7, but the angle makes it impossible to be sure. From their actions in the extant Z-film, "putting her in her seat" seems to mean that he reached out to her, and the gesture indicated to her that she was safer retreating to the passenger compartment (if that's any recommendation).

A killer such as John Wilkes Booth represented a conspiracy and a cause. He was hanged to repudiate an idea. Booth, of course, was not - to public knowledge - hanged. Four of his fellow conspirators were.

Does anyone know an accurate estimate of US monetary metals physically held in reserve? Actual hard gold and silver, vaulted here or abroad.

What if the Oswald capture reveals Hoover's M. O.? If it was intended to be the biggest gundown since Dillinger...why not stage it in a theater again?...

I'd like to see that illustration with a possible Liggett figure in it, if still available.