Joseph McBride

Eisenhower certainly did not treat Patton badly. If anything, he could be criticized

for overindulging Patton when he went off the handle, or should I say off the rails. Ike did so because Patton

was such a successful general and the Allies needed his talents.  Eisenhower admired his

generalship and daring, which historians have praised. But Ike hated having to keep him on after such

episodes as the slapping of the shellshocked soldier and various forms of insubordination.

Patton's admiration for the Nazis was so scandalous that Eisenhower

had to warn him in August 1945 to "get off your bloody ass and carry out the denazification program

instead of mollycoddling the goddamn Nazis." Patton's death in a car accident in Heidelberg that

December after his car was hit by a slow-moving Army truck is seen by some as suspicious.

https://deadline.com/2019/02/robert-kennedy-family-green-book-response-hear-audio-don-shirley-tony-lip-confirm-film-storyline-1202558236/

It's clear this discovery has caused major consternation among the paid

disinformation experts since they are out in force flooding the forum about it

to distract attention from it. We should keep out focus on the

discovery itself.

Let's not enable paid pro-government trolls such as DVP by responding to them. That plays into their hands. They

keep trying to tie up forums with their false claims in order to distract

from real discussions and evidence, and they are successful.

I wrote an email message of thanks yesterday to Tom Jackman for his article on the Lisa Pease book

and his other work: Dear Mr. Jackman,

Thanks for your evenhanded and respectful
coverage of Lisa Pease’s new book and the RFK
assassination. This and your other recent coverage
of related topics have been a breath of fresh air
to this observer who has followed for decades
how the Post has tried to mock and marginalize
people who dissent from the official myths
about political assassinations in this country.

It seems things may be changing. and the paper
may have more of an open mind.

Keep up the good work,

Joseph McBride
Author, INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE
KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER
J. D. TIPPIT

You can tell when an important new piece of information comes

out -- all the trolls paid to spread disinformation pop up and

try to flood the forum, while genuine scholars respond to their

bait, and the trolls achieve their purpose in obscuring the new evidence.

One part of the story I don't find credible is RFK supposedly giving

Michael Wayne his own PT-109 tie clasp at another event a couple of weeks before RFK was shot. Why would RFK give his own tie clasp to some stranger?

I received one of those tie clasps for being a volunteer on the 1960 Wisconsin primary

campaign (they became a totemic item of shared experience and comradeship

among people who worked for the Kennedys), but JFK or RFK did not take off his pin and hand it to me. 

My mother, who was active in the Wisconsin Democratic Party, got one for me when we both worked in the campaign,

on which RFK was campaign manager.

Thank you, Ron. I appreciate your points. We who write books on the case

and don't follow the official line do so out of love and dedication, and readers

of such books mostly share the same motivations. We don't expect wide audiences

or "general" readers, but when we find some of those readers we are pleased, and by and large

we get readers who are informed and thoughtful and, like us, want to

advance our understanding of this extraordinarily complex case. Such as you.

I'm just saying if you are truly interested, you can read Horne's five volumes in two weeks. It's not hard to do so

even while working for a living. And the details of the Zapruder film alteration and the body alteration are crucial. Horne turned

up fresh and convincing evidence of both. As you know, these are still matters of

controversy even within the research community, so it was wise of Horne to lay out

all of his evidence. People can then agree or disagree based on what he presents,

and he doesn't simply speculate or make unsupported claims, as too many authors do. He was in a special position with the ARRB and was

able to find aid in the interrogation of key witnesses as well as to

obtain revealing documents and other witness reports. He differs with some of

the approach of the others on the ARRB and goes well beyond their report, which

in some ways was another US government coverup. I found Horne's prose lucid, so I didn't think the text was hard to manage.

I find the same is the case with John Newman, who is taking a different angle and knows his material thoroughly.

I want the detail and the analysis. These books are for experts and scholars more than for general readers.

I read Doug Horne's five-volume set eagerly in two weeks. I learned a lot from it

and am glad he put in all the valuable detail.

Back in the 1990s I had an argument with a friend of Moldea's -- when I told him Moldea had done some good

early work (his book DARK VICTORY: RONALD REAGAN, MCA, AND THE MOB is a revealing work

of Hollywood and political history) but then turned and sold out on the RFK case (see

how he changed his supposed viewpoint between his Washington Post article and his book), my

friend (a fellow reporter) became incensed and started ranting incoherently. I also argued

with my friend (who himself has done some good work on labor issues and so forth) about conspiracies -- he claimed there

are no conspiracies in politics, etc. etc. I simply mentioned Watergate and asked if he thought it was a conspiracy, and he went off on another tirade.

Someone else I know was railing against conspiracy theories, and I mentioned she believed in a conspiracy theory

about 9/11. She was surprised and asked what I meant. I said, "The conspiracy theory that nineteen Arabs armed with box cutters

brought down the Twin Towers." She was thrown aback and tried to explain that wasn't what she

meant by conspiracy. Evidently to them conspiracy means any viewpoint opposing the official story. 

Penn Jones used to say that LBJ "was the only one in the motorcade who ducked."

