Joseph McBride

Vince, thank you again for the major work you have done on the Secret Service aspects of the plot, some of the most important and illuminating research on the case. BTW, the RTE did a wonderful documentary on JFK's Irish trip, JOHN F. KENNEDY IN THE ISLAND OF DREAMS, released in the US on VHS as JFK IN IRELAND. My Irish wife, Dr. Ruth O'Hara, at age two years and ten months in June 1963, was upset her parents didn't take her with them to the Dublin motorcade, so she insisted they drive to Galway so they could see him in Eyre Square on June 29. He gave a memorable speech there. She thought he was an imposter because she had only seen him on black-and-white TV, and the man she saw speaking had auburn hair. It is haunting that he said in his speech, "So I must say that though other days may not be so bright as we look toward the future, that the brightest days will continue to be those in which we visited you here in Ireland." I've visited Eyre Square a couple of times to see the site of the speech. The home of Nora Barnacle (James Joyce's wife) is nearby, as is the Spanish Arch.

I await your book for what you write about "the original Dallas plan" -- I hope we see the book soon. Dr. Rose surely would have done the JFK autopsy right away, however. Dr. Rose did the Tippit autopsy in midafternoon, but Kennedy would have taken precedence. That would have the conspirators given only a short time to alter the body -- and where in the hospital? I suspect the coffin was empty, the reason for the nearly violent confrontation in the hallway; there was a tunnel exit from Parkland out of sight of the media. I discuss this possibility in INTO THE NIGHTMARE. Have you considered that?

This TV footage of JFK's 1963 Dublin motorcade on O'Connell Street shows the standard flatbed truck with still and film photographers preceding the presidential limousine, motorcycle policeman riding en masse before the limousine and flanking the limo on both sides, etc. In Dallas, as we know, the motorcycle cops were removed from the sides of the limo by the Secret Service, and the flatbed truck was removed from the motorcade at Love Field by Secret Service Agent Roger Warner. https://www.rte.ie/archives/exhibitions/1722-john-f-kennedy/391584-president-kennedy-motorcade-through-dublin-city/?fbclid=IwAR3hTRdpZe_WK83jQYIVjZO7o9DCXB2o91Eo--kNpLDpxNezOY3JRT_CY98

Carl Oglesby has a brilliant analysis of Ruby's WC testimony in THE YANKEE AND COWBOY WAR, dissecting what Ruby was desperately trying to tell Warren between the lines, with Warren refusing to hear his message of involvement in the conspiracy or take him to Washington where he would feel safe to talk more freely than in the Dallas jail.

How does one order a copy of TWO DAYS OF INFAMY? I tried on the website, and there seemed no way to do so. It's also not on Amazon.

The first thing a constitutional convention would do would be to throw out the First Amendment, which is widely unpopular on both sides of the political spectrum but is all that keeps us having at least a vestigial democracy.

I wrote extensively about Poppy Bush in INTO THE NIGHTMARE (35 pages). Russ Baker in FAMILY OF SECRETS has a section on the Tyler episode that includes his interview with Aubrey Irby, then VP of the Tyler Kiwanis Club and later president of Kiwanis International, who attested to Poppy's presence at the Blackstone Hotel in Tyler to give a speech that had to be canceled due to the assassination. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/809170258040357823/

I tried to post a photo of Bush at the luncheon in Tyler on 11-22-63, but the site said it was too large to post. I write in INTO THE NIGHTMARE about where Tippit may have been over the noon hour that day (the evidence is not conclusive re his whereabouts).

None of the Dealey Plaza photos shows a man who looks close enough to G. H. W. Bush, in my view. He was in transit from Tyler to Dallas that afternoon and reported he went to the Sheraton, where the Secret Service and White House communications station were located.

Why would the plotters have wanted a Dallas autopsy, since it would have been performed by Dr. Earl Rose, who did the exemplary autopsies on Tippit and Oswald? Dr. Rose could not be controlled. He would have recorded evidence of wounds caused by shots from different directions.

The footage shows that the MDW team didn't carry the casket off the plane and catering truck as they wanted and expected to do but were stopped twice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNpq3HbTB0M

Yes, Rather made that improbable claim on numerous occasions. It was Garner's 95th birthday, and JFK called to wish him well. "Bucket of Warm Piss" Garner loathed his boss, FDR.

That does not look like Poppy Bush to me.

Ferrie's story about his trip never made sense. Nor did it make sense that Dan Rather claimed to have been interviewing Cactus Jack Garner in Uvalde on the morning of 11-22-63. For one thing, Uvalde is 372 miles from Dallas.

