David Andrews

David, There are a dozen threads going on here discussing alterations, and refuting alteration allegations. I want to know, if the Zapruder film is what Tink Tompson and others say it is - an accuate portrayal of the murder - then what does it tell us? If it was altered, why was it altered? To hide something that it would have told us if it wasn't altered? This thread is working on the assumption that the film can be shown to be an accurate portrayal of the murder, and therefor, I want to know what it does show and tell? BK Sorry - To be more exact, the amount of "action" in the commonly seen Z-film tends to obscure answer to three of your questions: "Does it tell us which direction the bullet came from?" - Not with the rotoscopy and edits applied to the head wounds. "Does it tell us how many shots there were and what damage they did?" - Not with the abovenamed effects, nor with the freeway sign, or the car motion edit. "Does it tell us Moorman was not in the street when she took the photo, and that witness testimony is not always accurate?" - Not with the altered and non-reactive background figures. So - the film obscures more than it answers, and the answers to these three questions have to be No, though another film of the assassination might afford different answers. So David, you believe the film has been altered. Now when was this done and who did it? Was it done before the copies were made or after the copies were made? Thanks, BK Bill - I don't want to challenge a strictly established rubric. I see what you're doing and why it should be logically and rhetorically inviolate in order to produce useful results. When I made my first post I missed it, as I had limited internet time, and I was brief because I didn't want to revive the recent "Moorman in the street" debate within your topic. I have not worked out the conflicting accounts of Z-film handling and travel of the negs and prints on that weekend or after. Nor have I reconciled all of the alterations that different researchers have noted. I have just seen enough that differs from eyewitness accounts and from responsible critical perceptions (among the many perceptions of several researchers) to believe that there has been alteration when I watch the film. Reading some accounts of suspected alterations helps me explore issues of discontinuity - nearly physical reactions to violations of time and sequence - that have bothered me during every close viewing. You may recall a thread that I started on the direction of the frontal head shot, wherein I later deleted the main post and apologized for dragging readers through hypotheses gained by watching the head shot repeatedly and trying to gauge which part of the underpass JFK's face was turned toward at the strike moment. That was a waste of a late night, and the conclusion I had next morning was that the rotoscopy and editing done on the head wound confused perception of the lateral placement of the shooter. So, yes, the amount of post-filming "action" I see in the common Z-film version has colored my research philosophy in the case of understanding your topic. If there seemed to be a dismissive or reductive tone in my post - I assure you, it was residual contempt for the people that tried to pass off what I believe is a fabrication. Which is not, though, the clean path to logic in research. I don't think I'm wrong about visible alterations. But I do think, emphatically, that yours is a great line of inquiry, reductive in precisely the most useful ways, and I'm looking forward to seeing it develop with researchers' contributions. I'll follow these, and if I can add something that I feel is a contribution within the rubric, I will. People on all sides of this thing - some with agendas, some lacking information - have been telling us, over decades, what the commonly seen Z-film shows. It is time that the sort of people that attracted me to this forum had a go at it. So - a promising new chapter in research, and thanks for it.

David, There are a dozen threads going on here discussing alterations, and refuting alteration allegations. I want to know, if the Zapruder film is what Tink Tompson and others say it is - an accuate portrayal of the murder - then what does it tell us? If it was altered, why was it altered? To hide something that it would have told us if it wasn't altered? This thread is working on the assumption that the film can be shown to be an accurate portrayal of the murder, and therefor, I want to know what it does show and tell? BK Sorry - To be more exact, the amount of "action" in the commonly seen Z-film tends to obscure answer to three of your questions: "Does it tell us which direction the bullet came from?" - Not with the rotoscopy and edits applied to the head wounds. "Does it tell us how many shots there were and what damage they did?" - Not with the abovenamed effects, nor with the freeway sign, or the car motion edit. "Does it tell us Moorman was not in the street when she took the photo, and that witness testimony is not always accurate?" - Not with the altered and non-reactive background figures. So - the film obscures more than it answers, and the answers to these three questions have to be No, though another film of the assassination might afford different answers.

