Joseph McBride

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.”

Stone has been prevented from making feature films about Poppy Bush & Noriega, the My Lai Massacre, the MLK assassination, and other subjects (the film industry blames the commercial failure of NIXON, a great film, but each of those failed projects has a different story behind it), so he has turned to making insightful documentaries. (He was allowed to make a 9/11 film, but it was an "apolitical" story, a conventional adventure drama about two guys trapped under rubble and being rescued. The one subversive true reference was missed by most people, a shout about explosions going off in the basement.)

Greg, how does this comment about Ruth Paine from a prominent Quaker author square with what you call Paine's "lifetime of living as a Quaker?" This is from my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: A highly sanitized July 1964 profile of Ruth Paine in Redbook magazine, “Prelude to Tragedy: The woman who sheltered Lee Oswald’s family tells her story,” helped establish the pattern of glowing media praise for this intelligence operative. It was written by Jessamyn West, the Quaker author of "The Friendly Persuasion" and a second cousin of fellow Quaker Richard M. Nixon. The article paints Ruth Paine as a selfless religious do-gooder, praising her “acts of kindness, of unselfishness, of brotherly concern” for the Oswald family. West does express shock over Paine admitting in a rare moment of candor, “I was glad” when Oswald was killed; West chides her by saying, “There is nothing remotely saintly or even Quakerish about being glad that one man has murdered another man.” Redbook at the time was owned by the McCall Corporation, whose president was Marvin Pierce. He was the father of Barbara Pierce Bush, the wife of the already CIA-connected George H. W. Bush, whose involvement in the assassination coverup I exposed in two 1988 articles for The Nation (see Chapter 10).

From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE about Ruth Paine being "glad" when Oswald was killed, etc.: The Russian-born Marina Oswald and Ruth Paine, the CIA-connected woman who offered her housing in Irving and gave every indication of acting as her intelligence handler, together provided much of the physical “so-called evidence” used to frame Lee Oswald, magically produced out of the endlessly bounteous Paine home and its garage. One of the silliest books on the assassination is an incurious panegyric to Mrs. Paine, the supposedly benevolent Quaker benefactress of Marina, by Thomas Mallon, who titled his work, with inadvertent suggestiveness, "Mrs. Paine’s Garage: And the Murder of John F. Kennedy." A highly sanitized July 1964 profile of Ruth Paine in Redbook magazine, “Prelude to Tragedy: The woman who sheltered Lee Oswald’s family tells her story,” helped establish the pattern of glowing media praise for this intelligence operative. It was written by Jessamyn West, the Quaker author of "The Friendly Persuasion" and a second cousin of fellow Quaker Richard M. Nixon. The article paints Ruth Paine as a selfless religious do-gooder, praising her “acts of kindness, of unselfishness, of brotherly concern” for the Oswald family. West does express shock over Paine admitting in a rare moment of candor, “I was glad” when Oswald was killed; West chides her by saying, “There is nothing remotely saintly or even Quakerish about being glad that one man has murdered another man.” Redbook at the time was owned by the McCall Corporation, whose president was Marvin Pierce. He was the father of Barbara Pierce Bush, the wife of the already CIA-connected George H. W. Bush, whose involvement in the assassination coverup I exposed in two 1988 articles for The Nation (see Chapter 10).

I think these came from Emile de Antonio's papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society. That's where I first saw them. There are other files on the film RUSH TO JUDGMENT. De Antonio was a great independent radical documentary filmmaker. I interviewed him once on LA TV. He asked me to do so after I wrote about his Weather Underground film for Variety. He surprised me by saying he thought Variety was more fair to him than other publications, because we had a policy of reporting accurately what a film contained, unlike other reviewers in other publications.