This one, Jim? From Nov. 22, Washington Post op-ed: Made by History Perspective The tie between the Kennedy assassination and Trump’s conspiracy mongering The birth of the conspiracy culture that gave us Trumpism. President John F. Kennedy and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy stand before the “Nutcracker”-themed White House Christmas tree in 1961. (Robert Knudson/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library) By Steven M. Gillon Steven M. Gillon is a senior faculty fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia and scholar-in-residence at HISTORY. He teaches history at the University of Oklahoma and is author of "America's Reluctant Prince: The Life of John F. Kennedy, Jr." November 22, 2020 at 3:00 a.m. PST Add to list President Trump’s bogus claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him is the latest in a long list of conspiracy theories he has promoted, which in turn have been amplified by cable television and social media. Yet, rather than being banished to the fringes of American politics, Trump has amassed a cultlike following and has now falsely managed to convince a majority of Republicans that he won despite all evidence to the contrary. Such behavior was unimaginable for earlier presidents. And yet conspiracy theories have a long history in right-wing politics. But tempting though it may be to chalk conspiracies up as a conservative phenomenon, the truth is more complicated. In fact, it was the assassination of John F. Kennedy 57 years ago today that transformed such paranoid thinking into more widespread distrust of government, ultimately creating openings for a demagogue like Trump. In 1964, the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, popularly known as the Warren Commission, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had fired three bullets from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building. It found that Oswald’s death 48 hours later at the hands of local nightclub owner Jack Ruby was an act of spontaneous revenge. Surprisingly, the report received a warm reception, and within two months after its release, 87 percent of respondents in a survey said they believed Oswald, acting alone, had shot the president. AD And yet, by the early 1970s, a majority of the public began to question the Warren Commission’s central conclusion that a lone gunman was responsible for Kennedy’s death. Beginning with the 1966 publication of Mark Lane’s bestseller “Rush to Judgment,” an army of investigative journalists and self-styled assassination experts refused to accept that the assassination could have been the result of a random, inexplicable act of violence, that a loser like Oswald could have single-handedly killed a man as great as Kennedy. This began as a well-intentioned search for alternative explanations of the assassination, but it ended up fueling the emergence of a conspiracy culture that now permeates every aspect of American society. The thread that runs through most Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories is that a shadowy network of nefarious individuals, working as part of a “deep state,” conspired to kill the president because he offered a new direction for the country. Originally, those who challenged the Warren Commission report focused on Cold War motivations, with either the Soviets or possibly the Cubans as perpetrators, which made sense, considering that Kennedy was assassinated just one year after the Cuban missile crisis. As Cold War tensions decreased in the 1970s, however, critics looked closer to home for an explanation. The disaster in Vietnam, the Johnson administration’s duplicity in explaining it, and Watergate combined to erode public faith in the integrity of government leaders. The journalist Tom Wicker wrote that many Americans had come to view their government as “a fountain of lies.” The pollster Daniel Yankelovich noted in 1977 that trust in government had declined from 80 percent in the late 1950s to about 33 percent in 1976. AD In this environment, critics chipped away at the Warren Commission’s conclusions, citing magic bullets and suspicious figures on a grassy knoll to hint at a larger plot to assassinate Kennedy. In December 1978, these critics seemed to receive official support from the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) which concluded, on the basis of a flawed acoustical analysis of a police motorcycle dictabelt recording, that four shots were fired at the president’s motorcade. The report only added to public doubt over the Warren Commission’s conclusions, and the new culture of cynicism helped conspiracy theories grow. By the 1980s, polls showed that many Americans believed their own government — not foreign actors — was involved in the assassination. In 1991, the filmmaker Oliver Stone added his own paranoid twist to the controversy with his wildly popular movie “JFK.” The film suggested that the military-industrial complex killed Kennedy because he planned to pull out of Vietnam. But Stone took his argument one step further, asserting in The Washington Post shortly after the release of “JFK” that the assassination “put an abrupt end to a period of innocence and great idealism.” AD Such a theory fed into simplified and exaggerated myths about Kennedy’s presidency and the past more broadly. Many Kennedy supporters trumpeted this revisionist narrative that his death erased possibility and sent the country careening downward. They went to great lengths to show that, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, rioting in the streets, campus unrest and, most of all, the escalation in Vietnam, resulted from the personal and policy failures of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, not from the flawed assumptions of postwar liberalism itself. Had Kennedy lived, supporters claimed, we would not have had Vietnam or Watergate. Liberal Kennedy champions looking to deny the failings of liberalism and conspiracy theorists trying to debunk the Warren Commission findings made for strange bedfellows. But they were united by this narrative of Kennedy’s life and death, which provided a simple explanation for the turbulence that marred the late 1960s and the 1970s. The bullets that struck down Kennedy marked a key turning point in American history, they asserted, snuffing out the country’s golden years, a time when the United States stood strong in the world, our nation felt united and life seemed simpler. This idea has persisted to the present, embedded in Trump’s shameless promise to “Make America Great Again.” AD It is perhaps one of the greatest illustrations of the irony of history: Kennedy’s image is being co-opted to buttress backward ideas and weaken political institutions. After all, Kennedy won the presidency in 1960 by advocating change, a “New Frontier.” At least on a rhetorical level, he challenged Americans to confront outdated beliefs and practices. Yet, conspiracy advocates have peddled myths distorting Kennedy’s life and death for far too long, thereby fueling cynicism about American institutions that has opened the door for Trump to lie with impunity. If the “deep state” could assassinate a president, then surely it would be capable of stealing an election. The ground for such conspiracy mongering is even more fertile today. If anything, distrust in government has only grown with time — a 2020 Pew Research study found a mere 20 percent of Americans trust Washington to “do the right thing” just about always or most of the time. And the rise of the Internet, and conservative talk radio and cable television news, has given megaphones to personalities who preach a rabidly anti-government message — and show little regard for facts. AD It is tempting to see Trump solely as a byproduct of this right-wing world. But it is more useful as we mark the passing of Kennedy this year — with Trump clinging fruitlessly to office, awash in falsehoods and conspiracies — to consider the ties between the two. Kennedy was a bold and imaginative, albeit flawed, leader who saw the potential for government to be a force for good in the world and to right wrongs. That his death would foster a conspiracy culture that contributed to Trump’s rise exposes the decay of our political discourse and the decline of our public institutions. Steven M. Gillon Steven M. Gillon is a senior faculty fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia and scholar-in-residence at HISTORY. He teaches history at the University of Oklahoma and is author of "America's Reluctant Prince: The Life of John F. Kennedy, Jr."Follow

