Joseph McBride

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

One of the NBC-TV anchors in the posted footage. He's with Frank McGee and Chet Huntley.

It's amazing how almost entirely wrong Bill Ryan was that day.

John Armstrong's HARVEY & LEE is a key book, deeply researched. It's an eye-opener, one of the paradigm-changers in the case. I don't agree with every conclusion, and sometimes I get lost in his certainty in which Oswald is which at a given moment, but the research is overwhelming and generally convincing. John Newman's OSWALD AND THE CIA is also essential. And the Léo Sauvage book THE OSWALD AFFAIR is still valuable. Richard H. Popkin's book THE SECOND OSWALD is thin but anticipates Armstrong.

I think "Whew, Vaughn Meader" is more droll. It lets the audience get it and flatters their intelligence, while capturing the sad desolation of the day.

I guess Donald Rumsfeld may have had something of a point when he remarked that "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." But in Rather's case, he gave specific (conflicting) locations for his whereabouts at the time of the assassination, and there is no evidence of him being in those locations either, and though he did not admit to being at the Trade Mart, a colleague said he was there at the time. Eddie Barker was there doing the live hookup -- as I mention in my video, Rather had arranged for CBS-TV to have five complete camera crews in Dallas that day (including the only live coverage), when ABC and NBC each had the usual one. The photo of the station wagon leaving Dealey Plaza at 12:40 p.m. comports with Roger Craig's precise description of Oswald leaving in a station wagon at that time.

I haven't looked for Aynesworth in the photos, so I don't know if he can be seen or not. What do you think? Thanks for making these photos (and your video collection) available. There is a fascinating unpublished ms. called THE RATHER NARRATIVE that goes into Rather's behavior in the case in detail. I also deal with it in my 50 REASONS . . . FOR 50 YEARS video for Len Osanic (with videography by Jeff Carter), "Political Truth: The Media and the Assassination," currently available on Vimeo.

Notice how Dan Rather is not in the photo of the Queen Mary driving toward Stemmons Freeway, despite his claim that he was standing in that area and ran over the hill to see the commotion after the shooting. (Rather has also claimed to have been in other locations at the time of the shooting. A colleague said Rather was actually at the Trade Mart.) I have often wondered what it was like for the men on the running board to hold on all the way to Parkland. JFK's limousine was going 70 mph -- "fast but safe" was the order. I have driven that route at 70 mph many times. It takes four minutes to get to Parkland at that speed. The shooting took place at 12:30, so the limo probably arrived about 12:34, and estimates of a later arrival are probably wrong. The hospital was not ready for the arrival.

I heard it reported as "Phew -- Vaughn Meader," in a sadly resigned voice. And that it was on the night of Nov. 22. Bruce spent the afternoon trying to figure out how to come onto the stage.

Vaughn Meader was terrific as JFK. One night when I lived in LA I saw him sitting alone at the bar and restaurant Joe Allen's, so I went over and talked with him. He was distressed at how his career had been ruined by the assassination. He was a desolate figure. Someone announced plans to make a movie about that, which would be a good idea, but I haven't heard anything about it for a while. He learned of the assassination (as I did) in Milwaukee. Meader was riding a cab from the airport for an engagement. The cabbie asked if he had heard about Kennedy in Dallas. Meader said, "No, what's the joke?"

Thomas, ouch -- what an author wants to hear is, "I will buy a copy." I ordered a copy of Jim's book, and it will arrive today. Support your respected JFK assassination authors!

Good to know it's out. I just ordered it and look forward to starting to read it tomorrow. I am glad you updated it and included material on THE POST, etc. The analysis of Bugliosi, Spielberg, and Hanks in the previous edition is acute and important -- the way books and films propagandize for the official theory is a serious problem with the case, as is the ongoing dishonesty of the news media in its "reporting" of the assassination, i.e., largely an avoidance of actual reporting while retailing tired old lies incessantly.

I appreciate your good work on the case, Bill, and John Armstrong's, along with that of Jim and others. The late Larry Ray Harris blazed the trail, as did Gary Murr. Greg Lowrey and Bill Pulte have done some crucial work.

