Joseph McBride

All this frantic, overwrought attention to Ruth Paine on the forum attempting to whitewash her, with twisting and ignoring of evidence and smears against her accusors, clearly was intended as a preemptive strike against Max Good's film. We saw some of this pattern of preemptive strikes by MSM apologists for the government before Oliver Stone's JFK was released -- and after. You have to wonder for whom the parties were/are working in putting out their disinformation and propaganda.

John Dean and the media have a lot of chutzpah to make him the hero/narrator of Watergate after all we've learned about those events.

Senator Yarborough told me that as the car sped out of Dealey Plaza, LBJ was hunched over in the gap in the front-seat area, huddled with Youngblood as they listened to the agent's walkie-talkie. The senator did not say that Youngblood tried to cover Johnson.

Admiral Burkley in his 1967 oral history for the JFK Library said, "I supervised the autopsy." He complained at length about the Secret Service barring him in Dallas from riding in close proximity to the presidential limousine. When asked if he agreed with the Warren Report on the number of bullets that entered the president's body, he said, "I would not care to be quoted on that."

Thanks for your good words about my Spielberg book, Jim. As always, my biographies are unauthorized. On Caro, I greatly admire his first volume on Johnson, which charts his unscrupulous rise to power at the same time as showing how he brought electricity to modernize the Hill Country. His second volume does astonishingly good research on the 1948 election theft, even getting the man who stuffed the ballot box to tell him how he did it, but, as you say, resorts to whitewashing Coke Stevenson to turn the saga into a simplistic morality tale. The third volume is excellent on how Johnson consolidated his power and ruled the Senate. But the fourth volume falls down on the job, even though it has some leads Caro developed but failed to follow to their logical conclusions (about Bobby Baker and Don Reynolds and Life magazine). The last I heard, Caro was up to 1967 in what he intends to be the final volume. Given what he wrote about JFK and LBJ in volume four, and the usual willful ignoring of the facts about the transition to power by mainstream historians, I don't expect that volume to be fully enlightening or truthful about Vietnam, though Caro may handle parts of the tragedy of Johnson's unraveling with some of the power of which he is capable. When Caro is telling the truth and digging deeply, he can be superb. His Moses book remains probably the greatest nonfiction book I have ever read, with the possible exception of Boswell's Life of Johnson. But the ambitious Johnson series falters because of the usual mainstream media roadblocks about facing the facts of 1963-64.

Correction: Caro's first book was his great biography of Robert Moses, THE POWER BROKER. I was deeply disappointed in the most recent Johnson volume, which distorts history in many ways and buys into myths such as the lie about Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood supposedly vaulting over the front seat of the convertible to shield LBJ during the shooting. I interviewed Senator Ralph Yarborough, who was riding in the back seat with LBJ and Lady Bird and said it never happened. Yarborough gave me numerous other insights into LBJ and the shooting, which I discuss in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE. Caro at one point, in a 1985 lecture at the New York Public Library, had raised hopes by promising he would deal with what he called "Johnson's blood feud with the Kennedys, which is a drama of Shakespearean vividness," but then he backed off from the implications of what he promised. That's how you get the big bucks and the awards.

This frustrating interview led me to re-read Clark's helpful book. David Lifton is an excellent interviewer, as we know from the invaluable quotes he drew from his sources and the way we see him work on his BEST EVIDENCE video. Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, another superb interviewer, says he believes in saying as little as possible, because his job as interviewer is getting the subject to talk (he also says if you let anyone talk uninterrupted for 30 minutes, they will reveal they are crazy). Occasionally an interviewer needs to redirect the flow of reminiscences and so forth, but you want the subjects to tell their story without leading questions and other interruptions as much as possible.

"Hubert was also interrupting"? He sometimes had to do so to get his story in while the other guy was yakking away repeating what Clark had told him or blathering on about whatever. I wished Clark had just told the guy to hold on and let him tell his story, but he was being polite. Clark was compelling whenever he was allowed to speak.

