Joseph McBride

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.

Bob Clark thinks the DPD did "magnificent work."

Thanks for adding your history with Maxine Cheshire, Douglas. That is revealing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/business/media/maxine-cheshire-dead.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage&fbclid=IwAR1LI8nwrr9s94JTrkm-721iYA7nLtx8fQlLrRYRx-lBlIKFIa1MK_e2m7Q Maxine Cheshire was rotten. She tried to sabotage my Bush CIA/Kennedy assassination research in Texas, but I outfoxed her. You'll see in this obit what John and Jacqueline Kennedy thought of her.

Niall O’Dowd: Joe Biden’s debt to the Kennedys It is Robert Kennedy’s bust that now graces the Oval Office, not JFK. Thu, Feb 4, 2021, 11:16 Niall O’Dowd Ted Kennedy helped him overcome the incredible loss of his wife and child. Pic: Joseph Biden speaks during a hearing, Washington DC, October 6, 1987. Beside him is fellow Senator Edward M ‘Ted’ Kennedy . (Photo by Ron Sachs/CNP/Getty Images) https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/niall-o-dowd-joe-biden-s-debt-to-the-kennedys-1.4476035

The question is whether or how much Rather "butchered" it or if he saw the unaltered film? Zapruder, for instance, testified under oath that he filmed the turn onto Elm Street. The jump cut on the extant film makes no sense. But some of Rather's description leaves out events we know occurred, such as Hill jumping onto the car. It's not believable on the extant film that he could reach the car in movement that way. The limousine stop was also removed.

Bill Moyers testified under oath to the HSCA that he gave the order for the removal of the bubbletop. Others have also made that claim. One of the oddities of this case is that Moyers has never written the memoir many would have assumed he would write and that would sell many copies, whatever he writes about the events and people in his life.

Baughman's book SECRET SERVICE CHIEF is quite good. I read it when it came out (it was published in January 1962). It is rather prophetic. The fact that I had read it was one reason I was not entirely surprised when Kennedy was shot and saw through some of the lies that were quickly spewed out that day about what happened. I wrote my short story about the Kennedy assassination, "The Plot Against a Country," even before that, in October 1961, for my freshman English class at Marquette University High School in Milwaukee. I believe I was concerned because of the lack of security around Kennedy and my concern about the vulnerability I witnessed in him when I met him twice during the Wisconsin primary campaign in March and April 1960 while working as a volunteer on his campaign and was in close proximity to him, talking with him on both occasions. And I was a student of the Lincoln assassination and had visited Ford's Theater in May 1962 but was surprised to find it closed and gutted at the time, before its restoration. On that visit I went around the Capitol, including the floor of the House while it was in session and the cloakroom, with a page boy, who showed me something he said he wasn't supposed to show people, the catafalque on which Lincoln's coffin had rested. It was in a locked, secluded room in the Capitol covered with a dusty black sheet. Kennedy's coffin later rested in state on that same catafalque. Also in May 1962, when I was in the honor guard at a speech he gave in the Milwaukee Arena, I impulsively said "Hi, Jack!" to him afterward when I pulled back a curtain behind the presidential podium five feet away from him, and he nodded and smile, then turned and walked down a ramp into the Lincoln limousine in which he would be killed the following year. My father at a reception before that event had time to ask Kennedy one question. He asked, "Do you ever worry about being assassinated?" Kennedy replied that of course he realized that was possible but that if he thought about it all the time, he couldn't do his job.

Jim, it's obvious she put it in writing. Various printed sources said he demanded that. Then there was a meeting. Then he OK'd her. Connect the dots. And if you Google for a minute or two, you get this on NPR's website: The Senate has voted to confirm Avril Haines to be director of national intelligence, making her President Biden's first Cabinet-level official to receive Senate confirmation. The vote was 84-10. Her confirmation comes after Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., briefly held up the process, asking for a written response from her about a question during her confirmation hearing a day earlier. "I no longer object," Cotton said Wednesday evening, noting that Haines had provided him with a response.

Although we narrowly fended off an attempted coup, Avril Haines could not be confirmed by the Senate today as director of national intelligence until she put in writing at the demand of the vile Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) that she and the Biden administration would not go after CIA officers from the Bush-Cheney regime for their involvement in the US government torture program. She had given verbal assurances, but he insisted on having it in writing. (See articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico. Cotton wanted this known.) That’s just Day One. The lines were drawn already. Cotton wants to be president. Imagine what he would do if he gets that job. I wonder if the torture program actually ended when Obama said it did or not (Haines was a deputy CIA director in the Obama administration). And I wonder what did Cotton himself do in the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan. A friend of mine says he would have demanded that Cotton specify in detail, on the floor of the Senate and for the Congressional Record, exactly what crimes he was referring to. Cotton strikes me as the kind of better-educated, more disciplined potential tyrant who has learned from what Trump did in his failed coup and could pull one off more efficiently if he takes office in 2025.

The Washington Post article today indicates Secret Service complicity in the attack on the Capitol, though the Post doesn't seem to fully grasp that. Since this event allegedly was an inside job, it’s noteworthy that, as the article points out, the Secret Service was very slow in getting Pence out of the chamber. It states that Pence "was not evacuated from the Senate chamber for about 14 minutes after the Capitol Police reported an initial attempted breach of the complex — enough time for the marauders to rush inside the building and approach his location, according to law enforcement officials and video footage from that day. Secret Service officers eventually spirited Pence to a room off the Senate floor with his wife and daughter after rioters began to pour into the Capitol, many loudly denouncing the vice president as a traitor as they marched through the first floor below the Senate chamber." Pence was there with his wife, daughter, brother, and some staffers. Similar to Dallas — as we know, the complicity of the Secret Service was necessary to Kennedy’s murder. There was a whole series of security-stripping actions in Dallas, including the car stop before the head shots that was removed from the Zapruder film (the car stop was described by dozens of witnesses, including Sen. Ralph Yarborough to me, as quoted in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE). If you want to kill a leader, you usually have to compromise his security. That’s a pattern long established. Trump tried to kill Pence — the first US president to attempt to assassinate his vice president.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), a former US Air Force officer and currently a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, said on MORNING JOE today that the mob was trying to assassinate Pelosi and hang Pence and that members of Congress were involved in the planning of the attack on the Capitol.