Joseph McBride

I don't know the identities of those men. I'm not sure offhand if that has been investigated. I was hoping from the title of this thread that it would deal with that question!

Behind the house but on the same property was a rooming house inhabited by various men. A subject for further research.

I just got Douglas Caddy's autobiography in the mail from Amazon and am eager to read it. Congratulations!

Also, no Dan Rather in the photo. I noticed that immediately when this was first printed by the Dallas Morning News in 1988 when I was in town for the twenty-fifth anniversary. A colleague has said Rather was at the Trade Mart. Rather has given various claims for his whereabouts at the time of the shooting, including his frequent claim he was on the other side of the overpass from the shooting area waiting for a film drop.

http://www.thesleuthjournal.com/the-sirhan-case-his-attorney-brother-speak-out-video/ Bob Wilson and I interview Sirhan Sirhan's attorney Laurie Dusek and his brother Munir on this new podcast. We are prompted by the 50th anniversary of the shooting and calls by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend for new investigations of the shooting, since they now believe Sirhan Sirhan did not shoot their father, as I agree.

It would be valuable to know how Marie Tippit wound up with the head of the State Democratic Party, Eugene Locke, the man in whose office the motorcade route was decided, as her attorney. The donations to the Tippit Fund were quite large, a reported total of $657,578, which would equal more than $5 million in 2018 money (I think some donations were in the nature of payoffs, and I went through all the police files of them and media reports about donations but still couldn't account for more than half of them), and Marie later complained that she had not received all the money she was due. The fund was administered by the Dallas Police Department. The board consisted of the mayor, the city treasurer, newspaper bosses Joe Dealey and James F. Chambers Jr., and other civic big wheels. She blamed poor financial planning and unwise handling by her advisers. "That [money] was put into a trust . . . and I can't say that we've come out earning a lot of money with it," she said in 1983. She added that her children were each to receive about $100,000, but for reasons she refused to discuss, "They did not get that much money each at all."

I somehow posted this twice and couldn't fix it. Among other things, I plug Lisa Pease's upcoming book on the RFK assassination on the show. I am hoping and expecting it will be the best yet on the subject. She is an ace researcher and writer and doesn't pull punches.

And the Mathers going to the Tippit home that afternoon to console the widow . . .

The link to the podcast:

They could replate the front page without too much trouble and then stop the presses and replace it. The process might take an hour or less, from the news room to the composing room to the press room. In an emergency, it could be done even faster. Sometimes in the wee hours for the second edition I'd cover a late-breaking shooting or fire or blizzard,' and we'd get the story onto page one and maybe with a jump inside. One night I got to the scene of a shooting before the cops did and found a guy lying on the floor of a hotel lobby, shot through a six-pack of beer he was holding, in a pool of bloody beer. We'd also add national and international stories from the wire, and sometimes those were major stories. Part of my job was to get the first edition each midnight and proofread the whole first section in twenty minutes; any story could be reset in time for the edition that most local homes received. The other sections had been finished earlier in the day and could not be changed. Also, the press foreman would sometimes be instructed by the night editor to smash words on the metal curved plate with a hammer if an obscenity inadvertently crept into the paper (for that reason the sports department was forbidden to call a hockey puck a puck; they had to call it a disk). And one time a problem arose because some disgruntled person in the composing room had scrawled an obscenity backward on an ad on an inside page so it would read clearly in the paper; no one caught it because of its position, until the daylight hours.

One of my editors at The Wisconsin State Journal in Madison (1969-73) told me he was such a newspaper addict that when he and his wife would go to Chicago for a fun weekend, he would drive her crazy by going downstairs from their hotel room to the street periodically to pick up each edition of the Chicago papers to study the changes in the various editions. There were numerous newspapers in some American big cities, and usually at least two major competing ones in each city of any size, until the sixties or thereabouts, when a federal law was passed (known as the Failing Newspapers Act) to allow newspapers to be consolidated under the same ownership and in the same printing and editing plants as long as they maintained editorial independence from each other, at least theoretically (as happened, for instance, with the locally-owned Milwaukee Journal and the Hearst-owned Milwaukee Sentinel in the sixties; they functioned "independently" for a while and ultimately merged as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).

