Joseph McBride

When I interviewed Henry Wade, he indicated he didn't think there was sufficient evidence to pin the Kennedy murder on Oswald. Jim Leavelle gave me the same indications and told me that's why Will Fritz told him to try to pin the Tippit murder on Oswald. I discuss what Wade and Leavelle told me in INTO THE NIGHTMARE. I also wrote about Wade in an article on the KennedysandKing website dealing with the Dale Myers book, which I consider the Warren Report of the Tippit case.

Robert Groden's coffee-table-sized book THE KILLING OF A PRESIDENT has a sharp, two-page spread of the Altgens panoramic photo. You can clearly see Senator Ralph Yarborough and Lady Bird Johnson in the back seat and the driver, Texas state trooper Hurchel Jacks. The area where Lyndon Johnson (in the back seat) and Secret Service Agent Rufus Youngblood (in a front seat) are sitting is a blur. I have seen enlargements that also show that area as a blur; you can make out what appears to be that leaning shape of Johnson. Yarborough told me that Johnson was leaning over the gap in the front seat and listening with Youngblood to his walkie-talkie and that Youngblood never left the front seat, contrary to what Johnson claimed, that the agent jumped over the seat and shielded him with his body in the back. The film Dan Rather described on CBS Radio and TV was the Zapruder film (see Richard B. Trask's PICTURES OF THE PAIN for transcripts), but it may have been the original, unaltered film, since he described seeing things that aren't on the extant, altered film. And I write in POLITICAL TRUTH, while analyzing the photographic coverage by amateurs and professionals, "With one possible exception, the rest of the fifteen professional photographers riding in the motorcade failed to document the actual moments of gunfire. That exception was said to have been a 16mm color film, possibly showing the 'complete assassination' including a closeup on Kennedy, which was shot by an unidentified 'TV newsreel man' in the motorcade and impounded by the Secret Service, according to an ABC-TV broadcast on November 23, 1963. No such film was entered into evidence by the Secret Service." Rather has claimed that he was waiting on the motorcade route for a film to be thrown in a bag by a CBS cameraman from the motorcade, although Rather has given conflicting reports of where he was during the shooting, and his CBS colleague Robert Pierpoint said Rather was actually riding in a car in the motorcade and bolted when the shots were fired. I found a document identifying the 16mm film as having been shot by an unidentified CBS cameraman. Rather arranged for CBS to have five full camera crews accompanying Kennedy in Dallas, including the only live hookup (at the Trade Mart); NBC and ABC each had only the usual single camera crew.

The link to my show with Len Osanic about POLITICAL TRUTH: https://blackopradio.com/archives2022.html

A rather incoherent review, even if interestingly bizarre. D. M. Thomas wrote a terrible novel about the assassination, FLYING IN TO LOVE (1992). THE WHITE HOTEL, the novel that made his reputation, is an awful load of pointless pretension too.

As I point out in POLITICAL TRUTH, Chomsky belligerently claims that the two subjects he refuses to discuss are the assassination of President Kennedy and 9/11, yet he has published books on both subjects. His book on JFK and Vietnam is really an attack on Oliver Stone and his film JFK. Chomsky once "joked" that his salary since 1955 has been paid by the military-industrial complex. I assume he means that he has worked all those years for MIT (for which he is still an emeritus professor, even though he is also a professor at the University of Arizona now). That comment by Chomsky reminds me of Freud's observation that there is no such thing as a joke.

Thanks for the kind words, Roy. I am glad you also appreciate Penn Jones, who was a mentor to me and an example I cite in POLITICAL TRUTH of an honest, uncompromising journalist. I disagree that Oswald fired a gun. There's no evidence to indicate he did. He didn't own the rifle or pistol entered into evidence (etc.). His words to his brother Robert while in jail on November 23 are worth recalling, "Don't believe all this so-called evidence."