Thanks, Jim DiEugenio, Robert Harper, and others for your good words about my work on the Kennedy and Tippit cases. I spent thirty-one years on INTO THE NIGHTMARE, although I did a lot else during that time. But I was always researching the book and regard the assassination as my main interest in life, even though I've spent much of my life writing books about film and spent eighteen years writing film and TV scripts (the most satisfying were five American film Institute Life Achievement Awards). The assassination has been my principal focus since the moment it happened, and before -- I wrote a short story about it, "The Plot Against a Country," for my freshman English class at Marquette University High School in October 1961. I've always had a book in the works since May 1963 and next month will publish my critical study of the great German American director Ernst Lubitsch, HOW DID LUBITSCH DO IT?. That Columbia University Press book has been in progress for nine years. I've just launched a website for the book, http://howdidlubitschdoit.com. I always continue researching the Kennedy and Tippit cases and value the work of Jim and others on this forum and other sites.

Jack Daniel told me the boys in his film are his sons. They didn't know the assassination had just occurred. The reason the framing is bad and he loses most of the limousine when he pans with it as it passes is that he was holding the camera up to his chest and not looking through the viewfinder, he said. He did that because he wanted to look directly at the motorcade.

The reference to Marquette briefly made me wonder what the FBI was up to with John McAdams on Nov. 23, 1963. I learned about the assassination while in the line for lunch at Marquette University High School.

I went looking for the cemetery with Oswald's grave on one of my first trips to Texas. I pulled into a Dallas cemetery to ask for directions to the right one. The man there was nice and told me where Oswald is buried (in Fort Worth), but he insisted Oswald was not from Dallas, he was from Fort Worth. Oswald sure got around for a guy of only 24.

Thanks for all the videos, David. You've done us a real service by finding them and posting them.

When Marguerite that weekend suggested that Lee should be buried in Arlington Cemetery, Robert said, "Shut up, mother." She actually had a good point. He was a patriotic veteran who tried to foil the plot as an FBI informant and wound up being made its patsy.

