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Joseph McBride

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  1. A solid, experienced reporter. His book about Ruby is good. His typed notes about his Dallas reporting that weekend are in a Warren volume and are fascinating.
  2. What you are referring to is just part of a 675-page book in which I explore many complex facets of Tippit, his life and murder, and the Kennedy assassination. Rather than taking it out of context, I will just refer readers to the book itself.
  3. My book INTO THE NIGHTMARE goes into the questions and remaining mysteries of what Tippit was doing on the day of November 22, 1963, leading up to his death.
  4. From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE, about strange discrepancies in accounts of when McNamara heard the news of the assassination. I find it patently unbelievable that I learned about the assassination twenty minutes before the Secretary of Defense supposedly heard the news, and I was a high school junior in Milwaukee: Another indication of the way things were rapidly threatening to spiral out of control for Johnson in the immediate aftermath of the assassination is this report in Jim Bishop’s 1968 book The Day the President Was Shot: “Officials at the Pentagon were calling the White House switchboard at the Dallas-Sheraton Hotel asking who was now in command. An officer grabbed the phone and assured the Pentagon that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff ‘are now the President.’” This indication of a possible military coup underway, whether Johnson was wittingly involved in it or not, could have influenced his first decisions, including his controversial and seemingly somewhat irrational choice to be sworn in on Air Force One at Love Field in Dallas. Delaying his departure for Washington to take the oath was unnecessary since he had become president, according to the Constitution, immediately upon Kennedy’s death. An ulterior motive beyond what was publicly stated would help account for Johnson’s decision to commandeer Kennedy’s plane, for which he would take severe criticism from Kennedy aides and others. William Kelly, writing on his website JFK Countercoup, theorizes that Johnson made that decision partly because Air Force One enabled him to make use of the most advanced and secure presidential communication lines at a time of maximum crisis: “All of the president’s communications were controlled by the White House Communications Agency (WHCA), then led by Colonel George McNally (code name ‘Star’), who was having lunch at the airport terminal when the assassination occurred and returned to Air Force One to ensure that the new president could communicate with anyone in the world. . . . The WHCA Command Center and base station for the Dallas portion of the Texas trip was set up in a room or suite of rooms at the Dallas Sheraton Hotel.” Kelly proposes that the strange message from the WHCA Command Center about McNamara and the Joint Chiefs being “the President” did not have to do simply with presidential succession but with the National Command Authority (NCA) nuclear release authority, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower had set up to control the command of nuclear weapons if the nation’s chief executive were disabled or killed. Kelly notes that under that plan, if a president were disabled or missing, the authority to use nuclear weapons would have passed to the secretary of defense. . . . Where was McNamara at the time of the assassination? He and Attorney General Robert Kennedy were the most important members of the Kennedy cabinet still in Washington at the time; fully half of the ten-member cabinet, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon (the cabinet officer responsible for the Secret Service), were in a plane bound for Japan, following a meeting in Honolulu to help decide Vietnam policy. But one of the many oddities of the official account of the assassination is that there are starkly contradictory accounts of McNamara’s whereabouts and activities in the immediate aftermath of the shooting in Dallas. In his 1995 book In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (with Brian VanDeMark), McNamara reports that he was at the Pentagon holding a conference about the defense budget that Kennedy planned to submit to Congress in January. With the secretary were with McGeorge Bundy; Kermit Gordon of the Budget Bureau; and Kennedy’s science adviser, Jerome Wiesner. Manchester reports in The Death of the President that during the meeting, McNamara was handed the first wire-service bulletin about shots being fired in Dallas, sent out at 12:34 by United Press International. Simultaneously the Pentagon’s command center sounded a buzzer, awakening [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman] General Maxwell Taylor, who was napping in his office between sessions with the Germans [the commanders of the West German Bundeswehr were meeting with the Chiefs that day]. . . . [McNamara] kept his head and made all the right moves. An ashen-faced aide came in with the bulletin. Jerry Wiesner studied the man’s expression as the secretary read it. Wiesner thought: The Bomb’s been dropped. McNamara quietly handed the slip around -- Wiesner felt momentary relief; anything was better than a nuclear holocaust -- and then the Secretary acted quickly. Adjourning his conference, he sent Mac Bundy back to the White House in a Defense limousine and conferred with Taylor and the other Joint Chiefs. Over the JCS signature they dispatched a flash warning to every American military base in the world. 