Joseph McBride

Back in the nineties, establishment historian Michael Beschloss (who has done some good work here and there) announced he was doing a book on the Lincoln assassination. In my research on John Ford at the Portland, Maine, public library, I found a lengthy, highly detailed eyewitness account of the assassination in an obituary of a local man from around the turn of the century. I was not familiar with that account so thought it might be rare. I sent a copy of the obit to Beschloss with a note saying, "I hope you don't write the Warren Report of the Lincoln assassination." That was somewhat impolitic, I admit, and I did not hear back, but he has not come out with that book.

Vince Palamara deserves great respect because he has advanced our understanding of the case in a crucial way. He staked out territory that had been seriously neglected -- the role of the Secret Service -- and dug into it as much as humanly possible. He came up with a wealth of fresh information, much of it revealing and incriminating, and he's still at it. He exemplifies Penn Jones's advice (given to me and other researchers), to take a neglected area of the case "and research the hell out of it." I am surprised that anyone could question Palamara's dedication and contribution. But as has long been said, you know a man by the enemies he makes -- in Vince's case, both inside and outside the Secret Service.

When I told a Dallas researcher that Morris Brumley had claimed he "infiltrated" the Klan for the Dallas police, he laughed and said a majority of the Dallas KKK were DPD members. You'd be hard pressed to find membership lists of a criminal organization, though perhaps it's possible there is one somewhere.

David, I read your question a couple of times but can't follow it, so please rephrase it.

I doubt there is a list of DPD officers who were Klan members. Morris Brumley surprised me by bringing up his KKK membership in our interview, with a tape recorder going on the table in front of him, and boasting about his involvement, showing me his membership card and talking about the crimes he helped commit. It was a stunning moment. Brumley had known Tippit from their youth.

Good work, Vince. Your digging into the Secret Service and its role in the assassination has been central to enlarging and sharpening our understanding. Keep up the valuable research!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=109&v=TVowQ4LgwLk Inspiring, though I miss his wry question, "Why does Rice play Texas?" That touch of Kennedyesque humor always moves me as a key part of his rousing speech.

Bonesman John Kerry is actually related to Michael Paine. As Casey Stengel used to say, "You could look it up."

I am enjoying reading Vince's new book, WHO'S WHO IN THE SECRET SERVICE: HISTORY'S MOST RENOWNED AGENTS. There is a lot of new material on agents we know about and much fresh information on some who are less familiar. The material is often surprising and arcane, which I always hope to find in books related to the JFK assassination. The book does not cover only that assassination but also deals with agents from other eras. Throughout it all runs Vince's vast and deep knowledge of the subject matter, his indefatigable research, and his ability to connect dots hardly anyone knew existed until he started writing his books.

We sure don't need that again.

Kerry caved in quickly on the morning after the 2004 election that W stole, even though his running mate, John Edwards, argued for contesting it. I always thought it compromised Kerry to be a Bonesman running against another Bonesman. Part of the essence of that secret club is that they all have blackmail material on each other.

From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: One of the most tantalizing incidents in the relationship between Ruby and the Dallas police was his encounter in the early morning of November 23 with a policeman named Harry N. Olsen, who told the Warren Commission that they spoke for two or three hours. Olsen and his girlfriend and future wife, Ruby stripper Kay Coleman (“Kathy Kay”), met with Ruby in Olsen’s car in a downtown Dallas parking garage and may have helped work Ruby up into a vengeful state against Oswald. Ruby testified to the commission that the two “kept me from leaving. They were constantly talking and were in a pretty dramatic mood. They were crying and carrying on.” According to Ruby, Olsen (whom he supposedly misidentified as “Harry Carlson”) said of Oswald that “they should cut this guy inch by inch into ribbons, and so on,” and Coleman, who was from England, said, “Well, if he was in England, they would drag him through the streets and would have hung him.” Thanks to this broad tip from Ruby, researchers have long suspected that Olsen could have been the police/underworld conduit who passed along to Ruby the order to kill Oswald. Joe Tonahill, one of Ruby’s lawyers, told Seth Kantor, “It wouldn’t have been any problem to reach in and get Ruby to do something like this, through the power of suggestion, through innuendo, without Ruby even realizing it. The conversation with Olsen and Kay could have been the beginning of it. It could have been a lot stronger. We don’t know who all he talked with.” Although Olsen denied to the FBI that he had encouraged Ruby to kill Oswald, Olsen abruptly left the police department (at the request, he said, of Chief Curry) and the city of Dallas the following month, moving to California with Coleman.