Uvalde, Texas, is where Dan Rather claimed to have been on the morning of November 22, 1963, to interview former VP John Nance Garner on his 95th birthday. That strains credibility, since Rather was in Dallas at the time of the assassination over the noon hour, and Uvalde is 355 miles from Dallas. Rather claimed he flew back. It is known that President Kennedy called Garner that morning to give him birthday greetings.

Hubert Clark tells his account so well I am exasperated by this ill-prepared guy interrupting him constantly, repeating what he says, asking leading questions, etc. etc. A good interviewer knows when to shut up.

Here's what I wrote on this topic in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: THE DEAD SECRET SERVICE AGENT STORY There is also that curious case of the dead Secret Service agent. Persistent reports that a Secret Service agent was killed in Dallas on November 22 may or may not relate to unknown activities in Oak Cliff in the period between Tippit’s murder and Oswald’s capture, the inadequately documented events at the theater, or to other strange events surrounding Tippit’s death. Dallas’s WFAA announced, “We may report this bulletin that a Secret Service agent and a Dallas policeman were shot and killed here today. They were shot some distance from the area where President Kennedy was assassinated.” All three television networks reported the agent’s death as fact, and the Associated Press was similarly quoted on WFAA-TV reporting, “A Secret Service agent and a Dallas policeman were shot and killed some distance from where the President was shot.” The story was dropped by the news media after received a carefully worded “denial” (with significant holes in it) at 3:40 p.m. by Robert A. Wallace, the assistant secretary of the Treasury in charge of the Secret Service: “No Secret Service man was injured in the attack on President Kennedy.” Note that this non-denial denial would not cover an agent’s death in another location that day in Dallas. And as was noted in Chapter 13, DPD Detective Marvin A. Buhk reported to Chief Curry on December 3 that Secret Service men had been involved in the hunt for the suspect in the Tippit killing. Some have theorized that the dead agent report may have been a cover story for spiriting Kennedy’s body out of Dallas by a route other than Air Force One or that the dead agent had attempted to warn the president of the impending plot. The Dallas Morning News reported that a man had run alongside Kennedy’s limousine a few minutes before the assassination, shouting a warning before being tackled by Secret Service agents from the followup car to Vice President Johnson’s vehicle several car lengths behind the president. Vince Palamara, the leading expert on the Secret Service involvement in the assassination, has studied these matters carefully and has found anomalies and gaps in the record pertaining to some agents who might have been a candidate for the “dead agent.” One report (from an article by Penn Jones and Gary Shaw) was that a Dallas or Fort Worth agent posing as a postal inspector knew of the plot and left his office on the day of the assassination, saying, “Well, this is it,” and was never seen by his family again, although they continued to receive his paychecks. Palamara identifies this man as Chuck Robertson. Palamara also quotes the late Secret Service agent James K. Fox as saying, “We lost a man that day -- our man.” Fox, who was stationed in Washington, D.C., was asked “to get ready a detail of four to six agents to assist in retrieving the body and casket of the unnamed Secret Service agent,” reports Palamara. In a transcript of a tape in which the respected Scripps-Howard reporter Seth Kantor recorded his memories shortly after the events in Dallas (reproduced in one of the Warren volumes), there is this passage about a discussion in an office in Parkland Hospital shortly after the announcement of Kennedy’s death: A western union man who had been with us since we came down from from [sic] Andrews Air Force Base came into the office. A nurse asked him about a report that a Secret Service agent had been killed out on the street. He said that it was true. This was one of the immediate rumors which sprung [sic] up. It took several days for this particular rumor not to be believed in Dallas itself (fellow in Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall who got