1. Press reports President Kennedy and Governor Connally of Texas shot and critically injured. Both in hospital at Dallas, Texas. No official information yet, will keep you informed. 2. This is the time to be especially on the alert. McNamara’s book, on the other hand, gives a considerably later time for when he learned the news, about 2 p.m. Eastern time, or 1 p.m. in Dallas. This seems bizarre, since it would mean that much of the world (including even me, a high school junior in Milwaukee) had known about the shooting for more than twenty minutes before the secretary of defense of the United States. McNamara writes about that meeting at the Pentagon: In the midst of our discussion -- at about 2:00 p.m. -- my secretary informed me of an urgent, personal telephone call. I left the conference room and took it alone in my office. It was Bobby Kennedy, even more lonely and distant than usual. He told me simply and quietly that the president had been shot. I was stunned. Slowly, I walked back to the conference room and, barely controlling my voice, reported the news to the group. Strange as it may sound, we did not disperse: we were in such shock that we simply did not know what to do. So, as best as we could, we resumed our deliberations. A second call from Bobby came about forty-five minutes later. The president was dead. Our meeting immediately adjourned amid tears and stunned silence. Strange as it may sound, indeed. Why McNamara chose to put out that patently incredible story, twenty-eight years after Manchester published his far different report of a quickly-moving defense secretary working in concert with the chiefs to send out a worldwide alert, remains unclear. It’s conceivable that McNamara’s account represents a memory lapse or sloppy research, though he was always renowned for his sharp memory (it is still on display years later in Errol Morris’s 2003 film, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, although McNamara’s memory conveniently falters briefly when he claims not to be sure whether he authorized the use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, a toxic chemical used while he was secretary of defense). McNamara’s account in his book of his actions on November 22, 1963, conflicts oddly with Bishop’s report that the White House Communication Agency was claiming that the defense secretary and the chiefs were “the president” (Bishop doesn’t offer an exact time for that story, but he suggests it was while Johnson and Air Force One were still at Love Field). What is clear from these muddled accounts is that important events were taking place at the highest level of power that the public was not supposed to comprehend, even decades later.
  5. Chomsky once "joked" that his salary since 1955 has been paid by the military-industrial complex. That was the year he started teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He remains an Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT even though he has moved to Arizona, where he is a Laureate Professor of Linguistics at Arizona State University. Freud once observed that there is no such thing as a joke. Chomsky has also declared that the two subjects he won't touch are the JFK assassination and 9/11, although he has published books about both subjects. His 1993 book RETHINKING CAMELOT: JFK, THE VIETNAM WAR, AND U.S. POLITICAL CULTURE is a not-so-oblique attack on and response to Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK.
  6. Obama killed about 10,000 people with drones. He joked to his staff about being a good killer. They had a day each week when they would meet about who to whack with drones.
  7. When someone writes "factoid," you know the person "learned" about the assassination from the late disinformation agent John MacAdams, who used the term as a childish code word to disparage something he didn't like before making or not making a case against it. The use of "factoid" is similar to the common disparaging use of the term "conspiracy theory" to end discussion.
  8. Keep doing what you're doing, Gil. It's appreciated.
  9. There's a Yiddish word for this thread: patchke (POTSH-kee). Definition: v. "1. To fuss or "mess around" inefficiently and inexpertly. 2. To dawdle, to waste time." (Rosten) On purpose in this case.
  10. I've now seen the acclaimed new Lizzie Gottlieb documentary TURN EVERY PAGE -- THE ADVENTURES OF ROBERT CARO AND ROBERT GOTTLIEB, and my review is two words long: "Yes, but . . ." Here's the "but": https://www.amazon.com/FRANKLY-UNMASKING-FRANK-Joseph-McBride/dp/1949950476?fbclid=IwAR1-44POlHAWHKD__A5AETSv9kOPEBxtdEAEPvgN7_MKVPF-fqEnBS9zFlY
  11. Thanks for that source, Matt. It's not definitive but suggestive about Helms. I hadn't read the piece before and am disappointed in David Ansen badmouthing Stone's JFK film in retrospect, since Ansen bravely praised it in his review in 1991 in the same issue when Newsweek trashed it in their cover story.