Despite the wealth of detail in the Secret Service Report, it is a significant deflection of substance that the report contains only one sentence about the crucial Nov. 14 meeting in Eugene Locke's office in Dallas, when the decision, passed along from Kenneth O'Donnell in Washington, was made to hold the event at the Trade Mart.

That''s a really ignorant and foolish article by Jack Ohman. But now I understand this oft-reported trope about people thinking when they visit Dealey Plaza that it is smaller than it seems in photos and films. That (willed?) misperception makes it easier to rationalize the bizarre Oswald-did-it theory that a mediocre marksman who didn't own the rifle entered into evidence that was misaligned and often jammed was able to shoot the president through trees and from behind and in front at the same time in less time than it would take to shoot and aim properly, and somehow hit the governor and James Tague too, even though no one saw him do it since he was in the second-floor lunchroom at the time.

The Industrial Boulevard route supposedly was considered too grungy for a presidential motorcade, but they would have seen more voters than by whizzing along the freeway to the Trade Mart. Still, by the time they reached Dealey Plaza, they had been seen by many thousands of people downtown and on the way from the airport. There was also a time consideration. As it was, the motorcade was running five minutes late as it entered Dealey Plaza. But the excuses don't explain the decision to violate Secret Service protocol, which required the limousine to not to go below 25mph. It was going about 11mph after the dogleg turn onto Elm Street..

To the HSCA.

Bill Moyers testified under oath that he made the decision to remove the bubble top in Dallas since the rain had stopped. He was an advance man on the Texas trip.

I write about this crucial decision at length in INTO THE NIGHTMARE. The decision to choose the Trade Mart as the luncheon location was made in Eugene Locke's law office in Dallas on Nov. 14. Kenneth O'Donnell made the final decision, with the complicity of the Secret Service (Lawson and Sorrels) and Governor Connally and perhaps also Locke. Jack Puterbaugh was representing O'Donnell at that meeting in Dallas. Yes, they could have gone through Dealey Plaza to the Trade Mart while bypassing Elm Street and putting a wooden ramp from Main leading to the freeway entrance ramp, but the choice of the Trade Mart made the dogleg onto Elm Street appear all but inevitable. Eugene Locke isn't talked about much, but he was one of those "Mr. Everywhere" guys -- a crony of LBJ, an old friend of Henry Wade, and the chairman of the State Democratic Executive Committee in Texas. LBJ rewarded him with the Medal of Freedom, the ambassadorship to Pakistan, and the post of deputy ambassador to South Vietnam (at various times, Mary Ferrell worked in his law firm, as did, after Locke's death, George W. Bush's personal lawyer and failed Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers); Locke even served as Marie Tippit's attorney after the killing of her husband. One of the surprises of my research was finding that O'Donnell evidently was the inside man on the plot at the White House. He and the Secret Service also stole Kennedy's coffin from the hallway at Parkland Hospital at gunpoint to avoid having an autopsy done by Dr. Earl Rose in Dallas, as was legally required (I think the coffin may have been empty at that point, and from the plotters' point of view, it would have been worth a gunfight to conceal that, which would have exposed the plot). O'Donnell lied to the Warren Commission about the direction of the shots; he later told Tip O'Neill that he heard two shots from behind the fence but "testified the way [the FBi] wanted me to. I just didn't want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family . . . everybody wanted this thing behind them." What was O'Donnell's motive for his various acts of disloyalty? According to Seymour Hersh's DARK SIDE OF CAMELOT, O'Donnell had been disparaging the president and was going to be fired on Monday, Nov. 25, by JFK at the White House for corruption (skimming of campaign contributions by O'Donnelll and two others). This part of Hersh's book (which in some sections admittedly has serious problems) seems to be based on strong evidence from Kennedy presidential campaign and Democratic National Committee operative Paul Corbin and journalist Charles Bartlett, a close friend of JFK's, who called O'Donnell "the bagman" for the corruption and said Corbin had signed statements he took to RFK and JFK. O'Donnell began a long slide into alcoholism after the assassination, and that led to his premature death in 1977. His daughter's book reports that he was always "haunted" by Dallas and blamed himself for choosing the motorcade route through Dealey Plaza: "His decision would haunt Kenny for the remainder of his life." O'Donnell would tell his wife, "I let him down. I failed. I let him down." As Mort Sahl put it, President Kennedy "had a strange group of friends. Remarkably absent when he fell."