Thanks for that kind mention of my new book, Joe. TWO CHEERS FOR HOLLYWOOD: JOSEPH McBRIDE ON FILM, has sixty-four essays, articles, and interviews from my fifty years covering films, including a new Introduction and five new articles. It contains one article about JFK, my review of THIRTEEN DAYS, which caused a lot of controversy with Irish America magazine. Here it is, from the April/May 2001 issue of that magazine, with my commentary preceding it: EYEBALL TO EYEBALL: JFK VS. THE JOINT CHIEFS IN THIRTEEN DAYS I was the film columnist for Irish America magazine for three years, and it was a mostly enjoyable outlet, allowing me to cover both new and classic films on Irish subjects and issues surrounding the movies’ depiction of our ethnic group. But this column on the 2000 film Thirteen Days, published in the April/May 2001 issue, shortly after George W. Bush became “president,” caused an uproar at the magazine. My bio under the column about this film about the Cuban Missile Crisis noted that I had been a volunteer in John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary campaign. For many years I had been working on a book dealing with the president’s assassination. The magazine’s editor, Patricia Harty, had been a guest of President Bill Clinton in the Lincoln Bedroom, and after Bush moved into the White House, she expressed a hope in the magazine that he also would invite her to stay overnight. My negative comparison in the column between Bush and President John F. Kennedy, suggesting that we might not be here if Bush had been president instead of JFK during the Missile Crisis, did not go down well at the magazine in the tense days following the stolen 2000 election. I also managed to express some of my views on the assassination, its causes, and JFK aide Kenneth O’Donnell, who is played by the film’s star, Kevin Costner. Further research for my 2013 book Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit convinced me that O’Donnell was disloyal to JFK. He was about to be fired for corruption upon the completion of the Texas trip and was an inside man in the White House performing vital tasks for the conspiracy; he also lied to the Warren Commission about the sources of the shots. There were rumors that O’Donnell’s son Kevin had helped finance Thirteen Days, but those were not proven at the time of the film’s release, so I went along with the editor cutting that suggestive piece of background information. The film gives an absurdly hagiographic portrait of Kennedy’s special assistant and appointments secretary, who actually played only a minor role in the crisis; JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen described Thirteen Days as “Kenny O’Donnell saving the world.” It later emerged that this distorted focus was indeed due in part to Kevin’s involvement in the financing. According to Britain’s Guardian newspaper, “His son Kevin, an internet tycoon, helped bankroll a buyout of Beacon Entertainment, which made the movie, and appears to have been the partial inspiration for promoting his father -- played by Kevin Costner -- to the role of the ‘ordinary Joe’ hero audiences identify with.” O’Donnell’s daughter Helen was more forthright in taking credit for two books (published in 1998 and 2015) intended to rehabilitate her father’s reputation. Another element of my Thirteen Days column the editor wanted to change was my insistence on putting quotes around “president” before Bush’s name, since I don’t believe he was ever president of the United States, only an unelected usurper. Somehow I won that battle, referring to him as “our new non-elected ‘president’ George W. Bush,” but she refused to let me refer to General Curtis LeMay as a “madman,” a word restored here and a judgment I believe is abundantly warranted. I knew my days as the magazine’s film columnist were numbered because of these fundamental political disagreements, so a few months later I resigned. But it was worth it to express my revisionist views on these controversial matters in Irish America. A lawyer I know who worked for the U.S. government told me at the time, “I can’t believe you got that printed.” ***** On the morning of Saturday, October 20, 1962, I was in a station wagon with my family en route to Milwaukee’s General Mitchell Field to hear President John F. Kennedy make a campaign speech for Democratic congressional candidates. As we moved slowly in a long line of cars to the airport, the radio reported that JFK had come down with a “slight cold” in Chicago and was returning directly to Washington. We didn’t know then that the Cuban Missile Crisis was reaching its boiling point. Even after Kennedy revealed in a television address two days later that the U.S. and the USSR were staring each other down over nuclear missiles in Cuba, I don’t recall being worried about the possibility of world annihilation. As a devout Catholic boy, I was mostly concerned that the president had lied to us. My naïveté over what the French call a “cold diplomatique” is a measure of how far we’ve come since that more innocent era; today we tend to assume the president is lying unless we can be convinced otherwise. The stirring new lm about the Missile Crisis, Thirteen Days, can’t help seeming somewhat old-fashioned in stressing the importance of thoughtful presidential leadership. The crisis actually had two heroes: President Kennedy and Soviet Chairman Nikita S. Khrushchev. Their prior recklessness over Cuba precipitated the crisis, but in the end both had the wisdom to save the world from destruction. Khrushchev is not depicted in Thirteen Days, but he is a powerful off-screen presence. In the 1974 TV movie on the crisis, The Missiles of October, he is memorably played by Howard da Silva. Missiles is more a chamber play than a realistic recreation, but it works superbly on those terms while thereby avoiding the pitfalls of impersonating famous characters. Surprisingly, so does the far more elaborately produced Thirteen Days, which boasts an extraordinarily fine performance by Bruce Greenwood as JFK. Greenwood captures Kennedy’s body language and the timbre of his voice while avoiding the usual caricature. Most importantly, Greenwood conveys the thoughtfulness and prudence that enabled Kennedy to resist