Joseph McBride

Thanks for your kind comments about my Spielberg book, Jim. Yes, Spielberg has taken the care to educate himself in history. He is an autodidact, partly because he is dyslexic, which caused him to be a weak student in high school. His historical films are carefully researched. I interviewed 35 Holocaust survivors to see what they thought of SCHINDLER'S LIST. They all said the same things -- that it was so authentic it felt like being back there in the midst of those events, which is a high compliment. Their criticisms were that the film, as violent as it is, was not as violent as the actual events -- even though the film pushes the envelope on realistic violence and does not flinch from it, some of the stories they told me would have caused people to run out of theaters, as Spielberg said when explaining why he didn't show SS men throwing babies into the air and spearing them with bayonets for "fun" during the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto (you can be sure Tarantino would have shown that). I heard one story from a survivor of the Plaszow camp that is the worst Holocaust story I have ever heard, and that is saying a lot. The survivors also said Ralph Fiennes was too handsome to play Amon Goeth, who was an ugly monster. Spielberg wanted to explore the human nature of even such an evil man, so casting an actor who looked like a slug might have worked against it by desensitizing the audience. But the survivors emphasized those were relatively minor complaints in view of the film's overall honesty. They were deeply grateful for it. By the way, Polanski turned it down because he was actually in the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto, and even he felt he was not ready to deal with the subject of the Holocaust then (he later did with THE PIANIST).

The Library of Congress also has old city directories.

The neoliberal McCarthyites are trying to attack Gabbard as pro-Russian by dredging up a claim by a firm that was exposed in February for fabricating Russian t-r-o-l-l [I didn't know that word was banned here] accounts on behalf of the Democratic Party! https://theintercept.com/2019/02/03/nbc-news-to-claim-russia-supports-tulsi-gabbard-relies-on-firm-just-caught-fabricating-russia-data-for-the-democratic-party/?fbclid=IwAR0mE2Guxa7KA6bdSunbEVUd6zdODt8Wg76prGDTJFJwLluERnqKq68X4do

I had a friend who was the publicist for Jack Webb in the 1950s. This man was Jewish, and he said it was painful to have to sit and listen every Saturday at brunch at the Cock ’n’ Bull restaurant on the Sunset Strip to Webb and Ronald Reagan trading anti-Semitic remarks while they were having a few drinks. He said he felt he couldn’t object or he would lose his job. The only surprise about hearing Reagan making a racist remark is that some people are surprised, given his long record of bigoted words and actions.

I don't know if that project will be made, but evidently it's planned as a theatrical film. The writer and director mostly work in TV. Rogen seems an odd choice. Just focusing on Walter doing his job that day seems myopic, but we probably couldn't hope the film would be more revealing of his role as a US government propagandist, e.g., in those shameful TV specials he turned out with Dan Rather upholding the Warren Report. But I always hold out judgment until I see what they do onscreen.

I am now hearing of a film project in preproduction about Walter Cronkite and the assassination. Supposedly about Uncle Walter's anguish reporting the story as it unfolded that day. It's called NEWSFLASH. The director is David Gordon Green. The writer is Ben Jacoby. IMDB says Seth Rogen (!) will play Cronkite, but another source says not.

Paul Trejo, I found no evidence that Tippit was a member of the John Birch Society, though his boss at Austin's, Austin Cook, whom I interviewed for INTO THE NIGHTMARE, was a member at least for a while. Cook was less than entirely forthcoming with me about his extensive rightwing connections but confirmed some; his place, as we know, was a hangout for the far right. I don't rule out involvement by Tippit with the Birch Society but would like to know what evidence you have for that claim.

Mae Brussell's alternate view of the "Manson" murders, arguing that Manson was a patsy and focusing on the underexplored role of Charles (Tex) Watson and his Army Intelligence connections: http://www.maebrussell.com/Transcriptions/16.html

"I literally -- my head kinda went back." -- Dan Rather

An excellent film that disappeared is Barbara Frank's documentary feature on the 1968 Robert Kennedy campaign, THE LAST CAMPAIGN. It played at the Deauville film festival in France but was never otherwise released, as far as I know. I saw it -- it is intimate and quite moving and beautifully filmed. Frank had access to RFK throughout the campaign up and down California. She was changing film in the Ambassador ballroom at the time of the assassination. She and her cameraman then shot part of the aftermath. She smuggled it out in her underwear. I don't know why this important film is missing in action.

Shakespeare's plays about Henry IV and V, especially as filmed by Orson Welles in CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, illuminate the history of the Bush family. Welles chose to make the first sentences of narration at the start of his film (taken from Holinshed's Chronicles), "King Richard II was murdered. Some say at the command of the Duke Henry Bolinbroke . . ." King Henry IV (the former duke) is an illegitimate king who after helping assassinate the true king subdues his rivals in civil war and hopes to make his wastrel son seem more legitimate through succession, and his last counsel to his son before Hal assumes the throne is to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels." When Keith Baxter, who played Hal so brilliantly, told Welles he was thinking of going on to do HENRY V, Welles asked, "Why? He was such a [s word, according to the rules of this website]."

