Joseph McBride

The ending of my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT: THE WHISKEY INCIDENT An obscure, long-forgotten incident that took place during an earlier motorcade could shed some light on how Kennedy might have reacted to what happened in Dallas. His words in response to the previous assault were ones he might have felt or uttered if he somehow could have come through Dealey Plaza alive. This October 23, 1960 incident in downtown Milwaukee, which I learned about while going through microfilm of old newspapers during my research for this book, occurred late in the presidential campaign when Kennedy visited my home town. I don’t know why I had something better to do that Sunday evening, but it was a "school night” and I was thirteen years old and in my final year of Catholic grade school, so I was not there as a witness. Both of the major local papers, the Journal and the Sentinel, covered the incident in detail. This day was Kennedy’s only visit to Wisconsin in the general election campaign, a whirlwind thirteen-hour trip to four cities to give speeches televised throughout the state and to raise funds in smaller, private groups. His concluding speech at the large Milwaukee Arena would be a paid political broadcast on two local TV stations. Riding in an open convertible, the presidential candidate was making a slow-moving progress through heavy crowds to give his speech at the place where I would later hear him speak as president and exchange greetings with him for the last time as he walked toward the limousine in which he would be murdered. On the Sunday evening of the campaign event in October 1960, Kennedy was riding in the front passenger seat of a rented convertible. Sitting in the back were his sister Eunice Shriver, Congressman Clement J. Zablocki, and, between them, William J. Feldstein, chairman of arrangements for the rally. The driver was a police detective, August Knueppel. After a rally at the airport, Kennedy had the top of the convertible raised because of the autumn chill, but he changed his mind on the way downtown and had it lowered because of the enthusiastic crowds, estimated at between thirty and forty thousand people. The Journal reported that Kennedy’s aides had asked the Milwaukee police not to interfere with the crowds so the candidate could shake hands and sign autographs. But that backfired. Many people were pressing dangerously in on the motorcade in the jammed downtown area along the city’s major thoroughfare, Wisconsin Avenue. Teenaged girls running alongside Kennedy’s car were screaming, some crying hysterically, and throngs of others were stretching out their hands to the candidate. Not wanting to risk pulling anyone toward the car, he touched the hands gingerly “using an up and down chopping motion,” all the time wearing “a small, fixed smile,” the press reported. As the candidate’s car edged to the corner of East Wisconsin Avenue and North Water Street, a crowd of about fifty Nixon supporters were among those waiting. Many were holding glasses of liquor, as if they’d come from a cocktail party. Some were chanting “We want Nixon!,” and some chanted obscenities as the rival candidate’s convertible drove slowly past. This location was just blocks from the spot where former president Theodore Roosevelt had been shot while campaigning in October 1912 but survived the bullet in his chest. At the time Roosevelt was shot he was getting into his car, en route to his speech at the Milwaukee Auditorium, much as Kennedy was doing forty-eight years later while heading to the Auditorium and Arena. Suddenly someone in the crowd that night in 1960 reached into the car preceding Kennedy’s and grabbed the Western-style hat of the Milwaukee County Sheriff, Clemens F. Michalski, flinging it into the air. An unidentified man standing with a blonde woman stepped forward and hurled a heavy Old Fashioned glass filled with whiskey at Kennedy’s head. “My God,” exclaimed Congressman Zablocki, “who’s throwing whiskey at us?” One of eighteen police officers nearby tried to jump into the fray, but the police were unable to stop the crowd as it spiraled out of control. “Then, wham,” recalled William Feldstein, “the glass came.” It hit the campaign worker in his head, causing swelling that lasted until the following day. “Kennedy was very incensed. He turned and asked me, ‘Are you all right?’ Then he turned to his sister and said: ‘Can you imagine anything like that?’” The windshield was splashed with booze, most of it landing on the driver, who responded with professional sang-froid, “It was cheap whiskey.” Kennedy was splashed too. He wiped his face and, reaching across the width of the car, handed back the glass to the man who had thrown it. Witnesses said Kennedy remained calm, but he said to his unknown assailant, "Here’s your glass, sir. You’re not fit to be an American.”

http://fightbox.com/en/podcast/item/...joseph-mcbrideMy two-hour-plus interview is now online (since it's already Nov. 22) in Europewith the well-informed Daniel Austin on his FightBox podcast. If you havetrouble playing it with Safari, as I have so far, try Chrome. We discussthe murders of JFK and Tippit, new document releases, and much more.It's good to see a channel that's mostly devoted to sports focusingon the assassination to help broaden the listeners' perspective. Danis a student of the case as well as of boxing and wrestling. There isalso a shorter version on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7RrhgbqF50.

