Joseph McBride

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.

Today, October 27, is the 57th anniversary of what was probably the most dangerous day in human history. That Saturday was the climactic day of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara went to sleep that night not knowing if he would wake the following morning. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were pressuring President Kennedy to invade Cuba, which had Soviet nuclear weapons installed, including many tactical nukes (McNamara later claimed the US did not know the nukes were present and operational, but Kennedy acted as if they were). The Chiefs were trying to force an invasion of 100,000 troops to begin on the following Monday or Tuesday. The results would have been catastrophic on the island and would probably have triggered World War III. Although both Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev earlier had been reckless in allowing the situation to get out of hand in a game of nuclear brinksmanship, both came to realize the extreme danger the world was under and that they had to stop it. Khrushchev sent two letters to Kennedy on Oct. 26, one threatening and one impassioned in its plea to end the danger. Kennedy's ExComm was confounded by the conflicting messages until Llewellyn (Tommy) Thompson, who had been ambassador to the USSR and knew Khrushchev well, urged Kennedy to reply only to the conciliatory message (the "Trollope ploy"). Thompson correctly believed the threatening message had been forced on Khrushchev by the Politburo and the conciliatory one was his own cri de coeur. In that one (among the most moving pieces of diplomacy ever written), the Soviet leader told Kennedy: "If you have not lost command of yourself and realize clearly what this could lead to, then, Mr. President, you and I should not now pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter the knot will become. And a time may come when this knot is tied so tight that the person who tied it is no longer capable of untying it, and then the knot will have to be cut. What that would mean I need not explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly what dread forces our two countries possess." Kennedy followed Thompson's advice to reply in kind but sent his brother Robert, the attorney general, to see Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobyrnin at the Justice Department on the evening of Oct. 27 to warn him of the extreme gravity of the situation. RFK delivered an ultimatum from the president while offering other terms as olive branches: If the USSR agreed to withdraw the missiles, the US offered a secret deal to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey and a promise not to invade Cuba. As reported by Khrushchev in his 1970 autobiography, KHRUSHCHEV REMEMBERS, what RFK told Dobrynin was: "The President is in a grave situation, and he does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba. . . . Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will. That is why the President is appealing directly to Chairman Khrushchev for his help in liquidating this conflict. If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control." (This part you don't read in mainstream history books.) Secretary of State Dean Rusk's famous comment, "We are eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked," referred to the Soviets, but he could have been describing JFK's relationship with the Joint Chiefs. After Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in exchange for the secret deal to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey and a promise not to invade Cuba, Kennedy wrote him, "I think that you and I, with our heavy responsibilities for the maintenance of peace, were aware that developments were approaching a point where events could have become unmanageable." The USSR backed down, world war was averted, the Joint Chiefs were furious with JFK, and both Khrushchev and JFK lost their jobs for saving the world. We owe them both thanks for our existence today.

Jacqueline Kennedy has an understandalbe excuse for skipping the movie, but Carly Simon should be ashamed of herself.

At the Nov. 22, 2013, Dallas commemorations, when the city kept dissidents out of Dealey Plaza so Bonesman David McCullough could give a speech, and thousands of us were protesting on surrounding streets, Alex Jones was ranting on a streetcorner to draw TV cameras and distract attention from the legitimate critics of the official version of the JFK/Tippit murder case. That is how the system is played.

This is excellent news. Congratulations to Jim and Oliver Stone. It should be terrific. Could you give us more information? One source says it's a documentary, but another says it's a documentary series. Is it finished shooting and editing? Reportedly it will be released in November 2020, but in/on what venues, theatrical and/or cable?

"Round up the usual suspects." -- Claude Rains in CASABLANCA.

Senator Ralph Yarborough told me LBJ leaned over the space between the driver's seat and the front passenger seat as Rufus Youngblood also leaned over to listen to the agent's walkie-talkie while they were going through the Triple Overpass. Yarborough said LBJ and the agent were about six inches apart. Yarborough was sitting in the back seat with LBJ and Lady Bird. I noted that since the Altgens photo shows LBJ ducking earlier on Elm Street, Yarborough evidently was off a bit on the timing of the leaning over. And Yarborough said the LBJ/Youngblood story about the agent jumping over into the back seat was false. More details are in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE.

The part of Vaughan's breakdown that states Secret Service Agent Rufus Youngblood jumped over the seat to protect LBJ with his body is inaccurate. See my interview with Sen. Ralph Yarborough in INTO THE NIGHTMARE for the accurate account.

