Joseph McBride

John Armstrong did exhaustive research and convinced me that there were two Oswalds. I differ with him on whether you can always pin down which was which, as his book mostly tries to do, and on whether one of the Oswalds killed Tippit. But his research is impressive, and those who belittle it are struggling to discredit a major work in the case that undermines the Warren Commission version that they seem to have allegiance to, despite all of what Oswald told his brother Robert was the "so-called evidence" the authorities were trying to bring against him.

From my 2013 book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: “THE ONLY ONE WHO DUCKED” While I was interviewing Senator Yarborough about [George H. W.] Bush, I took the opportunity of discussing with him the events of the Dallas motorcade. He offered an important revelation he also made over the years to some other researchers, and gave me some possibly significant insights into Lyndon Johnson’s state of mind that day. Yarborough was riding in the second car behind Kennedy’s, sitting behind the driver in the back seat of a convertible with Vice President and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson. In the front seat were the driver from the Texas Highway Patrol, Hurchel Jacks, and the VP’s Secret Service agent, Rufus Youngblood. LBJ sat directly behind Youngblood, and Lady Bird between her husband and Yarborough. Directly ahead of their car was the Secret Service presidential followup car, the “Queen Mary.” Senator Yarborough, 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. The official story put forth by Lyndon Johnson after the assassination was that when the shots were fired, Secret Service Agent Youngblood heroically vaulted over the seat and covered the VP with his body. Although Johnson arranged to have Youngblood receive the Treasury Department’s highest honor, the Exceptional Service Award, on December 4, 1963, and the agent was eventually promoted to Special Agent in Charge of the White House Detail and then deputy director of the Secret Service, Youngblood’s 1964 Warren Commission testimony contained significant qualifiers. He said that after hearing the first shot and seeing unusual crowd movement as well as movement in the Secret Service followup car behind the president’s limousine, “I turned around and hit the Vice President on the shoulder and hollered, get down, and then looked around again and saw more of this movement, and so I proceeded to go to the back seat and get on top of him. I then heard two more shots. But I would like to say this. I would not be positive that I was on that back seat before the second shot. But the Vice President himself said I was.” Asked to describe his movements further, Youngblood added another qualifier: “Well, the Vice President says that I vaulted over. It was more of a stepping over. And then I sat on top of him, he being crouched down somewhat.” Yarborough scoffed at that story. He said Youngblood never left the front seat. The back seat was so full, as photographs of the car in the motorcade confirm, that there would not have been room for the agent along with three other people; Yarborough would have known if a large man was sharing the seat with them. Yarborough’s description of Johnson’s reaction after the shots were fired was suggestive: Absolutely motionless. Said nothing. You know that tale Johnson liked to tell about Youngblood, the Secret Service man, jumping over the front seat when the shots were fired and shielding him with his body? Well, that’s as big a cock-and-bull tale as the time he told the Marines in Da Nang that his great-grandfather had fought at the Alamo. [Actually, Johnson told servicemen at Camp Stanley in Korea, “My great-great-grandfather died at the Alamo.”] Youngblood never jumped over the seat. Johnson sat there stoically. The only time they moved was when we were going through the Triple Overpass, and Youngblood leaned over the seat -- he had a small radio receiver in his hand -- and Johnson leaned over, they were about six inches apart, and they listened to some transmission together on the radio. [A photograph indicates Johnson had ducked earlier: See below.] I asked them what happened, and they didn’t say anything. They were afraid somebody might tell the truth. They knew damn well what happened, because when the cars pulled up at the hospital, the Secret Service men swarmed all around Johnson, and one of them said, “Mr. President.” They left Mrs. Kennedy alone in the car with the body, grieving over it. They knew he was dead instantly, because his head was blown off. Mrs. Kennedy was holding onto him and wouldn’t let him go until they put a suit coat around him to cover his head [Secret Service Agent Clint Hill did that]. It isn’t entirely clear from the transcript of our interview what Yarborough meant by saying, “They were afraid somebody might tell the truth.” Agent Youngblood that day was carrying a large walkie-talkie radio from a shoulder strap (it can be seen in the photograph of him escorting Johnson out of Parkland Hospital). The Secret Service was communicating on two frequencies in Dallas, Baker and Charlie. The Baker frequency was for transmissions between cars in the motorcade, including those between the vice president’s car and his followup car, but the Charlie frequency had much broader links among the Trade Mart, Air Force One and Two, the president’s limousine, its followup car, the lead car in the motorcade, and the rest of the motorcade, via the temporary White House Communications Agency Center setup at the Sheraton Hotel, which was itself linked directly to the White House. Youngblood told the Warren Commission that after the shots were fired, he radioed his followup car, “I am switching to Charlie”; but perhaps he and LBJ had been listening on Charlie all along, to follow the larger picture. One wonders if the behavior of Johnson even before the shots were fired meant he had some kind of premonition of trouble. Penn Jones always said that “Johnson was the only one who ducked” in the motorcade. He based this on the famous James Altgens panoramic photo of Elm Street during the shooting, in which it appears that Johnson is leaning sharply forward (possibly to duck for safety, possibly also to listen to Youngblood’s walkie-talkie) while Lady Bird and Yarborough smile and wave, momentarily oblivious to the gunfire. When I asked Yarborough what Johnson’s mood had been during the motorcade from Love Field before the shooting started downtown, the former senator said, He hardly spoke. The crowd would holler at him on the street, and even though he was a politician he did not smile or wave, he just looked straight ahead all day long. Johnson was worried about some revelations that were supposed to come out that day before a congressional committee in Washington about Bobby Baker, Johnson’s bagman. Johnson was scared to death it was going to blow that very day. I wondered why he was being so dour in the car, when the crowds were giving him so good a response. I tried to butter him up and said, “Mr. Vice President, why don’t you wave at them? Look how fond of you they are.” He never would respond, not a word. Senator Yarborough made it clear in our interview that what he thought Johnson was worried about came from his later knowledge of what was happening in the congressional committee at the time. Johnson was indeed very worried about the testimony being given at that exact moment in Washington by Maryland insurance man Donald Reynolds before a closed hearing with the staff of the Senate Rules Committee. As Robert A. Caro writes in the fourth volume of his Johnson biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power (2012), “[O]n that Friday, for the first time a Lyndon Johnson financial transaction was going to be described by a witness, seated beside his lawyer, to representatives of the United States Senate.” This is Caro’s description of the atmosphere in the car when the motorcade began at Love Field: “Lady Bird, sitting between Yarborough and her husband, tried to make conversation but soon gave up. The two men weren’t speaking to or looking at each other -- the only noises in the car came from the walkie-talkie radio that Youngblood was carrying on a shoulder strap -- as the motorcade pulled out.” . . .

