Joseph McBride

Monte Evans's rare book THE RATHER NARRATIVE

is a fascinating compendium of many of the

contradictions in Rather's story and an exploration

of where the truth in his activities may lie. It 

is still hard to find. 

Gary Wills in his book BOMB POWER

writes that we have not had a democracy

but instead a monarchy since the atomic

bombs were dropped on Japan, because

we've given one man the power to destroy

the world at his own will.

Benjamin, I like your use of the terms

D-party and R-party, which seem

subtly mocking yet not in an absurd way. It is indeed

fascinating to see how the various

layers of the media are handling

the assassination now. There seems

an upsurge of interest among the general

public due to the controversy over

the document release and continued blockage.

Benjamin, I like your approach to almost

everything but this use of language. I simply tune out when

I read taunts. There are too many of those

in JFK research, which is, or should be,

a serious area.

Benjamin, just as I have long found Republicans

childish when they refer to the "Democrat" party,

I find your rhetoric offputting when you

use derisive nicknames for the two

major parties. It seems like schoolyard

taunting. You have a lot to say that's

valuable, but you taint it with this kind

of rhetoric.

Oliver Stone does an excellent job with the 1944 Democratic

convention and the dumping of Wallace in his documentary

series on American history. This event that hasn't been

explored much helped change the course of postwar

American history as it led into what Gore Vidal dubbed

the "national security state" under Truman. There's

a good book on Roosevelt's health that discusses in detail how

he was dying by 1944 and that insiders knew he probably wouldn't

serve another full term.

Woody Allen contributed substantially to Mark Lane's

cause when he was traveling around lecturing

on the assassination. Allen also quipped

on one of his early albums that when he

saw the Warren Report in a bookstore, he

moved it to the fiction section. I do the same.

Thanks, Joe. I hadn't heard that before.

I met Mark Lane once, and we exchanged

mutual respect. He ran my two Bush articles

in an appendix to PLAUSIBLE DENIAL and elsewhere in that book praised my research

into George H. W. Bush and the assassination. I was grateful,

since he did so much to advance the case

early on when few people were dissenting

from the official story. I include 35 pages

on my Bush research and his Texas rightwing connections

in INTO THE NIGHTMARE. The Nation refused

to run my third article, about Bush's relationship

with James Parrott, even though they had enabled

me to continue my research by going to Texas.

Victor Navasky, then the editor of The Nation,

told me I should avoid researching the

assassination because it is a "quagmire." I write

at length in my recent book POLITICAL TRUTH about the

failure of the left/liberal media in the US

to investigate or admit the truth about the assassination.

One of the silliest books on the assassination

(and that's saying a lot) is John Loken's

slender 2000 volume, OSWALD'S TRIGGER

FILMS, THE MANCHURIAN

CANDIDATE, WE WERE STRANGERS, SUDDENLY?.

Aside from the simplistic nature of this approach

to human behavior, the book suffers from

two fundamental problems: (1) there's no

proof Oswald saw those movies; and (2) he

didn't shoot President Kennedy. At least

the author puts a question mark at the end of

his title.

 

Theodore White's uncut notes of the Jacqueline Kennedy interview

have been released and are online. They are fascinating to read.

The interview was sanitized at the time, and the LIFE editors

looked askance at her sentimental CAMELOT analogy. But such

was her power and such was the climate then, and

they were holding the issue on deadline, so they gave

in and let her include it. But her interviews

with William Manchester are among the JFK assassination

records that are still hidden from the public and probably

will be when most of us are long gone. The recently

published book of some of her musings is often

quite surprising (including harshly

negative remarks about Dr. King). Caroline Kennedy has not done the

public a service in withholding some of her mother's

thoughts but releasing only selections. Jacqueline

was a complex and well-read person whose reflections

are important to history.

