Joseph McBride

Hinckley did not shoot Reagan. The shot that hit Reagan was fired from above. It was on a downward trajectory and hit the side of the car, flattened itself, and richocheted into his left underarm, lodging in his chest. Hinckley was firing diversionary shots, like Sirhan. I remember finding it odd that the government never issued a report on the shooting. Some details did not emerge until months later, in a book on James Brady. Judy Woodruff, then a network radio reporter, was among those at the scene of the gunfire who said a shot came from above, but in her autobiography she changed her story to fit the official story, which is why she gets the big bucks today. As Vonnegut used to put it, "So it goes." In an official White House color photograph taken during the shooting (which is available online), you can see a man in the balcony at top right with his arm protruding in what looks like a firing position.

Penn Jones once told me to get into the manhole to check out the theory. I took a photo from that angle. It was theoretically possible, but the window of opportunity was so short and uncertain it seemed unlikely. The storm drain at the end of the picket fence where it adjoins the railroad overcrossing, on the other hand, looked like a much easier and more certain shooting location for a trained sniper.

Another key Curry quote is from November 23, 1963, his response on live TV to a question about the lack of clear fingerprints on the rifle. He said, "I don't know whether it would be enough to convict him or not. If we can put his prints on the rifle, that would certainly connect him with the rifle." The FBI evidently put his prints on the rifle the next day, after his death, in the Miller Funeral Home in Fort Worth.

https://midnightwriternews.com/mwn-episode-117-joseph-mcbride-on-unmasking-frank-capra-and-unearthing-george-bush/ Here is a new podcast S. T. Patrick did with me for The Midnight Writer News Show on how I unmasked Frank Capra . . . and Poppy Bush.

Thanks, Jeff, glad you like it. David did a great job. I appreciate your comments too on my work on John Ford. It was great working with you on two videos in Len Osanic's 50 REASONS . . . FOR 50 YEARS series, the ones on the Tippit murder and on "Political Truth: The Media and the Assassination." You did superb editing and videography, and I appreciated your deep knowledge of the field.

One of the critics I most admire, David Walsh of the World Socialist Web Site, did massive preparation for his thoughtful and gratifying April 24 review of my 2018 book HOW DID LUBITSCH DO IT? and his accompanying interview with me about that book and my new book, FRANKLY: UNMASKING FRANK CAPRA. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/04/24/lubi-a24.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/04/24/inte-a24.html

The 1946 Orwell essay "Politics and the English Language" is essential reading to understand today's world, as is NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/

Thanks, Rob. Yes, we need to take back that term "fake news." As Orwell helped teach us, political language can be perilous. It was Poppy Bush who popularized the term "political correctness" -- he used it as his broad-bush slur on liberals, and then liberals unthinkingly took it up as their credo, and it spiraled out of control into what can at its worst be a narrow-minded and often puritanical censoriousness. We all know how the CIA spread the term "conspiracy theory" as a slur, and how eagerly the media took that up. This has caused endless problems, including the recent obsession over Trump and his cronies engaging in "collusion" -- forgetting or not knowing that collusion is not a crime, what people should have been focused instead on is criminal conspiracy. Collusion can be offensive and damaging to the body politic and a cause for impeachment and other political decisions. But the MSM and many people are terrified of the word "conspiracy," so they fixated on collusion rather than conspiracy, and even when Mueller clarified the difference in his report, it caused consternation among some people who still don't understand what the laws are or how we should deal with evidence of political conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

Thanks for your kind words, Robert. I also like that Gary Wills book on John Wayne. I did an enjoyable and informative radio interview today with Doug Holm and Matthew Clark of KBOO-FM (Portand, Oregon), dealing with my new book, FRANKLY: UNMASKING FRANK CAPRA, on my legal and other problems getting my 1992 Frank Capra biography, FRANK CAPRA: THE CATASTROPHE OF SUCCESS, published. We also discuss how I dealt with the enigmatic personality of John Ford in two books, a critical study (written with Michael Wilmington) and a biography. My part of this show begins 45 minutes from the end and concludes seven minutes before the end. https://www.kboo.fm/media/71697-interview-film-historian-joseph-mcbride-frank-capra?fbclid=IwAR39Ea0RfEwUxQU8GOovo9w5CevEPYajtpZROHSfHkz7B0pYcJwwjJJpOxw

I once met a woman in DC who was working in the Democratic National Committee headquarters the Watergate at the time of the burglaries. I asked her why she thought they really happened. She looked alarmed and was struck speechless. I wonder if she knew about the call-girl ring.