Without getting into specifics or restarting recent debates - there's so much "action" in the way of unexplained phenomena in the commonly seen version that it's impossible to rule out tampering. Oh, OK - the limo motion and jerk forward, and the all-lawn background of much of the tight-shot portion. That's two. Descriptions of other versions, by Rich Della Rossa and others, must also be taken in account here.

Thank you, Bill, for these interesting Valkyrie contributions.

If you could forget the so called photo evidence and any photo resembalance to anyone, the documentary records do not mistake one Hoy for another, and are quite clear. Why muddy the waters? BK Well, I thought I was being encouraging, not muddying. I didn't mistake any Hoys, I don't think. I'm just glad that there's a new, promising lead to "Frenchy." Plus that Hoy! Hoy! Hoy! thing from 1940s music was...irresistable.

Hoy! Hoy! Hoy! It's time somebody nailed the first tramp (one of three "unworthy craftsmen?") I never had any confidence in the Charles Rogers high school photo comparison. Frankly, I've never put any credence in Gedney and Doyle, or in Rogers and Chauncey Holt. I'm willing to believe that the middle tramp is Charles V. Harrellson, based on family resemblances. There's something about Tramp Two's loping walk that suggests....a career in pictures.

Subject matter seems like an extrapolation from the theories that the assassination sprang from a faked assassination plan intended to be blamed on Castro.

I dunno - from the most familiar two pix we have of Robertson (full-face posed photo) and O'Hare (full-length, unposed in fatigues and cap), I'm surest that of all suspicious persons photographed near Dealey, the best IDs were of G. P. Hemming, Robertson, O'Hare, and also Ed Lansdale. Much less convincing: David Morales, Lucien Conein. The two men ID'd as Robertson and O'Hare on Houston, and later crossing DP toward the knoll - those guys read as definitely together, and for a purpose. Note also the Homburg that one of the pair wears - that's an Easterner's hat, and it looks like it was bought new for an occasion, or a mission. Those two guys just don't strike me as Dallasites. They're dressed like they're crossing Pennsylvania Avenue. I'm still pretty comfortable that the four I named above are ID'd correctly. I know Mr. Simkin and others believe that the "Lansdale" figure that Prouty and Krulak ID'd is not Lansdale, but Maxwell Taylor. I'd like to start a thread on why, physically and in terms of command responsibility, that guy is much more likely to be Lansdale than Taylor. Coming soon - maybe this weekend, and with all respects to those of differing opinion.

Still up and running as far as I can tell. See http://www.youtube.com/user/DavidVonPein Regards, Peter Fokes, Toronto Pictures of the Pein?

See today's MSN.com hom page for story on how the TV show "24" and other entertainment prepped America for a black president. http://www.msn.com/ I incline to Gore Vidal's view, expressed frequently since the 1980s, that corporations and other entities support and pay off both political parties to ensure that their needs are taken care of. Obama is the latest in a line of obscure Reform candidates elevated to national prominence by the Democratic party to prove its liberalism and common-man appeal. The first was Woodrow Wilson, who brought you the Federal Reserve. Other likely suspects include FDR, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton. I have no real hope for change from him - I just pray that the two rounds of conservative-supported thievery (9/11 insider trading and the currenrt mortgage market scandal) will satisfy everone who profited on the people's lives and money, and will not crash the economy under Obama - who of course will not be blamed by the populace.

And I have no problem with your description of Johnson, Bill. Fascinating reptile, though. Where is the lit on the DNA non-match for Brown's son?

Well, I wish some researcher with access to records and witnesses would vindicate this woman and her book from Dave Perry's contradictions and other detractors, especially in the timing of the "Box 13 campaign" party and the "Murchison" party. I wish M. Brown had done more in her own defense. I have no uncertainty that she was placed to hear secrets, nor that she kept one - Johnson's son. But let's at least reconcile disputed accounts of time and place. I can see how Brown might have had knowledge of the Box 13 issue before Perry says she could. Johnson's ballot thieves had their pictures taken, famously, leaning on the hoods of cars covered with stolen ballot boxes - the photo's in Robert A. Caro's volume on Johnson's rise to power. So the Johnson camp may have been smirking about Box 13 before it became a scandal in the press, and Brown may have picked up on this. She may well have one night heard Johnson smirk about never being embarrassed by the Kennedys again, too.