Ricky Leacock, the celebrated

documentarian who helped make PRIMARY (which I 

am in as a Kennedy volunteer, part of the crowd

at the climactic Milwaukee rally, firing off my

flash camera and singing along with the crowd

to his campaign song, a version of "High Hopes") told

me it was obvious she hated campaigning. She would

sit off to the side at events and read Proust or the

Memoirs of Saint-Simon in the original French. When Leacock asked her how she

felt about campaigning, she said, "Have you ever

tried to smile a thousand times a day?"

At that big rally on April 3 in PRIMARY, I had no problem getting JFK to

sign a "Hello, My Name Is" tag -- and my wrist --

but Mrs. Kennedy balked at my request for her

to sign the nametag. She kept saying "No, no, no"

in that whispery voice, and I kept bugging her until

one of her husband's aides said, "Oh, for Christ's

sake, Jackie, give the kid your autograph." She

signed; I learned it was rare for both of them

to sign the same document, and such examples

were going for $100,000 even in the 1960s. Mine

was lost when we had a house fire in 1962. My

mother made me wash my wrist a week after

JFK signed it. But I still have my May 9, 1960, letter from Senator Kennedy

thanking me for my work on the campaign. It's

my most prized possession.

Comments on Arthur Krock from my 2021 book POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY:

 

[New York] Times columnist Arthur Krock, ignoring the concerns he expressed in October 1963 about a possible CIA coup in the works to overthrow the government, wrote in his 1964 column on the Report, “If there ever is to be a more definitive history of the tragedy at Dallas in November 1963 than the report of the Warren Commission, it will have to be supplied by psychiatrists.” Although accepting the finding that Oswald was the lone assassin, Krock admitted that the questions of motive for both Oswald and Ruby remained “unanswered.” This led Krock to the illogical conclusion, “The opportunity to establish one died with Oswald, and Ruby’s is as yet only slightly less speculative. In view of the insuperable obstacles to history, the report of the Warren Commission is even more remarkable an achievement.” Helping establish a template for many future commentators on the case to be evasive about it, Krock thereby took refuge in what he called the supposed “Unsolved Mysteries of Motive” rather than showing any sustained interest in the political causes of the assassination. . . .

 

The concerns expressed by Kennedy about the possibility of a military coup had been shared by the influential New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, a longtime confidant of Joseph Kennedy who had helped JFK revise his 1940 book Why England Slept but had often been at odds with the president over policy. JFK let his dissatisfaction slip in 1961 when George Tames of the Times took his iconic photograph of the president leaning over a table at a window in the Oval Office in silhouette between two flags, seemingly burdened by what Jacqueline Kennedy called “the awful weight of the presidency.” Tames remembered that Kennedy had been unaware the photo was being taken as he looked at the editorial page of the Times. When he glanced over at the photographer after it was shot, Kennedy said to him, “I wonder where Mr. Krock gets all the crap he puts in this horseshit column of his." . . .

 

Speaking with [Theodore] White on November 29, [1963,] Jacqueline [Kennedy] had it in her mind to draw a parallel between her late husband’s administration and the court of King Arthur. She meant it to have heroic and mythic overtones but perhaps also was subconsciously evoking the Arthurian atmosphere of treachery and adultery. She spoke of the Broadway musical Camelot, which she said they had both loved, and while recalling the events of the assassination in fragmentary fashion, she tried to elevate her husband’s legacy by quoting and italicizing the lines, “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.” The more skeptical president probably would have winced at that dubious and corny analogy, which has been endlessly overused through the years. White wrote in his 1978 memoir, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure, “Quite inadvertently, I was her instrument in labeling the myth. . . . Whether this is myth or truth I still debate.”