"Something wrong." -- Dr. Henry Lee

Jim, does this mean the DVD won't be out soon?

You mean "toeing the line," I assume.

CRISIS: BEHIND A PRESIDENTIAL COMMITMENT is a superb documentary about the integration of the University of Alabama and shows that Kabuki dance between Wallace and Katzenbach/JFK/RFK without spelling it out in explicit verbal language.

He had to do Vietnam because that's why he was put in office. He knew it was doomed and it would destroy him as well, but he felt he had no choice. His story was a classical tragedy.

I am glad you are reading POLITICAL TRUTH, Ron. This book covers a lot of ground and is the result of many years of study and thinking about the mainstream media's dereliction of duty.

From my 2021 book POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY: JOHNSON GETS HIS WAR Johnson’s bullying of internal opposition was evident in a secretly recorded telephone call on February 25, 1964, to McNamara, who had been working in concert with Kennedy before the assassination to begin the withdrawal process and had continued as secretary of defense under Johnson: Johnson: I hate to modify your speech any, because it’s been a good one, but I just wonder if we shouldn’t find two minutes in there for Vietnam. McNamara: Yeah, the problem is what to say about it. Johnson: All right, I’ll tell you what I would say about it. I would say that we have a commitment to Vietnamese freedom. We can pull out of there. The dominoes would fall, and that part of the world would go to the Communists. We could send our Marines in there and we could get tied down in a third world war or another Korean action. Nobody really understands what it is out there. And they’re asking questions and they’re saying why, why don’t we do more. Well, I think this: you can have more war or you can have more appeasement. But we don’t want more of either. Our purpose is to train these people [the South Vietnamese], and our training is going good. McNamara: All right, sir, I’ll, I’ll get — Johnson: I always thought it was foolish for you to make any statements about withdrawing. I thought it was bad psychologically. But you and the president thought otherwise, and I just sat silent. McNamara: But the problem is — Johnson: All right, then the question’s, how the hell does McNamara think when he’s losing the war he can pull men out of there? That’s when McNamara should have resigned as secretary of defense. Instead he went through the agony of further capitulation, sporadic resistance, and acquiescence that lasted until he was fired in February 1968. The tone and gist of his 1964 conversation with Johnson was similar to the November 24 decision by the new president (in private) to prosecute the war more aggressively. Johnson maintained his lie about not wanting to widen the war until after his election in November 1964 as the alleged “peace candidate” against the bellicose Republican Barry Goldwater. By March 1965 the Marines were landing in Da Nang, beginning Johnson’s massive escalation of the war. Even after that he tried to conceal his intentions, which caused a “credibility gap” and further eroded the loss of faith in the government that had begun with the assassination. Other Johnson telephone conversations from 1964 make clear that well before his dispatching of combat troops, the president himself was harboring grave doubts about the situation he had gotten himself into with Vietnam. Johnson’s secret plans to escalate the war were putting him in a vise that he fully recognized, in the manner of a tragic protagonist enmeshed in a futile struggle with his fate. But he could not tell the public the truth that he felt powerless to do anything about it. Two tapes of LBJ phone conversations not released until 1997 offered startling revelations that would have changed the course of the war if the public had known about them in 1964. “Tapes Show Johnson Saw Vietnam War As Pointless in 1964,” the New York Times reported when they were released by the LBJ Presidential Library. But the “paper of record” buried the Associated Press dispatch on page twelve of its second section. Johnson’s pessimistic May 27, 1964, conversations with two of his closest advisers are striking indications of why such a giant credibility gap would develop over Vietnam, and with hints of why it existed. On that date, Johnson spoke on the telephone with McGeorge Bundy, who had continued as his national security adviser. The president said of Vietnam, “I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damn mess I ever saw.” That night Johnson called Senator Russell, his longtime mentor and a foreign policy expert with substantial knowledge of Vietnam, the chair of the Senate Committee on Armed Services since 1955. “Oh, I’ve got lots of trouble,” Johnson told him. “ . . . What do you think about this Vietnam thing?” . . . Russell: Well, frankly, Mr. President, if you were to tell me that I was authorized to settle it as I saw fit, I would respectfully decline to undertake it. [Johnson laughs] It’s the damn worse mess I ever saw, and I don't like to brag. I never have been right many times in my life, but I knew we were going to get in this sort of mess when we went in there, and I don’t see how we’re ever going to get out of fighting a major war with the Chinese and all of them down there in those rice paddies and jungles. I just don't see it. It’s — I just don’t know what to do. Johnson: Well, that's the way I’ve been feeling for six months [i.e., since he took office]. . . . Russell: I don’t think the American people are quite ready for us to send our troops in there to do the fighting. . . . Johnson: I’m afraid that’s right. I’m afraid that’s right. I don’t think the people of the country know much about Vietnam, and I think they care a hell of a lot less. . . . Russell: I just don’t know, it’s a tragic situation, it’s just one of those places where you can’t win. Anything you do is wrong. . . . it’s the damnedest mess on Earth. The French poured, they lost 250,000 men and spent a couple billion of their money and two billion of ours down there. And just got the hell whipped out of them. And they had the best troops they had. . . . Johnson: I just haven’t got the nerve to do it, and I don’t see any other way out of it. Johnson gave Russell various excuses about why he couldn’t pull out — it was psychologically important to the U.S., he was obligated by treaty, dominoes would fall, he might be impeached — but Russell dismissed them. The unspoken subtext was that the people in the military-industrial complex who had put Johnson in power expected him to give them the war, and he had to fulfill his end of the bargain. In another conversation with Johnson on June 11, 1964, Russell made this chillingly accurate prediction about how hopeless it would be: “It’d take a half million men. They’d be bogged down in there for ten years.”

