Joseph McBride

That hed is unfortunate, but it used to be newspaper lingo to omit subjects in a sentence and use the verb to convey immediately what happened, particularly in one of those huge headlines for a major event.

Oswald did not visit Mexico City but was impersonated.

Thanks much, Anthony. I am glad you enjoy my writing.

Thanks for the suggestion, Michael. I will check into it. And I appreciate your good words on POLITICAL TRUTH. It's the result of many years of research and thought as well as reflecting what I've learned in my long career as a journalist, which began in May 1960. The first article I sold (about my sports hero, Milwaukee Braves pitcher, Warren Spahn and his son, Greg, my Little League teammate) was published in the national magazine The Young Catholic Messenger in the same week that I received a letter for Senator John F. Kennedy thanking me for my work on his Wisconsin presidential primary campaign.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” — James Baldwin Read my Slate article for my thoughts on the film. https://slate.com/culture/2022/11/fabelmans-steven-spielberg-movie-true-story-parents-divorce.html You may or may not be aware that his parents' divorce is the primal trauma that drives most of his films, not only this one, which portrays it most directly. His films usually deal with irresponsible father figures and sometimes irresponsible mother figures. Spielberg once said that the worst thing about the anti-Semitic abuse was getting punched in the face, which the film shows graphically and viscerally. He also suffered some anti-Semitism in Phoenix that the film does not show. He often felt like an outsider as a kid, which is traumatic for anyone. That's as big a motivator for his work as anything; he became a filmmaker to find acceptance from his peers in school. I can easily relate to those traumas. And most filmgoers can, as the great success of E.T., for example, shows. That was his most closely autobiographical previous film, although as he notes all his films are autobiographical. BTW, since we're on this site, I will note that Spielberg's Saratoga pal Mike Augustine told me they made a short film commemorating the JFK assassination and that Spielberg thought a conspiracy was behind it. Gus Russo claimed to me that he asked Spielberg about that film but that Spielberg denied making it. But Gus Russo is a dubious source, as we know. I assembled the history and listing of Spielberg's amateur films from my many interviews with his friends (cast and crew et al) and from other sources.

The odd Ready theory cries out for some kind of evidence, if any exists. I will note that Senator Yarborough told me when the limo "almost came to a halt," Secret Service agents (plural) jumped out of the Queen Mary and ran to the limo, which we don't see in the extant Zapruder film. So Ready could have been one of them. The story about the "fight" and shooting of Connally in the car seems bizarre. On the other hand, the first time I read BEST EVIDENCE I found it hard to believe or follow entirely, but then I read it again and found it convincing in most respects. It's hard for people to accept a radical departure from an official story. So the psychological tendency is to rule it out without considering the contrary evidence to the official story. We need to have Lifton's text of FINAL CHARADE, in whatever form it exists, and his supporting notes for his later claims. I looked into Similas and couldn't find corroborating evidence of his claims, although the available information doesn't rule them out, either.

Yes, Spielberg has told that story before making the film: see his clip telling it to Ron Howard et al. on YouTube and his recounting the experience in the Peter Bogdanovich documentary DIRECTED BY JOHN FORD. The only part he left out in THE FABELMANS is Ford telling him never to spend his own money on a film (Spielberg eventually violated that when he and his partners each put $33 million into starting up DreamWorks). My experience interviewing Ford on the last day of his career, August 19, 1970, was quite similar, though I had an hour with him and doggedly tried to elicit cogent remarks from him, with occasional success (that interview is transcribed at length in my 2007 book TWO CHEERS FOR HOLLYWOOD: JOSEPH McBRIDE ON MOVIES). Ford was both gruff and somewhat affectionate with me, as he is in THE FABELMANS. He stonewalled me a lot and gave me a rough time, but at the end he gave me an Irish blessing -- and then joked about it -- and when I gave him a copy of my first published book, PERSISTENCE OF VISION: A COLLECTION OF FILM CRITICISM, he read the dedication to him (lifting his eyepatch and holding the page close to his eye) and said, "Oh, that's sweet." I don't find THE FABELMANS "highly sentimentalized" (?), an odd description for a film that's often searingly painful; see my article about it in Slate, from the viewpoint of a biographer comparing it with the actual events of his youth. It mostly portrays them accurately but takes some liberties and leaves out some things I wish he had put it, but overall it's one of the best filmed autobiographical works.