“What bothered her was history,” White recalled. “. . . She wanted me to rescue Jack from all these ‘bitter people’ who were going to write about him in history [she had mentioned Arthur Krock and Merriman Smith]. She did not want Jack left to the historians. . . .  [I]n the most lucid possible manner, she was making a plea that was both unreal and unnecessary. She had asked me to Hyannisport, she said, because she wanted me to make certain that Jack was not forgotten in history. The thought that it was up to me to make American history remember John F. Kennedy was so unanticipated that my pencil stuttered over the notes. . . . What she was saying to me now was: Please, History, be kind to John F. Kennedy.” The sympathetic but clear-minded reporter could not help recognizing that the Camelot myth she was purveying was “a misreading of history. The magic Camelot of John F. Kennedy never existed. Instead, there began in Kennedy’s time an effort of government to bring reason to bear on facts which were becoming almost too complicated for human minds to grasp. . . . I would never again, after Kennedy, see any man as a hero. A passage of my own life had closed with a passage in American politics.”

https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/02/archives/fbirecords-trace-oswald-and-bullets-newlyreleased-files-describe.html

 

The ammunition the Warren Commission claimed

was used in the assassination was soon traced

back to the CIA. But then quickly a CYA memo

appeared claiming half of the lot was sold

to the public. See the NY Times article on

that above. 

I long ago focused on Marina's forging of

Lee's signature. It raises many questions,

especially since most of what Lee called

the "so-called evidence" was supplied

to the authorities by Marina and her friend Ruth Paine.

Also, FBI agent Hosty writes in his book that Marina

was his primary target of concern, not Lee.

He writes that he thought Marina might have been KGB,

as she appears to have been in the USSR. But

Lee was an FBI informant, so Hosty is covering

that up.

The often-dubious Mailer book on Oswald reports (basing on Soviet

information) that she was expelled

from Leningrad for prostitution. She reportedly

was a KGB "swallow." The hasty courtship and marriage

to Oswald is suspicious.

Her statements before the Warren Commission obviously cannot be

taken at face value; I am surprised that anyone

does. Even her later statements reversing

the earlier ones cannot be taken at face value,

since she lied so much earlier, albeit under

duress.

It seems like a no-brainer to me that either the Miami

PD screwed up bigtime or, if they passed the obvious, highly specific

threat up the ladder, the Secret Service or FBI

let it happen. Vince Palamara's work on the

Secret Service shows how corrupted they

were; to kill a leader, you usually have to corrupt

his or her bodyguards or provide them with

sufficient grievance. And Hoover hated JFK and RFK. The

warning signs were there, blinking code red, and were not followed.

Mel Brooks said, referring to Nixon, that if

the president isn't doing it to some woman,

he'll do it to the country. Gore Vidal's play

THE BEST MAN is about that kind of

situation. Vidal observed that scandal

in the US means "sex found out."

I realized while writing INTO THE NIGHTMARE that Kenneth O'Donnell

was complicit in the plot to kill JFK, the key inside man at the White House

who helped carry out the plot in Dallas and in lying to the Warren Commission. The evidence gradually

became overwhelmingly obvious. His daughter and son have

waged a campaign with this movie and her books

to whitewash his image, but she acknowledges he

drank himself to death over guilt for what happened to JFK.

Brennan is not credible. His identification of a gunman

is worthless. It would have been thrown out in court.

My column on THIRTEEN DAYS in Irish America magazine (April/May 2001)

is reprinted in my 2017 book collection TWO CHEERS

FOR HOLLYWOOD: JOSEPH McBRIDE ON MOVIES

(Berkeley, Hightower Press), including this introduction:

 

Eyeball to Eyeball: JFK vs. the Joint Chiefs in Thirteen Days

I was the film columnist for Irish America magazine for three years, and it was a mostly enjoyable outlet, allowing me to cover both new and classic films on Irish subjects and issues surrounding the movies’ depiction of our ethnic group. But this column on the 2000 film Thirteen Days, published in the April/May 2001 issue, shortly after George W. Bush became “president,” caused an uproar at the magazine. My bio under the column  about this film about the Cuban Missile Crisis noted that I had been a volunteer in John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary campaign. For many years I had been working on a book dealing with the president’s assassination. The magazine’s editor, Patricia Harty, had been a guest of President Bill Clinton in the Lincoln Bedroom, and after Bush moved into the White House, she expressed a hope in the magazine that he also would invite her to stay overnight. My negative comparison in the column between Bush and President John F. Kennedy, suggesting that we might not be here if Bush had been president instead of JFK during the Missile Crisis, did not go down well at the magazine in the tense days following the stolen 2000 election.