DVP is trying to get away with repeating the WC lie about the time of the Tippit shooting. Tippit most likely was shot at about 1:08 or 1:09, perhaps as early as 1:06, and not 1:14 or 1:15. As most readers of this forum realize, that lie was spread to give the alleged lone nut shooter enough time to get from his rooming house on foot to shoot Tippit -- which Oswald did not do.

Fortas helped steal the 1948 Senate election for LBJ and was indeed a key adviser. Eventually LBJ even appointed him to the US Supreme Court, which proved disastrous. Laura Kalman wrote an excellent 1990 biography of Fortas. He was one of those extremely important figures behind the scenes who make things happen in DC.

See below for my comments on Carl Oglesby and his essential book on the case and on modern American politics. He also wrote a short primer on the JFK assassination -- among other works.

Thanks for your kind words, Pat and Ron. There were many contradictions in Capra, who was a truly tragic figure, a man of great talents brought down by flaws in his nature. That complexity is what made his life story so fascinating to write and sustained me all those years throughout the Sturm und Drang of the legal battle; he was a Dostoevskian figure. The 1992 biography was attacked by one of Capra's sons as "a hatchet job," but even he said, "His research was really good." I hope you don't think that first volume of my two-part Capra biography is a hatchet job; I don't, 'and the strongly positive critical reception it received did not view it as such but as a fully three-dimensional, lifelike portrait. And the decision to write it was all my own.

Thank you, Stephanie. I am glad you will be reading the new book. Here is from the interview I did with Chris De Benedetti of the San Francisco Bay Area online news service localnewsmatters.org: Are there parallels between the difficulties you encountered with the Capra book and the JFK assassination, which you’ve also written about? It’s a very destructive thing for a country to live a lie. With the JFK assassination: most of the country doesn’t believe the Warren Report. The official lie is really damaging to the people’s trust in government and the media. The public — give them credit because they’re smarter than some people think. President Trump misuses the term “fake news” just to describe news about himself he doesn’t like. But, in fact, we do get a lot of fake news — such the coverage of Vietnam and the history of Watergate. The job of historians is to expose the things that have been covered up. That’s why I’ve tried to do. So, I think people will be interested in my books for a lot of reasons, not just film historians.

https://www.masslive.com/entertainment/2019/04/film-historian-explains-difficult-journey-in-unmasking-famed-filmmaker-frank-capra.html?fbclid=IwAR3t-d-yQurybz_l0RGLAwjC74YdamwrwZUABGZvUdXuQdVriz2d8b14xyg https://www.localnewsmatters.org/2019/04/12/qa-with-author-joseph-mcbride-on-the-contradictions-of-frank-capra/ In the early phases of my work on INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT, I was working on a seven-year project, a biography of a celebrated film director, FRANK CAPRA: THE CATASTROPHE OF SUCCESS (1984-92). I encountered great difficulties in trying to get the book published in the face of the corrupt machinations of Capra's archivist and my original publisher (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House) and some of Capra's family. The legal battle that ensued consumed most of four years of that period; I did not go public about this until now. I've now written a book chronicling this harrowing, sometimes darkly comical, Kafkaesque ordeal -- FRANKLY: UNMASKING FRANK CAPRA -- which taught me a lot about how hard it is in this country to reveal the hidden truth about a major cultural figure and historical events. My 1992 biography of Capra eventually was published by an honest publisher, Simon & Schuster. FRANKLY is self-published through my Hightower Press imprint and is available exclusively through Amazon. Two interviews about the new book appeared today (see links above). https://www.amazon.com/FRANKLY-UNMASKING-FRANK-Joseph-McBride/dp/1949950476

