Joseph McBride

Good news indeed. I am eager to own and see it. Shout! Factory also has a sparkling edition of ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, whose tenuous connection with the assassination is that one of the theaters where it opened in 1979 was the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff.

And he never was arraigned for the murder of Kennedy. Both Leavelle and Wade indicated to me that Fritz told them to make a case on Oswald for the Tippit killing because the case on him for the Kennedy killing was weak.

It was a fine interview by Chuck, but our phone connection went dead several times, and he shortly afterward called me back each time. We didn't know what caused that glitch. He said he filled in each time. He is indeed highly knowledgeable and an excellent interviewer.

From Chapter One of my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: I watched Oswald being hauled through a corridor of the Dallas police headquarters on live television that Friday night at 7:55 (Central Standard Time), telling the national audience, “I haven’t killed anybody!” And I heard him proclaim as he was being dragged through the hall, “I’m just a patsy!” I watched the alleged assassin’s riveting, but all too brief, midnight press conference in which he denied involvement in the killing of the President. He denied even knowing he had been charged of that crime, a claim that at the time seemed almost incomprehensible. My strong belief in Oswald’s innocence from the beginning was reinforced by what I saw and heard while watching that press conference. Referring to his 7:10 arraignment on Friday evening in Captain Will Fritz’s office for the charge of murdering Officer Tippit, shortly after Fritz had signed that complaint, Oswald told the reporters at his press conference, Well, I was, uh, questioned by a judge [David L. Johnston, a justice of the peace]. However, I, uh, protested at that time that I was not allowed legal representation, uh, during that, uh, that, uh, very short and sweet hearing. Uh, I really don't know what this situation is about. Nobody has told me anything except that I am accused of, uh, of, uh, murdering a policeman. I know nothing more than that, and I do request, uh, someone to come forward, uh, to give me, uh, legal assistance. When asked, “Did you kill the President?,” the accused man replied, No. I have not been charged with that. In fact, nobody has said that to me yet. The first thing I heard about it was when the newspaper reporters in the hall [voice quavering], uh, axed [sic] me that question. When Oswald said he had not been charged with the assassination, an offscreen reporter responded insistently, seemingly in anger, as if he were lying, “You have been charged. You have been charged.” Oswald looked confused, then angry, as he was quickly led out of the room. When a reporter asked how he had received his black eye, he replied, leaning into the microphone, “A policeman hit me.” Oswald was telling the truth: he was not aware at that point that charges had been filed against him in the assassination. The Warren Report states, “The formal charge against Oswald for the assassination of President Kennedy was lodged shortly after 1:30 a.m. on Saturday, November 23” (Captain Fritz signed the complaint at 11:26 p.m.). The Dallas Police Department would later claim Oswald was arraigned before Judge Johnston later that morning, at 1:35, for Kennedy’s murder. However, a little-noticed November 25, 1963, FBI document (written the day after Oswald was murdered in the police headquarters) states that Oswald was never arraigned for the murder of the president, only for the murder of Tippit: “The following information was obtained by SA [Special Agent] JAMES P. HOSTY, JR., from the office of Captain WILL FRITZ, Dallas Police Department, on November 25, 1963: . . . No arraignment on the murder charges in connection with the death of President KENNEDY was held inasmuch as such arraignment was not necessary in view of the previous charges filed against OSWALD and for which he was arraigned.” Furthermore, reports Anthony Summers in his history of the assassination, “Officer J. B. Hicks was on duty in the relevant office until after 2:00 A.M. and is certain Oswald was not arraigned at 1:35.” **** Detective Jim Leavelle also confirmed to me that Oswald was telling the truth at the midnight press conference in saying he was not aware at that point that charges had been filed against him in the assassination. -- JM

A two-hour podcast with the well-informed Chuck Ochelli on THE OCHELLI EFFECT about my recent book POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNED.

Oswald was arraigned for the murder of Tippit but not for the murder of Kennedy, though he was charged with both murders.

Yes, Pat, I often think of Hank Quinlan in TOUCH OF EVIL when I think of Will Fritz. The similarities are striking. But I don't know of any direct connection or knowledge of Fritz by Welles or the authors of the source novel, BADGE OF EVIL. Fritz, as I gather, was more of a local character than a national figure until the assassination. But in the film a license plate prominently seen on a vehicle is a Texas plate. Welles had recently played a Mississipian in THE LONG, HOT SUMMER and a tyrannical Texan in MAN IN THE SHADOW.

Yes, we know he threatened Frazier. And as you see in the film THE THIN BLUE LINE, Randall Adams was threatened with a gun while being interrogated by Dallas Detective Gus Rose, who was also involved with the Kennedy case. On the other hand, Fritz was known to be quite adept at interrogration. Part of his legend was that he once persuaded a suspect to confess to murder on the telephone to Nebraska. But the failure to take more than cursory notes in the interrogation of Oswald was unforgivable.

As we know, even Robert Oswald thought the Paines were somehow involved in the assassination. Maybe Will Fritz did too. To suggest that it is difficult to believe Fritz and the DPD giving someone the third degree is laughable.

David, I would hope that (1) you don't give your precious tapes to the opposing side, the Sixth Floor Museum; and (2) you have access to them in writing FINAL CHARADE, which we are all looking forward to with great interest. BEST EVIDENCE was a paradigm changer for me and many others.

Morrison immolated himself in front of the Pentagon, not the White House. McNamara witnessed it and was troubled by it.

Here's a link to Edwin Black's important article on the Chicago plot against JFK. This is a PDF in the Harold Weisberg collection: http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg Subject Index Files/V Disk/Vallee Thomas Arthur/Item 05.pdf

"Follow the money." -- William Goldman (writing the line for the mythical "Deep Throat" in ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN)

Jefferson Morley on how the mainstream media, despite the pardon, are maintaining their coverup of the reason Abraham Bolden was framed: https://jfkfacts.org/biden-pardons-abraham-bolden-the-only-secret-service-agent-who-sought-jfk-accountability/

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.” . . .