I also managed to express some of my views on the assassination, its causes, and JFK aide Kenneth O’Donnell, who is played by the film’s star, Kevin Costner. Further research for my 2013 book Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit convinced me that O’Donnell was disloyal to JFK. He was about to be fired for corruption upon the completion of the Texas trip and was an inside man in the White House performing vital tasks for the conspiracy; he also lied to the Warren Commission about the sources of the shots. There were rumors that O’Donnell’s son Kevin had helped finance Thirteen Days, but those were not proven at the time of the film’s release, so I went along with the editor cutting that suggestive piece of background information. The film gives an absurdly hagiographic portrait of Kennedy’s special assistant and appointments secretary, who actually played only a minor role in the crisis; JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen described Thirteen Days as “Kenny O’Donnell saving the world.” It later emerged that this distorted focus was indeed due in part to Kevin’s involvement in the financing. According to Britain’s Guardian newspaper, “His son Kevin, an internet tycoon, helped bankroll a buyout of Beacon Entertainment, which made the movie, and appears to have been the partial inspiration for promoting his father -- played by Kevin Costner -- to the role of the ‘ordinary Joe’ hero audiences identify with.” O’Donnell’s daughter Helen was more forthright in taking credit for two books (published in 1998 and 2015) intended to rehabilitate her father’s reputation.

Another element of my Thirteen Days column the editor wanted to change was my insistence on putting quotes around “president” before Bush’s name, since I don’t believe he was ever president of the United States, only an unelected usurper. Somehow I won that battle, referring to him as “our new non-elected ‘president’ George W. Bush,” but she refused to let me refer to General Curtis LeMay as a “madman,” a judgment I believe is abundantly warranted. I knew my days as the magazine’s film columnist were numbered because of these fundamental political disagreements, so a few months later I resigned. But it was worth it to express my revisionist views on these controversial matters in Irish America. A lawyer I know who worked for the U.S. government told me at the time, “I can’t believe you got that printed.”

 

****

 

 

 

On the morning of Saturday, October 20, 1962, I was in a station wagon with my family en route to Milwaukee's General Mitchell Field to hear President John F. Kennedy make a campaign speech for Democratic congressional candidates. As we moved slowly in a long line of cars to the airport, the radio reported that JFK had come down with a "slight cold" in Chicago and was returning directly to Washington. We didn't know then that the Cuban Missile Crisis was reaching its boiling point.

 

Even after Kennedy revealed in a television address two days later that the U.S. and the USSR were staring each other down over nuclear missiles in Cuba, I don't recall being worried about the possibility of world annihilation. As a devout Catholic boy, I was mostly concerned that the president had lied to us. My naïveté over what the French call a "cold diplomatique" is a measure of how far we've come since that more innocent era; today we tend to assume the president is lying unless we can be convinced otherwise.

 

The stirring new film about the Missile Crisis, Thirteen Days, can't help seeming somewhat old-fashioned in stressing the importance of thoughtful presidential leadership. The crisis actually had two heroes: President Kennedy and Soviet Chairman Nikita S. Khrushchev. Their prior recklessness over Cuba precipitated the crisis, but in the end both had the wisdom to save the world from destruction. Khrushchev is not depicted in Thirteen Days, but he is a powerful off-screen presence. In the 1974 TV movie on the crisis, The Missiles of October, he is memorably played by Howard da Silva.