Joe Kennedy's anti-Semitism and isolationism and appeasement and defeatism are so thoroughly and authoritatively documented it seems unnecessary to have to add to that historical record. If FDR were here, he could spend weeks giving us the details. Pointing this out is not an attack on his sons, obviously; it helps show how far they came in reaction against him and on their own, even if they also depended to some extent on his influence and largesse. JPK's lavish and dubious spending in West Virginia and elsewhere in the 1960 campaign is also abundantly documented (check out the meaning of the euphemism "walking-around money," etc.). Hubert Humphrey, by the way, understandably was quite bitter about this at the time, since he was sparsely funded. JFK had to overcome considerable and not irrational liberal skepticism in 1960 to get the nomination; Richard Leacock, one of the cameramen on PRIMARY and a longtime leftist, told me the crew were for Humphrey (whose liberal bona fides were then celebrated, before he sold out to LBJ) until the crew started watching JFK in action and realized he was a genuine liberal, even if, as Leacock claimed, in JFK's bellicose Cold Warrior speech at the April 3, 1960, rally I attended in Milwaukee ("We can see the campfires of the enemy burning on distant shores," etc.), JFK was "declaring war on Vietnam." (Robert Drew seems to have been a Kennedy partisan from the start, but the crew were the skeptics.) Discounting Eleanor Roosevelt's skepticism about JFK's liberalism, which Kennedy had to work hard to overcome, serves no useful historical purpose and misses a major point in JFK's evolution and rise to power. There's no point in either hagiography or hatchet jobs against JFK or RFK or even Old Joe -- that distinction is "the fallacy of false alternatives" anyway. A nuanced history of the family is what is valuable. No president has ever been perfect: not Washington, Lincoln, FDR -- it's an almost impossibly demanding job for any human being -- and JFK should not be immune from analysis and criticism for his flaws, even while we praise and admire his many virtues. Though some of JFK's campaign rhetoric was boilerplate to convince voters he was as tough as the hardcore anti-Commie Nixon, to disregard it is a distortion of the record. Yes, JFK was on the right side of history about colonialism from the early postwar years, but he had a way to go to escape more fully from the Cold War mindset of the early 1960s, which we see in his evolution from the Bay of Pigs through the Cuban Missile Crisis and beyond. Ignoring that complex process or oversimplifying the record is not particularly helpful in understanding that period and the pressures he had to resist and try to overcome that led to his assassination. John Newman's book JFK AND VIETNAM documents thoroughly the complexities of that process, and his more recent volumes are also enlightening. The Richard Condon novel WINTER KILLS is an intricately witty satire of conspiracies and the "wilderness of mirrors" into which people and a nation can fall while enmeshed in them or in trying to unravel them. I find the film version (necessarily) less nuanced but still a sharp and often painfully hilarious black comedy along the lines of DR. STRANGELOVE; surely it hardly needs pointing out that the film is not meant to be a docudrama about Joe Kennedy but instead is a very dark satire along the lines of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, one of the truly great films of the 1960s. Condon's 1959 novel THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE is a brilliant and prescient book that has a lot to say about our political system, media propaganda, and national neuroses/psychoses. I would continue to defend Richard Whalen's solid biography of JPK, even if more discoveries have been made in the past decades and some areas of JPK's life remain opaque and even if Whalen may not pass someone's ideological litmus test. And I'd like to see specific proof (if it exists) that the disturbing quote from Truman about JPK maligning FDR is (allegedly) fabricated. Michael Beschloss's first book, KENNEDY AND ROOSEVELT: THE UNEASY ALLIANCE, remains illuminating as well. There has not been enough written about Joe Kennedy Sr., even though he himself was responsible for the first two Kennedy books, THE STORY OF THE FILMS and I'M FOR ROOSEVELT (I found a copy of the latter in a used bookstore for $1.25). The title of that book proved to be rather ironic as time went on.

Joe Kennedy's record as a businessman remains a matter of some dispute and suffers from ambiguity and/or a lack of full information on some areas (e.g., the claims of bootlegging, which are distinct from his record as a legal importer of liquor). Richard J. Whalen's biography THE FOUNDING FATHER paints a convincing picture of a ruthless businessman who at the very least cut ethical and legal corners; he did have positive qualities, such as his early backing of the film business (the first Kennedy book is a collection of pieces about a serious conference on films he sponsored at Harvard in the 1920s). JPK was well-known as a major manipulator of the stock market (not necessarily criminal) to the extent that FDR appointed him the first SEC commissioner because he knew how all the levers were pulled; he did an exemplary job in that position, much to many people's surprise. But JPK's record appeasing the Nazis and defeatism about England's chances of winning the war is abundant and shameful. Anyone who tries to deny it is shutting his eyes to the indisputable record. It was a source of great friction with the British and with FDR, who finally eased him out of his position as ambassador to the Court of St. James's, where he was causing great damage to the relationship and the war effort. His sons had to live that down, which caused them a lot of problems. JPK remained embittered and, according to Truman, referred to FDR as "that crippled son of a bitch who killed my boy Joe." JPK's record of funneling great sums of money into JFK's campaign for president in the primaries (especially West Virginia) was so blatant and dubious and well-known that JFK had to publicly joke about it to defuse the issue (as he so adroitly could do with sensitive issues; e.g., his quip to reporter May Craig's demand about why he wasn't doing more for women's issues). JFK had to carefully keep his father at arm's length during the fall campaign and his presidency, though he still took some of his father's advice behind the scenes. JPK was also a big defender of Joe McCarthy, another albatross JFK had to deal with; that family friendship and his father's rightwing McCarthyite views caused JFK great difficulties with Eleanor Roosevelt (for example), which he had to defuse to get the nomination. So let's not whitewash old Joe. Or indulge in Kennedy family hagiography at the expense of the more complex historical record.