  12. I heard that but don't know for sure. What's your source?
  13. That great scene between Nixon and Helms in Oliver Stone's NIXON over the Kennedy assassination documents was not in the original theatrical release but is on the homevideo editions as an extra. It's essential to the movie and true to the situation between them. Why it was originally not used I don't know for sure.
  14. And the Deep State (represented by Johnson's "Wise Men") deposed Johnson in 1968. From my 2021 book POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY: “THE WHOLE BAY OF PIGS THING” The late Carl Oglesby’s The Yankee and Cowboy War goes where Caro and others are afraid to inquire. Fearlessly connecting the dots in his research, Oglesby attempts to put together the pieces of the complex factors surrounding the assassination to explicate its pivotal importance in modern American history. His 1976 book is less known than any of Caro’s but is a thoroughly revisionist, groundbreaking study of the pattern of American history from 1960 through Watergate. Oglesby offers one of the most acute studies of the turbulent political context in which the assassination occurred. He broadens the topic from a study of some aspects of the physical evidence in the case to the struggle for dominance of American politics between the internationalist, old-money Eastern establishment (the “Yankees”) and the new money of the more conservative Southwestern and Western oil and gas men and defense contractors (the “Cowboys”) from the 1950s onward. That political power shift led to the rise not only of Eisenhower and LBJ but also of the Californians Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Oglesby studies the assassination as the turning point in a process that had already been underway but was accelerated by Kennedy’s murder. The Yankee and Cowboy War analyzes the tensions among warring American political, intelligence, and business factions over Vietnam and other aspects of foreign policy, including the United States’ combative relationships with the USSR, China, and Cuba. Oglesby’s book is one of the most acute and provocative studies of the political context in which the assassination occurred and that resulting transfer of power, often by clandestine means. Like Scott before and after him, Oglesby draws direct interconnections between American intelligence operatives and Cuban exiles involved in both Dallas and Watergate. Those convulsions have been portrayed in the mainstream media and conventional history books as separate and aberrational rather than central to that period in American history. Oglesby analyzes President Nixon’s use of the suggestive phrase “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” on the 1972 Watergate “smoking gun tape” in terms of Nixon’s guilty knowledge about and/or involvement in the Kennedy assassination. Nixon’s November 21–22 visit to Dallas was for the annual convention of American Bottlers of Carbonated Beverages, at which Lyndon Johnson had spoken two days before the assassination. Nixon was one of four U.S. presidents in Dallas on the day of the assassination, also including George H. W. Bush as well as Kennedy and Johnson. On the “smoking gun” tape recorded on June 23, 1972, the day after the final Watergate break-in, Nixon committed an obstruction of justice that would eventually lead to his resignation. He ordered his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to tell CIA director Richard Helms to make the FBI stay out of the Watergate investigation. At the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1962, Helms had been the CIA’s deputy director for plans (i.e., in charge of the Agency’s covert action or “dirty tricks” department). On the tape, Nixon referred to both Helms and Watergate burglar and CIA man E. Howard Hunt, who was blackmailing him: We protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things. . . . Of course, this Hunt, that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things, and we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hankypanky that we have nothing to do with ourselves. Later that day, Nixon instructed Haldeman to go tell Helms: Very bad to have this fellow Hunt, ah, he knows too damned much, if he was involved — you happen to know that if it gets out that this is all involved, the Cuba thing, it would be a fiasco. It would make the CIA look bad, it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and it is likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing which we think would be very unfortunate — both for CIA and for the country, at this time, and for American foreign policy. Just tell him to lay off. . . . the problem is it tracks back to the Bay of Pigs and it tracks back to some other, the leads run out to people who had no involvement in this, except by contracts and connection, but it gets into areas that are liable to be realized. What was Nixon really talking about here? Haldeman wrote in his memoir, The Ends of Power (1978, with Joseph DiMona), that Nixon used “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” as coded