 

Missiles is more a chamber play than a realistic recreation, but it works superbly on those terms while thereby avoiding the pitfalls of impersonating famous characters. Surprisingly, so does the far more elaborately produced Thirteen Days, which boasts an extraordinarily fine performance by Bruce Greenwood as JFK. Greenwood captures Kennedy’s body language and the timbre of his voice while avoiding the usual caricature. Most importantly, Greenwood conveys the thoughtfulness and prudence that enabled Kennedy to resist the pressures of his Joint Chiefs of Staff to escalate the crisis by attacking Cuba. Thirteen Days is unexpectedly timely now, since "thoughtfulness and prudence" are not words that spring to mind in discussing our new non-elected "president" George W. Bush.

 

Steven Culp smoothly impersonates Robert F. Kennedy in Thirteen Days, although the characterization is somewhat sentimentalized, portraying Bobby as less "ruthless" than he actually was, thus missing some of his complexity. The film alludes only briefly to RFK's plotting against Castro, which continued even after the missile crisis, and while emphasizing his gradual dovishness, it does not include his rash suggestion early in the crisis that the U.S. stage a provocation, "[Y]ou know, sink the Maine again or something."

 

Both actors playing Kennedys act rings around the nominal star, Kevin Costner, who affects a laughably bad Kennedy accent as the president's appointment secretary, Kenneth O'Donnell. Costner doesn’t seem to realize that a Kennedy accent, which has strong traces of England, is not the same as a Boston Irish accent. Despite Costner's efforts to be relatively self-effacing, his star power imbalances the film, since his O'Donnell is basically a glorified courtier. But it was only Costner's clout as star and producer that made this film possible. (The unofficial sequel to Thirteen Days has already been made, and it also stars Costner -- Oliver Stone's JFK. Maybe next he can play George H. W. Bush in the prequel, The Bay of Pigs.)

 

Thirteen Days screenwriter David Self ably edited the riveting dialogue derived from the 1997 book of transcripts of the White House deliberations, The Kennedy Tapes, edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow. Unfortunately, that marvelous book is given ungenerous acknowledgment in microscopic type near the close of the end credits (the film's title is cribbed from RFK's posthumously published book on the crisis, on which The Missiles of October was based).

 

Director Roger Donaldson, an Australian who began his filmmaking career in New Zealand, is not seduced by any American flag-waving rhetoric, and he vividly depicts the ominous military preparations for an invasion of Cuba, an element unseen in Missiles. But Thirteen Days, for all its aura of authenticity, misses the ultimate point of the crisis. The filmmakers went eyeball to eyeball with some of the darkest truths about modern American history -- and they blinked.

 

The strange decision to tell the story from O'Donnell's viewpoint led Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen to mock Thirteen Days as "Kenny O’Donnell saving the world." Journalist and Kennedy confidant Ben Bradlee described Costner's heart-tugging portrayal of Kenneth O'Donnell as "exaggerated and fictionalized. To me, he was the enforcer, he kept everyone in line. He was a tough guy and totally loyal servant and friend." It's significant that the more convivial Kennedy aide Dave Powers, JFK's closest friend and O'Donnell's collaborator on the 1972 memoir Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, is not portrayed in the film, for Costner's character resembles a combination of Powers and O'Donnell.

 

I find it hard to accept O'Donnell as a loyal, sympathetic figure because I can't overlook his role in covering up the truth about Kennedy's assassination. O'Donnell and Powers were riding in the Secret Service followup car behind JFK's limousine in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Asked by Warren Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter for his "reaction as to the source of the shots," O'Donnell testified cryptically, "My reaction in part is reconstruction -- is that they came from the right rear. That would be my best judgment."  However, House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill revealed in his 1987 autobiography, Man of the House, that O'Donnell and Powers told him they heard two shots from behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll in front of the president.

 

O'Donnell explained to O'Neill, "I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn't have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn’t want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the [Kennedy] family." Powers more truthfully told the commission, "My first impression was that the shots came from the right and overhead, but I also had a fleeting impression that the noise appeared to come from the front in the area of the triple overpass. This may have resulted from my feeling, when I looked forward toward the overpass, that we might have ridden into an ambush."

