Joseph McBride

I discuss all the details in INTO THE NIGHTMARE. The tunnel is discussed in the WC 26 volumes as well in a Nov. 27, 1963, report by Parkland Hospital administrator Charles Jack Price on his activities on Nov. 22.

I think it's a strong possibility that the coffin that left Parkland and caused a heated confrontation in the hallway with guns drawn to prevent the Dallas medical examiner from doing an autopsy was empty and that the body had been removed through a tunnel. It was worth a gun battle with Mrs. Kennedy present to prevent the coffin being taken by Dr. Rose, as was legally required, because that would have exposed the conspiracy. I write about this in INTO THE NIGHTMARE. Lifton seems not to have considered this possibility, which would have facilitated the body alteration.

Thank you, Paul and Rob. I am glad it came out well. The host does a good job, and he let me cover a lot of topics. Here's from INTO THE NIGHTMARE, the portion of my interview with Sen. Yarborough in which he talks about the shots: Senator Yarborough, who had “a lifetime of handling arms,” described for me his reactions to the shots fired in Dealey Plaza, giving an eyewitness and earwitness account that matched that of numerous other witnesses but is, like theirs, at odds over some details with what can now be seen in the altered Zapruder film: The first shot I heard I thought was a rifle shot. The second shot, the motorcade almost came to a halt. They said later that the president‘s car slowed to something like five miles an hour. I wondered what the hell they were stopping for when somebody is shooting. People were jumping out of the car in front of me [the Secret Service followup car] and running to the president‘s car. I thought maybe somebody had thrown a bomb in there. The third shot I heard was a rifle shot. When I asked Yarborough if he thought there was a gunman on the Grassy Knoll, he said, I believe I would have heard or picked the shot up. I just don’t [think so]. I didn’t think so at the time. There’s one possibility -- I don’t think there was a second gunman, but if somebody else fired a shot at the identical time as the gunman in the School Book Depository, if two shots were fired instantly, it would be hard to differentiate them. I know that when I’ve gone deer hunting, if I fire my rifle at the same time as somebody else fires his, you can’t tell the two shots apart. I agree with John Connally that it’s foolish to say that only two shots were fired [Yarborough apparently is alluding to the single-bullet theory, which Connally never accepted].

My October 1961 writing about the assassination (which I discuss in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE) was a short story for my freshman English class at Marquette University High School in Milwaukee, "The Plot Against a Country." Although one could say it was the first fictional treatment of the assassination, it was pretty bad. It deals with a Soviet plot to kill the president (I was brought up with a Cold War indoctrination) and steals its methodology from a Superman comic (JFK is poisoned by licking a stamp smuggled into the Oval Office by an Eastern European cleaning lady; in the comic book the bad guys used Kryptonite). My only excuse for that embarrassing plot hook was that I was fourteen at the time, but that's not a very good excuse. But on the plus side, the story does show concern that President Kennedy could be killed in office, it recognizes that a political plot would most likely be involved to kill a president and that infilitration would be necessary, and I mention the autopsy and some other realistic details. I had done some studying of the Lincoln assassination as a kid (I had done a lot of reading about the Civil War, and that was the centennial year), so I knew about political conspiracies. And I had witnessed at close hand how vulnerable Kennedy was from talking with him twice during the Wisconsin primary campaign; he had no visible security except for a few cops around at the Milwaukee event, not guarding him closely in a crowd of 3000 people; at the Wauwatosa Kids for Kennedy event, attended by about 100 people in a small meeting room at the Civic Center, he came with only an aide, a photographer, and a reporter [Theodore White?], and no security). I think that concern about his vulnerability was why I wrote the story. I also may have known about the Richard Pavlick assassination attempt. The close friendship between LBJ and Hoover, his neighbor, is well-known, and Hoover supplied him with dirt from his files that LBJ used against other politicians. Re Sylvia Meagher, I just suggest you read her exhaustive, brilliant, lucid book, which I consider the best book on the assassination. We had about a dozen students in the Film and Society class this year at San Francisco State. Some years we have more. I do one class session on PRIMARY and JOURNEYS WITH GEORGE (for contrast to show how things have changed with politics and the media), and another showing the Zapruder film, the WFAA interview with Zapruder, the section on the Z film and the reconstruction of events by Garrison in the Stone JFK film, parts of RUSH TO JUDGMENT (Acquilla Clemmons and S. M. Holland, the opening with Oswald and Wade, and the ending with Penn Jones), and parts of WAG THE DOG and BLOWUP to show how photographic history is altered. The students this year seemed fascinated and receptive -- as I find young people tend to be, more than older people on this subject -- and asked good basic questions about the how and why of the assassination. I talk about the alteration of the Z film and refer them to Doug Horne's fourth volume and other good books.