language: “It seems that in all of those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination. . . . After Kennedy was killed, the CIA launched a fantastic cover-up. . . . In a chilling parallel to their cover-up at Watergate, the CIA literally erased any connection between Kennedy’s assassination and the CIA.” Haldeman’s book relates that when he went to see Helms on Nixon’s order, he told the CIA director, The President asked me to tell you this entire affair may be connected to the Bay of Pigs and if it opens up, the Bay of Pigs may be blown. Turmoil in the room, Helms gripping the arms of his chair leaning forward and shouting, “The Bay of Pigs has nothing to do with this! I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs!” Silence. I just sat there. I was absolutely shocked by Helms’ violent reaction. Again I wondered, what was such dynamite in the Bay of Pigs story? Finally I said, “I’m just following my instructions, Dick. That is what the President told me to relay to you.” Helms was settling back. “All right,” he said. But the atmosphere had changed. Now, surprisingly, the two CIA officials [Helms and deputy director General Vernon Walters] expressed no concern about the [impeachable Nixon] request that Walters go see FBI Director L. Patrick Gray. Interpreting the continuing cover-up of Dallas as a principal motive of Nixon’s ordering the CIA to cover up Watergate, the action that led to his impeachment and resignation from office, Oglesby portrays Nixon’s ouster from the presidency not as the result of the bungled “third-rate burglary” portrayed in the press but as a “countercoup” by the CIA against Nixon, stemming from the successful Dallas conspiracy. Nixon’s battle for control with the Agency is also portrayed as the cause of the Watergate affair by revisionist historians Jim Hougan in Secret Agenda; Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (1991); and Stone in Nixon. Oglesby considers the Watergate break-ins to have been staged and deliberately sabotaged by the CIA to draw Nixon into the series of crimes he predictably committed to cover up the break-ins. That coup enabled a removal of the president without assassination. But it was not a bloodless coup. Oglesby writes in extensive, compelling detail about the 1972 “Watergate plane crash” in Chicago that killed CIA-connected Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt’s wife, Dorothy, herself a CIA veteran, along with CBS News correspondent Michele Clark and forty-three other people, as a means of stopping Hunt’s husband from blackmailing Nixon. Oglesby further interprets an earlier coup, President Johnson’s forced “abdication” in 1968, as the outcome of the internal power struggle between the “Cowboy” faction that LBJ represented and the Eastern “Yankee” elite. Oglesby writes that Johnson’s grudging agreement not to seek another term as president, “as well as his switch to a negotiated settlement line on Vietnam,” was a “bloodless power play.” The North Vietnamese Tet Offensive of January 1968 and the international Gold Crisis that resulted from the weakening of the U.S. economic position by the war caused Johnson to be forced out of power by his “Wise Men,” the group of senior leaders who regularly advised him on policy as a kind of shadow government (the epitome of what’s meant by “deep politics”). Drawn largely from the leadership of the Eastern establishment, they included Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge, Douglas Dillon, and George Ball. On March 25, 1968, they told Johnson the war could not be won the way he was pursuing it and that he could not run for another term as president. Johnson surprised the nation by announcing “his” decision on television six days later. He was bitter about it and, according to the chief American correspondent of the Sunday Times of London, Henry Brandon, Johnson told him later that year, “The only difference between Kennedy’s assassination and mine is that mine was a live one, which makes it all a little more torturing.” Oglesby interprets that forced abdication as a Yankee power play by the Wise Men. He writes that they wanted to “break off [from the Cowboys] a war believed to be unwinnable except through an internal police state, both sides fighting for control of the levers of military and state-police power through control of the presidency. Johnson’s Ides of March was a less bloody Dallas, but it was a Dallas just the same: it came of a concerted effort of conspirators to install a new national policy by clandestine means. Its main difference from Dallas is that it finally did not succeed.” That the ouster from office of Kennedy’s successor resulted in America eventually losing the war in Vietnam was another tragic historical irony. After Nixon’s ascension in place of Johnson, the new president wound down the war diplomatically but with excruciating slowness while expanding the war enormously in terms of American firepower. That devastating escalation was partly made possible by Nixon’s canny decision to end the draft, which helped reduce domestic dissent. His maddening