Robbie's doing remarkable work getting a wide range of guests and conducting lively interviews and panel discussions. I complimented him on doing all this at age 24, the same age as another precocious fellow, Oswald. We need to help cultivate the new generation of researchers and podcasters, such as Robbie. They give us hope in the future of the field. I find that my students are fascinated to learn about it and have open minds on it, unlike most of my Baby Boomer generation.

BEST EVIDENCE was one of the paradigm changers in the case for me. A towering work of investigative and iconoclastic research.

COUP 53 (2019) is a great and revealing documentary by Taghi Amirani and Walter Murch about the 1953 CIA/MI6 coup that overthrew Mossadegh. Amirani directed the film and wrote it with Walter Murch, who also was the editor. Murch is the world's best film editor and sound designer.

One of the times when I visited the Tippit murder site to do my research, a bunch of neighborhood kids clustered around me to ask what I was doing. When I told them, they were seriously interested and asked me to talk with them about what had happened there. They knew a little about it but were eager for more. So I spent half an hour going through the evidence and showing them photographs and answering their intelligent questions. All most gratifying. The kids also told me that Geraldo Rivera had come through there about a week earlier. He arrived in a limousine and spent only a few minutes looking around and didn't talk with any of them. They naturally resented his attitude and viewed him with scorn.

The "dark-complected man" aka "Cuban" sitting next to the Umbrella Man had a walkie-talkie, as did that other fellow with the crew cut (identified as Jim Hicks) who was walking on the grass on the south side of Elm Street with the device in a back pocket just after the shots were fired.

Such a tiresome, specious lot of schoolyard-level attacks.

Robert Oswald is a deeply biased witness against his brother.

Ad hominem insults only reveal the lack of credibility of the person lobbing the insults. They show an inability to argue factually.

Oswald didn't own the revolver placed into the "so-called evidence." So it was a plant.

Yes, indeed, Lori, it is outrageous. Let us all raise our voices against this latest plan of Dallas to obfuscate history.

Kennedy was going to fire Lodge when he came to Washington, but the assassination interfered with that plan, and Lodge instead participated in the November 24 meeting with LBJ et al that secretly reversed the course of American involvement in the Vietnam War from deescalation to extensive escalation.

Armstrong proved through his exhaustive and definitive research that Oswald did not own either the rifle or the revolver that were submitted as part of what he called the "so-called evidence" against him. So a lot of the debate about these weapons in regard to Oswald's guilt or innocence is beside the point.

Zapruder testified before the Warren Commission that he filmed the turn onto Elm Street. So the jump in the footage is an obvious indication of the tampering that went on with the film at the CIA secret facility in Rochester that weekend.

Jim Engster is always a smart, sympathetic listener and voice on the topic of the JFK assassination. Our interviews have become a welcome 11/22 ritual for me. He is with Talk Louisiana and the NPR affiliate in Baton Rouge. It is heartening to talk with a good radio host in the mainstream media who cares about the case as Jim does. Among the topics we discussed today are President Biden's upcoming (Dec. 15) decision on the release of about 15,000 remaining classified documents on the assassination (well beyond the 25-year limit specifed by the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992) and the Dallas Morning News's outrageous plans to "Reinvent" Dealey Plaza by changing the grassy knoll to tear out the picket fence, plant trees, and build a pedestrian walkway in an attempt to obliterate the history of what happened 59 years ago. https://www.wrkf.org/show/talk-louisiana/2022-11-22/tuesday-november-22nd-lewis-unglesby-joseph-mcbride-molly-buchmann

https://luminarypodcasts.com/listen/william-ramsey-investigates/william-ramsey-investigates/into-the-nightmare-my-search-for-the-killers-of-president-john-f-kennedy-and-officer-j-d-tippit-with-author-jospeh-mcbride/84418890-3587-48d3-a2fb-7b16a0ff20eb

