Joseph McBride

My review of the Sahl documentary from Daily Variety, 1989: https://duckprods.com/projects/mortsahl/ms-dailyvariety890918.html

Robert Weide in tribute to Mort Sahl has made his hard-to-see documentary MORT SAHL: THE LOYAL OPPOSITION available for free for one week on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/364958125

Kudos to the late Mort Sahl for his sacrifices on behalf of President Kennedy. Sahl said in Robert B. Weide's 1989 PBS American Masters documentary about him, MORT SAHL: THE LOYAL OPPOSITION, "The social democrats in this country have a lot of guilt. They didn’t stand up to Vietnam. They didn't stand up to the encroachment of the intelligence community. And they walked away from Jack Kennedy. The most they could come up with after he was shot in the street like a dog was to say, 'He wasn’t that good a president anyway.' Yeah, let me tell you, he had a strange group of friends. Remarkably absent when he fell."

Peggy Noonan will always be in the Hall of Shame for writing two of the worst speeches ever given by an American president, the one by Reagan calling the Contras the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers and the other by Reagan gushing in maudlin tones over the Challenger astronauts after they died so he could do a live cutaway to the "Teacher in Space" on his State of the Union address that night.

Oops. Posted twice. But always worth watching again.

Gore Vidal said that the smoking gun of 9/11 was the claim that 19 Arabs armed only with boxcutters brought down the air defense system of the United States.

JFK, held by his wife, is lying on the seat, moribund. (He couldn't be "laying" anything because that is a transitive verb and he was helpless.) Hill rode spread-eagle on the limo all the way to the hospital, blocking them with his body. The car was going seventy mph ("Fast but safe" was the order on the radio). I drove that route many times at that speed, and it always took four minutes to arrive at the back of Parkland Hospital.

Biden turns 79 two days before this year's anniversary of the assassination. But as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1963, "I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.”

Jim Leavelle, the lead detective in the Tippit case, indicated to me that Captain Fritz wanted him to work up a case on Oswald for the Tippit murder since they didn't have a sufficient case on Oswald for killing Kennedy. I asked Leavelle why he thought they had a better case for the Tippit murder, and he said they had witnesses (ignoring the chaotic state of the witness reports). It's a little-known fact that Oswald was arraigned only for the Tippit murder and not for the presidential assassination. Henry Wade and J. Edgar Hoover also expressed doubts about whether there was a sufficient case against Oswald in the assassination.

Nasty attacks on other researchers using hostile language do not advance the cause of understanding this case but drag it down. Informed disagreement, citing evidence to support one's viewpoint, is another matter altogether.

Dallas researcher Matt Douthit informed me that Susan Marie Thornton (born June 17, 1964) has died (on July 16 of this year). She lived in Hawkins, Texas, and was a daughter of Johnnie Maxie Witherspoon, who was Officer J. D. Tippit's mistress. Some have claimed that Susan was J. D.'s. child and that Johnnie Maxie informed him about that pregnancy shortly before he was murdered and that it had something to do with his killing. But I interviewed Johnnie Maxie in 1993, and she insisted Susan was not J. D.'s child and that she could not have been because he had had a vasectomy. Her father was listed as Stephen Thompson Jr. Johnnie Maxie told me Stephen was Susan's father. Larry Ray Harris, however, told me that Steve Thompson thought Tippit was Susan's father. Harris said that Steve told him and fellow researcher Ken Holmes Jr. "very frankly and forthrightly that the child was fathered by Tippit. They had separated, and then after Tippit was killed, they reconciled, she had the baby, and they raised the child like it was their own." Greg Lowrey, who has researched the Tippit case as intensively as Harris did, told me that when Harris and Holmes went to see Steve in Lubbock, Texas, and Holmes "confronted" Thompson, "Ken got pushed and beat up." Lowrey did not believe the "jealous husband" theory about Tippit's murder and thought it was disinformation. Johnnie Maxie also did not believe Steve killed Tippit. In INTO THE NIGHTMARE, I discuss various people who have been spoken about as suspects, and I ruled out, to the best of my knowledge, both Steve Thompson and Johnnie Maxie Witherspoon (as well as Oswald). Johnnie Maxie died in 2016; Steve is still alive. For obituary information on Susan Thornton: https://www.dignitymemorial.com/.../susan-thornton...