Bill, I'd love to dig up some traitors' bodies and behead and burn them, as was done to Cromwell and other English anti-monarchists after the Restoration. I'd like to see some living people subpoenaed or indicted for their involvement, too. Seriously, I feel that Dallas was a great shame and blight on America, and set the agenda for later and current damage in foreign and domestic policy, and more murders. And the intel-political-business links fascinate me. But perhaps my interests as a historian also draw me toward Oswald. Like the victim in a con game, he hoped to get something. What was it? I think we can better understand some of his handlers and contacts, like Hemming, Nagell, Ferrie, et al, by approaching them through their relation to Oswald's own interests. Beyond my political and social and justice interests at large, I'll always have an intense interest in what went down in Dealey, and at the level just above the physics and geometry is Oswald. At 24, Oswald had racked up a career of experiences and associations that no 24-year-old I ever heard of ever had. He had a clear trail back to Cuba and Russia, expanded from his early defector-spy and FPCC provocateur experiences by the Mexico City adventures. So they really picked a good one, not a schlub like that bookstore owner out west, or Thomas Arthur Vallee. *But why was Oswald willing to be at the TSBD?* And why did he submit to the Mexico City dipping, even if only the parts he knew about? How did that fit in with his interests? It takes two to make a con game, and Oswald's participation is important to consider.

Again, Bernice, I have no doubt that that is Son of LBJ up there, and that M. Brown knew a lot. I would just like to see those time and circumstance discrepancies cleared up. That will always have my ear.

If you conclude that Oswald was set up as the patsy, as he himself claimed to be, then his motive(s) could be totally unconnected with those of the acutal assassin(s), who may have been pure mercinaries for the money, or an anti-Castro Cuban/mobster with a grudge/beef as a motive. If you are looking for a motive for Oswald to kill the President, I'm afraid you will have to submit to the same conclusions as the Warren Report, Posner, Bugliosi and others who try to portray him as the actual assassin and deranged, lone-nut. There wasn't any. BK > > Righto - I should have discussed my motivations. I believe that if we can understand Oswald's motivations coherently across a range of actions (White Russian newspapers in the service; falsely [?] defecting to Russia; leaflets at the Trade Mart and voter registration in Clinton; apparent dropping out of the plot prior to Dallas; Mexico City; Sylvia Odio visit [?]; involvements with characters like Ruby, Hemming, Nagell; taking TSBD job; Texas Theater), we can create an approach to the circumstances that caused him to become the patsy, and thus understand the logistics of events in Dallas better. Does he have a personal mission here? Is he an infiltrator of the plot for another? Is he just a GI who once defected as a spy, and now is scuffling for government work? Did he issue warnings? Was he an accessory before the fact? Unlike the Warren Report, I have no doubts that Oswald was an intel op - but to what purpose? Did he have expectations and hopes, good or evil, or was he just a willing footsoldier for covert ops? The more we can plausibly analyze the motives for his actions, the closer we may see how he was used, and whether he was a conspirator or an accessory. Some of my own interest comes from trying to reconcile Richard Case Nagell's experience of an Oswald apparently convinced that he was to be the shooter. When I wonder why a shooter would want to be so sheep-dipped, I consider writers who suggest that Oswald may have been told that his end mission was not to end up a patsy, but to earn the bona fides to get up next to Castro and kill him, like the World Historical Individual he once wrote about (or allowed himself to be sheep-dipped to write). I don't want to go out on a limb with Castro - but looking for support for that is influencing my reading.

I would very much like to believe Madeleine Brown, because I believe that she was LBJ's mistress, and my first look at her son's picture (as an adult) told me I was looking at Johnson, Jr. I have to reserve judgment on the party story, though, until someone refutes the discrepancies in time and circumstances that have been raised, and for the other misdated events such as the Adolphus Hotel meeting. If that's been done, I would like to read it. I'm aware that people on this site whose work I respect have more positive feelings, and I respect what they took away from their experience of Madeleine Brown.

