Joseph McBride
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Posts posted by Joseph McBride
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Ad hominem insults only reveal the
lack of credibility of the person
lobbing the insults. They show
an inability to argue factually.
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Oswald didn't own the revolver placed
into the "so-called evidence." So it
was a plant.
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Yes, indeed, Lori, it is outrageous. Let us all raise our voices
against this latest plan of Dallas to obfuscate history.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 RisenNov. 18, 2022In 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.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.
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.
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.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.
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.During the 1950 summer school session he met Alice Niles, a student at Radcliffe. They married the next year.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.
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.”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).
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
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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§ion=Obituarie
Here is a link to their article: https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/SeedsOfDoubt.html
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Kamala Harris and now Gavin Newsom have
kept Sirhan in prison unjustly for political advantage.
Paul Schrade was a hero to help keep the case alive and
to come to Sirhan's defense in later years.
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The spurious dictabelt tape was a poison
pill inserted by Mary Ferrell and other
disinformation specialists to discredit
the idea of a conspiracy in the JFK
assassination.
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The Belmont FBI memo on the night of 11-22-63, which I discovered in the 1980s
and write about in INTO THE NIGHTMARE (I couldn't
get an article about it into print in the 1980s, and Doug
Horne discussed it in his volumes before I published
INTO THE NIGHTMARE), mentions a bullet lodged
behind the president's ear that they were in the
process of obtaining. It probably was removed
in the pre-autopsy "surgery." It never was
entered into evidence. That memo and
corroborating evidence (such as Secret
Service and civilian eyewitness accounts
of a bullet striking JFK there) is a smoking gun that destroys the Warren Report. And there are accounts
of other bullets found but not entered into evidence.
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I agree with you, David. And thank you for
continuing to post photos and videos. Even
though I disagree with you on most issues,
you make a real contribution here, unlike
some posters who visit just to snipe or make
snarky comments and never add anything
to the discussion or research.
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When I first went to Dealey Plaza and met Penn Jones on the twentieth anniversary of the assassination, I asked him
if he was also going to the (empty and sterile and insulting) Dallas monument that day. He said no,
because "The holy ground is where the martyr falls."
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I'm with Robert and Jonathan on this. This kind of violence
could happen anywhere in this violence-prone country.
It's sad wherever it happens.
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Thanks much, Bob.
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Podcasts are a great way to have a lengthy
serious discussion about the case. Robbie
Robertson is one of the good podcast hosts.
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Some Kennedy memorabilia I missed: On May 12, 1962,
I was part of his "honor guard" at the Milwaukee Auditorium
and Arena for the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner.
After the room cleared, I went up behind the dais to look
at the podium, which still had the presidential seal on it.
I saw that the president had left some notes on his
speech on the podium; I remember he was doodling
sailboats on it.
While I stood there for about five
minutes debating about whether or not to take
the notes (I was a well-behaved Catholic
kid at the time), a Secret Service agent came up to remove
the presidential seal. I asked him if I could have
the notes. He took them and said, "No, because
the president might have been writing something about Berlin."
I was disappointed but moments later heard some commotion
from behind the curtain. I pulled it open, and there was
President Kennedy five feet from my face, passing as he walked
toward a down ramp. I impulsively said, "Hi, Jack!," and
he smiled and nodded. Then he turned and walked
down the ramp into the limousine in which he
would be killed the following year. That was the
last of three times I met him.
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Yes, but I will never part with my letter from JFK,
which means much more to me.
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I had a "Hello, My Name Is" nametag both JFK
and Jacqueline Kennedy signed for me at the
climactic rally in the Wisconsin presidential primary
on April 3, 1960. She rarely signed a document
with him. One went many years ago for $100,000.
But mine burned up when my bedroom caught
fire in 1962. That was the only autograph Jackie Kennedy
signed at the rally in 1960 (that rally is
the centerpiece of the classic documentary PRIMARY). I badgered her for about
five minutes as she kept refusing, until one of her
husband's aides said, "For Chrissake, Jackie, give
the kid your autograph." I do have photos I took of JFK
at the big rally. I was a volunteer on his campaign.
Oh, and my mother made me wash
my wrist a week after the big rally, despite my protests,
even though Senator Kennedy had signed my wrist.
My most prized possession is a letter from him
on May 9, 1960, thanking me "for the diligent work
you did in my behalf during the campaign." He signed
it "Jack Kennedy."
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Ron, the legal battle didn't go as far as court.
I won out of court against Random House/Knopf and took my Capra biography to a new publisher,
Simon & Schuster. I felt it wise to keep the battle quiet at the
time but wrote about it eventually in FRANKLY.
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In my thoroughly detailed 601-page book, FRANKLY: UNMASKING
FRANK CAPRA, I write specifically about the attempts to stop my Capra
biography, a legal battle that took up four years
of my life but which I ultimately won. I am sure there many other examples of such corruption.
But when I told my story at the time to a distinguished
fellow author, a future winner of the Pulitzer Prize, he said, "This
is the most bizarre story I ever heard. The worst thing
I ever heard. . . . Offending Frank Capra is the least
of it. It's a real mystery. I've never heard a story like this." I greatly admire Caro's biography of Robert Moses --
it and Boswell's Life of Johnson are the best
nonfiction books I've ever read -- and Caro's first
volume on Johnson was an inspiration to me
when I wrote the Capra biography. I went with Gottlieb
partly because he was Caro's editor. Caro let us down
in Vol. 4, printing lies about the JFK assassination (including
the myth about Rufus Youngblood jumping over the
seat to shield LBJ with his body, which Senator Ralph
Yarborough, who was riding in the back seat with
LBJ and Lady Bird, told me did not happen). Caro in a 1985 lecture at the New York
Public Library said that in coming volumes he would deal with what he called Johnson's "blood feud with the Kennedys,
which is a drama of Shakespearean vividness," so I had expected more. But you
don't get the big advances and prizes telling the truth
about the Kennedy assassination. Nevertheless, even
in Caro's Vol. 4, there is much valuable detail about the pressures
Johnson was feeling that day. And Caro earlier showed how
Johnson felt he simply had to become president. Well-informed readers can
put together the puzzle ourselves.
OSWALD'S MOTIVE
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted · Edited by Joseph McBride
Robert Oswald is a deeply biased witness against his brother.