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Joseph McBride

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  1. And the Mathers going to the Tippit home that afternoon to console the widow . . .
  2. 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.
  3. 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).
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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..
  7. 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.
  8. 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."
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.”
  12. Have you read my interview with Johnnie Maxie Witherspoon?
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. Numerous "witnesses" to the Tippit scene had Ruby connections. Ruby lived very close to where the murder occurred. He may even have been at the scene of the crime himself. It has long been claimed by some people that "Oswald" was walking toward Ruby's apartment house for refuge, but since the Oswald who was arrested on the ground floor of the theater was not at the Tippit murder scene, that is a red herring, though the proximity between the Tippit murder and the Ruby apartment house may have some bearing on the case. (The two Oswalds theory persuasively argued by John Armstrong complicates the situation considerably, though I am less certain than Armstrong is about which Oswald was where at what time. There may well have been both Oswalds at the theater -- including the man arrested in the balcony and taken out the back who disappeared and perhaps was the one seen in Carl Mather's car -- another fascinating lead that has not been adequately explained.) In any case, the Tippit scene was clearly a staged event, and a trap into which the officer was lured in order to be shot. I write about all this in INTO THE NIGHTMARE. The researcher who discovered the pattern of Ruby-connected witnesses at the Tippit murder scene was Jerry Rose. As I write in my book, In a 1985 article for his assassination journal The Third Decade, Jerry Rose discussed “the large number of indirect linkages of Ruby and Tippit” and raised the possibility that “Tippit was recruited into a conspiracy against Oswald by employing the linkages between [Oswald’s] own associations and those of Tippit” (see more about this in Chapter 13). . . . As was mentioned in Chapter 11, Jerry Rose, in his 1985 article for his assassination journal The Third Decade, offered a new paradigm that could help break through the cloud of confusion surrounding the officer’s shooting. Rose proposed "a relatively original approach here to the question of a pre-assassination relationship between Jack Ruby and J. D. Tippit. What I want to bring out here is something of the large number of indirect linkages of Ruby and Tippit: some of the many 'coincidences' of association between Ruby associates and persons who were either associates of Tippit or witnesses to his murder. The purpose of this analysis is to suggest -- certainly not to prove -- that: (a) Tippit was recruited into a conspiracy against Oswald by employing the linkages between his own associations and those of Tippit; and (b) (an entirely original idea, I think) that Ruby used these same linkages to set up a group of 'witnesses' to Tippit’s murder who would implicate Oswald as the murderer." However, it must be said that at least two Ruby-connected witnesses, Helen Markham and T. F. Bowley, provided some evidence that was damaging to the Oswald-did-it hypothesis, though they may have been going off-script (Markham was all over the map, hysterical and manipulated and unreliable except, it seems, for the question of when the shooting occurred). I did the first interview with Bowley that he gave other than to the police and the HSCA, and he seemed largely credible to me, although he did minimize his Ruby involvement, the full extent of which only came out years after I interviewed him (when the city of Dallas honored him; it seems his Ruby involvement was one reason he was generally reluctant to put himself forward, although evidently hardly anyone before me had tried, and I found him approachable). It does seem there were two sets of witnesses at that RASHOMON-like Tippit murder scene, which took me years to try to sort out.
  17. Two witnesses to the Top Ten phone call by the officer, the store owner, J. W. (Dub) Stark, and a former employee of Stark's, Louis Cortinas, identified the officer as Tippit. They said they knew him well. Tippit being outside his district is suspicious, although he was said by some witnesses to have frequently been in the area where he was killed. His assigned district was four miles from where he was shot. Tippit was shot in the district assigned to Officer William D. Mentzel; the two of them were secretly assigned that day to hunt down Oswald after the presidential assassination, before Oswald was officially identified as a suspect and before his name officially was known to the police. I discuss all this in detail in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE.
  18. One thing I can't stand about JFK assassination forums is all the wrangling that goes on. I try to not indulge that. It's counterproductive. Let people state their views and agree to disagree. Otherwise it just wastes time, which I guess is the point of it.