Staughton Lynd, Historian and Activist Turned Labor Lawyer, Dies at 92 After being blacklisted from academia for his antiwar activity, he became an organizer among steel workers in the industrial Midwest. The activist and historian Staughton Lynd in 2019. “At age 16 and 17, I wanted to find a way to change the world,” he said in 2010. “Just as I do at age 79.” By Clay Risen Nov. 18, 2022 Staughton Lynd, a historian and lawyer who over a long and varied career organized schools for Black children in Mississippi, led antiwar protests in Washington and fought for labor rights in the industrial Midwest, died on Thursday in the town of Warren, in northeast Ohio. He was 92. His wife and frequent collaborator, Alice Lynd, said his death, at a hospital, was caused by multiple organ failure. Mr. Lynd was one of the last of a generation of radical academics — including his friend and colleague Howard Zinn — who in the 1960s overthrew their predecessors’ obsession with detached, objective scholarship in favor of political engagement. Many of his colleagues stayed within the bounds of academia, but Mr. Lynd burst beyond them. As a young professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, he led students in marches against nuclear weapons. In 1964 he was one of the main organizers behind Freedom Summer, which brought Northern college students to Mississippi to teach and organize in Black communities. In 1965 Mr. Lynd joined another radical historian, Herbert Aptheker, and a founder of Students for a Democratic Society, Tom Hayden, on a trip to North Vietnam. There they met with Communist leaders and made global headlines, but also numerous enemies back home. The trip effectively ended Mr. Lynd’s career at Yale, where he had moved just a year before. Mr. Lynd was not a communist, though he was often mistaken for one. Instead he made his own way on the left, drawing equal inspiration from Marxism, American abolitionism and Quaker pacifism — a diversity that helped explain his involvement with so many different movements. “Staughton was very unusual,” Gar Alperovitz, a historian who wrote several books with Mr. Lynd, said in a phone interview. “He walked a path that was his own. And when it intersected with the activist groups on the progressive left, he would be involved. But he was a very moral political figure rather than a tactical one.” In age he fell between the Old Left, which cut its teeth in the 1930s and ’40s, and the New, which was coming up in the ’60s. There was no question where his loyalty lay: He reveled in the impassioned spontaneity he encountered as a professor on college campuses, and students flocked to him in turn. At Yale they would cram into his office or gather on his living room floor to hear him take on all comers, staking positions to the left even of outspoken liberals like the Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, a frequent verbal sparring partner. Even as he developed a following as an agitator, he built a reputation as a pathbreaking historian. His best-known book, “The Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism” (1968), opened new ground by identifying members of the Revolutionary War generation who embraced abolition and equality, and it won praise even from establishment historians. “Of all the New Left historians, only Staughton Lynd appears able to combine the techniques of historical scholarship with the commitment to social reform,” David Herbert Donald wrote in a 1968 review in Commentary. But his academic star soon fizzled out. By the end of the 1960s, his outspoken activism had drawn the attention of the F.B.I. and gotten him blacklisted from higher education, even from small urban colleges in Chicago, where he and his family had moved in 1968. He pivoted, involving himself in labor organizing among the factories that lined the southern shores of Lake Michigan. He received a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1976, after which he and his wife moved to Youngstown, Ohio, where workers, union leaders and owners were fighting over the impending closure of the city’s steel mills. To the frustration of both the union bosses and the mill owners, he sided with the rank and file, writing a handbook for workers trying to navigate the legal system. In the early 1980s he helped lead a high-profile effort to turn the mills over to a worker-owned cooperative. Though the effort failed, it brought him renewed acclaim on the left. He did much of his later work alongside his wife. She wrote several books with him and, after getting her own law degree, joined him as a partner. They officially retired in 1996 but continued taking pro bono cases, this time with a focus on the death penalty and prison reform. “Whether in his pathbreaking historical work on the roots of American radicalism, his active participation in campaigns for civil rights, his crucial role in steps toward democratization of the economy, Staughton Lynd was always in the forefront of struggle, a model of integrity, courage, and farsighted understanding of what must be done if there is to be a livable world,” the linguist and left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky wrote in an email. Staughton Craig Lynd was born on Nov. 22, 1929, the same year that his parents, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd, published their book “Middletown,” based on their research in Muncie, Ind. It was one of the first books to offer a comprehensive study of an American community, and it established them as two of the country’s best-known academics. The Lynds lived in New York City — Robert Lynd taught at Columbia, while Helen Lynd taught at Sarah Lawrence College — but Staughton was born in a hospital