We will have to wait for the publication of Lifton's FINAL CHARADE or further Lifton interviews and lectures to get the evidence on his claim about McNamara. He made it on the Brent Holland podcast. He has been doing interviews with Holland recently hinting at some of the revelations in his book. He also claims Oswald might have survived Ruby's gunshot but was deliberately killed on the operating table at Parkland. And he says he has eyewitnesses to a body transfer at Love Field.

The Pentagon Papers says explicitly that South Vietnam was a creation of the United States. Since they had Leslie Gelb on the series, they could have asked him to say that. But no.

The heading, "Ken Burns' Vietnam," leaves out his co-director, Lynn Novick. She went to Vietnam; he didn't. She conducted 85 of the 100 interviews. And so on. She is at least as much the auteur as he is. Women directors often get ignored. Jim DiEugenio doesn't ignore her in his fine articles on this deplorable, mendacious series.

A lot of this back-and-forth is erroneous. I am the one who found the FBI memo about George H. W. Bush revealing and discussing his early CIA ties and interviewed the "other" George Bush the CIA falsely claimed was the one referred to in that memo and wrote about these matters for The Nation in 1988, etc. I have 35 pages in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE on the G. H. W. Bush connections to the assassination. In it I discuss the third article I wrote for The Nation in 1988, in which I went deeply into Bush's involvement with James Parrott and his rightwing cronies, who were investigated for six months by the FBI after the assassination. The Nation refused to run that well-documented article, which I submitted in time to run before the 1988 election.

In Berkeley, as one might expect, people flock to truly good political movies (and there is a theater that plays a lot of offbeat documentaries on social issues). I remember the jammed house for FAHRENHEIT 9/11 at a large theater when I went with my brother Tim, who looks a lot like Michael Moore and was wearing a baseball cap. People were doing doubletakes in the lobby as we walked past.

When I saw PARKLAND during its first week in Berkeley, there were three other people in the theater. A fiasco. One subversive thing Oliver Stone managed to slip into WORLD TRADE CENTER was someone shouting that there were explosives going off in the basement. Otherwise it seemed to be a case study in how to make an "apolitical" film about a political subject, which means it was political by not challenging the official myth. I saw it at a preview in San Francisco and was surprised when Stone himself showed up with one of his stars. The discussion didn't amount to much, nor did the film.

See my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE for an account of my two Bush articles I managed to get published in The Nation during the summer of 1988, and some of their questionable behavior during that period (including their connections with U.S. intelligence), and how they killed the third article I wrote in time to be published before the 1988 presidential election, a well-documented piece about Bush and James Parrott and his rightwing cronies, after they commissioned me to do two months of additional research in D.C. and Texas.

