Joseph McBride

Pete, thanks much for your comments about my work. I believe Kantor about Ruby. Kantor was a solid reporter, and his book on Ruby is good. Kantor's typed notes about his assassination coverage are in one of the 26 WC volumes and are valuable. Ruby would have had time to go from the Tippit murder scene (if he was there) to Parkland. He may have been involved in helping stage the witnesses (etc.) for the Tippit murder; I go into that in INTO THE NIGHTMARE, basing it partly on the theory proposed by Jerry Rose. Ruby tried to tell Earl Warren he was involved in the Nov. 22 plotting, but Warren wouldn't listen. Roger Craig was a reliable and honest witness. The station wagon story is credible, and you can see the vehicle in a photo taken at 12:40 p.m. There were two Oswalds, as Armstrong has shown, and so they left Dealey Plaza in different ways. I am not convinced the cab ride did not happen.

Milton Friedman helped come up with the idea of starving the government so programs to benefit people would be cut.

Thanks, Jim. Yes, it was in LEGEND by Epstein. That is supposed to be Oswald in the doorway. Wayne was filming THE BARBARIAN AND THE GEISHA for John Huston and paid a visit to Corregidor by helicopter to see the troops.

HARVEY AND LEE confirms Oswald and John Wayne were both on Corregidor when Wayne visited Marines there in January 1958. Jim Hargrove, is this supposed photo of the two authentic? It first appeared in the Epstein book on Oswald.

If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality. And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element. As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Thanks, Anthony.

". . . there is no evidence at all that the Outfit had anything to do with Monroe." What about her traumatic visit to the mobbed-up Cal-Neva Lodge just before her death?

I knew Marilyn Monroe's publicist, Rupert Allan, whom I found to be an honest and sophisticated man (Rupert was also Princess Grace's publicist and was the partner of General Frank McCarthy, the producer of PATTON who was the personal secretary of General George C. Marshall during World War II). Rupert told me he thought MM died of an accidental overdose because she was taking pills and guzzling small bottles of Champagne she routinely had around her bedroom and lost track of what she was ingesting. (Yet the autopsy did not show that.) Rupert said she had called him the night before and was upset because she had been invited to a party at Peter Lawford's beach house in Santa Monica with a bunch of callgirls and she thought Lawford and the other men in that circle considered her little more than a whore. Rupert also told me that MM had once considered committing suicide when she was in a New York hospital during her marriage to Arthur Miller in 1960. That was when she was reported to have had a miscarriage but may have been having an abortion. Rupert said MM told him she looked out the window of her room on a high floor of the hospital and thought of jumping but saw a woman in a green coat waiting for a bus and thought she might kill that woman by landing on her, so she changed her mind.

Do we need books summarizing HARVEY AND LEE? Why not read HARVEY AND LEE? If that's too hard for people, they should find another field. The book is dense with information but impressively researched and lucid. This situation reminds me of the many ripoff books trading on another seminal book in the field, David Lifton's BEST EVIDENCE.

I wonder what group "Jonathan Cohen" is working for. He pops up now regularly with his kneejerk pro-WC comments, as David Von Pein used to do as the designated disruptor of intelligence discourse on this site.

David, I was using the description by the priest of the wound, not the doctor. A priest is not a medical expert, so he could more easily make such a mistake in looking down at the president on the table.

In the November 22, 1963, issue of the New York Times, there is a full-page, back-page advertisement for SEVEN DAYS IN MAY. It and DR. STRANGELOVE were supposed to be released in 1963 but were pushed back until the following year because of the assassination, and STRANGELOVE underwent some changes. The handwriting on the invitation below is Kubrick's.

Another photo I took of JFK speaking at that rally:

A photograph I took at the big Milwaukee rally on April 3, 1960, that is the centerpiece of PRIMARY.

Looking at some pages of the "Patterson" book on the Amazon site, I see the book is written in the present tense, like a film or TV treatment. That figures in light of the TV series plan. Although I am a recovering screenwriter and have read many screenplays and still read them with pleasure for research purposes, I have a mental block that's hard to overcome against reading books written in the present tense, possibly because it makes them seem like screenplays. In a book that purports to be historical, present tense subtly reduces credibility because it makes it seem as if the story is being hyped as "happening now" to jazz it up.