Yesterday on the 56th anniversary of the JFK assassination, I did a twenty-five-minute interview on Jim Engster's radio talk show in Baton Rouge, Lousiana, on the NPR affiliate WRKF. Jim is a knowledgeable interviewer who is open-minded on the assassination, unlike many in the mass media. We had a couple of the expected irate calls but mostly calls from people who care and are well-read on the subject, and we covered a lot of ground. I am still volunteering for JFK, as I did in his 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary campaign. https://www.wrkf.org/post/friday-november-22nd-stephen-handwerk-joseph-mcbride-rene-coman

I am not sure how Cliff means his post, but I think part of our responsibility as researchers is to remind the public of the issues and foster discussion and education on the subject. And to stand witness to injustice.

During the shooting of ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, I had an interview lined up with Alan J. Pakula for Daily Variety, or so I was told by a publicist. I went to Pakula's home at noon on a Saturday and found him distracted; he did not realize I was coming, and he apologetically said he had no time to talk. So I figured I had time for one question. A friend of mine who was investigating the RFK assassination had told me that Bob Woodward was CIA (actually, as we know, he was/is ONI). So I asked Pakula if he had heard Woodward was CIA. He said he had, "but if I think about that while making this movie I'd go crazy."

It's worth noting that Mentzel, who was part of the plot, weighs in quickly. Well before Oswald was captured and officially identified, Mentzel was sent with Tippit to hunt down Oswald in Mentzel's district (Tippit was out of his district).

Thanks much, Douglas, for posting my contribution on the Tippit murder for FIFTY REASONS . . . FOR FIFTY YEARS, Len Osanic's fine series. I also contributed an episode called "Political Truth: The Media and the Assassination" (#46). Jeff Carter was the excellent videographer on both episodes. Here is the link to "Political Truth.""

I've never understood the claim that McCone could not have been involved in the JFK assassination (or any other assassination, for that matter) since he was a Catholic. Many Catholics seem to have no trouble murdering people. And it seems illogical that if McCone actually believed murder was morally wrong,he would be head of the CIA at all. And how often do political figures' personal beliefs actually affect their actions? This obfuscation is one reason reason McCone gets so little scrutiny. McCone was also one of the Republicans JFK appointed to high posts (McNamara was another; his actions on Nov. 22 are the subject of suggestively contradictory stories; another was Dillon, who as Secretary of the Treasury had responsibility for the Secret Service). There's also RFK's supposed question to McCone the day of the assassination in what was reported as a long conversation while they were walking the grounds at Hickory Hill. RFK is reported to have demanded to know if the CIA killed his brother, and to have asked it in a way that made it impossible for McCone to lie to him (what way could that possibly be?), and was supposedly satisfied by the denial. That story doesn't pass the smell test.

See next post.

Yarborough told me Youngblood was never in the back seat. He scoffed at the idea that a large man could be amidst them, since it was crowded already with himself, LBJ, and Lady Bird. It appears that Specter may have fudged this a bit, deliberately.

I am in the midst of teaching two class sessions on Kennedy and the assassination as part of my Film and Society: Films on American History course at San Francisco State University. As before, I see my students being open-minded on the subject and willing to listen to alternate versions, which is hopeful. My generation that lived through the events was more inclined before 1963 to believe in official versions, though we then experienced a series of rude awakenings in the 1960s -- the assassinations, Vietnam, violence in the streets. Some of that conflict between official and revisionist history continues with older people. Younger people will listen but badly need education they aren't usually getting in schools.

See my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE for my revealing interview with Senator Yarborough on LBJ's behavior and demeanor during the motorcade and the shooting, as well as the senator's views on Poppy Bush.

"Kennedy's" . . . "Nazi's" . . . etc. I see these usages all the time and wonder why people often use apostrophes to pluralize words.