it from a friend who got it from a postman supposed to have been at the death scene that the shot and bleeding SS man was picked up and whisked away and it was all hushed up. Why? I asked. Because they even have to die in secret, he said. He and others hinted that maybe the SS man was in on the plot to kill the President.) The mention of the Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall Printing Company (JCS) in Dallas is intriguing, for this was the firm for which Oswald worked from October 12, 1962 (ten days before the Cuban Missile Crisis would become public) through April 6, 1963, doing photographic work. The firm did classified jobs for the U.S. Army and Navy on maps and photographs. It is one of the many mysteries of Oswald’s story -- most likely an indication of his intelligence connections -- that he could have obtained such a sensitive position with his record as a supposed defector to the USSR. As Armstrong writes in Harvey and Lee, “It is worth noting that while working on military jobs at JCS Oswald made no attempt to conceal his sympathies towards Cuba, Russia, and communism. He brought Russian newspapers to work, read them during his breaks, and spoke Russian with co-worker Dennis Ofstein. Apparently, no one at JCS was concerned.” That last point may not be entirely true. Oswald was fired in late March 1963 because he was “inept in this particular craft,” but not because of any other problem, according to the Warren Commission testimony of Robert L. Stovall, the company’s president. But the director of the firm’s photographic department, John G. Graef, testified that Oswald had friction with other employees and that his reading of a Russian newspaper at work “didn’t help” him avoid being discharged when business was slow. And as for the curious history of the dead agent story, is it possible that Tippit worked clandestinely for the Secret Service or some other U.S. government agency and could have been reported to be the “dead agent” before the official story began to coalesce? The reports that a policeman was killed along with the agent, and that the agent “had been killed out on the street,” are suggestive, even if the record is vague on what might have happened. It would not have been unusual for a police officer to have operated under cover for a U.S. federal law enforcement or intelligence agency. Alternatively, given the initial confusion about an agent and a policeman being shot on the street, seemingly in the same incident, could this have resulted from an incident, otherwise lost to history, in which Tippit, or whoever shot him, shot an agent? As was discussed in Chapter 14, the chain of evidence on Tippit’s service revolver was broken by the strange action of witness Ted Callaway. M. S. Arnoni, who wrote some insightful early commentary on the assassination and related events, asked these questions as early as December 1, 1963, in his article “Dark Thoughts about Dark Events’ in the independent journal The Minority of One: “Was Lee Harvey Oswald a walking corpse, a fall guy, doomed even before the assassination to die? And if so, did he die after fulfilling an assassin's role, or only as a decoy? Was the assassin condemned to death by the very people who assigned him to shoot? If so, when did the execution take place -- with the shooting of Lee Oswald, or with the shooting of Dallas Patrolman J. D. Tippit? The first reports of the murder of Patrolman Tippit also related that a Secret Service man had been wounded; since then, nothing has been heard about that Secret Service man. What was his relation to Patrolman Tippit; and is it possible that the two were shot in a duel between them?” I asked Jim Leavelle if he had heard anything about a Secret Service agent being killed that day in Dallas. Leavelle confirmed he had looked into the story, but thought it wasn’t true: “I’ve heard that, but I’ve asked some people about it. Nobody knows a thing about it. It’s never been brought to my attention that it happened out there where [Tippit] was. If there had been a Secret Service man hurt out there, we’d have known about it, I can assure you about that. [Forrest V.] Sorrels was chief of the Secret Service here, and we were real close. I can assure you that if there had been a Secret Service agent shot or killed or even hurt, wounded [in Dallas that day], we would have known about it. We worked together just like that.”