That seems a logical conclusion from his repeated meetings with the FBI in the run-up to the assassination and other information, as well as from his well-placed position on the motorcade route. Here are two sections from my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: THE FBI COVERS MORE OF ITS TRACKS The delicate matter of the FBI’s possible relationship with Oswald, which caused Agent Hosty to destroy the note he claimed Oswald had left at the Dallas office around November 12, was exacerbated on November 24 when Jim Ewell of the Dallas Morning News reported that Oswald "was interviewed by the FBI here six days before the Friday assassination. "But word of the interview with the former defector to Russia was not conveyed to the U.S. Secret Service and Dallas police, reliable sources told The Dallas News Saturday. "An FBI agent referred all inquiries to Agent-in-Charge Gordon Shanklin, who could not be immediately reached for comment. "However, in Washington, a spokesman for the FBI said it was 'incorrect' that the FBI had questioned Oswald or had him under surveillance at any time in recent months, the Associated Press reported. The interview reportedly was held Nov. 16 -- at a time when the Secret Service and police officials were coordinating security plans for the President’s ill-fated Dallas visit. These sources said the Oswald interview added more data to an already “thick file” the FBI has on the 24-year-old avowed Marxist who defected to Russia in 1959 and returned in 1962." Later the same morning that report hit the streets, Oswald was killed. And still later that day, Hosty’s supervisor, the same Gordon Shanklin, ordered him to destroy the note from Oswald. A lot was at risk in the frantic attempts to dispose of Oswald and cover up whatever relationship the FBI had with him. What was in jeopardy was the whole house of cards surrounding the assassination, the developing cover story of Oswald as a “loner” who conceived and carried out his scheme to kill the president with no apparent political motive, or, indeed, no discernable motive of any kind. What Scott describes as part of the “phase-two” story was fast being implemented, the denial that Oswald was in cahoots with the USSR or Cuba and portraying him instead as a loner with vague communist sympathies that were not of the nature to lead the U.S. into a retaliatory war. The same Dallas Morning News article that morning about Oswald’s November 16 interview with the FBI carried Chief Curry’s retraction of his statement about the bureau withholding information from the police. But according to Ray and Mary La Fontaine in their 1996 book Oswald Talked: The New Evidence in the JFK Assassination, reporter Ewell told them that Curry himself “and his police intelligence unit” were the “reliable sources” who leaked that piece of embarrassing information (or falsehood) about the FBI to the newspaper. The chief evidently felt the lack of cooperation his department had received from the bureau contributed to making the Dallas police look worse than unprofessional in the eyes of the world when the president was killed. Nothing, however, could make the police look more incompetent or corrupt than allowing their prisoner to be murdered on live network television while handcuffed to two detectives and surrounded by dozens of other officers in the basement of the police headquarters. But with the reputation of the nation’s most prominent law enforcement agency, the FBI, in equally serious jeopardy, the report of its November 16 interview with Oswald seemed to magically vanish from the accumulating public record of the assassination, rarely being mentioned again except in an occasional book such as the LaFontaines’ or Scott’s Deep Politics II. Later, another story emerged that may or may not have been connected with a contact between Oswald and the FBI on November 16. It was reported that at 1:45 a.m. on November 17, a clerk in the FBI’s New Orleans office, William S. Walter, received an “URGENT” Teletype sent to all Special Agents in Charge from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warning of a possible threat to assassinate President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22 by a “MILITANT REVOLUTIONARY GROUP.” Walter later made a copy of the Teletype from notes he said he had taken from it; he added before that phrase, “CUBAN FACTION.” The FBI denied the existence of the Teletype, but the LaFontaines, who report Walter’s belief that Oswald was an FBI informant, speculate that the urgent warning may have stemmed from a tip provided by Oswald in the November 16 interview. They raise the possibility that the gunrunning investigation involving the Treasury Department and the FBI, in which Oswald also may have been an informant, could have become intertangled with this assassination warning in the eyes of the FBI. With some of the documentation destroyed or otherwise missing, including any original copies of the Teletype Walter said he received, it’s impossible to pinpoint exactly what kind of warning Oswald might have been passing along to the FBI. The possibility that this tip came from Oswald echoes the report that an FBI informant named “Lee” had passed along the warning that caused President Kennedy’s Chicago trip on November 2 to be canceled because of the threat of an assassination attempt. THE WADE REVELATION The FBI’s jeopardy over its relationship with Oswald could have been even worse if Henry Wade had told the media in 1963 what he told me three decades later. The former Dallas County district attorney revealed a piece of information that, if true, would be an indication of an deeper relationship between Oswald and the FBI than has ever been acknowledged. A former FBI agent himself, Wade told me in 1993 that Oswald may have given information to the FBI only a day or two before the assassination. “We weren’t getting much -- full cooperation from some of the federal authorities,” Wade said. “You know Jack Revill said when he walked into the jail up there, an agent of the FBI said, ‘We know Oswald well. I talked with him yesterday.’ Or something similar to that. And then it got into a big fuss with the FBI and the Dallas police, [over] who was telling the truth. Hosty’s the agent.” I asked Wade to clarify if Hosty indeed said he talked with Oswald the day before the assassination, and the former DA replied, “Within a day or two, I don’t know exactly.” Wade then recounted the story about Oswald going to the FBI office to tell them to leave his wife alone. Wade seemed uncertain whether or not Oswald had left a note or how that story came out; Wade said, “I don’t know who said he went there. The only one I could think of was his wife.” Whether or not Wade was mixing up the timeline of Oswald’s visit to the FBI office with a subsequent encounter with the FBI was unclear. But a report from a well-placed source such as Henry Wade about possible contact between Oswald and the FBI a day or two before the assassination would (if accurate) seriously contradict even the belated official version, revealed twelve years after the assassination, of the latest date on which Oswald had contact with the FBI (November 12, the approximate date Hosty said Oswald left the note) as well as the virtually forgotten newspaper report of the Bureau’s interview with Oswald on November 16. Wade’s revelation, especially when added to those other reports, would make it even more likely that Oswald had an informant relationship with the FBI, and would make the destruction of the note (with its contents that remain uncertain) a matter of even more critical importance to maintaining the coverup. Of course, it is possible that in our interview, the seventy-eight-year-old Wade, who had retired as DA in 1987 but was still practicing law, misremembered the date of Oswald’s last contact with the FBI, placing it closer to the time of the assassination than earlier reported. Nevertheless, Wade still appeared sharp-witted, and he seemed emphatic about the close proximity of Oswald’s contact with the FBI and the assassination, although uncertain whether the contact came on November 20 or 21. It is also conceivable that Wade might have been consciously or subconsciously exaggerating the proximity of the acknowledged and unacknowledged contact(s) with Oswald in order to spite the FBI. This could have been a further sign of the resentment felt by the Dallas law enforcement community over its fraught relationship with the FBI. Although it’s worth recalling in this context that Wade was one of the Texas law enforcement officials who discussed with the Warren Commission the potentially highly damaging rumor about Oswald being an FBI informant, the DA nevertheless expressed skepticism about that report in his June 1964 testimony. The commission had called Wade, Bill Alexander, and Waggoner Carr to an informal meeting in Washington on January 24 to discuss the rumor after hearing it from Carr. J. Lee Rankin wrote in a memorandum to his files that Carr “suggested that his information came ultimately from District Attorney Henry Wade,” although Wade denied that. Rankin reported after the Washington meeting that Wade “and others of the Texas representatives stated that the rumors to the effect that Oswald was an undercover agent were widely held among representatives of the press in Dallas,” and that the rumors were that Oswald was an informant for both the FBI and the CIA. But Rankin’s memo reports that Wade and Alexander blamed reporters for the rumors and “both indicated that they would not vouch for the integrity or accuracy” of those reporters. Before meeting with Wade in Washington, the commission quietly but expeditiously looked into the DA’s own relationship with the FBI and why he had left as an agent in 1943 after working mostly on espionage cases. Rankin told the commission in the secret January 27 executive session (not declassified until 1974) that “we thought possibly there was --- he might have left under a cloud.” But Rankin found that Wade left the FBI because he wanted to go into private practice and to join the U.S. Navy; “there was no ill feeling between them,” and the FBI had tried to persuade Wade to return to its employ. So that suspicion about Wade’s motives was unsupported by evidence, and Rankin’s impression of Wade was that he was “a very canny, able prosecutor.” . . .