http://midnightwriternews.com/mwn-episode-013-a-tribute-to-jim-marrs/

From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT: Later on November 22, [Bill] Alexander [one of Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade's top assistants] was agitating for a filing against Oswald by the DA’s office as a member of a communist conspiracy to kill the president. According to Manchester’s Death of a President, Alexander “prepared to charge Oswald with murdering the President ‘as part of an international Communist conspiracy.’” When I asked Alexander if he did advocate such a charge, he replied, “Yes, I did, directly due to the fact that we seized all that communist material and his correspondence with a guy named Stone nobody knew was a Communist at the time.” Alexander identified this man as I. F. Stone (1907-89), the leftwing independent journalist who had been accused earlier in 1992, apparently falsely, of having been a Soviet agent. This charge was made by a KGB major general Stone may have known as an innocent press contact. Somewhat surprisingly given his iconoclastic reputation as an independent investigative journalist, Stone vigorously defended the Warren Commission against its critics in 1964. Like many others on the American left, he may have been felt threatened by the fact that a supposed leftist was charged with the crime and have been anxious to dissociate himself and others from Oswald by helping stigmatize him as an aberrant loner with no coherent political motive or agenda. No correspondence between Oswald and I. F. Stone has ever been entered into evidence in the assassination case. On October 5, 1964, shortly after the publication of the Warren Report, Stone wrote in his publication I. F. Stone’s Weekly: All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting, in defense of the Left and of a sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology. Now I see elements of the Left using these same tactics in the controversy over the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission Report. I believe the Commission has done a first-rate job, on a level that does our country proud and is worthy of so tragic an event. I regard the case against Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone killer of the President as conclusive. By the nature of the case, absolute certainty will never be attained, and those still convinced of Oswald’s innocence have a right to pursue the search for evidence which might exculpate him. But I want to suggest that this search be carried on in a sober manner and with full awareness of what is involved. It is one thing to analyze discrepancies. It is quite another to write and speak in just that hysterical and defamatory way from which the Left has suffered in the last quarter century or more of political controversy. . . . While Stone went on to attack such pioneering and iconoclastic assassination books as Joachim Joesten’s Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? and Thomas Buchanan’s Who Killed Kennedy? as examples of the tendencies he deplored, it is clear that what made him most concerned about criticism of the Warren Report was that undermining its official conclusion would mean a possible reopening of McCarthyite witch hunting, or, as Stone put it, “conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology.” The same anxiety is obvious in Richard Hofstadter’s highly influential essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which also appeared around that time and seemed similarly motivated. Both authors wanted to maintain an unquestioning climate in which the Warren Commission and other elements of the U.S. government, at the end of their sham investigation in 1963-64, would exonerate the left in general from suspicion by conveniently placing all the blame on one lone nut (albeit a seemingly leftist nut) for the assassination. Stone even took it upon himself to defend the dubious behavior of individual commission members. He denied a charge by British philosopher and historian Bertrand Russell that Gerald Ford was “an associate of the F.B.I.,” which turned out to be true, since it eventually became known that the future president was the FBI’s inside man on the commission, leaking its doings to Hoover and his minions. Stone seemed especially outraged by Lord Russell’s temerity in including in his attack on the probity of the commission the name of former CIA director Allen Dulles. Even though Stone admitted that he had criticized Dulles over the years, he insisted, “I would not impute to him or any other member of the Commission conduct so evil as to conspire with the secret services to protect the killers of a President.” This blank check to exonerate the agency Dulles formerly headed rang especially odd in light of Stone’s willingness to attack the CIA in other cases. With seemingly unconscious irony, he put in a box on the front page of his first issue after the assassination (on December 9, 1963, an issue headed, “We All Had A Finger on That Trigger”): The Real Test of Our Morality One way to demonstrate to the world in the wake of the President’s assassination that we are a civilized people would be to pass a law forbidding the CIA ever, directly or indirectly, to finance or plan the killing of a foreign leader we dislike. I. F. Stone’s position on political assassinations, however, was more malleable than that statement would make it seem. When he was interviewed on camera by Ken Burns for his 1985 documentary Huey Long, about the U.S. senator and former Louisiana governor who was assassinated in 1935 under still-mysterious circumstances, Stone made this statement about Long: “I was very impressed with him. But it’s a terrible thing to say, I was really glad when they shot him. I don’t believe in terrorism or assassination, but he could have become an American dictator.” Stone’s befuddled defense of the Warren Commission bore out the truth of what Lord Russell had written in his provocative article “16 Questions on the Assassination,” published in the independent American journal The Minority of One on September 6, 1964: The methods adopted by the Commission have indeed been deplorable, but it is important to challenge the entire role of the Warren Commission. It stated that it would not conduct its own investigation, but rely instead on the existing governmental agencies -- the F.B.I., the Secret Service and the Dallas police. Confidence in the Warren Commission thus presupposes confidence in these three institutions. Why have so many liberals abandoned their own responsibility to a Commission whose circumstances they refuse to examine? From factually unsupported finger-pointing at I. F. Stone in our 1992 interview, the disgraced former assistant DA Bill Alexander went on to describe other materials he said were found in Oswald’s possession that he considered reason to file a charge of conspiracy against the prisoner: “We picked it up, we had all the Communist literature. It had the right names and the right phone numbers, including the Russian embassy. What else are you supposed to think?” Where did they find the material?, I asked. “Oak Cliff,” he replied, referring to Oswald’s rooming house, adding, “I don’t know what they got out of Irving,” where other authorities said they found much more leftwing material among Oswald’s belongings at the Paine residence. When the Dallas sheriff’s and police departments first searched the Paine residence on November 22, they reported seizing file cabinets of information on alleged Cuban sympathizers from the garage, possibly evidence of Oswald’s infiltration activities (or information collected by Ruth Paine and her husband, Michael Paine, who was known to attend both left/liberal and rightwing political gatherings), but those files soon vanished from the evidence. Sheriff ’s Deputy Buddy Walthers reported that the local authorities confiscated, along with “Cuba for Freedom” literature, “a set of metal file cabinets containing records that appeared to be names and activities of Cuban sympathizers.” Deputy J. L. Oxford reported that they seized “about 7 metal boxes which contained pamphlets and literature from abroad.” My telephone interview with Alexander ended with him indicating that he’d be happy to talk again the following week, but when I called him then, he refused to meet with me or talk further. Word about Alexander’s plan to charge Oswald as part of a communist conspiracy quickly made its way back to Washington on the day of the assassination. Manchester reports that since such an indictment “could have had grave repercussions abroad” (and domestically, with calls for retaliation against Cuba and the USSR), “when [U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, based in Dallas] Barefoot Sanders heard of it from the FBI he phoned [U.S. Deputy Attorney General in Washington] Nick Katzenbach, who persuaded two members of the Vice President’s Washington staff to have their Texas contacts kill it.” It became known later that Henry Wade received three telephone calls that day from President Johnson’s aide Cliff Carter (a prominent Texas fixer for LBJ who had traveled in the Dallas motorcade) urging the district attorney not to include the conspiracy charge in the filing against Oswald for murdering Kennedy. Wade confirmed in our interview that Carter had called him about the matter on November 22. Although Manchester reports that the indictment “had already been drawn up,” Wade claimed to me that he wasn’t sure whether Alexander was going to push that charge: “I think some of the press got the idea he probably [would], but they didn’t know Bill.” But Wade said Carter also urged him to correct that misapprehension by holding his own post-midnight press briefing after Oswald made his few remarks before the media on Friday night before being hustled away by the police. “Apparently they [the Johnson Administration] were afraid that if we took a charge on Oswald, we were going to take one that led to a part of a Russian conspiracy, which was kind of silly,” Wade told me. “I mean, even if he was part of it, you don’t allege anything in an indictment that you can’t prove. You have to prove everything in a case. All a murder indictment says is that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy by shooting him with a gun. That’s all you gotta prove. From all the evidence that indicated if he had any connection with a foreign government, it was with Castro’s Cuba, because he had that literature all over his room out there he had rented and also out at his wife’s house. And I never saw any evidence that -- the only evidence you had about Russia, he lived over there two years or something. I don’t know whether they ever found out anything about as much.” . . .

