Joseph McBride

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.

One thing about Stone's NIXON I wonder about is why the absolutely essential, pivotal, and brilliant scene with Richard Helms (Sam Waterson) being confronted by Nixon over documentation re the Kennedy assassination ("the whole Bay of Pigs thing," in Nixon's code for that subject) and over control over the CIA was not in the release version. It is in the director's cut on homevideo.

It's sad how Alan Pakula died. In 1998, when he was 70, he was driving on the Long Island Expressway, and a driver ahead of him struck a metal pipe that flew through his windshield and killed him. He was a sophisticated, well-read, and civilized man, very un-Hollywood. I enjoyed talking with him. Before directing he produced films for director Robert Mulligan, including FEAR STRIKES OUT (I liked that book as a kid), TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER, INSIDE DAISY CLOVER, etc. KLUTE and SOPHIE'S CHOICE are some of the excellent films Pakula directed. His comment to me on Woodward shows his savvy but the limits of how far he wanted to go or could go (Billy Wilder's THE FRONT PAGE from 1974 can be read as a satire of the media frenzy over Woodward & Bernstein and is a strong indictment of the callousness and dishonesty of the press; Wilder was an old reporter from his Vienna and Berlin days and saw through at least some of the Washington Post BS). I am fortunately out of the movie racket, but I thought someone should do an honest film about Woodward & Bernstein. My friend Rod Lurie, a former film critic who is now a writer-director (I helped get him into the LA Film Critics Association after he was blackballed over some of his reviews) says ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN is his favorite movie. I finally suggested he remake it and tell the truth (I stay away assiduously from working on movies myself). He didn't want to do it, of course. THE POST is a terrible movie, as you know, swallowing the Kool-Aid about the Post and gorging on it (Pakula and Redford wanted to cast Lauren Bacall as Katharine Graham, but Graham refused to be portrayed in the film). Oliver Stone's superb, underrated NIXON does deal with Watergate extensively and serves as a corrective. Most reviewers missed the subtle JFK conspiracy connections in that film. I gave it a rare five stars when I reviewed it as the first film I reviewed for Boxoffice. I dropped a note to Stone suggesting he do LBJ to complete a presidential trilogy, but to my surprise he wrote back and said LBJ never interested him.

This was posted earlier (see "Marie Tippit dies" topic).

Alan Pakula didn't tell me he *knew* Bob Woodward was CIA. I asked him during the making of ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN if he had heard that, based on information I had been given by a friend who was an RFK assassination researcher, who didn't realize back then that Woodward was/is ONI instead. Pakula's actual reply to me was, "I've heard that, but if I think about it while making this movie, I'll go crazy." When I later told Pakula that I had slipped into a projection room in the Warners editing building one night and watched him and Redford, by themselves near the front, screening rushes for the film (ten takes of the scene between Redford and Hoffman browbeating an indignant woman reporter in going after ex-lover Ken Clawson to get a document; all the takes were different emphases with the same dialogue, fascinating to watch). When I revealed to Pakula that I'd been there and offered a brief analysis of what I had seen, he grinned and said, "I'll tell Bob. He'll go crazy." Deep Throat is a character that was suggested to Bernstein & Woodward (Bernstein received top billing on the book) by their agent, Alice Mayhew, after she read the first draft, in which no such character appears. Yes, it's a composite of all the various intelligence sources Woodward had. Their identification of the the senile ex-FBI official Mark Felt as supposedly being Deep Throat was, in Watergate lingo, a "modified, limited hangout," since it's likely he was (just) one of their sources.

"In part one [my interview begins after a verrrrry slow eight-minute introduction -- JM], noted film historian Joseph McBride returns to the show to give his thoughts on The Parallax View as well as to discuss the film in the context of the Kennedy assassination, the Nixon Presidency and Watergate, and the rise of New Hollywood. He also offers some personal stories about The Parallax View‘s director Alan J. Pakula, discusses the technical aspects of the film such as the lauded cinematography done by Gordon Willis, and much, much more."

https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/2021/03/03/marie-tippit-widow-of-dallas-police-officer-gunned-down-by-lee-harvey-oswald-dies-at-92/

One theory of the Tanden nomination was that Biden knew she wouldn't fly, so he offered her up as a sacrifice to get the Republicans to go along with the rest of his major nominations.