I didn't like ZABRISKIE POINT when it was first released because I thought the two leads couldn't act and were like zombies. The film seemed muddled. But many years later, as part of my Orson Welles research, since ZABRISKIE POINT is the film he is primarily spoofing in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (and since we filmed much of OTHER WIND in Carefree, Arizona, right down the road from the house Antonioni "blew up"), I rewatched ZABRISKIE POINT on the big screen at the Pacific Film Archive. I was surprised that with the perspective of time, I now liked it and thought it an insightful look at that tumultuous period. The atmosphere of incipient chaotic violence that periodically erupts was well-captured as part of the times. The Angela Davis scene is good documentary context. Rod Taylor's capitalist character is well-drawn and complex. The slow-motion blowing up of the house at the end is a spectacular metaphor. The shooting of the cop, I was surprised to find, takes place right outside a building where I now teach at San Francisco State, the Creative Arts Building, and the strike is partly inspired by our long student strike. And the mindless fanaticism, lack of affect, and zombie-like behavior of the film's two leads now struck me as reminiscent of the sociopathic behavior of some of the violent student radicals I covered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for three years for The Wisconsin State Journal. After participating in nonviolent student protests (some of which, such as our 1967 Dow Chemical protest, turned into riots due to police attacks), I covered the riots that ensued later, almost every night. Although there were about 2,000 students engaged in nonviolent protests, there were about 200 who were violent and would start fires and break windows and throw rocks and engage in running battles with police, who used clubs, bricks, and tear gas. Once I was pinned down in a gun battle between the cops and some students. Eventually four students blew up a campus building (the Army Math Research Center, which was plotting bombing runs for the Vietnam War) and killed a graduate student (one of the bombers was a government provocateur who is still at large and probably went into the witness protection program; the government and police knew about the bombing beforehand and let it happen). That helped end the student antiwar movement, along with the Greenwich Village bombing and Nixon's ending of the draft so he could widen the war despite promising to stop it. Shortly before we began filming OTHER WIND, I angered Welles by telling him the students were getting crazy and were going to kill somebody soon. He couldn't stand criticism of antiwar students even though he also angrily defended LBJ as a great president because of his civil rights record while shrugging off my criticisms of LBJ's disastrous Vietnam policy. Two days later, August 23, 1970, we shot the first day on OTHER WIND, I flew back to Madison, and when I got off the plane at 7:30 a.m., I asked a cab driver what had been happening over the weekend. He said, "The students just blew up a building." So ZABRISKIE POINT, for me, captures that Zeitgeist.

Moyers was an advance man on the Texas trip and was involved in the motorcade planning, including the fatal choice of the Trade Mart destination, which led to the Elm Street turn in violation of Secret Service protocol. He also testified to the HSCA that he gave the order (by phone) to take the bubbletop off the limousine at Love Field. As we know, he charted a plane in Austin to rush to LBJ's side, arriving just before Air Force One took off. And he was in the midst of the plans to establish the Warren Commission and was the recipient of the infamous Katzenbach memo, which discusses that idea. No wonder Moyers doesn't write his memoirs. He has also consistently refused to be interviewed by Robert Caro for his LBJ biography (even though Caro wouldn't ask him the right questions about the assassination). Is Moyers's career in public television some sort of attempted penance on his part? He is also an ordained Baptist minister.

Abt behaved shamefully that weekend and has not been sufficiently criticized for his deliberate inaction in failing to represent Oswald.

Lawsuits against two networks.

The person who was fired denies in the Megyn Kelly interview that she leaked the tape, though.

I posted something on THE IRISHMAN and the book but it seems to have disappeared, which baffles me. I write about my PATRIOT GAMES review controversy to which Jim refers in my new book, FRANKLY: UNMASKING FRANK CAPRA.

If they exist, reconnaissance photos reportedly taken as a spy satellite flew over the Dealey Plaza area at noon on Nov. 22, 1963.

"Principals" and "principles" have different meanings.

Here's what happened to Howard Dean: the Washington Post was against his candidacy early on, when they ran a feature in the dog days of summer testing out all the "crazy man" tropes that would become familiar, about his red-faced shouting and so forth. Then we dissolve forward several months, and Dean comes out publicly in favor of breaking up the big media monopolies. It is no coincidence that within a week he was gone. The TV networks contrived to tamper with the audio of his excited campaign speech, and the Post led the charge in the print media as the MSM called it a "Dean scream" and making it seem like evidence of insanity. It was a feeble excuse to end a candidacy, but it did the job. (I also tried to figure out specifically why the Post was supporting the Iraq War -- aside from their longtime Bush/CIA connections, although some elements of the CIA did oppose that truly insane enterprise. What I found in my research was that the Post corporation made its profit from its printing business. The newspaper was a loss leader. They were trying to get W to push through a bill in Congress to give their printing business a tax break to keep it profitable. Therefore they supported the war. And in return they got their tax break. So much for the Post's phony image of being a "liberal" newspaper, which few on this site would fall for in any case.)

Jim, thanks for your continued, always fascinating posts. They are invaluable. HARVEY AND LEE is one of the books that was a paradigm changer for me.