In my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE, I quote my 1988 interview with Sen. Ralph Yarborough (D-Texas),

who was riding in the back seat of the convertible with LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson right behind

the Queen Mary. Among other things, Yarborough told me that Secret Service Agent Rufus Youngblood

did not jump over the seat, as LBJ later claimed, and that while the shots were fired, LBJ was crouching

to listen to Youngblood's walkie-talkie, which he wore on a strap over his shoulder in the front seat. Yarborough

said this about his reactions on hearing the shots, an account at variance with the extant version of the Zapruder film:

"The first shot I heard I thought was a rifle shot. The second shot, the motorcade almost came to a halt. They said later that the president‘s car slowed to something like five miles an hour. I wondered what the hell they were stopping for when somebody is shooting. People were jumping out of the car in front of me [the Secret Service followup car] and running to the president‘s car. I thought maybe somebody had thrown a bomb in there. The third shot I heard was a rifle shot."

FBI agent James Hosty, who was assigned to the Oswalds in Dallas,

writes in his book that he was more concerned about Marina than Lee because he thought she

might be KGB. Of course, Hosty may not have been telling the truth, since

he "bungled" the case so badly, and since Oswald was an FBI informant (Henry Wade

told me Oswald last spoke to the FBI a day or two before the assassination, and

it was reported he also spoke with them on November 16 and in the second week of November). We

know about Marina's uncle in Soviet intelligence and how she allegedly had been a "Red Sparrow" and had been kicked

out of Leningrad for prostitution. She may have been a sleeper KGB agent, at least in her initial assignment to go with Oswald to the US, but helped

Ruth Paine set up Oswald for the CIA, so she most likely turned before the assassination. In any case, under extreme pressure from the US government

after the assassination, Marina did whatever was needed to cooperate and stay in the country. Her actions in the next few years show

an attraction to American materialism, but she was probably disoriented and she remains an enigma today. All her changes of

heart don't add up to much of a coherent picture, in my view.

Read Doug Horne's volume four.

What a duo. Accessories after the fact and in Rather's case, before as well.

I would hope Jim and other will ignore the disinformation that

is being spewed out by Carlier. He is obviously one of those

trolls whose job is to derail legitimate discussion of the issues.

François Carlier is one of those obvious disinformation specialists

whose job is to disrupt a forum such as this by making ridiculously

untrue statements that people feel compelled to answer, thus distracting 

us from more important topics. Ignore him (as I fail to do here).

Dulles's book THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE is valuable, if obviously

evasive, and it reportedly was drafted by E. Howard Hunt. Gore Vidal

has a hilarious piece in which he speculated that Hunt also

wrote the Oswald and Hinckley diaries. Paul Schrader thought

Hinckley showed unfulfilled promise as a film critic, since he

described Otto Preminger's TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME, JUNIE MOON

as being like a plastic flower stuck in a pile of doggie-do (I used

the actual word, but it was censored here).

http://www.wrkf.org/post/thursday-november-22nd-joseph-mcbride-thom-bierdz

On Nov. 22, I discuss with Jim Engster of Talk Louisiana the murders

of JFK and Tippit after we talk about my involvement in the new Orson Welles film, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND.

I also read an FBI report that mentioned that they were investigating a brother of hers in connection with the case.

She has never been properly investigated.

Peter R. Whitney writes in his 1999 article "Priscilla and Lee: Before and After the Assassination": Nevertheless, when the assassination did occur, Miss Johnson promptly retrieved her profile of Oswald from Sid Goldberg at NANA(88) and quickly redefined the subject of her report. One possible reason behind Miss Johnson's decision to change drastically the slant of her report was the fact that she was interviewed by two FBI agents, Darrel Currie and James Sullivan, on November 23, 1963. According to their report, which remained "classified" until November, 1977, "the purpose of the interview was to obtain information about Lee Harvey Oswald." It was also stated that "incidental thereto and without indicating possible Bureau interest in her as a suspect in the captioned case, she was advised that inasmuch as she is a potential witness, that biographical and background data on her would be advisable."(89) http://www.jfk-info.com/pjm-1.htm

From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE, quoting my interview with

DPD Detective Jim Leavelle, the lead detective in the Tippit case:

In my interview with Detective Leavelle, I observed that on the tape of the police broadcasts

from November 22, 1963, the police comments on Kennedy's shooting seemed relatively calm

and matter-of-fact in comparison to the sound of their voices when it is reported that a police officer was also shot.

Leavelle nodded in agreement. I asked how he thought his department reacted to the shooting

of the president. The detective's lips curled in a little smile:

"As the old saying goes back then, 'It wasn't no different than a South Dallas n[-word; the rest of the word Leavelle uttered

is quoted accurately in the book was redacted by the forum] killing'.' When you get right down to it -- because it was just another murder inside the city lines of Dallas that we would handle.

It was just another murder to me. And I've handled hundreds of 'em. So it wasn't so big deal."
 

Jacqueline Kennedy told Theodore White in her "Camelot" interview

on November 29, 1963 (according to White's notes), "Every time we got off the plane that day, three times they

gave me the yellow roses of Texas. But in Dallas they gave me red roses.

I thought how funny, red roses -- so all the seat was full of blood and red roses."

(The person who presented her with a bouquet of red roses at Love

Field on November was Elizabeth [Dearie] Cabell, the wife of CIA-connected Dallas mayor Earle Cabell. Jacqueline Kennedy's reference

to "that day" must mean she conflated in her mind the airport landings of Nov. 21 and 22. On Nov. 21 they landed

in San Antonio and Houston. On Nov. 22 they landed in Dallas.)

If you compare Witt's HSCA testimony to the Umbrella Man's actions

in the Zapruder film, you will see Witt is a fake. It's as simple as that.