Clete Roberts has one of the key lines in John Ford's body of work. He's the TV reporter who describes Spencer Tracy's Mayor Skeffington in THE LAST HURRAH as "victorious in defeat."

Gore Vidal wrote a droll piece in the New York Review of Books in 1973 analyzing the writings of E. Howard Hunt and noting their curious similarities to the "diaries" of the "lone nuts" who pop up periodically in American history to assassinate our leaders.

Connally was not secretary of the Navy when Oswald received his "undesirable" discharge in 1960. John Armstrong goes into anomalies in Oswald's alleged letter to Connally in January 1962. I read James Reston Jr.'s book when it came out and found it unconvincing.

In other news, President Kennedy is going on a campaign trip to Texas . . .

See INTO THE NIGHTMARE for more thoughts on Kenneth O'Donnell as a key inside man at the White House for the conspiracy. This was one of the surprises I found in my long research, but I believe the evidence he was a traitor to JFK is ample and unavoidable.

Such a waste of time to argue with David Von Pein, whose (no doubt paid) mission is to keep rehashing old (mostly settled) issues as distractions from more valuable questions raised by Jim and others here. DVP's is an old tactic that does its job all too well, but we should not fall for it here anymore.

Many here will recall previous discussion of the January 27, 1964, executive session of the Warren Commission in which J. Lee Rankin was discussing Marina Oswald as well as Lee Oswald's knowledge of languages. He said, "In addition to that there is this Spanish dictionary, and the books about Spanish where he was trying to learn Spanish although he had know some Spanish before he went to Russia, and we are trying to run that down to find out what he studied at the Monterey School of the Army in the way of languages because she used to make fun of him, according to some of their Russian friends, about his pronunciation of Spanish words, and he was very clumsy at it, and was embarrassed by her making jokes about that."

That quote you have attributed to RFK is really from George Bernard Shaw. RFK always attributed it as such at the end of his stump speech. When the traveling press heard him say, "As George Bernard Shaw once put it . . .," it was their cue to run for the bus. It was only after Ted Kennedy skipped the Shaw attribution in his eulogy that people began attributing the quote to RFK.

In THE MEN WHO KILLED KENNEDY, Charles Harrelson is shown Tramp pictures and admits one of the Tramps sure looks like him. Oliver Stone had Woody Harrelson as the male lead in NATURAL BORN KILLERS. Woody reportedly doesn't believe his father shot JFK.

Ironically, in the famous photo by George Tames of the New York Times of JFK in the Oval Office leaning on a table with his back to the camera -- a photo often taken to represent the burdens of the office of the presidency and sometimes titled "The Loneliest Job" or "The Loneliest Job in the World" -- JFK was reading the Times editorial page at the time and turned around to mutter, "That goddam Arthur Krock." He also said, "I wonder where Mr. Krock gets all the crap he puts in this horsexxxx column of his." The photo was taken on Feb. 10, 1961. Krock's column that day summarized criticisms of Kennedy's health care proposals, including that they amounted to "socialized medicine." Krock was an old friend of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and helped rewrite JFK's Harvard thesis into his early book WHY ENGLAND SLEPT.

“If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought -- not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1929

When this photo of the limo and the motorcycle escort was first published in the Dallas Morning News in 1988 when I was in Dallas for the twenty-fifth anniversary, I immediately noticed that Dan Rather is not in it. He claimed he was on that side of the overpass. That was just one of the stories he gave about where he was then. A colleague said Rather was actually at the Trade Mart, where CBS had the only live TV hookup. Rather had arranged that as one of five film crews the network had in Dallas for the president's visit. NBC and ABC only had the usual one crew each. I discuss this in my video on the news media and the assassination in Len Osanic's series 50 REASONS . . . FOR 50 YEARS.