Oswald was an FBI informant. He had met with the FBI in Dallas two or perhaps three times in November 1963 before the assassination. Oswald had infiltrated the plot but did not know he was being set up as the patsy.

From my 2013 book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT: THE GATEKEEPER After it became clear to me that the introduction into evidence of the audiotape on which the HSCA based its halfhearted conclusion of conspiracy was designed to discredit the whole investigation, I became keenly interested in tracing the provenance of the tape to see how this could have happened. According to Fort Worth researcher Jack D. White, the tape was first brought forward by Gary Mack, who took it to Mary Ferrell, the supposedly self-appointed den mother of assassination researchers in Dallas (Dallas Tippit researcher Greg Lowrey called her “The Gatekeeper”). But according to Mack, who worked with Penn Jones on his newsletter The Continuing Inquiry, Jones gave him the original clue and a copy of the tape. Mack, a former Fort Worth NBC-TV announcer who changed his name from Larry Dunkel while working as a disk jockey, eventually turned into a lone-nut theorist after he became the curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at the former Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza, which exists primarily to debunk conspiracy theories while misleading and distracting tourists at the site of the murder. Its raison d’être seems to be to protect the image of Dallas by attempting to perpetuate the Warren Commission’s version of events. Mack’s ally Ferrell supplied favored researchers with documents from her ample files (since her death in 2004, available online at maryferrell.org), and she has been hailed by many researchers for her supposedly self-effacing generosity toward the cause of history. In an article on the acoustics evidence, Myers discusses the provenance of the tape and cites Mack’s 1979 report that Jones originally suggested they look into the question of a stuck microphone on a police motorcycle that blocked a radio channel during the motorcade. “Penn was of the opinion that the communications were jammed on purpose,” Mack wrote. Mack thought such a police radio tape might contain sounds of shots. Jones provided a tape that was of insufficient quality to work with, but Ferrell came up with a better one. Ferrell, White said, tracked down a first-generation copy of the tape made from a police Dictabelt and presented it to the HSCA. As I later found after making contact with Mary Ferrell myself, she actually had deep connections with U.S. intelligence. She was a member of the Agency of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), founded by CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, who many researchers believe helped organize the Kennedy assassination plot and the framing of Oswald in particular. Ferrell’s excuse for being a member, that she was infiltrating the organization to learn more about U.S. intelligence, seems laughably transparent. “We know Mary Ferrell has many contacts with the FBI and other government agencies,” Lowrey told me. “I’m also suspicious of her association with Hugh Aynesworth,” the Dallas reporter who covered the case from the first day and has long been an opponent of conspiracy theorists, as well as serving as an FBI informant during the Garrison case. “You can start in any direction,” said Lowrey, “and ultimately it will lead you to [Ferrell]. You will come back to her.” Ferrell was a legal secretary for the Socony Mobil Oil Company in Dallas at the time of the assassination. As well as putting her in the circle of big oil in Dallas, the Mobil association gives Ferrell at least a tangential link to some key Kennedy assassination characters, including people involved in oil, the White Russian community, and U.S. intelligence. Volkmar Schmidt, a German-born Dallas petroleum geologist who claimed he tried to turn Oswald against General Walker and therefore felt “a terrible responsibility” for the Walker assassination attempt and the Kennedy assassination, told researcher William E. Kelly in a 1995 interview that in 1963 he worked for a Dallas branch of Mobil, the Field Research Laboratory of the Magnolia Petroleum Company. Schmidt said he met George de Mohrenschildt and Ruth Paine, the Oswalds’ CIA handlers, and Paine’s husband, Michael, “through the circle of young professionals at the Magnolia labs.” It was at a February 22, 1963, party arranged by Everett D. Glover, a chemist with the labs, at a house he shared with Schmidt, that Schmidt had a long talk (“about two solid hours”) with Oswald about Walker and other political topics, including Kennedy and Cuba (Schmidt claimed Oswald was “hateful” toward Kennedy, and that he tried to turn that feeling against Walker, telling Oswald the general was a racist and “kind of a poopoo”). At the same party the Oswalds were introduced to Ruth Paine; Glover told the Warren Commission that Ruth spent most of her time that night speaking with Marina in Russian. As well as by George de Mohrenschildt and his wife, Jeanne, the party was attended by others from the Magnolia labs and by George’s oil industry friend Samuel Ballen. Armstrong writes in Harvey & Lee, “There is little doubt the purpose of this social gathering was to provide CIA operative George DeMohrenschildt the opportunity to introduce Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina to CIA operative Ruth Paine. During the next 10 months, until November 22, 1963, Oswald’s activities were closely monitored by either DeMohrenschildt or Mrs. Paine” [italics in original]. Mary Ferrell was a lifelong Republican who disliked Kennedy (Lowrey put it more strongly: “She hated John Kennedy; it was no secret”), and she admitted in 2000, “I didn’t even care enough to go down on Elm Street to watch the motorcade.” A feature on Ferrell in the Dallas Morning News on the twentieth anniversary of the assassination in 1983 mentions that she was downtown that day “but didn’t bother interrupting her lunch” to see Kennedy. The writer, Brad Bailey, hinted at the strangeness of this paradox in her career: “Mrs. Ferrell didn’t particularly like Kennedy as a president or as a fellow Catholic. . . . So she has a hard time explaining the fireproof library building in her Oak Lawn backyard with floor-to-ceiling shelves containing virtually every document ever published on the assassination. Nor can she easily explain the additional 25,000 pages of FBI documents spread across her living room floor or the clippings and papers that fill another room.” The most I could get from Ferrell when I asked about her motivation, a question that seemed to momentarily take her aback in our last conversation in December 1992, was the vague response, “I just didn’t think they went to Oak Cliff and picked up the man who did it in a darkened theater. Somehow it just didn’t make sense.” Ferrell was surprisingly equivocal on some of the most-discussed topics surrounding the assassination. She said she refused to see Oliver Stone’s JFK because when reporters called her, “I was really glad I didn’t have to lie and say I didn’t like it or I did like it.” As for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison himself, she told me, “I loved Jim Garrison -- I wavered between thinking he’s insane and thinking he’s a genius.” And as for Oswald, she said that if people “come to me and say, ‘I think Oswald acted alone, and do you have documentation?,’ I just politely say, ‘Go somewhere else.’ Everything I do is based on Oswald did not act alone. Not that he didn’t act. I don’t know.” And the Morning News reported in 1983 that despite all her research, she had “given up hope of deciding what really happened that day in Dallas. ‘We have now had about four major investigations, and I consider that the truth is still hidden from us,’ she says.” Some of the explanation for what that newspaper described as Ferrell’s “compulsion” to serve as a repository and clearing house for assassination research can be found in another paradox about Ferrell. Her obituary in the Morning News referred to how she “worked more than thirty years as a legal secretary for a law firm and also in the Governor’s office in Austin.” She was a conservative who kept close to the power center of that era in Texas by working for Democrats, including Governor Dolph Briscoe in 1973-74, and she was “a close personal friend” of John Connally, Lowrey noted. Ferrell was even closely connected to those who determined the route of the Dallas motorcade. It was in 1964, soon after the assassination, according to Lowrey, that Ferrell became a legal secretary in downtown Dallas to Eugene M. Locke, who headed the law firm of Locke, Purnell, Boren, Laney and Neely and was also the head of the State Democratic Executive Committee of Texas. (Ferrell claimed on various occasions that she did not start working for Locke until 1967 or 1970. Locke died in 1972.) In addition to heading a major law firm and having oil, land, and construction interests, Locke in his official position with the state party helped plan the presidential trip to Dallas. A crucial meeting that helped decide on the route of the motorcade -- violating Secret Service regulations by causing it to make a sharp turn from Houston onto Elm Street, past the Texas School Book Depository, slowing the motorcade to eleven miles an hour in the kill zone -- was held in Locke’s office, although Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell apparently was responsible for the final decision that determined the route. (See more on Locke and that meeting in Chapters 15 and 16.) Lowrey suggested, though without having proof, that Ferrell could have helped her soon-to-be-employer Locke with those arrangements. That seems more of an educated guess when one considers that her husband, Hubert (Buck) Ferrell, who worked for Eagle Lincoln-Mercury in Dallas at the time of the assassination, supplied some of the cars for the motorcade, and that Mary Ferrell said her own car was used in the motorcade when “They quickly ran out of cars.” According to assassination researcher Todd Wayne Vaughan, who interviewed both Ferrells, Mary supplied her own recently purchased 1964 Ford Mercury Colony Park station wagon for the motorcade, and it was used as one of the “VIP” cars. My dealings with Mary Ferrell in 1985-86 were what made me aware of her duplicity. I first called her to ask her confidential advice about a previously unknown FBI document I had found that seriously undermined the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman theory, and she betrayed my trust (see Chapter 15). After being thus alerted to her dishonest modus operandi, I began delving into her dubious background and concluded that after the assassination she set up shop with the backing of the federal government to serve as a clearing house and watchdog in Dallas, doling out favors while actually going about her main business of keeping tabs on what researchers were doing and selectively, subtly feeding them disinformation. As a result of her clever application of spycraft and her faux-motherly act, many researchers naively regarded her as a guru with a disinterested dedication to the truth. When I called her again in 1992 to request an in-person interview about her background and involvement in the case, she pressed me hard to find out what aspects of the assassination I was researching, and when I carefully gave her only general answers, saying that my areas of interest included the roles played by researchers, she refused to meet with me and said she didn’t want to be interviewed about her own background. Lowrey said, “Mary stays in the shadows. Her agenda is subtle and devious: ‘What are you going to do with it?’” Penn Jones gave me some good advice: “Stay away from her.” Ferrell’s production to the HSCA of the tape made that allegedly contains audio impulses demonstrating that four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza seemed suspiciously timely to me. It seemed to buttress the notion of conspiracy but more likely was cleverly orchestrated by Ferrell to discredit it in due course, like a planted mine sure to go off and destroy everything that surrounded it. Anomalies and ambiguities surrounding the tape itself made the HSCA’s belated “discovery” and endorsement of four shots dubious. That was probably seen by Blakey and others on his staff as a convenient late-arriving fig leaf with which to cover themselves by suggesting a conspiracy while not investigating its participants fully and honestly. The problems surrounding the tape were manifold, including debatable photographic evidence of the police motorcycle with a stuck microphone that supposedly recorded the sounds, claims by some skeptics that the tape actually was recorded about a minute after the assassination, and above all the inherent difficulties of interpreting the sound impulses allegedly found on the tape and synching those impulses with films of the assassination (including the altered Zapruder film). These problems would keep various experts, conspiracy theorists, and lone-nutters alike busy for years of debate, sometimes switching sides back and forth to add to the confusion. That may have been the point of the whole exercise initiated by Mary Ferrell with the collusion of Gary Mack. In the process, many studies were made, and much ink was consumed, but the subject only became more intractable, as, indeed, it seemed to me almost from the beginning, given the near-impossibility of reconstructing credible gunshots from a belatedly produced Dictabelt recording made in part with a police microphone of uncertain location. By so badly muddying the waters, the claim by the HSCA about shots being recorded on the tape most probably was intended to distract attention from the actual likelihood that more than four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza. This was among the more sophisticated and effective disinformation ploys launched against the finding of the truth of what happened in November 1963, but just one of the many obfuscatory maneuvers that began the first day and continue to the present. “All this stuff that went to the HSCA from the nucleus of people revolving around Mary Ferrell probably was concocted by mixing it with half-truths,” Lowrey noted. “Their MO is propping up a story and then shooting it down -- damn effective.” The HSCA Report, while saying that there were two gunmen, nevertheless claims that a single shot from the Grassy Knoll, the closer of the two alleged firing locations, missed, and blames Oswald (who was in the second-floor lunchroom of the Depository at the time) for firing all the shots that hit Kennedy, Connally, and bystander James Tague. Researcher Jack White, who continued to believe that “shots are recorded on the tape,” nevertheless aptly called the HSCA Report “a half-horse, half-zebra, half-assed kind of report.” The HSCA, in my view, largely succeeded in disproving the (naive) notion that this case could be investigated fairly by a government up to its eyes in direct involvement in the planning, execution, and coverup of the crimes themselves. Like the Warren Commission investigation before it, the HSCA investigation also turned up a wealth of evidence and fresh leads that, ironically, cast doubt on its own conclusions. A further problem was that some of the HSCA’s work product, including reports of witness interviews, did not reach the public until the 1990s, delaying both its utility and its ability to cast doubt on the HSCA’s own conclusions. The material was sealed until after the film JFK helped provide the impetus for the establishment of the ARRB, which helped free six millions of pages of previously classified material in U.S. government files. That material has proven invaluable in filling in some of the important gaps in our information about the case and in calling attention to previously hidden aspects of these events. Despite the flaws of the HSCA investigation, with all the genuine revelations that were being made about the case in the 1970s, as well as all the controversy engendered by true and false leads, the seeds of doubt were being widely sown again throughout the land. If I had been led astray from the initial evidence I heard with my own ears on the afternoon of November 22 and from my sense that first evening that Oswald was telling the truth in denying involvement in the killings of Kennedy and Tippit, I was now beginning to reclaim my first impressions as the truth.