the pressures of his Joint Chiefs of Staff to escalate the crisis by attacking Cuba. Thirteen Days is unexpectedly timely now, since “thoughtfulness and prudence” are not words that spring to mind in discussing our new non-elected “president” George W. Bush. Steven Culp smoothly impersonates Robert F. Kennedy in Thirteen Days, although the characterization is somewhat sentimentalized, portraying Bobby as less “ruthless” than he actually was, thus missing some of his complexity. The film alludes only briefly to RFK’s plotting against Castro, which continued even after the missile crisis, and while emphasizing his gradual dovishness, it does not include his rash suggestion early in the crisis that the U.S. stage a provocation, “[Y]ou know, sink the Maine again or something.” Both actors playing Kennedys act rings around the nominal star, Kevin Costner, who affects a laughably bad Kennedy accent as the president’s appointment secretary, Kenneth O’Donnell. Costner doesn’t seem to realize that a Kennedy accent, which has strong traces of England, is not the same as a Boston Irish accent. Despite Costner’s efforts to be relatively self-e acing, his star power imbalances the film, since his O’Donnell is basically a glorified courtier. But it was only Costner’s clout as star and producer that made this film possible. (The unofficial sequel to Thirteen Days has already been made, and it also stars Costner -- Oliver Stone’s JFK. Maybe next he can play George H. W. Bush in the prequel, The Bay of Pigs.) Thirteen Days screenwriter David Self ably edited the riveting dialogue derived from the 1997 book of transcripts of the White House deliberations, The Kennedy Tapes, edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow. Unfortunately, that marvelous book is given ungenerous acknowledgment in microscopic type near the close of the end credits (the film’s title is cribbed from RFK’s posthumously published book on the crisis, on which The Missiles of October was based). Director Roger Donaldson, an Australian who began his filmmaking career in New Zealand, is not seduced by any American flag-waving rhetoric, and he vividly depicts the ominous military preparations for an invasion of Cuba, an element unseen in Missiles. But Thirteen Days, for all its aura of authenticity, misses the ultimate point of the crisis. The filmmakers went eyeball to eyeball with some of the darkest truths about modern American history -- and they blinked. The strange decision to tell the story from O’Donnell’s viewpoint led Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen to mock Thirteen Days as “Kenny O’Donnell saving the world.” Journalist and Kennedy confidant Ben Bradlee described Costner’s heart-tugging portrayal of Kenneth O’Donnell as “exaggerated and fictionalized. To me, he was the enforcer, he kept everyone in line. He was a tough guy and totally loyal servant and friend.” It’s significant that the more convivial Kennedy aide Dave Powers, JFK’s closest friend and O’Donnell’s collaborator on the 1972 memoir Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, is not portrayed in the film, for Costner’s character resembles a combination of Powers and O’Donnell. I find it hard to accept O’Donnell as a loyal, sympathetic figure because I can’t overlook his role in covering up the truth about Kennedy’s assassination. O’Donnell and Powers were riding in the Secret Service followup car behind JFK’s limousine in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Asked by Warren Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter for his “reaction as to the source of the shots,” O’Donnell testified cryptically, “My reaction in part is reconstruction -- is that they came from the right rear. That would be my best judgment.” However, House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill revealed in his 1987 autobiography, Man of the House, that O’Donnell and Powers told him they heard two shots from behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll in front of the president. O’Donnell explained to O’Neill, “I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn’t want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the [Kennedy] family.” Powers more truthfully told the commission, “My first impression was that the shots came from the right and overhead, but I also had a fleeting impression that the noise appeared to come from the front in the area of the triple overpass. This may have resulted from my feeling, when I looked forward toward the overpass, that we might have ridden into an ambush.” Thirteen Days is most valuable for reopening for a wide audience the question of civilian control of the military, a topic as important today as it was in 1962. The heart of the film is JFK’s confrontation with his Joint Chiefs, particularly General Curtis LeMay, the madman who at the time was U.S. Air Force chief of staff. Not content with incinerating cities in Germany and Japan during World War II, LeMay subsequently headed the Strategic Air Command and wanted to launch a preemptive nuclear attack against the USSR. He helped inspire not one but two characters in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove, Sterling Hayden’s General Jack D. Ripper and George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson. The most stunning revelation in The Kennedy Tapes is the exchange between LeMay and JFK on October 19, which is recreated onscreen. On the tape itself, the insubordinate general angrily reminded Kennedy that “you've made some pretty strong statements about [the Soviet missiles in Cuba] being defensive and that we would take action against offensive weapons. I think that a blockade and political talk would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this. And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way, too. In other words, you're in a pretty bad fix at the present time.” Kennedy responded incredulously, “What did you say?” LeMay repeated, “You’re in a pretty bad fix.” The Kennedy Tapes reports that Kennedy then made “an unclear, joking, reply.” According to RFK’s Thirteen Days, which incorrectly ascribes LeMay’s remark to another general, the president retorted, “You are in it with me.” On the tape, what Kennedy says is, "You're in there