 

Thirteen Days is most valuable for reopening for a wide audience the question of civilian control of the military, a topic as important today as it was in 1962. The heart of the film is JFK's confrontation with his Joint Chiefs, particularly General Curtis LeMay, the madman who at the time was U.S. Air Force chief of staff. Not content with incinerating cities in Germany and Japan during World War II, LeMay subsequently headed the Strategic Air Command and wanted to launch a preemptive nuclear attack against the USSR. He helped inspire not one but two characters in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove, Sterling Hayden's General Jack D. Ripper and George C. Scott's General Buck Turgidson.

 

The most stunning revelation in The Kennedy Tapes is the exchange between LeMay and JFK on October 19, which is recreated on screen. The insubordinate general angrily reminded Kennedy that "we made pretty strong statements about the [unclear] Cuba, that we would take action against offensive weapons. I think that a blockade, and political talk, would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this. And I'm sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way, too. You're in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President."

 

Kennedy responded incredulously, "What did you say?"

 

LeMay repeated, "You’re in a pretty bad fix."

 

The Kennedy Tapes reports that Kennedy then made "an unclear, joking, reply." According to RFK’s Thirteen Days, which incorrectly ascribes LeMay's remark to another general, the president retorted, "You are in it with me." The film's JFK says, "Well, maybe you haven't noticed you're in it with me." The departing LeMay (played by Kevin Conway) fumes, "Those goddam Kennedys are gonna destroy this country if we don't do something about this." No wonder the actual President Kennedy worried at one point in that crisis, "Suppose Khrushchev has the same degree of control over his forces as I have over mine?"

 

Khrushchev's own anxiety over the situation, expressed in his moving letter to Kennedy on October 26, receives insufficient emphasis in the film. The Soviet leader wrote: "If you have not lost command of yourself and realize clearly what this could lead to, then, Mr. President, you and I should not now pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter the knot will become. And a time may come when this knot is tied so tight that the person who tied it is no longer capable of untying it, and then the knot will have to be cut. What that would mean I need not explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly what dread forces our two countries possess."

 

Secretary of State Dean Rusk's famous comment, "We are eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked," referred to the Soviets, but he could have been describing JFK's relationship with the Chiefs. After Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a secret deal to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey and a promise not to invade Cuba, Kennedy wrote him, "I think that you and I, with our heavy responsibilities for the maintenance of peace, were aware that developments were approaching a point where events could have become unmanageable."

 

The turning point of the crisis was Robert Kennedy's meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin on October 27, delivering an ultimatum from the president while offering the other terms as olive branches. As reported by Khrushchev in his 1970 autobiography Khrushchev Remembers, the scene was considerably more dramatic than the one in the film, which chickens out at this critical moment of revelation by having Dobrynin, not RFK, bring up that some in the U.S. military "wish for war."

 

According to Khrushchev, what RFK told Dobrynin was: "The President is in a grave situation, and he does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba. . . . Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will. That is why the President is appealing directly to Chairman Khrushchev for his help in liquidating this conflict. If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control."

 

Kennedy’s friend Paul B. (Red) Fay Jr., the under secretary of the navy, had a similarly chilling conversation with JFK in the summer of 1962. It took place the day after Kennedy finished reading Seven Days in May, the popular novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II about an attempted military coup against a fictional president. "It’s possible," Kennedy told Fay. "It could happen in this country, but the conditions would have to be just right. If, for example, the country had a young President, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back, but this would be written off as the usual military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, 'Is he too young and inexperienced?' The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment.

 

"Then, if there were a third Bay of Pigs, it could happen." Kennedy added defiantly, "But it won't happen on my watch." He felt so strongly about such a threat that he regarded Seven Days in May as "a warning to the nation" and in 1963 allowed director John Frankenheimer to shoot scenes for the film version in the White House. A full-page ad for the film appeared in the New York Times on the day of the president's assassination.