Orson Welles wrote a good screenplay in the 1970s based on one by Donald Freed about Sirhan's brainwashing by the CIA to serve as the patsy. Sirhan is portrayed sympathetically, as a weak, lonely young immigrant easily manipulated by a female agent who lures him to a safe house to be worked on by his CIA programmer. It was called ASSASSIN or THE SAFE HOUSE. Welles was to have played the CIA programmer with Nietzschean beliefs, called Dr. William A. Must (apparently based on Dr. William Joseph Bryan Jr.), and possibly was to have directed the film, but of course they couldn't get funding. I write about this in my 2007 book WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO ORSON WELLES?: A PORTRAIT OF AN INDEPENDENT CAREER. Sal Mineo was being considered to play Sirhan, and he was murdered in 1976 in one of those slayings that seemed to make no sense.

It's valuable to hear your thoughts and perspective and history, Steve Jaffe. Thanks for contributing here. I look forward to your book. I found EXECUTIVE ACTION enlightening from its first run and believe it influenced Stone's JFK as well. I like the way EA gets into the mindset of the plotters to show how it could have gone down and probably did (though Lane complained the script was rewritten by Trumbo to avoid blaming the CIA by name; perhaps you can shed light on that). Ryan is especially brilliant. The Will Geer/H. L. Hunt figure is also fascinating. Even if the film had to be somewhat circumspect in accusing specific people and institutions in order to get made at all, making these men and the Lancaster figure composites has its value dramatically. It's easy enough to identify Geer's character as H. L. Hunt, though he also can stand in for other rightwing oligarchs who hated Kennedy, including Clint Murchison Sr., D. H. Byrd, and H. L.'s son Nelson Bunker Hunt. Ryan's suave and genocidal CIA man reminds me of both Richard Helms and George H. W. Bush, though Bush's CIA involvement was not known at the time (Bush, though known as "Poppy" to his family, was nicknamed "Rubbers" by his cronies in Congress for so vigorously pushing birth control methods for Third World countries; the Ryan character has a particular chilling speech about what he says is the urgent need for population control in Third World countries). Lancaster is something like William Harvey, David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, or a combination thereof.

Harry Olsen was fired by Chief Curry in December 1963 and fled to California with Coleman. Garner made many claims of involvement in activities surrounding the assassination in a 1967 interview with Mark Lane. Garner died at age thirty of an alleged heroin overdose in Louisiana in January 1970. In his obituary, Penn Jones reported, “Garner repeatedly told Jim Garrison that [DPD Captain] Will Fritz in Dallas had threatened Garner’s life.”

Have you read my interview with Johnnie Maxie Witherspoon?

It was Gladys Johnson I found guarded and suspicious, not the room itself! I never understood why people think Dealey Plaza is small compared with photos and films. I first visited there in 1983 and have been there frequently since and have always found it much the way it appears on film. Maybe that is because I saw so many films and photos of it before going there. It's good that it has not been changed much other than in a few significant details. There was serious talk about tearing down the TSBD, but an outcry prevented it. Too bad the Ambassador Hotel in LA was torn down with the enthusiastic support of the Kennedy family. A bullet lost in the ceiling space could have helped prove that there were two gunmen -- although we already have a lot of proof of that. The first time I went in the pantry with my brother we were milling around, and a black kitchen worker, rather than throwing us out, smiled and said, "Do you want to see where his head fell?" He showed us the spot, from which someone or other had gouged some of the concrete. This good man was almost venerating the spot -- unlike the Kennedy family.

Whatever Livingstone writes needs to be taken with a big grain of salt and corroborated with more reliable sources, if possible. He uses a lot of gossip and speculation and was inclined to be, shall we say, rather intemperate. He did turn up some possible good leads to be pursued elsewhere. I left out a lot of things from various sources that I could not substantiate. Some may be tantalizing, but there's too much speculation and mere gossip in the JFK/Tippit/Ruby/Oswald case and the literature on it already.

Fascinating point, Gene, yes. Further investigation is warranted. I would just add that Earlene Roberts was the housekeeper. Gladys Johnson was the landlady. I met Mrs. Johnson once at that rooming house. She showed me Oswald's room (it was so tiny it was almost like a closet) but was very guarded and suspicious. Roberts was infirm and died in 1966.