with me. [Forcing a laugh] Personally." The film’s JFK says, “Well, maybe you haven’t noticed you’re in it with me.” The departing LeMay (played by Kevin Conway) fumes, “Those goddam Kennedys are gonna destroy this country if we don’t do something about this.” No wonder the actual President Kennedy worried at one point in that crisis, “Suppose Khrushchev has the same degree of control over his forces as I have over mine?” Khrushchev’s own anxiety over the situation, expressed in his moving letter to Kennedy on October 26, receives insufficient emphasis in the film. The Soviet leader wrote: “If you have not lost command of yourself and realize clearly what this could lead to, then, Mr. President, you and I should not now pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter the knot will become. And a time may come when this knot is tied so tight that the person who tied it is no longer capable of untying it, and then the knot will have to be cut. What that would mean I need not explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly what dread forces our two countries possess.” Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s famous comment, “We are eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked,” referred to the Soviets, but he could have been describing JFK’s relationship with the Chiefs. After Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a secret deal to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey and a promise not to invade Cuba, Kennedy wrote him, “I think that you and I, with our heavy responsibilities for the maintenance of peace, were aware that developments were approaching a point where events could have become unmanageable.” The turning point of the crisis was Robert Kennedy’s meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin on October 27, delivering an ultimatum from the president while offering the other terms as olive branches. As reported by Khrushchev in his 1970 autobiography Khrushchev Remembers, the scene was considerably more dramatic than the one in the film, which chickens out at this critical moment of revelation by having Dobrynin, not RFK, bring up that some in the U.S. military “wish for war.” According to Khrushchev, what RFK told Dobrynin was: “The President is in a grave situation, and he does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba. . . . Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will. That is why the President is appealing directly to Chairman Khrushchev for his help in liquidating this conflict. If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.” Kennedy’s friend Paul B. (Red) Fay Jr., the under secretary of the navy, had a similarly chilling conversation with JFK in the summer of 1962. It took place the day after Kennedy finished reading Seven Days in May, the popular novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II about an attempted military coup against a ctional president. “It’s possible,” Kennedy told Fay. “It could happen in this country, but the conditions would have to be just right. If, for example, the country had a young President, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back, but this would be written off as the usual military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, ‘Is he too young and inexperienced?’ The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment. “Then, if there were a third Bay of Pigs, it could happen.” Kennedy added defiantly, “But it won’t happen on my watch.” He felt so strongly about such a threat that he regarded Seven Days in May as “a warning to the nation” and in 1963 allowed director John Frankenheimer to shoot scenes for the film version in the White House. A full-page ad for the film appeared in the New York Times on the day of the president’s assassination. The American public, unaware of the trade of the missiles in Turkey, generally considered the Cuban Missile Crisis an unalloyed Kennedy triumph, but from the viewpoint of the Chiefs it was a failure of presidential will, “another Bay of Pigs.” Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recalled in 1987, “After Khrushchev had agreed to remove the missiles, President Kennedy invited the Chiefs to the White House so that he could thank them for their support during the crisis, and there was one hell of a scene. LeMay came out saying, ‘We lost! We ought to just go in there today and knock ’em off!’’’ Some have suggested that the nuclear test ban treaty with the USSR in 1963 may have been regarded by military leaders as the “third Bay of Pigs,” requiring a violent seizure of power to ensure U.S. superiority over the USSR. LeMay was not alone in his advocacy of a first strike. At a July 1961 meeting of the National Security Council, the Chiefs outraged JFK with a presentation suggesting that the rates of missile production in the two countries would allow a “window of opportunity” in “late 1963” for a “surprise” U.S. nuclear attack on the USSR. Kennedy’s most eloquent statement on the danger of nuclear war was his speech at American University in Washington on June 10, 1963, which Khrushchev described as the greatest speech ever given by an American president [in the postwar era]. Part of that speech is played over the ending of Thirteen Days. The original text reads: “What kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on Earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children -- not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women -- not merely peace in our time but peace for all time. . . . Our problems are manmade -- therefore, they can be solved by man. . . . For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.” Khrushchev was equally eloquent when he reflected to Norman Cousins shortly after the crisis, “What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?” Both leaders paid dearly for their principled restraint. Khrushchev was deposed by his Presidium colleagues in October 1964, eleven months after Kennedy was murdered. Indira Gandhi observed, “Kennedy died because he lost the support of his peers.” Those who continue to believe that a coup d’état can’t happen in this country are ignoring not only the truth about November 1963 but also the events surrounding our last presidential election.