 

The American public, unaware of the trade of the missiles in Turkey, generally considered the Cuban Missile Crisis an unalloyed Kennedy triumph, but from the viewpoint of the Chiefs it was a failure of presidential will, "another Bay of Pigs." Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recalled in 1987, "After Khrushchev had agreed to remove the missiles, President Kennedy invited the Chiefs to the White House so that he could thank them for their support during the crisis, and there was one hell of a scene. LeMay came out saying, 'We lost! We ought to just go in there today and knock 'em off!''

 

Some have suggested that the nuclear test ban treaty with the USSR in 1963 may have been regarded by military leaders as the "third Bay of Pigs," requiring a violent seizure of power to ensure U.S. superiority over the USSR. LeMay was not alone in his advocacy of a first strike. At a July 1961 meeting of the National Security Council, the Chiefs outraged JFK with a presentation suggesting that the rates of missile production in the two countries would allow a "window of opportunity" in "late 1963" for a "surprise" U.S. nuclear attack on the USSR.

 

Kennedy's most eloquent statement on the danger of nuclear war was his speech at American University in Washington on June 10, 1963, which Khrushchev described as the greatest speech ever given by an American president [in the postwar era]. Part of that speech is played over the ending of Thirteen Days. The original text reads: "What kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on Earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children -- not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women -- not merely peace in our time but peace for all time. . . . Our problems are manmade -- therefore, they can be solved by man. . . . For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal."

 

Khrushchev was equally eloquent when he reflected to Norman Cousins shortly after the crisis, "What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?"

 

Both leaders paid dearly for their principled restraint. Khrushchev was deposed by his Presidium colleagues in October 1964, eleven months after Kennedy was murdered. Indira Gandhi observed, "Kennedy died because he lost the support of his peers." Those who continue to believe that a coup d'état can't happen in this country are ignoring not only the truth about November 1963 but also the events surrounding our last presidential election.

 

####

 

I have never seen any credible evidence that Oswald

went to Mexico City. Even J. Edgar Hoover

doubted it, as he told LBJ on the morning of November 23, 1963.

https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/lbjlib/phone_calls/Nov_1963/html/LBJ-Nov-1963_0030a.htm

Thanks for finding and posting these revealing clips, Gil. They

are a service to the forum and its members. They show the

value of having a trained eye zero in on key points.

When I went to the JFK Library in 1984, I asked to see

the papers of Ambassador Kennedy. The person at

the research desk said, "WHO???" I replied, "Ambassador

Joseph P. Kennedy Sr." Then she said, "OH!!! We don't

let people see THOSE!" Since then they have let

some researchers look at some of his papers.

An interesting interview, but it's hard to evaluate

without knowing the identity of the witness. Much

of what she says tracks with my interview with

Johnnie Maxie Witherspoon. Mrs. Witherspoon

was evasive about where she lived at the time

of Tippit's death and where she was that day. I

write at length in INTO THE NIGHTMARE about her and her involvement

with Tippit.

https://www.wrkf.org/show/talk-louisiana/2022-12-22/thursday-december-22nd-joseph-mcbride-mark-ballard

Jim Engster of Talk Louisiana is one of the rare MSM hosts who 

takes a serious interest in questions surrounding the JFK

assassination. He has me on his show each anniversary of JFK's

death to discuss the latest developments in the case and now had me on today discussing the

recent document release (and non-release). The callers

were thoughtful as well. Thanks to my friend Jim DiEugenio

for sharing ideas with me before the show as part of my research

for it, and to the other members of this forum for many valuable

commentaries and discoveries among the documents.

Hinckley didn't shoot Reagan. The shot that hit

Reagan came from above and richocheted off

the presidential limousine upward into his armpit.

I am still hoping for news on the state in

which FINAL CHARADE was left.