Joseph McBride

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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.

While I was researching my book POLITICAL TRUTH, I wrote and narrated "Political Truth: The Media and the Assassination," this segment of FIFTY REASONS . . . FIFTY YEARS, the 2013 video series on the assassination produced by Len Osanic for his Black Op Radio. Jeff Carter was the videographer.

Thanks, Ron. I updated the Amazon author page recently. I have never taught at UC Berkeley but live in Berkeley.

Thanks, my friends. POLITICAL TRUTH is the result of my long study of the case, beginning informally in 1963 and systematically in 1982. I began outlining this book in the 1990s and then thought of having a chapter on the media in INTO THE NIGHTMARE but realized it was too big a topic for one chapter (other than the chapter in INTO THE NIGHTMARE on the four-day TV docudrama over the assassination weekend). I have kept studying the case all the way through and wrote POLITICAL TRUTH over the past couple of years.

https://www.amazon.com/Political-Truth-Assassination-President-Kennedy/dp/1939795613/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=JOSEPH+MCBRIDE+POLITICAL+TRUTH&qid=1640561446&s=books&sr=1-2 POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY by Joseph McBride Hightower Press New on Amazon $45; 491 pages In 1963, President John F. Kennedy was killed in a coup d’état. Ever since then, it has been virtually taboo in the American mainstream media to report this basic truth. Instead, print and television “news” reporters and historians spread the government’s lies and attack people they label “conspiracy theorists” rather than investigating the case themselves. Joseph McBride, author of Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit, offers a deep analysis of this dereliction of journalistic duty. Political Truth assimilates a wealth of media disinformation and contrastingly accurate investigations by independent researchers, reporters, and filmmakers. McBride’s provocative study traces how the false reporting of the assassination has led to today’s poisonous political divide over the meaning of historical reality. Joseph McBride is the author of twenty-four books, including biographies of Frank Capra and John Ford. He has been a journalist since 1960, writing for such publications as the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, Life, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and, on this subject, for The Nation. He is a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University.

I refer you to the highly detailed discussion and analysis of the murder scene in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE. Jerry Rose first proposed this theory about Ruby in an article for The Third Decade, "Jack Ruby and J. D. Tippit: Coincidence or Conspiracy?," March 1985; you can find that article on the Mary Ferrell site.

There is evidence that Jack Ruby helped stage the Tippit murder scene.

John Armstrong has exhaustive chapters in HARVEY AND LEE following the alleged chain of evidence, documents, and other details and finding no credible evidence that Oswald owned either gun. The FBI expert who testified to the Warren Commission could not link the pistol to the bullets found in Tippit's body. And we all know about the problems with the planted rifle, part of what Oswald was speaking about when he told his brother Robert on November 23, "Don't believe all this so-called evidence."

Lee Oswald did not own either of the weapons entered into evidence in the Kennedy and Tippit murders.

Clint and Lisa got married recently. They posted wedding pictures on Facebook.

I delve into the critical planning of the motorcade route in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE, identifying who made the decisions.

Vince Palamara has done all of us researchers, and our country, a great service with his indefatigable and revelatory research into the disloyal and deadly involvement of the Secret Service in the assassination. Vince exemplifies the good advice the late Penn Jones gave me and other researchers, to "Pick one aspect of the case, one that hasn't been studied enough, and research the hell out of it." Vince sure has done that, and I hope he continues to dig under every stone and pore through every document and video and still he can find and share it all with us as he has been doing. He is the citizen researcher par excellence.

Armstrong proves, with exhaustive research, that Oswald did not own either of the guns entered into evidence.

https://www.wrkf.org/show/talk-louisiana/2021-11-22/monday-november-22nd-rusty-yates-joseph-mcbride-brian-mitchell

Thanks, Denny. Yes, Mike was the second smartest guy in our class, after Dick Benka, with whom I saw DR. STRANGELOVE and learned to understand and appreciate black comedy after Dick insisted we sit through it a second time (the first time I had thought it was a scary Cold War thriller). Mike was warmhearted and always friendly. The guys at my high school treated me well, which was a relief after my hellish grade school. And the Jesuits helped me learn critical, logical, skeptical thinking.