It's revealing that the CIA front Washington Post is now trying to demonize Warren the way they did Bernie and before that, Howard Dean, whom they set out to destroy and did. The Post did another attack job on Warren and picked a closeup photo of her looking wild-eyed (read: nutso) just like they liked to do with the other two they hate. The Post doesn't want any candidate who might actually start trying to redistribute the wealth. The NY Times does not like Bernie but for some reason still seems to respect Warren despite the biases that paper holds similar to those of the Post. I could tell the Post was out to get Dean early in the campaign when they ran a piece emphasizing how he would become so passionate in his speeches that he would get red in the face and scream. Then they destroyed him with their hyped-up piece on his "scream," which was mostly due to an anomaly with a network microphone. That piece, significantly, ran shortly after Dean announced he would break up the monopolies of the major media if he became president. It's an old media trick to use code words and loaded images to mean "craziness," for which they also use the phrase "conspiracy theorist." Another word they use for "crazy" is "rambling."

I don't have any direct knowledge about those others and the KKK. There was certainly a lot of racism on the DPD and in the DA's office. Wade's office convicted many innocent people. Later DA Craig Watkins (who was African American) freed some of them. Racism in the South then tended to translate into hatred of JFK and RFK.

When I interviewed retired Dallas DP Detective Morris Brumley and he started boasting about his KKK activities (see my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE), he claimed he had "infiltrated" the Klan for the DPD. I asked another researcher from the Dallas area who was knowledgeable, and he laughed at the word "infiltrated," since he said the Dallas area KKK was 75% Dallas policemen in those days.

The highly sanitized July 1964 propaganda piece that did a lot to present Ruth Paine to the American public as supposedly just a charitable Quaker lady, a selfless religious do-gooder who acted out of kindness for the Oswald family by taking in Marina and getting Lee a job in the Texas School Book Depository (etc.), was a profile entitled "Prelude to Tragedy: The woman who sheltered Lee Oswald's family tells her story." It was written by Jessamyn West for Redbook. Jessamyn West was the Quaker author of THE FRIENDLY PERSUASION and a second cousin of fellow Quaker Richard Nixon. Redbook was owned at the time 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.

James Ellroy has written some lively crime fiction revolving around the JFK assassination, although it is too much in the mob-did-it camp and too oblique to get close enough to the actual heart of darkness. But I think his memoir MY DARK PLACES is a great book that would make a great movie. So I am sad to find that Ellroy now believes in the mythical lone-gunman theory and he believes that appallingly gullible and crudely propagandistic book by Thomas Mallon about Ruth Paine, an assassination conspirator, a CIA operative who supplied much of what Oswald called the “so-called evidence” against him (Mrs. Paine is still living in Marin County, California). I guess Ellroy’s previous novels digging into the milieu of the Kennedy years and the assassination are now passé in his own mind, which sadly has turned delusional on this subject. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/books/review/by-the-book-james-ellroy.html From New York Times interview with James Ellroy, June 6, 2019: Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most? As novelists, Don DeLillo and Thomas Mallon. “Libra,” DeLillo’s book on the J.F.K.-hit conspiracy, knocked me on my ass. Mallon’s nonfiction book “Mrs. Paine’s Garage” converted me to the lone gunman view of history. I live in the past. DeLillo and Mallon have served to make it a most felicitous place to abide.

That was the Robert R. Mullen Company where Hunt worked, a CIA front.

I started watching this, but it disheartened me because it seemed like researchers were trying to tell an eyewitness that what he saw was wrong.

Good luck with your book, Jim. I am glad my articles in The Nation were helpful to you and your father.

Facebook for the first time in my experience blacked out a JFK autopsy photo I posted today. It says against the black covering background, "This photo may show violent or graphic content." And it goes on, "This photo was automatically covered so people can decide if they want to see it." You can click on a link reading "Uncover photo" to open it. This was the "stare of death" photo I posted among others on JFK's 102th birthday, including a portrait I took of him while working as a volunteer in his 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary campaign, a photo I took of the room where he was born, a baby photo, photos of him as a boy, etc.

Facebook for the first time in my experience blacked out a JFK autopsy photo I posted today. It says against the black covering background, "This photo may show violent or graphic content." And it goes on, "This photo was automatically covered so people can decide if they want to see it." You can click on a link reading "Uncover photo" to open it. This was the "stare of death" photo I posted among others on JFK's 102th birthday, including a portrait I took of him while working as a volunteer in his 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary campaign, a photo I took of the room where he was born, a baby photo, photos of him as a boy, etc.

Leo's not Steven Parent, the teenager who was killed in his car while trying to flee. Leo plays a fictional character in the film, a neighbor. Oddly, in THE HAUNTING OF SHARON TATE, Steven Parent is a character (and lives), but William Garretson, the nineteen-year-old caretaker who lived in the guest house and whom Parent was visiting, is said to be away that night, even though he was actually at the scene when the murders occurred and was considered a suspect initially when the police arrived (maybe that's why the filmmakers changed that aspect of the story, though Garretson died in 2018). Garretson claimed he slept through the murders, which defies credibility. Another version has it that he hid out in the woods behind the caretaker's house until it was all over. He sued the LAPD for false arrest but lost the suit.

I had read that before -- interesting background, hard to know what to make of it all, but food for future thought and research. Thanks for posting it, Jim.