You can clearly see a round notch from the bullet entrance wound at the top of the tracheotomy incision (artificially widened as that incision is).

She hadn't even seen THE GRADUATE yet.

For what it's worth, the DHS memo on tomorrow's threatened violence at the Capitol: https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/read-the-memo-on-the-sept/66b1a39ce1bf4276/full.pdf

What shooting by Oswald? Are you claiming he shot the photograph?

There was no individual known to Woodward & Bernstein as Deep Throat. He did not appear in the first manuscript of the book, and its editor, Alice Mayhew, suggested adding it. The character was a composite of Woodward's intelligence sources. And that line "Follow the money" was written by screenwriter William Goldman.

There's a lot of denial among some of the Kennedy family. The ones who look into the cases and speak out are admirable exceptions.

I saw Sirhan's attorney, Angela Berry, react this morning on CNN. The network repeatedly called Sirhan RFK's assassin and only in passing mentioned that RFK Jr. questioned that he was guilty of that crime. Berry in her interview acknowledged the feelings of Ethel Kennedy and the children who oppose Sirhan's release but said we are a nation of laws, not emotions. The newsy takeaway was that Berry said even if Newsom rejects parole, they plan to challenge it in court.

I liked the acerbic section of Thompson's book on my hometown, Milwaukee. Not as funny or scathing as Lenny Bruce's chapter in his autobiography on playing Milwaukee, but the part about Thompson getting picked up for jaywalking outside his hotel downtown in the wee hours is indelible in capturing the deadness of that burg. Back then, they rolled up the sidewalks on the main drag, Wisconsin Avenue, at 9 p.m. As for Bremer, look up the footnote in ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN by Bernstein and Woodward (as they were billed in those days) about how they investigated the possibility that the Wallace shooting was the "ultimate [Nixon] dirty trick." They should have kept digging into what that was about. If Wallace had stayed in the race, the odds are it would have gone into the House of Representatives, and Nixon would have won that way anyway. But before that, he was worried that Wallace was siphoning off a lot of his "Southern strategy" racist support.

Although Rupert Allan was not Marilyn's press agent at the time of her death, he was well-connected with some of those who at least thought they knew what happened to her. I am not vouching for his information, since I have not dug into the case myself, but quoting what he said as an insider who knew some things others did not. He told me, for example, that Marilyn told him directly about her earlier suicidal impulse in New York and why she did not go through with it. That story was never printed until I reported what Rupert told me.

I knew Marilyn's press agent Rupert Allan, a highly sympathetic and sophisticated man who also spent years as the press agent for Princess Grace. I asked Rupert what he thought caused Monroe's death. He said she had little bottles of Champagne all around her bedroom and would frequently drink them, often without thinking. He thought she popped too many pills on the night of her death while guzzling Champagne and lost track of the effect until she fell into a fatal unconsciousness. He said she was extremely upset at the time because Peter Lawford had invited her to a party at his Santa Monica beach house at which some call girls would be present; Marilyn was deeply wounded that Lawford and company thought of her in that category, Rupert said. He also reported to me that she had seriously considered suicide while in the hospital in New York in 1959 for a gynecological operation. She told Rupert that she went to the window of her eighth-floor suite to jump but when she looked down and saw a woman in a green coat waiting at a bus stop, realized she might kill the woman by jumping, so she desisted.

I interviewed Terrence Malick in the 1970s before he became a recluse. He quoted Ben Hecht on how the worst danger facing Hollywood screenwriters is the impulse to self-censorship. It is often subconscious and sometimes conscious but brought on by the pressures of the system and must be resisted.

Rory Kennedy has an op-ed in the NYT today demanding Sirhan be kept in prison. Governor Newsom, facing a recall election, hedged in an interview about what he would do, saying he will wait for the parole board report, but went out of his way to say what a great admirer of RFK he is. One of the RFK children said when she met Newsom, he recited five RFK speeches verbatim. People confuse their understandable admiration for RFK with unthinking acceptance of the untenable lone-nut theory that Sirhan shot him. It does not look promising for Sirhan with all this pressure from the ignorant and/or in denial children of RFK vs. their two siblings who understand the case and spoke out for parole. A further tragic situation for Sirhan.