Joseph McBride

It's possible, though it doesn't entirely pass my smell test as a reporter, partly because it seems too convenient (and Myers as a source is dubious). I tried to check every claim against other evidence. Tippit's last two transmssions to the dispatcher was at 1:08, so it is unlikely he was shot at 1:06. The likelihood is that he was shot at 1:08 or within the next minute. Larry Ray Harris and Greg Lowery, two very thorough Tippit researchers, agreed with me.

Thanks much for the kind words on my book, Richard. I did not say much about Mrs. Higgins because I could not verify her claim about that time being mentioned on local TV. I tried to include verifiable information. What she said about the TV station seemed possible but perhaps unlikely. Meanwhile, run, do not walk to get your copy of Condon's novel. Nabokov's LOLITA is a great novel, by the way. Graham Greene championed it past the censors and helped it get published in both the UK and the US.

Oddly credible, not "incredible" is how I would describe THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. We know about MK-ULTRA.

I read that Richard Condon was supposedly influenced in part by Roy Cohn in creating the monstrous mother figure who controls the Joe McCarthy character in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, my favorite novel.

All that harassment is appalling, Vince. It is a backhanded tribute to how powerful and influential your investigation of Secret Service complicity in the assassination has been.

They ban reviewers because of "bias"? How do they define "bias"? Isn't all reviewing opinionated by nature? Legally there is no such thing as a right or wrong opinion; it has to be backed up by facts to mean anything.

That attack review on the book on Amazon is grossly unfair. The guy obviously had some animus toward it ahead of time and unleashed it. I recommend anyone here who likes the book (as I do) post a good review to counterbalance that garbage.

I received the book yesterday, Vince, and started reading it. A fine job, thorough and encyclopedic and lively to read, with fascinating documents and photographs as well. I look forward to reading the rest of this major work in the field. Thanks for your kind words on my work and that of other researchers -- you are working in the best scholarly tradition of acknowledging other scholars, which unfortunately is not always the case in this field. Beyond your unrivaled and deep knowledge of the role of the Secret Service -- a truly groundbreaking study that has changed our views of the case and followed Penn Jones's advice to take one area that has not received enough attention and "research the hell out of it" -- you have turned up a great deal of other information and have raised many provocative questions for us to ponder. We won't all agree with everything, but that's part of the scholarly process too. Kudos!

Thanks, Ken. I appreciate your good words. I don't recall what Summers wrote, but I found the claims about Hoover being a cross dresser very dubious.

FYI, the tired old Hoover-as-crossdresser myth originated solely with an unreliable source, the former wife of a mob figure who was sent to prison.

Pluralization is not accomplished with apostrophes. "Loose" does not mean "lose." I see this kind of stuff all the time. It's elementary or used to be. When you read such errors, you lose faith in the writer and get distracted from the intended content.

I was surprised (mildly, since I knew their bias) how few photos are in the WC files at the National Archives. I was dismayed too at how meager the shelf is on the assassination at the Kennedy Library. They just don't care. Those things are revealing. I also wanted to find a telegram Frank Capra claimed Joe Kennedy sent Harry Cohn recommending he not release MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON in Europe because it supposedly would hurt our country's reputation. I asked a librarian at the Kennedy Library to see the papers of Ambassador Kennedy. "WHO?," she said. I patiently replied, "Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr." "Oh!," she said, looking startled. "We don't let people look at THOSE!" This was 1984. Much later the library opened at least some of his papers to researchers, and someone found the telegram, which hadn't been in Capra's papers.

I wanted to see how Thompson dealt with those issues and thought he would in his book, since he is a leading dissenter from them and they affect any study of the evidence. So I was surprised he doesn't address them in what evidently is his final book.

I refer you to the section on the TWILIGHT ZONE film and crash in my Spielberg biograhy. There have been two good books on the crash and trial, Stephen Farber and Marc Green, OUTRAGEOUS C0NDUCT: ART, EGO, AND THE "TWILIGHT ZONE" CASE, Arbor House/Morrow, 1988, and Ron LaBrecque, SPECIAL EFFECTS: DISASTER AT "TWILIGHT ZONE": THE TRAGEDY AND THE TRIAL, Scribners, 1988. OUTRAGEOUS CONDUCT is better, but the other one also has useful information. An important article on the trial is by Gay Jervey, "Misfire in the Twilight Zone," The American Lawyer, December 1987.

As for the plan to kill Oswald shortly after the assassination, that may have been the mission of Officers Tippit and Mentzel when they were dispatched to track him down in Oak Cliff, which took place before 12:45 p.m., proof they were involved in the conspiracy, since the police "officially" did not know Oswald's identity until they took him downtown after capturing him at the theater around 1:52 (though actually they had been tracking him before the assassination, and he was an FBI informant). Tippit was shot in a police ambush at around 1:08 or 1:09; Mentzel didn't make it there, apparently because he was involved in a car accident nearby. Though the record does not indicate whether they were sent to capture or kill Oswald, it appears the DPD then wanted to kill Oswald in the theater as part of an improvised backup plan but failed, so Ruby had to be called in to do the job. The bus incident may have been another attempt to kill Oswald after he made it out of the TSBD alive.