  19. In addition to the TSBD workers involved in the refurbishing work, at least two strangers, if not more, were seen on the upper floors by witnesses. They might have taken advantage of the construction work to blend in. http://harveyandlee.net/TSBD_Elevator/TSBD_elevator.html
  20. On the police radio on 11-22-63 you can still hear the Texas School Book Depository called "the Sexton Building." It was owned by oil man D. H. Byrd, who made a fortune out of the Vietnam War. I write about Byrd in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE. Byrd was an LBJ-Connally associate, an old friend of LBJ's, and was connected to Lee Oswald's CIA handler George de Morenschildt and Jack Crichton through oil business dealings. In addition to being a cofounder of the Civil Air Patrol (in which the teenaged Lee Oswald met flight instructor David Ferrie), Byrd was a major defense contractor through his partnership in the conglomerate Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV). According to Peter Dale Scott in his 1970-71 manuscript THE DALLAS CONSPIRACY, Byrd and his business partner James Ling made a prescient purchase of 132,600 shares of LTV stock in November 1963 for about $2 million, whose value rose to about $26 million by 1967 after LBJ's escalation of the war. Russ Baker calls Byrd an "avid Kennedy hater." He was also friendly with Clint Murchison and Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell (CIA liaison) and his brother, U.S. Air Force General Charles Cabell, Allen Dulles's deputy CIA director before both Dulles and Gen. Cabell were forced out by President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. It has been suggested that as of 11-63 Byrd's Texas School Book Depository was something of a Potemkin village to allow the plot to function partly out of its premises and to justify placing the unsuspecting Oswald as patsy on the presidential motorcade route through Marina Oswald's CIA handler Ruth Paine. The building was called the Sexton Building before the Texas School Book Depository moved in during the spring of 1963. It "was almost completely devoid of tenants until about six months before the assassination," Baker writes. The sixth floor was being refurbished by outsiders that November, which enabled access to the building by unknown people. Given how many lies have been told about the assassination in history textbooks, it's ironically fitting that the building served as a School Book Depository. Texas public school officials to this day largely set the parameters of what is acceptable in nationally distributed textbooks. According to Baker, Byrd "evidently rejoiced in Kennedy's assassination -- as suggested by the macabre fact that he arranged for the window from which Oswald purportedly fired the fatal shots to be removed and set up at his home." Byrd was a big-game hunter who was on his first foreign safari in Africa at the time of the assassination.
  21. Most of the anchors and TV reporters put out a lot of false information that day, but Bill Ryan seemed to be ahead of the curve with his reckless and repeated jumping to conclusions based on skimpy or erroneous information. I learned that day to get to a radio as fast as possible when something major happens, because the news often changes to fit the official line. From 12:40 to 1 p.m., I was hearing on network radio that the shots came from the hill overlooking Elm Street or the area of the railroad bridge. Then by 1 p.m. the reports changed to all the shots coming from behind, from a building called the Texas School Book Depository, without any explanation being offered on what happened to the shots from the front, and my antennae went up. By the end of the day I wasn't believing the official story that was already solidifying to try, convict, and execute Oswald on television. Over the years the coverage of the first twenty minutes has been proven far more accurate, with witness reports, photographs, and other evidence. And the brief statements Oswald was allowed to give on TV that first night helped convince me he was innocent of killing the president. Little was said on the news about the Tippit killing, but he was accused of that and denied it as well. An FBI document I found showed that he was never even arraigned for the JFK murder, only for the Tippit murder, although he was charged with both. Jim Leavelle told me Oswald was telling the truth at his midnight press conference when he said he had not been told by the police that he was being charged with the president's murder. As I write in INTO THE NIGHTMARE, Leavelle told me Captain Fritz directed him to nail Oswald for the Tippit killing since they didn't have the goods on him for the JFK killing. I asked Leavelle what he thought he had on Oswald for the Tippit murder, and he said he had witnesses, unlike in the president's assassination, but we now know the Tippit witnesses offered highly differing accounts, and some had dubious credibility, particularly their star witness, Helen Markham. And the Warren Commission denied the existence of Acquilla Clemmons, though Leavelle said he knew about her. She was threatened by the police to keep silent; she did not, and she was never seen again after her interview with Mark Lane and Emile de Antonio for the film of RUSH TO JUDGMENT. If we had known on the evening of November 22 what we know now, history would have been very different.
  22. One of the NBC-TV anchors in the posted footage. He's with Frank McGee and Chet Huntley.
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