in Philadelphia because his mother preferred the doctors there. He grew up among the New York intellectual set, attending the Ethical Culture School and the Fieldston School, and entered Harvard in 1946. He studied social relations, a popular but now defunct major. In his free time he dabbled in radical politics, joining the Communist Party-aligned John Reed Club and briefly participating in two Trotskyist organizations on campus. During the 1950 summer school session he met Alice Niles, a student at Radcliffe. They married the next year. After graduating in 1951, he spent time studying urban planning before being drafted into the Army in 1953. As a conscientious objector, he was given a noncombat role, despite the continuing Korean War. A year later, though, he received a dishonorable discharge after Army investigators dug up his Communist affiliations in college; they also highlighted his mother’s career as a “modern” professional woman. He and others with similar disqualifications appealed, and the Supreme Court eventually ordered the Army to give them honorable discharges instead. The change in status allowed Mr. Lynd to take advantage of the G.I. Bill, which he used to pay for graduate school. But first, he and Alice spent three years living on a Quaker commune in northern Georgia. They then spent six months in a similar community in New Jersey, where he first met Mr. Dellinger, a like-minded pacifist who brought him on as an editor at his magazine, Liberation. The Lynds finally returned to New York City, where Mr. Lynd worked for a tenants’ rights organization on the Lower East Side and pursued a history doctorate at Columbia. He received his degree, with a dissertation on New York State during the Revolutionary War, in 1962. By then he and Alice were already in Atlanta, where he got a job teaching at Spelman (and where Mrs. Lynd babysat the children of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a neighbor). Among his colleagues was Mr. Zinn, who would be fired for his activism in 1963, and among his students was Alice Walker, who would go on to write “The Color Purple.” Mr. Lynd became actively involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and grew particularly close to one of its leaders, Bob Moses, a similarly cerebral activist. In 1964 Mr. Lynd was chosen to oversee the educational component of Freedom Summer, instituting curriculums and training teachers for the many schools that were to open across Mississippi. He was in Oxford, Ohio, where organizers gathered before heading to Mississippi, when he first heard about the kidnapping and murder of the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. “I’ll never forget Mickey Schwerner’s wife, Rita, pacing one of the rooms all night long, waiting for word of some kind,” he wrote in The Bill of Rights Journal in 1988. That fall Mr. Lynd joined the Yale history department, though by then he was spending more and more of his time as an activist. In June 1965 he joined another antiwar protester in a lonely demonstration outside the Pentagon. Almost immediately, dozens of military police officers had surrounded them. “What in the cotton-picking world do you think you’re doing?” he recalled one of them asking. He straightened himself up, looked at the officer, and replied: “You don’t understand. We’re the first of thousands.” His trip later that year to North Vietnam, and a 1966 trip to London, where he blasted American foreign policy on the BBC, persuaded the State Department to revoke his passport. Mr. Lynd’s activism brought waves of criticism from alumni and pressure on Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster, to fire him. Mr. Brewster resisted, but he let it be known, quietly, that Mr. Lynd was unlikely to receive tenure. In 1968 the Lynds moved again, to Chicago, where Mr. Lynd was eager to get involved with the labor movement. He taught briefly at two local schools, Roosevelt University and Columbia College, and applied unsuccessfully to others. But he failed to find a permanent contract — the result, he insisted, of a concerted effort to blacklist him from teaching. He then worked briefly for the social activist Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, and he and Alice Lynd wrote an oral history of Chicago labor, “Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers” (1973). Mr. Lynd wrote more than 20 more books and extended pamphlets, mostly about labor organizing and prison reform. An exception was “Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together” (2009), written with his wife. A year later, an interviewer for Harvard Magazine asked him why, after such a long career, he was still so active. “At age 16 and 17, I wanted to find a way to change the world,” he said. “Just as I do at age 79.” Clay Risen is an obituaries reporter for The Times. Previously, he was a senior editor on the Politics desk and a deputy op-ed editor on the Opinion desk. He is the author, most recently, of “Bourbon: The Story of Kentucky Whiskey.” @risenc

Staughton Lynd, a prominent activist in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War and labor movements, has died. He and Jack Minnis wrote one of the early groundbreaking articles dissenting from the official story of the JFK assassination, “Seeds of Doubt: Some Questions About the Assassination,” The New Republic, December 21, 1963. Lynd's New York Times obit is respectful but naturally doesn't mean that article they wrote: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/us/staughton-lynd-dead.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Obituarie Here is a link to their article: https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/SeedsOfDoubt.html