Paul, I was listening to network radio broadcasts in that 12:40-1:30 pm CST time period before I had to go back to school in the rain that had come up from Dallas (where it ended that morning) to Wisconsin. I think the person controlling the radio at the Milwaukee drugstore where I and a few other people were huddled around it would switch channels for updates. Those reports said the shots came from the railroad bridge or the hill (soon to be known as the Grassy Knoll). But shortly after 1 p.m., Dan Rather on CBS Radio was reportong that the shots came from the TSBD. I quote Rather's report in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE as well as samples of some earlier network radio reports I may have heard.

I'm surprised that the new book does not go into the film and body alteration issues. Thompson had been quite vocal in opposing Horne's convincing account, with evidence, of Z film alteration. That invalidates some of Thompson's assumptions.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE was released on October 24, 1962, the Wednesday of the Cuban Missile Crisis -- the country was, to say the least, distracted. October 27 was the climax, the night McNamara went to sleep thinking he might not wake the next morning.

I didn't want to go to work on Sunday, November 24, but my mother insisted I go to Milwaukee County Stadium to do my job as a vendor at an NFL game (I was putting myself through high school that way). The Packers were playing the San Francisco 49ers. I later met a 49ers player from that game who told me he and his colleagues were resentful at having to play; the NFL owners were largely conservative and didn't care about Kennedy, to say the least. When the news about Oswald being shot came through before the game, I saw it breaking as a wave in the stands with people listening to their little transistor radios, the only time I've ever seen news being received that way. So I missed the live TV broadcast but saw the tape later that day. I always resented I couldn't have stayed home and watched the unfolding news that Sunday. On the Friday night, my siblings went to see the lousy PT 109 movie at our local theater while I watched Oswald being dragged through the halls of the police station denying he was guilty and saying, "I'm just a patsy!" (That's one reason I care more than they do about the case.) By that evening I was believing in Oswald's innocence, and from the first radio reports I began hearing at 12:40 that day and the abrupt change at 1 p.m. to shift all the shots from the front to behind, my journalistic antennae (I had already been a journalist for three years when it happened) told me something was wrong with the lone-gunman story.

Congratulations, Vince! I just ordered it. Can't wait to read it. Cheers.

The U.S. lost the Korean War too, according to no less an authority than Lt. Gen. Lewis (Chesty) Puller, USMC, the most decorated Marine in American history, who won his fifth Navy Cross in Korea for commanding the rear of the First Marine Division in the epic retreat from the Choisin Reservoir. In my book SEARCHING FOR JOHN FORD, I quote Puller's comment when he heard the situation in Korea described as a stalemate with the forces of Communist China: "Stalemate, hell! We've lost the first war in our history, and it's time someone told the American people the truth about it. The Reds whipped the devil out of us, pure and simple."

She was a charitable woman, yes, but when her son Curtis talked about how she never bore anger toward Oswald and his family, I wondered whether it was also because she may have known Oswald did not kill her husband. My book INTO THE NIGHTMARE revealed that she knew J. D. was sent by the DPD to hunt down Oswald in Oak Cliff shortly after the assassination along with another officer (whom I later recognized was William Mentzel, the officer assigned to that district). It is unknown whether Tippit and Mentzel were told to capture Oswald or kill him, but that early pursuit well before Oswald was officially identified by the DPD shows that Tippit and Mentzel were part of the conspiracy and is further proof that the DPD had knowledge of Oswald in Dallas before the presidential assassination.

"Deep Throat" is a character invented by Alice Mayhew. She was Bernstein & Woodward's agent for the book ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. After they turned in their first draft, which didn't contain that character, she suggested it to them. It provides a convenient composite cover for all of ONI man Woodward's unacknowledged intelligence sources. He and Bernstein later fingered the FBI's Mark Felt as "Deep Throat," naming him at a time when he was senile, but he was probably just one of their sources.

I noticed on my latest viewing that the saloon fight in THE PARALLAX VIEW is also a homage to the one in SHANE. The one in the Pakula film always struck me as too cartoonish for the film that surrounds it, unlike the magnificently choreographed and powerfully visceral fight in SHANE, but I see what Pakula was driving at a bit more, even if I still think it's a flaw in the film (like the near-drowning battle in the dam and the car chase; those seem sops to the studio and the boxoffice). Once those are out of the way, the film keeps relentlessly on its track. And the opening part is gripping. The assassination, the depiction of the Beatty character's messy life, the visit from the scared-out-of-her-wits Paula Prentiss -- and the jump cut to her body in the morgue is a real shocker that propels Beatty on his quest (as well as a homage to Penn Jones). Pakula pointed out that the film begins with a totem pole and then reveals the Space Needle, a kind of modern totem pole, behind it. The film is fascinating visually as well as thematically; the mood it creates with both aspects is suitably eerie and disturbing. The off-kilter compositions and often strange editing create a feeling that you never quite know what's around the corner.