I agree this needs to be weighed. And that Joe Kennedy was shady. We need to know the social backgrounds and contexts from which potential presidents emerge. Some escape the negative aspects of their backgrounds; some do not. But if we don't know these people's histories, we are in for continuing unpleasant shocks.

O'Rourke's mother is a stepdaughter of Fred Korth, a member of LBJ's Texas machine (including during the time of the stolen 1948 US Senate election) as well as a leading figure in the military-industrial complex, a Vietnam War profiteer, and the disgraced center of the TFX scandal. When I pointed this out, I got some flak from people who apparently don't want to know the backgrounds of potential presidents they might want to vote for. We saw how that worked out with the Bush family. Most Americans still don't know most of their actual background, which includes two U.S. presidents (Poppy Bush of the CIA and Franklin Pierce) and one unelected usurper who occupied the White House for eight years.

I knew Monroe's publicist, Rupert Allan. He was a sophisticated man who also represented Princess Grace and many other important figures in the world of show business, including European filmmakers. When I asked him what he knew about her death, he told me a story I have never seen printed anywhere. He said that when she was in the New York hospital with her "miscarriage" during her pregnancy by Arthur Miller, she was suicidal and thinking of jumping out of a window in her hospital room on the eighth floor. She looked down and saw a woman in a green dress waiting at a bus stop. She thought if she jumped she might land on the woman and kill her, so she changed her mind. For what it is worth, Rupert did not think Marilyn was murdered. He thinks she accidentally ingested too many pills mixed with booze. He said she liked to have a lot of small bottles of Champagne around her bedroom and would guzzle them and lose track of what she was doing. He said he thought that happened that night. He said she had told him she was upset because she had been called and invited to a party at Peter Lawford's beach house. She learned in the call that a couple of prostitutes would also be coming. She felt she was being regarded as in the same category as those prostitutes, which greatly bothered her. So Rupert thought she was distraught but did not consciously kill herself. I don't doubt his veracity about her mental state and what she told him (I knew him well), but the pills were not found in her stomach by Dr. Noguchi in the autopsy, which casts doubt on Rupert's theory of her death. She had mental problems (George Cukor thought she was mad) and engaged in risky behavior but was also mistreated by various men and her studio. I think there is ample evidence of other activity going on around Marilyn that week and on the fatal night that could add lethal details to the story. Some details remain murky.

In regard to the still unconfirmed allegations of a dead Secret Service man in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, it was reported by Seth Kantor that a source told him "they even have to die in secret."

I do a short version of a "course" on JFK and the assassination when I teach Film and Society in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University with an emphasis on Films about American History. It's a history course/film course. Since most students are taught little about American history these days, I make it my mission to do so. One student called out, "I didn't know this was going to be a history course!" Well, yeah. I discuss many other important issues in American history and films relating to them, including ones that lie, such as ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, and deconstruct those. I devote two weeks to JFK and the assassination. I am pleased that the students are deeply interested in the subject and have open minds, unlike most people of my Baby Boomer generation. We always have good discussions and questions and papers as a result. I show PRIMARY (which I am in) to discuss how JFK was our first television president and how it shows the moment when politics and entertainment blended (the April 3, 1960, rally I attended in Milwaukee). I read from Norman Mailer's 1960 piece on JFK and discuss how prescient it was. With it I show parts of Alexandra Pelosi's JOURNEYS WITH GEORGE to show how far things have degenerated. I sometimes show other material about TV and history. The following week I show Groden's DVD version of the Zapruder film (I run the first three times) and then discuss its alteration and the other issues surrounding it and the gunfire and the coverup. I show the twenty-one-minute segment from Stone's JFK analyzing the Z film and reconstructing the events of that day (pointing out how rare it is for a film to analyze another film in detail and how accurate Stone's film is in most particulars). And I show excerpts from RUSH TO JUDGMENT to provide the filmed testimony from dissenting witnesses such as S. M. Holland and Acquilla Clemmons (those have a tremendous effect on the students). I sometimes show parts of BLOWUP and WAG THE DOG to discuss film alteration and microstudy. I want them to become critical of the media and to understand how they are being manipulated and how they need to study multiple sources and documents and books to draw their own conclusions. When I teach a section of this course on Films on the Media, I do similar weeks on JFK and the assassination. I sometimes show the great documentary CRISIS: BEHIND A PRESIDENTIAL COMMITMENT, which provides a rare look behind the scenes and is more dramatic than most historical docudramas. It would be good to teach a whole course on the subject of JFK and the assassination, but I haven't done that yet. One of my colleagues devoted a whole semester to Stone's JFK and each week discussed a different aspect of film's technique and content. That sounds like a fascinating idea.

I tried buying it early on Kindle, but it wouldn't download.