I'm throwing this question out apropos of Robert's post, not in response to it: One has to wonder what Oswald's motive was, precisely. Was he being blackmailed, was he an anti-communist patriot allowing himself to be sheep-dipped by the US? What brought him to Dallas and what put him in the TSBD? Did he think he could expose the plan? Did he not know that he was working with anti-Castro forces? I'm entertaining and researching the notion - but not yet supporting it - that Mexico City was explained to him as an establishing of his false pro-Castro credentials, with the payoff being his opportunity to get asylum in Cuba, and then kill Castro. At least, all that sheep-dipping may have been explained to him as such - I can't think of why else he'd have gone along with it, unless he was just drawing checks for showing up. Late applications to upgrade his discharge and re-enlist, possible warnings sent to the FBI - those may have been second-track attempts at evading the mission entirely, if they occurred. Any interest in a thread in which we might synthesize the leads to Oswald's motivation? What expectations or hopes of his were betrayed when he was captured in the theater?

Request moved to end of thread. Mods please delete.

"The Kennedy habit of speaking out of both sides of the mouth at once, like the larger Kennedy habit of trying to please both hawks and doves simultaneously, can be criticized as a defect of leadership, even of character.[138] [...] "But the political schizophrenia expressed by such doubletalk was not just personal, it was national. If the Kennedys failed to speak or to pursue a single policy on Cuba, we must take into account the hurricane of dissenting voices in Congress, and manipulators inside the Administration, that made it virtually impossible to do so." Circumstances previously unknown in the US? Compare Congress during the Lincoln administration, and Lincoln's 1861 First Inaugural speech.

That's a strange grouping in the detail of Robertson, O'Hare, and a dark-skinned bystander in the large Cancellare above. Is that an African-American or a Cuban? Did the Agency twins fall in step with him, as I offered previously - or is he joining step with Robertson? Even in the immediate wake of the tragedy, it's unusual to see this cross-racial grouping in the South of 1963 - or, for that matter, in the North of that time as well. (This poster born 1959, with a long memory.)

The fellow above looks like an out-of-place Easterner, or somebody dolled up to look like one. That get-up is the all-weather spook uniform of the Hunt decades. A tweed hat, car coat, and a pipe used to be able to see an old intel hand through anything. Note the Homburg on the head of the man ID'd on Houston Street, and later in Dealey, as John A. O'Hare. Another Easterner look - last seen on Humphrey Bogart in "Sabrina." Somebody bought a new hat for the occasion, and it's not a Stetson. In the full version of the Dealey photo (Cancellare) at right above, Robertson and O'Hare seem to have latched on to an African-American bystander in a suit and hat, falling in step with him and using him as a "beard" to cross the center grassplot and reach the foot of the knoll. Again, they look like Easterners trying to blend in with locals. Otherwise...why would that guy be walking in step with Robertson and O'Hare?... I wish I could post the full shot, but my copy is huge.

Thank you, Evan. Please understand that, since I'm beginning work on a 9/11-related novel, I may post much more in the JFK Assassination Debate Forum - which study is, for me, a "working vacation" away from 9/11 issues. Now David, Don't be asking so many sane and reasonable questions all at once as you may give the impression that we can actually answer some of the outstanding issues. Did you go to the Wecht Conference? BK No, sorry, this Duquesne grad had to miss the Wecht conference, but I caught the highlights in discussion on Len Osanic's Black Op Radio podcasts. I'm originally from Fredonia, NY, and I always seem to miss events scheduled by the publisher of The Fourth Decade at SUNY Fredonia, which always nags me as an opportunity missed.

I would put it as acting not above the law, but as a law unto themselves, with an uneasy but cooperative relationship to the neocon agenda in the Middle East and Central Asia. Remembering, of course, that the neocons are just the party of purpose for larger interests.

Jack, please guide me in an area that I have been meaning to research but have been sidetracked from: What is the relationship between this inter-civic network of Trade Marts and World Trade Centers and the NYC World Trade Center? (The "twin towers," a Rockefeller family project of the late 1960s, which came to house within its complex various intelligence agencies by the 1990s.) Is there a good resource on the relationship, if any, that I should be aware of? Thanks!

It's sad that two powerful and influential men like JFK and Hoffa - whatever their failings or antitheses - can be removed from public life in this country, while ridicule of persons who care about these events is the best that they can command in the press today, even when their absences call into question the nature of government and society. That Iraqi shoe-thrower may be the only working reporter this year. Welcome, Mr. Waldron, and thank you for your book and your input here.