Marie Tippit died today at age 92 at a hospital near her home in Sulphur Springs, Texas. She had COVID and died the day the Texas governor opened up the state "100%." When I met her in 2014 on her husband's 90th birthday at a tribute to him in the Sixth Floor Museum, she expressed willingness to be interviewed by me, but Gary Mack and her Dallas Police Department minder intervened. She seemed to be a nice lady. She was usually controlled by the DPD after the murder. She knew a lot she did not tell the press, but I revealed some of it in INTO THE NIGHTMARE. The Dallas Morning News obit predictably and falsely says her husband was killed by Oswald.

Alan Seeger, born in New York, was killed in France on July 4, 1916, at the age of 28, while fighting with the French Foreign Legion against the Germans in the Battle of the Somme. This poem was published posthumously. Pete Seeger was his nephew.

JFK's favorite poem: I Have a Rendezvous with Death BY ALAN SEEGER I have a rendezvous with Death At some disputed barricade, When Spring comes back with rustling shade And apple-blossoms fill the air— I have a rendezvous with Death When Spring brings back blue days and fair. It may be he shall take my hand And lead me into his dark land And close my eyes and quench my breath— It may be I shall pass him still. I have a rendezvous with Death On some scarred slope of battered hill, When Spring comes round again this year And the first meadow-flowers appear. God knows 'twere better to be deep Pillowed in silk and scented down, Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep, Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath, Where hushed awakenings are dear ... But I've a rendezvous with Death At midnight in some flaming town, When Spring trips north again this year, And I to my pledged word am true, I shall not fail that rendezvous. Source: A Treasury of War Poetry (1917)

Thank you very much, Jamey.

THE WHISKEY INCIDENT: I've sometimes wondered what John F. Kennedy would have said about his assassination. My father, Raymond McBride, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal, when he had time for one question at a reception before the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner at the Milwaukee Arena in May 1962, asked President Kennedy if he worried abut being assassinated, and he said he didn't, because if he thought about it, he couldn't do his job. (Maybe he should have thought about it more than he did, especially with all the warning signs in November 1963.) While researching my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT, I found out about a long-forgotten incident in the 1960 campaign. A whiskey glass was thrown at Kennedy and others in an open car in a motorcade by a man in a crowd of Nixon supporters while Kennedy was being driven to the Milwaukee Auditorium and Arena on October 23 (the same location, coincidentally, where former president Theodore Roosevelt was headed when he was shot in an assassination attempt during the 1912 campaign). In the 1960 incident, a campaign aide, William Feldstein, was hit in the head by the glass, and JFK and others in the car were splattered with the whiskey. According to Feldstein, "Kennedy was very incensed. He turned and aske me, 'Are you all right?' Then he turned to his sister [Eunice Kennedy Shriver] and said: 'Can you imagine anything like that?'" I end INTO THE NIGHTMARE with this incident and how Kennedy, after wiping his face, reacted to the man who attacked him and the others in his car. I found a photo on microfilm of a Milwaukee newspaper (too big to be posted here). It shows JFK reaching across the car to hand the (unseen) man the glass. The caption says, "Jack Returns Glass With Verbal Punch. Sen. Kennedy, slightly doused Sunday when a glass of whisky was thrown into his open car while his parade was forming at N. Water St. and E. Wisconsin Ave., returns the glass to a man, calmly saying: 'Here's your glass, sir. You're not fit to be an American.' Story appears on Page 1, Part 1. UPI Telephoto."

FYI, she prefers to be called Mary Ann Moorman.

The news guy in the video with the mayor.