I wonder if Greg knows that the article that principally established Ruth Paine as a kindly Quaker do-gooder who took in a poor Russian woman and wound up being betrayed by the Oswald couple into a notorious situation was published in Redbook in July 1964 as "Prelude to Tragedy: The woman who sheltered Lee Oswald's family tells her story." It was written by Quaker author Jessamyn West, the author of THE FRIENDLY PERSUASION, which was filmed in 1956 as FRIENDLY PERSUASION. West was a second cousin of fellow Quaker (!) Richard M. Nixon. Redbook at the time was owned by the McCall Corporation, whose president was Marvin Pierce. He was the father of Barbara Pierce Bush, a descendant of President Franklin Pierce and the wife of the CIA-connected George H. W. Bush, whose early CIA connections and involvement in the assassination I established in two articles for The Nation in 1988. Although the West article is mostly glowing and simplistic hagiography, West does express shock over Ruth Paine admitting in a rare moment of candor, "I was glad" that Oswald was killed; West chides her by saying, "There is nothing remotely saintly or even Quakerish about being glad that one man has murdered another man."

Double posted by accident.

The assassination wasn't a complete surprise to me or to some others who followed presidential security closely. I worried about JFK's assassination early on -- I wrote a short story about it for my freshman English class at Marquette University High School in Milwaukee in October 1961, "The Plot Against a Country." I wrote it because while acting as a volunteer in Kennedy's 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary campaign and meeting him twice, I was concerned about his lack of security, and I was already a student of the Lincoln assassination. The third time I met Kennedy was in May 1962, when he came to Milwaukee as president, and I was part of his honor guard at the Jefferson-Jackson Day event. I came within five feet of him afterward. My father, Milwaukee Journal reporter Raymond E. McBride, met Kennedy at a VIP reception beforehand and had time for one question, so he asked, "Do you ever worry about being assassinated?" The president said he was aware of the risk but couldn't think about it because he wouldn't be able to do his job if he did.

Dan Rather convinced CBS to have FIVE full camera crews covering JFK in Dallas, including the only live hookup (at the Trade Mart). ABC and NBC each had the usual one crew covering the president's trip to Dallas.

Mike Wallace of KLRD-TV was the announcer talking about the McKinley assassination during the live coverage of the presidential breakfast event in Fort Worth on November 22, 1963 (no, not the better-known Mike Wallace). Bob Walker, the station manager and news director of WFAA-TV in Dallas, also went on about assasinations during his live coverage of President Kennedy's arrival at Love Field. The concern was "in the air."

The disinfo agent Mary Ferrell urged me to read the Latimer book, which she said was definitive on this case. I had already read it and knew it is fallacious. That was one of the reasons I found Ferrell suspicious.

Zapruder's son, Henry, worked for the Justice Department at the time. Abe Zapruder was a member of the Dallas Petroleum Club along some other persons of interest in the case.

From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: Senator [Ralph] Yarborough [D-Texas, who was riding in the back seat of the convertible with LBJ and Lady Bird in the motorcade], who had “a lifetime of handling arms,” described for me his reactions to the shots fired in Dealey Plaza, giving an eyewitness and earwitness account that matched that of numerous other witnesses but is, like theirs, at odds over some details with what can now be seen in the altered Zapruder film: The first shot I heard I thought was a rifle shot. The second shot, the motorcade almost came to a halt. They said later that the president‘s car slowed to something like five miles an hour. I wondered what the hell they were stopping for when somebody is shooting. People were jumping out of the car in front of me [the Secret Service followup car] and running to the president‘s car. I thought maybe somebody had thrown a bomb in there. The third shot I heard was a rifle shot. When I asked Yarborough if he thought there was a gunman on the Grassy Knoll, he said, I believe I would have heard or picked the shot up. I just don’t [think so]. I didn’t think so at the time. There’s one possibility -- I don’t think there was a second gunman, but if somebody else fired a shot at the identical time as the gunman in the School Book Depository, if two shots were fired instantly, it would be hard to differentiate them. I know that when I’ve gone deer hunting, if I fire my rifle at the same time as somebody else fires his, you can’t tell the two shots apart. I agree with John Connally that it’s foolish to say that only two shots were fired [Yarborough apparently is alluding to the single-bullet theory, which Connally never accepted]. I’ve talked to Dallas policemen who told me that the people from Washington gave them an awful grilling. They came down with a theory in mind and they didn’t want to hear anything else that might not match up with their theory. I have the suspicion this fellow Ruby knew somebody about it, with his criminal connections. Oswald went by his room in Oak Cliff, to get his gun or something, and the direction he was walking in was the direction of Ruby’s apartment. I think it was a conspiracy, of course, but I don’t know who the conspirators were. Anyway, too many people wanted Kennedy dead.

A distinguished scholar such as Vince Palamara, who has written a number of important books on the case, does not need advice on his reading comprehension, "joking" or otherwise.