I haven't published transcripts but have quoted my interviews in my books on the case.

From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE on Dearie (Mrs. Earle) Cabell: Why was there such contrasting haste to pin the Tippit killing on Oswald? “The Tippit charge, you had eyewitnesses,” former Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade told me in our 1993 interview. That revealing statement thirty years after the fact, dubious as it was, suggests that the Dallas authorities actually hadn’t been sure if they had any eyewitnesses to the shooting of Kennedy. But Wade hastened to claim to me that they had “five at one time” (sic) who saw Oswald shoot the president. He couldn’t recall who they might have been, other than the mayor’s wife, Elizabeth (Dearie) Cabell. She was riding in the motorcade with her husband, Earle Cabell, five cars behind the presidential limousine. (Earle Cabell’s brother was the former deputy director of the CIA, U.S. Air Force General Charles P. Cabell, who had been fired by President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, along with director Allen Dulles and the invasion planner, Richard M. Bissell, Jr.) Dearie Cabell was the person who presented Jacqueline Kennedy with a bouquet of red roses at Love Field that morning. In Life magazine journalist Theodore H. White’s notes for the “Camelot” interview on November 29, 1963, the president’s widow recalled, Every time we got off the plane that day, three times they gave me the yellow roses of Texas. But in Dallas they gave me red roses. I thought how funny, red roses -- so all the seat was full of blood and red roses. Dearie Cabell was never produced as an eyewitness to Oswald shooting the president. Wade admitted, “I never talked with her about it.” When she testified to the Warren Commission in July 1964, Mrs. Cabell said she had been facing the School Book Depository at the time the first shot rang out, as their car was making the turn from Houston onto Elm. “Because I heard the direction from which the shot came,” she “jerked” her head up and “saw a projection out of one of those windows” on the sixth floor. She was not sure which window and said she “did not know” what the “rather long looking” projection was, “because I did not see a hand or a head or a human form behind it.” In addition to not identifying Oswald as a shooter, Mrs. Cabell testified to some points that contradicted the official story: “I was acutely aware of the odor of gunpowder. I was aware that the motorcade stopped dead still. There was no question about that.” Her testimony about the motorcade coming to a complete stop jibes with that of numerous other witnesses but is not consistent with what is seen in the Zapruder film, so her testimony helps provide evidence that part of the film has been removed, most likely to cover up Secret Service activity after the shots and a fatal lack of sufficient protection at the time of the fatal head shot(s). Mrs. Cabell’s testimony about gunpowder suggested a shot or shots fired from ground level rather than a high window, and she also said that when she turned her head forward after the first shot, “I am completely aware of the people running up that hill [the Grassy Knoll]. I saw the man throw the child on the ground and throw himself. I saw a woman in a bright green dress throw herself on the ground. I saw the policeman running up the grassy slope.” In his televised news conference shortly after midnight on the night of the assassination, Henry Wade was asked by a reporter, ”Can you say whether you have a witness who says he saw the man pull the trigger [i.e., against Kennedy]?” Wade replied, “No, I cannot.” When I asked Wade about that in our interview, he acknowledged, “I didn’t know of any” at the time, but he added, “Before it was over, by Sunday afternoon, I was told they had five witnesses, and they showed me statements some of ’em had made, and they said that they knew it was Oswald up there.” On the night of November 24, in his other televised press conference that weekend, Wade said, “[W]e have a number of witnesses that saw the person with the gun on the sixth floor of the Book Store Building.” But he added, “You put a man in the window with a gun. People cannot positively identify him from the ground. He fits their general description.” Despite Wade’s claim to me that he had been told of five eyewitnesses to Oswald shooting from the window, the only witness the Warren Commission eventually claimed had identified Oswald as that shooter was Howard Brennan, who was watching the motorcade while sitting on a wall at the corner of Elm and Houston streets but refused to positively identify Oswald at a lineup on November 22. Brennan’s admittedly flawed eyesight and dubious physical description of the man he claimed to have seen firing a rifle in the window -- he told the commission that the man, in his early thirties, about five feet ten inches, was standing in the window as he fired, although a shooter in that position probably would have had to be kneeling -- make his belated identification of Oswald to the FBI on December 17 highly dubious. Speaking of Brennan’s original failure to identify Oswald, “which would weaken his testimony some,” Wade recalled that Brennan “felt he was afraid of the Russians.” To the commission, Brennan explained he had already seen Oswald on television by the time of the lineup, that Oswald looked younger than the man he claimed to have seen in the window, “And then I felt that my family could be in danger, and I, myself, in danger,” and that “since they already had the man for murder” (of Officer Tippit), there was no need at the time for his further identification. So they had no actual, credible witnesses who could identify Oswald in the window.