gradualism in bringing the war to the conclusion he had promised in his 1968 campaign but did not deliver during his tenure in office was the subject of a question put to a member of his administration at an event I covered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1972, as a reporter for The Wisconsin State Journal. Henry Kissinger’s deputy William H. Sullivan (who later was serving as the U.S. ambassador to Iran when the hostage crisis erupted in 1979) was asked at that event why the U.S. was still in Vietnam. He answered that it was because the U.S. needed to control the oil in the South China Sea. That kind of candid public revelation about realpolitik and the economic causations of war is most unusual among government officials. What I reported was picked up by the Associated Press and went around the world on its wire, although it was eclipsed by another revelation I reported from the same event, Sullivan’s comment that the Paris peace talks soon would be resuming. Following the stir both statements caused, Sullivan claimed he had not made them. I produced my notes to prove that he had. Then it was claimed that Sullivan’s speech to a university organization had been off-the-record. I produced a letter from that organization inviting our newspaper to cover his appearance on campus. Studies of the Vietnam War rarely discuss the importance of oil in motivating the long U.S. presence there. Revisionist (i.e., truthful) historians such as Oglesby and Scott attempt to make sense of these often-hidden aspects of modern American history. They analyze them as part of the workings of the deep state, a line of inquiry that helps clarify the seemingly mad spectacle of American foreign policy from Watergate and Vietnam and continuing through all the internal battles and external crises that have followed. That history takes us through the terms of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and careens catastrophically from 9/11 to the attempted Trump Coup. The parade of nearly constant destructive upheavals and calamities our country has undergone since the end of World War II demonstrates the continuing validity of Scott’s 1993 thesis about the regularity of “perceived threats” in modern American history and how those threats have been resolved through “collusive secrecy and law-breaking” and how they “deserve to be regarded as periodic readjustments of the open political system in which we live.” Even though the Cold War ended in 1991, such upheavals and readjustments, often carried out by violent means, remain the norm in the conduct of American foreign policy and the central role the military-industrial complex plays in our national life. By studying the functioning of the deep state that way, Scott writes, “we should look within, not outside, the political status quo, if we hope to understand the [Kennedy] assassination.” Beyond the Cold War period, what Chomsky calls a “constant parade of enemies” has been conjured up by the U.S. government and its propaganda apparatus, including the media. They serve as focal points of enmity for rallying the public behind the ongoing interests of the military-industrial complex and the policy of permanent or semi-permanent war (hence 9/11 and the “War on Terror”). And so, despite periodic changes of party control, the country remains largely in the hands of the same deep power structure that killed President Kennedy in 1963. “But what did we all believe in 1964 about the integrity of our upper government?” Oglesby asks. “What did we believe about spies, clandestinism, realpolitik, about intrigue as a method of decision-making and murder as an instrument of policy? In 1964 we could not yet even see through the fraud we call ‘the Gulf of Tonkin incident.’” Yet as a result of that atmosphere of deceit, there burst forth a flood of public distrust that was, perhaps, the beginning of a fresh start for those who could face the harsh new awareness. For as Salandria put it in 1994, Not only did the killing of JFK destroy the American public’s confidence in the presidency but in essentially all aspects of the legitimacy of the government. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and respected members of the Congress and of the American Establishment placed their names on the Warren Report, which the American public considered to be a fraud. The public lost its confidence in the media, which refused to investigate the killing. These changes were significant and important, and they can be traced and are traced by so many of us to the assassination.
  15. There's a lot of intended time-wasting on this forum now by trolls or hardcore Warren Commission adherents (whether they are sincere or disinformation agents) who want to endlessly rehash the old "so-called evidence" (as Oswald called it) while ignoring subsequent research that proves the official story false. I would suggest people not getting bogged down in pointless and tedious arguments of this kind. That's what the lone-nut crowd want, to distract us from serious ongoing research.
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