Let's call a N-a-z-i a N-a-z-i.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CHrFU6qgMZ7/?igshid=1rhdd3abm4uzu&fbclid=IwAR2dz7cwCh6Dj3NyO24l-auutuWgeNb_hBkff87MUFgpDTo6imFf0yiUoms "The concession speech we all deserve."

Wheeler's BS about the Wisconsin election results has been debunked. It was an error by the AP that they quickly corrected, not an error by the Rock County ballot-counting staff. https://www.wisconsinrightnow.com/2020/11/10/rock-county-wisconsin-election-glitch/

Thanks, Joe. Mailer sold out because he needed money. He joined forces with the despicable Lawrence Schiller. But there are a few revelations in that book, such as that Marina was kicked out of Leningrad for prostitution. (Side note: I once happened to be in Beverly Hills and heard a commotion outside. I went out and saw Lawrence Schiller standing in the middle of the street screaming at one of his children and vice versa. I stood nearby ready to intervene. It calmed down.)

Neil McGlone interviews me for a British audience (the Ipswich Film Theatre) on YouTube about my experiences as a JFK volunteer in the 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary and an extra in the classic documentary film PRIMARY, as well as my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT.

Doug Horne proved the Zapruder film was altered (see his Vol. 4); what he learned backs up eyewitness testimony and other evidence. Sydney Wilkinson's work furthers that research -- she shows that you can clearly see the trapezoidal shape of the matte painting on the back of JFK's head. The extant Z film is a crude cartoon. Jim, why do you have any doubts on that score?

Congratulations, Larry. I am looking forward to read it. You always do diligent and far-reaching research. I like your taking the personal approach in the opening too.

That's not much of an insight from Kerry, a Bonesman, like Poppy and W. Kerry subscribes to the Cuba/Russia influence cover story. And to say Oswald was influenced by some unknown forces isn't saying anything anyway. Nor does Kerry want to think about a second gunman. Kerry caved on the theft of the 2004 election the next morning even though Edwards wanted to fight it. RFK Jr. wrote a definitive article for Rolling Stone on the theft of that election.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is a granddaughter of Jules Stein, the longtime head of MCA, who had extensive criminal contacts. Dan Moldea, before he started covering up the assassinations, did an excellent book called DARK VICTORY: RONALD REAGAN, MCA, AND THE MOB, which is surprising among film history books for its frankness and depth into delving into the nexus between crime and the film industry, which I describe as "a criminal enterprise." There were rumors about the mysterious death of Taft Schreiber, the longtime MCA exec who was called their "house liberal" even though he also had connections with Nixon and Gerald Ford. A well-connected Universal producer told me there were those in the Black Tower who thought Schreiber was deliberately murdered in an internecine power struggle (the official story was that he was given the wrong blood as a transfusion at the UCLA Medical Center, where Stein was a big wheel). Dr. Stein called me out of the blue to give me what could have been disinformation about that case (he rarely talked to the press). A studio chief told me that Reagan was anointed as the next GOP presidential hopeful in 1964 at a meeting at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel called by Lew Wasserman of MCA with Hollywood moguls. They realized Goldwater would go bust and needed to pledge to support a new rightwing standard-bearer. Wasserman was nominally a Democrat, but MCA played it safe by donating to both parties. And MCA worked closely with Sidney Korshak, the connection between the mob and Hollywood. My French documentary director friends Clara and Julia Kuperberg made a good documentary about Korshak, a subject most American journalists or filmmakers are afraid to touch. My friend Dave Robb is an exception; he spent a lot of time trying to dig into Korshak. These are hard subjects to research.

William vanden Heuvel, who is still alive, is a former assistant AG to RFK and the father of Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation, which, as we know, has a spotty record on telling the truth about the JFK assassination and has mostly been involved in covering up the crime, with some exceptions, including my articles on G. H. W. Bush.