I have taped a lively show with Len Osanic about my new book, POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA AND THE ASSASSINATION, to air on January 20 on Black Op Radio. It is good to be back on Len's invaluable program after having his guest several times in 2013 to discuss my earlier book on the case, INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT. Len asks me about many aspects of the mainstream media's falsifications of the assassination coverage over the years as well as about why and how I came to write POLITICAL TRUTH, which is an outgrowth of my decades of research for INTO THE NIGHTMARE. I had thought of including a chapter on the media's lying in that book but realized it was too big a topic and needed a whole book; instead I included a chapter in INTO THE NIGHTMARE on what I call the four-day docudrama on TV about the assassination from Nov. 22-25, 1963, the trial and execution by television of the patsy and an attempt to lull the public into accepting the cover story. I began studying the case at that time and more methodically in 1982 and started outlining the book that became POLITICAL TRUTH in the 1990s. In 2013 I did a segment of Len's series FIFTY REASONS . . . FOR FIFTY YEARS entitled "Political Truth: The Media and the Assassination," which can be seen on Vimeo and is a 13-minute précis of the eventual book and a good introduction to it. Rather than aiming to be an encyclopedic chronicle of the media coverage, like some earlier books on the subject that in my view become scattered and unfocused as a result, my book POLITICAL TRUTH is analytical and a sharply pointed work of media criticism, drawing from my career as a professional journalist since 1960. I sold my first magazine article shortly after I served as a volunteer on Senator John F. Kennedy's Wisconsin presidential primary campaign (he quipped when I answered a question he asked about PROFILES IN COURAGE at one of the campaign events, "I hope I don't have to run against you in 1964"). POLITICAL TRUTH is now available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.

Thanks for looking. It takes a while for Google algorithms to catch up with books. They gradually move up the ladder. Look on Amazon with the title and the author and on my Amazon author page.

While watching the trial-by-television and televised execution of Oswald from November 22-24, 1963, I first realized that in our country, despite what the Constitution says, people accused of crimes are guilty until proven innocent. As I write in my new book POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY: My interviews for Into the Nightmare with former Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade and Detective James Leavelle, who was in charge of the Tippit case and participated in Oswald’s interrogations (which were not tape-recorded), indicated similar doubts they did not share with the public. Leavelle told me that Captain Will Fritz, the chief of homicide who was in charge of the investigation, told him that Friday to concentrate on the Tippit murder, because the evidence for the assassination was relatively weak. Fritz said, “Well, go ahead and make a tight case on him in case we have trouble making this one on the presidential shooting.” A little-noticed FBI document from November 25 indicates that Oswald was never even arraigned for shooting the president: “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.” Oswald was arraigned only for shooting Tippit, a case in which the evidence was also weak. When I asked Leavelle why he thought they had a better case in the Tippit murder, he replied that unlike in the Kennedy shooting, they had “witnesses.” In fact the Tippit witnesses varied widely, with some reluctant to identify Oswald as the killer, some doing so only considerably later, and some saying two men had committed the crime and that the shooter did not resemble Oswald. And there never were any credible eyewitnesses produced to implicate Oswald in firing at Kennedy.

Large parts of my new book POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY are devoted to analyzing the stark failings of Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Alan Brinkley, Eric Foner, Richard Hofstadter, and other celebrated historians (some of whom have done good work in other areas, such as Foner on the Reconstruction period) in dealing with the assassination. I explore why this failure came to be, why they, despite having time to reflect and do actual research, instead have chosen to follow the cover story fabricated in the first weekend by the mainstream news media with the help of the CIA and other government agencies, working together in what film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has called "the media-industrial complex."

https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=351345333178475

Sorry, but the button kept telling me I wasn't posting, and I was, so I removed the copies.

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And as I note, Kennedy while in Texas did seem aware of some of the threats against him but still fatalistically disregarded them.

From POLITICAL TRUTH: President Kennedy had always seemed fatalistic, to a fault, about the possibility of assassination. When my father [Raymond E. McBride] spoke briefly with the president at a Milwaukee reception in May 1962 while covering a political dinner for the Journal, he asked Kennedy a question rarely posed to him: “Do you ever worry about being assassinated?” Kennedy replied that he realized that could happen, but he could not to afford to think about it, since he wouldn’t be able to do his job if he did.

Yes, Jim, you know you've struck a nerve when they trot out Chomsky and Posner to attack you. I am just waiting for Dan Rather now. And maybe Bill Moyers and George Will.

That story by McNamara is clearly incredible and some kind of coverup, as I write in POLITICAL TRUTH. The notion that I as a sixteen-year-old high school student in Milwaukee learned of the shooting long before the secretary of defense is ludicrous. John Newman's JFK AND VIETNAM has a lot on the Hawaii conference.

