Joseph McBride

Where do I find Greg Parker's chat with Alan Dale?

The most moving moment in JFK for me is when Oswald, dying, slumps to the floor of the police station in slow motion as Costner in VO is saying, "Who grieves for Lee Harvey Oswald?"

There are some interesting FBI reports from November and December 1963 regarding Priscilla Mary Post Johnson, indicating Bureau interest in her before as well as after the assassination as having been a possible target of recruitment by the KGB. And the Bureau was interested in her contact with Oswald in the USSR. A December memo indicates she was cleared of the suspicion of being a target of KGB recruitment interest. According to a Nov. 29 FBI memo, she was interviewed in Cambridge, Mass., by two FBI agents from 11:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. on Nov. 23-24, supposedly at her request, "to obtain information regarding LEE HARVEY OSWALD. Incidental thereto and without indicating possible Bureau interest in her as a suspect in the captioned case [i.e., the one about possible KGB recruitment], she was advised that inasmuch as she is a potential witness [evidently in the JFK case referred to in the same paragraph], that biographical and background data on her would be desirable. Accordingly she willingly furnished the following information . . ." She denied one of her brothers was a pilot, as had been reported of the possible female subject of KGB interest, whose brother was said to have been an Air Force pilot who had flown President Eisenhower. The FBI reports indicated that Johnson received (unusual) help from Richard Nixon, Llewellyn Thompson, and Nikita Khrushchev with an extension of her visa and that she claimed her activities in the USSR were innocent. These documents are posted at the Mary Ferrell website. Earl Golz interviewed Johnson when the documents were released in 1977: http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg Subject Index Files/M Disk/McMillan Priscilla Johnson/Item 07.pdf

And it's no doubt significant that Fred Korth was the lawyer for Edwin Ekdahl when he was divorced from Marguerite Claverie Ekdahl aka Marguerite Oswald in 1948.

Are you distinguishing between internal WC memoranda and transcripts and so forth and FBI documents, etc.?

I've always been fascinated by the stories about a supposedly dead Secret Service agent spirited out of Dallas. I write what I know about that in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE.

From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT (2013): My journey back to my original understanding of the Kennedy assassination coverup began in earnest in the early 1970s. Studying the Vietnam War as it unfolded and with the help of the revealing Pentagon Papers made me fully aware of how pervasive the level of deceitfulness involved in the assassination was in our governmental system. But it was the Watergate scandal that served as the decisive catalyst for my reexamination of postwar American history. This demonstrable conspiracy -- one of those rare political conspiracies everyone accepted as such -- and the many other crimes surrounding the Nixon presidency gave me a fresh awareness of the role of what Peter Dale Scott has since described as “deep politics” in American history. Scott, who has written perceptively on Watergate as well as the Kennedy assassination, is one of the writers who has drawn connections between those two events, which the mainstream media have regarded as distinct, even though some of the same high-level and lower-level players were involved. Scott writes in Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, “In each case an incumbent President was removed from office, after a build-up of suspicion and resentment inside his administration because of his announced plans and/or negotiations for disengagement from Vietnam.” In fact, as I was beginning to recognize at the time of Nixon’s resignation in 1974, three presidents in a row -- Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon -- had been removed from office. It was becoming hard not to notice how the political system had changed with the Coup of ’63 and the coverup that followed. The calamitous turn in the Vietnam War when the Vietcong mounted the Tet Offensive in January 1968 led to President Johnson’s forced withdrawal from that year’s presidential race at the behest of his senior advisers, “The Wise Men.” That group was largely drawn from the leadership of the eastern establishment and including Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge, Douglas Dillon, and George Ball. Their decisive meeting with Johnson came on March 25, six days before he stunned the nation by announcing at the end of a televised speech about Vietnam, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” Henry Brandon, the chief American correspondent of the Sunday Times of London, reports in his autobiography, Special Relationships: A Foreign Correspondent’s Memoirs from Roosevelt to Reagan (1988), about a conversation he had with President Johnson in 1968, after that decision was made: “LBJ, aware by then of his public repudiation, seemed to drag a burden of anguish in his wake when he spoke his own epitaph during a flight to visit President Truman in Independence, Missouri, aboard Air Force One: ‘The only difference between Kennedy’s assassination and mine is that mine was a live one, which makes it all a little more torturing.’” (Johnson visited Truman in Independence on May 3 and October 11 of that year.) Former Secretary of State Acheson summed up the March decision by the Wise Men by saying that “we can no longer do the job we set out to do [in Vietnam] in the time we have left, and we must begin to take steps to disengage.” Carl Oglesby in The Yankee and Cowboy War interprets what he calls Johnson’s forced “abdication” as a Yankee power play by the Wise Men to “break off [from the Cowboys] a war believed to be unwinnable except through an internal police state, both sides fighting for control of the levers of military and state-police power through control of the presidency. Johnson’s Ides of March was a less bloody Dallas, but it was a Dallas just the same: it came of a concerted effort of conspirators to install a new national policy by clandestine means. Its main difference from Dallas is that it finally did not succeed.”