Ford's pardon of Nixon sealed his fate. Carter was sabotaged in the hostage rescue effort and then a victim of the October Surprise, so we should add him to the list. I go into O'Donnell's role in the plot in INTO THE NIGHTMARE: JOHNNY, HE HARDLY KNEW YE Further support for the presence of a shooter on the knoll came from surprising sources, Kennedy’s close aides Kenneth O’Donnell and Dave Powers, who were riding in the Secret Service followup car and witnessed the assassination at close range. Their once-private recollections were reported in House Speaker Thomas (Tip) O’Neill’s 1987 book, Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill (with William Novak). After John F. Kennedy was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1952, O’Neill was the man who replaced him in their Massachusetts district of the House of Representatives before going on to become speaker from 1977 through 1987. O’Neill wrote in his book: I was never one of those people who had doubts or suspicions about the Warren Commission's report on the president's death. But five years after Jack died, I was having dinner with Kenny O'Donnell and a few other people at Jimmy's Harborside Restaurant in Boston, and we got to talking about the assassination. I was surprised to hear O'Donnell say that he was sure he had heard two shots that came from behind the fence. "That's not what you told the Warren Commission," I said. "You're right," he replied. "I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn't have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn't want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family." "I can't believe it," I said. "I wouldn't have done that in a million years. I would have told the truth." "Tip, you have to understand. The family -- everybody wanted this thing behind them." Dave Powers was with us at dinner that night, and his recollection of the shots was the same as O'Donnell's. Kenny O'Donnell is no longer alive, but during the writing of this book I checked with Dave Powers [who from 1964 until 1994 was museum curator of the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum]. As they say in the news business, he stands by his story. And so there will always be some skepticism in my mind about the cause of Jack's death. I used to think that the only people who doubted the conclusions of the Warren Commission were crackpots. Now, however, I'm not so sure. O’Donnell’s behavior surrounding the assassination, and not only his lie in this critical matter, raised questions in my mind. He had the reputation of being a great Kennedy loyalist, an impression promoted by the intermittently powerful yet somewhat ludicrous 2000 film Thirteen Days. Although it dramatizes the opposition Kennedy faced from General Curtis LeMay in the Cuban Missile Crisis, it blinks on the full implications of that conflict and grossly exaggerates the role of Kennedy’s special assistant/appointments secretary by portraying him as a key presidential confidant in that crisis; JFK’s speechwriter Ted Sorensen mockingly described the film as “Kenny O’Donnell saving the world.” It turned out the film was hardly an unbiased historical account. According to Britain’s Guardian newspaper, it was covertly an O’Donnell family enterprise: “His son Kevin, an internet tycoon, helped bankroll a buyout of Beacon Entertainment, which made the movie, and appears to have been the partial inspiration for promoting his father -- played by Kevin Costner -- to the role of the ‘ordinary Joe’ hero audiences identify with.” I find it hard to accept Kenneth O’Donnell as a loyal, sympathetic figure because I can’t overlook his role in covering up the truth about the assassination. When asked by Warren Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter his “reaction as to the source of the shots,” O’Donnell testified cryptically, “My reaction in part is reconstruction -- is that they came from the right rear. That would be my best judgment.” Powers more truthfully told the commission, “My first impression was that the shots came from the right and overhead, but I also had a fleeting impression that the noise appeared to come from the front in the area of the triple overpass. This may have resulted from my feeling, when I looked forward toward the overpass, that we might have ridden into an ambush." The 1972 book by O’Donnell and Powers, with Joe McCarthy, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye”: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, is silent on the source of the shots, but it does indicate that Powers, unlike O’Donnell, did not accept the single-bullet theory: “Dave, who was watching the President and Connally carefully during the shooting, still thinks that the first bullet hit Kennedy in the neck, the second struck Connally and the third one ripped open the President’s head.” O’Donnell also admits interfering with a Secret