Thanks, Jeff. I am glad you are enjoying the Lubitsch book. I am grateful for your excellent work as a videographer on a related project of mine, "Political Truth: The Media and the Asssassination," on Len Osanic's 2013 series FIFTY REASONS . . . FIFTY YEARS. I've been studying the role of the media in the assassination since 12:40 p.m. on November 22, 1963, and wrote a chapter in my 2013 book INTO THE NIGHTMARE on what I call the four-day assassination TV docudrama, which helped tranquillize the traumatized public and keep them at home rather than out in the streets demanding answers, as would happen in other countries. We did get to see and hear Oswald declare his innocence repeatedly, and many other truthful pieces of information and witness reports came out before the official story came together. But I heard on the network radio the shots mysteriously changing direction by 1 p.m. on Nov. 22 from the earlier reported frontal shots (from the railroad bridge area or the hill, as was reported) to the back in the Texas School Book Depository. And as Cronkite, Brinkley, Rather et al tried Oswald and convicted him on live TV with the help of the Dallas authorities, that opened my youthful eyes to trial-by-media and the failure to adhere to the principle of innocent until proven guilty. In POLITICAL TRUTH I analyze how the official story came together that weekend and (despite loose ends that emerged here and there in the media) was solidified over the next weeks and months before it was carved in stone by the Warren Report and by the mainstream media's lying and support of that document. The later disgraceful network TV documentaries that have proliferated since 1964 have mostly kept reiterating those lies, though between the cracks I found some doubts expressed even by Cronkite & Rather. An obscure CBS special in December 1963, THE LAW AND LEE OSWALD, is often insightful and thoughtful, which is probably why it's never repeated. But it's mostly the dissident, independent journalists, researchers, and documentarians such as you and Len Osanic and Oliver Stone and Jim DiEugenio, who have countered the lying network propaganda shows. Throughout POLITICAL TRUTH I contrast the official story and the independent researchers' work and show how the systematic falsification of the assassination story by the government and its propaganda arm, the mainstream media, was the beginning of our current toxic atmosphere of living in two divided senses of reality.

Ruby was indeed knowledgeable, since he was part of the plot. Carl Oglesby in The YANKEE AND COWBOY WAR has a brilliant and moving deconstruction of Ruby's anguished Warren Commission testimony, in which he struggled to tell parts of the truth even though Warren was not interested in hearing it. He begged to be taken to DC to testify more frankly but was refused.

Thank you, Gary. And thank you for your fine, groundbreaking monograph on the Tippit murder. You were way ahead of us all.

I am pleased to report that the Kindle edition of my new book POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY is now available on Amazon, along with the higher-priced paperback edition. The "Look Inside" function is now activated too, so people can preview part of the book. POLITICAL TRUTH, which I began outlining in the 1990s while working on INTO THE NIGHTMARE and wrote over the past couple of years, reexamines the long history of mainstream media lying and coverup about the assassination case and the Tippit murder, the contrary truth-telling by independent researchers, and the damaging effects this systemic lying by the media and government has had on our country. Although the roots of the lack of trust and belief in the government and media are usually traced back to the Vietnam War, I argue that this process actually began with Dallas, which led directly to the widening of the war (the media are still lying about that too, partly since to face the facts would lead to reexamining what happened in Dallas and why). I argue that the widespread failure to acknowledge that a successful coup d'état took place in the US on November 22, 1963, has led to the failure by many in the media and elsewhere to prepare for or even recognize the reality of what happened when a coup attempt took place in 2020-21. Though that coup attempt was unsuccessful, another attempt will probably happen again. And in the meantime, the toxic disbelief in reality by many people, fostered by the assassination coverup and government and media lies about other major events, has divided our country into two warring camps. As the epigraph to my last chapter, I use the comment that Jack Ruby addressed to Earl Warren during his Warren Commission testimony in the Dallas County Jail in June 1964: "[A] whole new form of government is going to take over our country . . . it is a very serious situation. I guess it is too late to stop it, isn’t it?"

Thanks for your comments. Here's what I write about this, among many other observations on Rather's long involvement with the assassination: Rather convinced his superiors in New York to “lay on double coverage all over Texas and quadruple it in Dallas,” he wrote in his 1977 memoir, titled with unconscious irony The Camera Never Blinks: Adventures of a TV Journalist. According to John B. Mayo’s 1967 book Bulletin From Dallas: The President Is Dead, CBS had *five* full network TV production crews in Dallas at the time of the assassination, including the only live remote TV network hookup (to broadcast Kennedy’s speech at the Trade Mart, a focal point of security concerns), while NBC and ABC each had only the customary single crew following the president. Rather wrote, When the President’s party left Washington, CBS was staffed for the road as fully as a network can be without planning an invasion. Still, I do not mean to invest in this any mystic implications. We were preparing for the unexpected. An incident. A reaction. A story. We were not having visions. But whatever was to happen in Dallas, I knew we would be in an unusually good position to cover it. What would become known as Rather’s “golden gut” in anticipating possible trouble — perhaps in this case a euphemism for some kind of advance knowledge of what was going to occur; he was not the only person who expected danger for Kennedy in Dallas — gave CBS a critical advantage in its coverage and vaulted Rather to national prominence.