An eloquent show offering worthy tribute to a pioneer researcher, a man of great lucidity and integrity.

The Tippit and Oswald autopsies by Dr. Rose are model autopsies.

Callaway broke the chain of custody on Tippit's gun.

Armstrong proves in exhaustive detail that Oswald didn't own the rifle or handgun submitted into what Oswald aptly called the "so-called evidence."

I do mention it in INTO THE NIGHTMARE. I don't have an electronic copy of the article to post. It used to be online but it no longer is. I'd have to look through my research files.

There actually was a man who ran alongside JFK's limousine in the downtown area a few minutes before the assassination, trying to get the attention of JFK, shouting, "Stop! I must warn you!" He was tackled by Secret Service agents from the followup car to LBJ's vehicle, three car lengths behind the president. This was reported by the Dallas Morning News.

Oswald didn't shoot Tippit.

"Was Tippit looking for LHO?" I answer this in the affirmative in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE, which examines the Tippit murder in great detail.

I would position myself in the parking lot behind the Grassy Knoll at noon or before. I read once that there was a satellite that flew over that area at noon and have always wondered if any pictures it took exist.

This chicanery to damage the USPS reminds me of how GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil of California bought up and destroyed the once-well-functioning trolley systems in LA and 18 other American cities after World War II by changing schedules to frustrate customers and not replacing machinery that needed fixing, etc., in order to discourage ridership and cause deficits. Those were then used as excuses to terminate these invaluable systems so the companies could push cars and buses and trucks to make up for the war production of Jeeps and military trucks. This helped ruin LA and other cities. Robert Towne wanted to make this the third in his CHINATOWN trilogy, under the title SMOG, but couldn't, partly because THE TWO JAKES did not do well but also probably because of the theme, which would scare the studios. WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT deals with it but in a comedic vein. I saw an excellent Oscar-winning student documentary from c. 1975 that told the story well. I am old enough to remember the Milwaukee trolley system. I have a memory of my mother taking me to see my first movie (FANTASIA in 1949) on a trolley (I didn't like the movie and maybe should have stopped there).

I'm already enjoying Oliver Stone's new book, which arrived today. It is eloquently written and revealing about his life and influences and work. I remember my first knowledge of Stone was reviewing SEIZURE for Variety -- I gave it a pretty good review. How could a film go wrong with Hervé Villechaize in it?

Thanks, Cliff, I will see what I can do with the browser.

I've always typed into Google, "JFK education forum" to get here. Now that doesn't take me here. I tried variations and finally just had to type "education forum" and then go another step to the JFK section. What gives?

Mary Ferrell's husband, Buck, helped supply vehicles for the motorcade. Even their own car was used.

Looking forward to it, Vince. Good title.

Both Kennedy and Obama were asked early in their presidencies what was the biggest surprise they learned after they were inaugurated. Both said the same thing -- How little power I actually have.

From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE about Johnson's forced removal from office: In fact, as I was beginning to recognize at the time of Nixon’s resignation in 1974, three presidents in a row -- Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon -- had been removed from office. It was becoming hard not to notice how the political system had changed with the Coup of ’63 and the coverup that followed. The calamitous turn in the Vietnam War when the Vietcong mounted the Tet Offensive in January 1968 led to President Johnson’s forced withdrawal from that year’s presidential race at the behest of his senior advisers, “The Wise Men.” That group was largely drawn from the leadership of the eastern establishment and including Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge, Douglas Dillon, and George Ball. Their decisive meeting with Johnson came on March 25, six days before he stunned the nation by announcing at the end of a televised speech about Vietnam, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” Henry Brandon, the chief American correspondent of the Sunday Times of London, reports in his autobiography, Special Relationships: A Foreign Correspondent’s Memoirs from Roosevelt to Reagan (1988), about a conversation he had with President Johnson in 1968, after that decision was made: “LBJ, aware by then of his public repudiation, seemed to drag a burden of anguish in his wake when he spoke his own epitaph during a flight to visit President Truman in Independence, Missouri, aboard Air Force One: ‘The only difference between Kennedy’s assassination and mine is that mine was a live one, which makes it all a little more torturing.’” (Johnson visited Truman in Independence on May 3 and October 11 of that year.) Former Secretary of State Acheson summed up the March decision by the Wise Men by saying that “we can no longer do the job we set out to do [in Vietnam] in the time we have left, and we must begin to take steps to disengage.” Carl Oglesby in The Yankee and Cowboy War interprets what he calls Johnson’s forced “abdication” as a Yankee power play by the Wise Men to “break off [from the Cowboys] a war believed to be unwinnable except through an internal police state, both sides fighting for control of the levers of military and state-police power through control of the presidency. Johnson’s Ides of March was a less bloody Dallas, but it was a Dallas just the same: it came of a concerted effort of conspirators to install a new national policy by clandestine means. Its main difference from Dallas is that it finally did not succeed.”