Todd Wayne Vaughan in 1993 did a valuable 50-page schematic breakdown of the motorcade identifying vehicles and people and providing other information, etc. It's posted on the site with Harold Weisberg's papers. http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg Subject Index Files/M Disk/Motorcade Route/Item 15.pdf

Todd Wayne Vaughan in 1993 did a valuable 50-page schematic breakdown of the motorcade identifying vehicles and people and providing other information, etc. It's posted on the site with Harold Weisberg's papers. http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg Subject Index Files/M Disk/Motorcade Route/Item 15.pdf

https://www.wivb.com/news/breaking-neighbor-who-testified-against-amber-guyger-shot-and-killed-in-dallas/?fbclid=IwAR0vC082fve7i8u3pF_f7aGCDvJpASPrG0QuOimfsAtq9qxSBRZOsxE2YW4 https://atlantadailyworld.com/2019/09/30/woman-who-filmed-dallas-police-officer-amber-guyger-shoot-botham-jean-fired-video/

Scorsese addresses THE IRISHMAN and the JFK assassination question from 21 minutes into this discussion until the end at 29 minutes. This is a panel discussion of THE IRISHMAN at the NY Film Festival.

https://www.baylorlinefoundation.com/mccalls-personal-journals-reveal-president-kennedy-almost-came-to-waco-on-november-22-1963/?fbclid=IwAR3_Z8HILEW4-PGJdV8VP6BkrjPXpxWkcImUPfpNidmHHxT_BjjWRL0f-1o

I haven't seen the film yet, but I have read the Variety review by Owen Gleiberman in which that publication (which Sam Fuller described to me in the 1970s as "that f-u-c-k-ing rag you love so much") takes its usual bold critical and historical stand: Scorsese wants to dramatize how America used to work (and maybe still does), with the personal and political hopelessly entangled. Frank’s assignments go well beyond whacking mobsters who don’t know their place. In 1961, he’s asked to help in a weapons shipment that turns out to be for the Bay of Pigs invasion. For a while, the film turns into a luridly arresting Mob’s-eye-view history lesson about the Mafia and JFK: the resentment the Italian crime leaders felt at having “bought” the 1960 election for Kennedy (by stuffing the ballot boxes of Chicago), only to see him appoint his brother, Robert F. Kennedy (Jack Huston), to the position of attorney general, at which point RFK goes after the Mob with unprecedented vengeance. The film presents the JFK assassination as an underworld conspiracy, and whether or not you buy that, the triangle of the Mob, the Teamsters, and the JFK administration, with the former bootlegger Joe Kennedy called upon to repay favors, makes for a thrillingly entangled political spider web.

Frank Capra told me that during World War II he was walking through a government warehouse with a general. Capra asked what happens when such a warehouse becomes too full. The general smiled and said, "We have a fire."

Cokie Roberts, the TV news pundit who died today, was the daughter of Warren Commission member and House majority leader Hale Boggs, whose airplane disappeared in Alaska in 1972 not long after he publicly dissented from the findings of the Warren Report and strongly criticized J. Edgar Hoover (as forum members know, documents later surfaced showing that the wreckage actually was located and that there were survivors of the plane crash; the whole story is not known). I suspect the disappearance of Boggs sent a sobering message to Roberts and her mother, future congresswoman and ambassador Lindy Boggs, who probably knew more about the assassination than they would admit. Roberts would defend the Warren Commission. I had an opportunity to question Roberts about the crash. This is what I wrote in INTO THE NIGHTMARE:

Note: Nouns are not pluralized by adding apostrophes.

Article with video clip of Moldea interviewing Cesar: https://sputniknews.com/military/201909131076797366-robert-f-kennedys-son-claims-compelling-evidence-father-assassinated-by-cia-operative/

Also from the Heavy.com article:

From the Heavy.com article:

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More news here on both Cesar and Sirhan and a recent photo of Cesar. https://heavy.com/news/2019/09/thane-eugene-cesar-rfk/?fbclid=IwAR3PoxbrqPXejomzCdNDrxiyAoHnDc6DxC3-ShDEjHC01kEjrCdnTjy6-zE

https://heavy.com/news/2019/09/thane-eugene-cesar-rfk/?fbclid=IwAR3PoxbrqPXejomzCdNDrxiyAoHnDc6DxC3-ShDEjHC01kEjrCdnTjy6-zE More news here on both Cesar and Sirhan and some good background, as well as a recent photo of Cesar:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has posted on Instagram that his father's assassin, Thane Eugene (Gene) Cesar, died yesterday, Sept. 11.

In the 1964 election, George H. W. Bush lost the US Senate race in Texas to the incumbent, Democrat Ralph Yarborough. Bush ran in concert with Jack Crichton, who lost the gubernatorial election to the incumbent, Democrat John Connally.