The priest may have been referring to what appears to be a small bullet entrance wound at Kennedy's hairline on the right side of his head. You can see it in an autopsy photo. Perhaps when the priest said it was "on the left forehead," he was thinking of how it appeared to his left when he was looking down at the dead president.

From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE:

I thought the initial post praising Gary Mack was a joke, but I guess not. Don't people understand how he sold out and the damage he did to the research community?

If you listen to the early Dallas police radio reports of the assassination, a number of the cops refer to the TSBD as "the Sexton Building."

JFK assassination case photo expert Jack White introduced me once to Tom Wilson in Dealey Plaza and vouched for the importance of Wilson's photographic research. I found Wilson's book compelling and revealing.

Yarborough vehemently denied to me (unconvincingly) that Kennedy's Texas trip was partly to heal the rift between him and the LBJ/Connally faction. But the evidence is to the contrary.

A telling statement by John Connally that I report in INTO THE NIGHTMARE: Could Tippit have been just what he seemed, a “poor dumb cop” who got in the way of history? Unfortunately for those who need heroes, there is too much conflicting evidence to enable us to accept such a simplistic view of the events of the last day of Tippit’s life. If it is hard to imagine policemen being satisfied with pinning the killing of one of their own on an innocent man, then the reader should just watch The Thin Blue Line to see exactly how such a travesty of justice can occur, with the connivance of Henry Wade and others involved in the Tippit case, in order to wrap up the case quickly. Could a misguided sense of patriotism also have been one of the reasons for Tippit’s fellow policemen to hide the facts about his life and death? Such a motive in hiding the truth about the Kennedy assassination was at work in the mind of John Connally, the Texas governor who was wounded in the assassination along with Kennedy. Connally always refused publicly to endorse the Warren Commission’s single-bullet theory. Both he and his wife, Nellie, firmly maintained from November 1963 until the ends of their lives that the governor was wounded by a separate bullet from the ones that struck Kennedy. But though the next logical step would have been to admit that there were two gunmen, the Connallys would never do so. It seemed that they had decided to confine themselves to dropping a very broad hint. That supposition received confirmation in 2009 when a longtime journalist and Democratic Party congressional staff member, Doug Thompson, who founded the Capitol Hill Blue website, revealed a conversation he and his wife had with Governor Connally in 1982 when he visited Santa Fe for a political fundraiser. Thompson wrote, “I had to ask. Did he think Lee Harvey Oswald fired the gun that killed Kennedy?” "Absolutely not," Connally replied. "I do not, for one second, believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission." “So why not speak out?” Thompson asked. Connally said, "Because I love this country and we needed closure at the time. I will never speak out publicly about what I believe." Others would take a different view of what loving one’s country means. It would mean facing the facts, hard as it may be, about the assassination of the president, rather than knowingly accepting a false version that might seem consolatory in its simplicity.

In response to the question posed by Joe Bauer, here is the dedication to my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: "To Acquilla Clemmons, S. M. Holland, Mary Ann Moorman, and the other witnesses who came forward with great courage, at the risk of their safety and sometimes even at the cost of their lives, to tell us the truth as they saw it about the assassination of President Kennedy and the surrounding events. These people, uncommon common men and women, are the only true heroes of this tragic case; they refused to accept the lies about these events while relentlessly pursuing the truth and making it possible for others to do so on our nation’s behalf."

Kudos to Geraldo Rivera for showing the Z film on American TV. But when I was researching INTO THE NIGHTMARE in the 1980s and made one of my visits to the Tippit murder scene, a bunch of neighborhood kids gathered around to ask me about that event I spent half an hour talking with them and showing them photos of the crime scene; it was inspiring to hear their keen interest and good questions. They told me Geraldo had recently come to the site in a limousine and spent ten minutes there and didn't talk with anyone. They were not impressed.