Service man’s attempt to respond to the shots: “A Secret Service agent beside me, probably Tim McIntyre who was standing behind Clint Hill on the left running board, pulled his gun and I reached for it, pushing it down, thinking that if he fired, he might hit somebody in the crowd.” O’Donnell also was instrumental in the illegal removal of Kennedy’s body from Dallas, which prevented a legitimate autopsy and made the coverup of a conspiracy possible. Furthermore, O’Donnell had played a major role, and probably a decisive one, in choosing the Trade Mart as the venue for JFK’s Dallas speech, evidently in concert with Texas Governor John Connally, who was pressing hard for it. And according to Secret Service expert Vince Palamara, it was O’Donnell who had decided that neither of Kennedy’s military aides, Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh or Major General Chester Clifton, would ride in the presidential limousine, as one usually did, and instead placed them far behind JFK in the motorcade and unable to see the president. The 1964 Ford Mercury station wagon in which they were riding was the sixteenth car in line, just ahead of the first press bus, and, according to researcher Todd Wayne Vaughan, originally was scheduled to carry members of the Washington press corps and was the personal vehicle of assassination “researcher” Mary Ferrell. The decision by O’Donnell to choose the Trade Mart for the president’s speech, with the additional connivance of the Secret Service, determined that the limousine would pass through Dealey Plaza at a slow pace. The HSCA staff report on the motorcade cites Gerald A. Behn, the Secret Service’s Special Agent in Charge of the White House Detail, as stating that O’Donnell made the decision for the Trade Mart, overruling security concerns expressed by Behn and others about that location. O’Donnell testified to the commission, “There was a controversy between the Governor [Connally], and between some of the local Democratic figures, and between our people, as to whether the place finally selected was the best place for the President to give the address. The Governor felt very strongly on it. And we finally acquiesced to his views. But I would think that came rather late in the game, and it would have altered the route quite dramatically.” According to the HSCA, the principal advance man on the Texas trip, Jerry Bruno, made notes on November 6 indicating that “O’Donnell held and exercised the power to make the final decision and accordingly gave orders to Bruno and Behn to implement the decision.” But the decision was not finally settled until November 14, the day of the motorcade planning meeting in the office of Dallas attorney Eugene Locke, the head of the State Democratic Executive Committee of Texas; Bruno wrote in his journal, “On this day, Kenny O’Donnell [who was in Washington that day] decided that there was no other way but to go to the mart.” On November 15, Bruno wrote, “The White House announced that the Trade Mart had been approved. I met with O’Donnell and [Peace Corps deputy director and Texas advance man Bill] Moyers who said that Connally was unbearable and on the verge of cancelling the trip. They decided they had to let the Governor have his way.” November 14 was the day Democratic National Committee representative Jack Puterbaugh, who presumably was working closely with O’Donnell, participated in that final decision in Dallas or perhaps conveyed it from Washington (see further discussion of the all-important choice of the motorcade route, and the role of Locke as well, in Chapters 6 and 16). As mentioned earlier, when William Manchester interviewed O’Donnell about his and the Secret Service’s heated struggle, with guns being drawn, to remove President Kennedy’s coffin illegally from Parkland Hospital over the objections of the local medical examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, O’Donnell said, “it became physical -- us against them.” Manchester suggests that Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman made the initial decision to remove the body, but also calls O’Donnell “the leader of Rose’s opposition.” O’Donnell told the commission that it was his decision to remove the coffin so that Mrs. Kennedy would not have to stay in Dallas when an autopsy was being performed: ”I in my own mind determined that we had no alternative but to just depart. . . . I notified the Secret Service and [U.S. Air Force] General [Godfrey] McHugh [military aide to Kennedy], and told them to get ready to depart. We went in and took the body out.” Manchester quotes O’Donnell as saying to a Dallas policeman at Parkland, “Get the hell over. We’re getting out of here. We don’t give a damn what these laws say.” If all these actions by O’Donnell were the actions of a Kennedy loyalist, I wondered what a disloyal aide might have done under the same circumstances. And why was there such an effort in later years to burnish the image of O’Donnell, including not only a 2000 big-budget movie but also a 1998 book by his daughter Helen, A Common Good: The Friendship of Robert F. Kennedy and Kenneth P. O’Donnell? I searched for clues about why O’Donnell’s loyalty to JFK might have been compromised. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh provides them in his 1997 book The Dark Side of Camelot, alleging that O’Donnell was the center of a corruption scandal at the White House that appeared about to explode once the president returned from Dallas. John and Robert Kennedy reportedly were already working to shed Lyndon Johnson from the 1964 ticket, using the spreading Bobby Baker scandal as leverage. Hersh writes: “During his last days in Washington, [President] Kennedy was confronted with a serious allegation against Kenny O’Donnell.” According to Hersh, the allegation came from Kennedy presidential campaign and Democratic National Committee operative Paul Corbin, who was close to Bobby: “In the late spring of 1963, Corbin concluded that he had solid evidence of the skimming of campaign contributions by O’Donnell and two others, and he went to [a close friend of JFK, journalist Charles] Bartlett to have him warn the president.” Although JFK was dismissive of the allegations, Bobby was not. Hersh writes that Corbin returned to his inquiry with renewed determination, Bartlett told me, and, after months of preparation, “brought Bobby the stuff. He had affidavits proving that it was still going on” as of November 1963. “He was a good sleuth,” Bartlett said. “He told me he got it all together, signed statements, with Kenny O’Donnell being the bagman. He took it to Bobby and Bobby went through it and said, ‘This is it.’ He called Jack” in front of Corbin. Evelyn Lincoln told the attorney general that his brother had just left for Texas. “Bobby said,” Corbin told Bartlett, ‘“We’ll do it Monday. First thing.”’ After the assassination, the distraught attorney general told Corbin to let the issue rest. “Lyndon wouldn’t believe me,” Kennedy said, according to Corbin. So both O’Donnell and Johnson may have been saved by Dallas from expulsion from the administration or possibly even prison terms. Hersh reports that Bartlett in the summer of 1963 wrote JFK another memorandum revealing that O’Donnell, far from being loyal, actually held his boss in contempt: “O’Donnell, while drinking at a bar in Hyannis Port, had been overheard by a Secret Service agent making derogatory remarks about the president. ‘The purport of O’Donnell’s remarks,’ Bartlett wrote, ‘was that the President was in fact rather stupid and that if it were not for [O’Donnell’s] assistance, he would fall flat on his face. O’Donnell said he had had a great many offers from industry but that he was afraid to leave because he knew that the administration would fall apart.’ Kennedy’s response was to give the note to O’Donnell, who had the Secret Service agent immediately removed from the White House presidential detail, disrupting his career.” Hersh also quotes from a July 19, 1963, memo Bartlett wrote the president reporting, “An aura of scandal is building up -- someone as remote as John Sherman Cooper [the Republican senator from Kentucky] observed to me the other evening that . . . it would be a terrible thing if your record as President were to be impaired by disloyalty on the part of your associates.” Cooper that November was appointed by President Johnson to the Warren Commission. After the assassination, O’Donnell began a long slide into alcoholism that led to his premature death in 1977. He worked for LBJ for a while, and then for RFK in his 1968 presidential campaign, and he made two unsuccessful bids to become governor of Massachusetts. His daughter writes that he was always ”haunted” by Dallas. Although she makes no mention of the financial scandal that Hersh reports was brewing, and blames Governor Connally for choosing the Trade Mart, she writes that her father blamed himself for choosing the motorcade route through Dealey Plaza: “His decision would haunt Kenny for the remainder of his life.” O’Donnell would tell his wife, “I let him down. I failed. I let him down.” As Mort Sahl put it, President Kennedy “had a strange group of friends. Remarkably absent when he fell.”

Glad to hear of the widespread impact of the documentary, Jim. Excellent work by you and Oliver Stone. It does show that the interest in the subject continues strong -- even in the USA.

Thanks, Benjamin. I appreciate it. Hey, Ron, I think I figured out the phone glitch problem -- its battery is running low. It's probably as simple as that. I am glad you enjoyed the conversation.

Well, the joke does wear a trifle thin . . .

Calling the Democrats the Donk Party is like the Republicans calling them the Democrat Party. It gets tiresome and has been since I was first aware of that c. 1960.