I interviewed Tilson, who did not seem to me to be a credible witness. His stories did not check out.

I don't know the answer about whether Jean Hill was challenged on her frequent changes of story. I was going to do that.

I met Jean Hill in Dealey Plaza on one of my research trips to Dallas. She agreed to an interview with me. I planned to confront her with all the changes in her accounts. The day before the scheduled interview, she canceled it, without an explanation. Her changed accounts make her a dubious witness, unlike Mary Ann Moorman, who has been consistent and honest in her recollections and statements.

Wade deputy Bill Alexander evidently was the one primarily pushing the conspiracy charge. Alexander was later fired for saying Earl Warren should be hanged. Alexander is a person of interest in the assassination.

When I interviewed DA Henry Wade and, separately, Detective James Leavelle, both indicated to me that the case against Oswald on the presidential assassination was not strong (Oswald told his brother Robert on November 23, "Don't believe all this so-called evidence"). That was why, as a little-noticed FBI memorandum indicates, Oswald was never even arraigned for the assassination, only for the Tippit murder, although he was charged with both crimes. Leavelle told me Captain Fritz instructed him to make a case against Oswald for the Tippit murder because the case for the Kennedy murder was not as strong (I asked Leavelle why he thought that was, and Leavelle said that in the Tippit case they had witnesses; but, as we know, the witness testimony in that murder was all over the place and often dubious). J. Edgar Hoover himself on November 23 told LBJ, "This man in Dallas. We, of course, charged him with the murder of the President. The evidence that they have at the present time is not very very strong."

The LHO false-flag diversion theory (the theory Don DeLillo employs in his novel LIBRA, a book that otherwise has some merits) never made any sense to me. Oswald would have been an idiot to get involved in that. He was not an idiot. But he was a patriot and was too trusting of the FBI. He was an FBI informant who had infiltrated the plot against JFK. He met with the FBI two or three times that November before the assassination.

Thanks much, Ron. I am glad you are reading POLITICAL TRUTH and finding it valuable. If when you are done and feel inclined to post a review on Amazon, that would be helpful too. It's good to call attention to books you like and hope others will read. I do that as well.

Thanks much to Jim DiEugenio for his thoughtful coverage and expert analysis of my book POLITICAL TRUTH and Jim DeBrosse's earlier book SEE NO EVIL: THE JFK ASSASSINATION AND THE U.S. MEDIA. Jim's many reviews of books on the case are the most comprehensive and in-depth analyses of that field. I always learn a lot from his astute commentaries, as I do from these two reviews.

While it is true that Ruth Paine claimed she never saw the rifle in her garage, photos of Oswald holding the alleged assassination rifle were found by the authorities in her home. These photos clearly are fakes. Mrs. Paine's garage and the other parts of his home also kept producing bounteous "so-called evidence" whenever it was needed. The so-called Walker note is a conspicuous example.

Beverly Oliver in 1963 was seventeen and a nightclub dancer (at the Colony Club) and did not look like the middle-aged, somewhat stocky Babushka Lady seen in a clear, sharp black-and-white photo taken just after the shooting.