https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/04/19/low-quality-disinformation-kennedy-assassination/

My January 24 interview about the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit is now archived on host Brent Holland's NIGHT FRIGHT website. We talk about issues I discuss in my 2013 book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT and what I have learned in my continuing research into the case. http://nightfrighshow.blogspot.com

Chris, have you watched Doug Horne's interview with Brugioni? Doug's research and account of the alteration of the film is detailed and convincing.

I hope you find time to listen to it.

I did a 23-minute interview today on the assassinationwith Jim Engster in Louisiana, an open-minded interviewerwho approaches the subject from various angles. Myinterview is preceded with one with Alexandra Zapruder,whose deplorable new book I dispute in my segment.http://www.jimengster.com/jim-engster-podcasts/

I think Meagher's is the best book on the assassination. Her analysis is so lucid and cutting.

SUNDAY UPDATE: I've just been informed that today's planned podcast with former Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden (whom President Kennedy called "the Jackie Robinson of the Secret Service") has had to be rescheduled. I am sorry it won't be on today as planned but will update you. I am looking forward to doing the interview with Mr. Bolden with host Bob Wilson on Bob Wilson's Antennae Radio podcast for Debbie Scott's Radio Network.

Former Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden will be interviewed this Sunday, Sept. 25, at 7 p.m. Eastern time by me and host Bob Wilson on Bob Wilson's Antennae Radio podcast for Debbie Scott's Radio Network. We will discuss the November 2, 1963, Chicago plot, Bolden's attempts to tell the Warren Commission about it and Secret Service racism and misconduct, and his trumped-up bribery conviction. President Kennedy called Bolden "the Jackie Robinson of the Secret Service." It will be an honor talking with him and hearing more of his thoughts on these and other subjects. https://www.spreaker.com/sh…/bob-wilsons-antennae-radio-show

That is intriguing -- I would like to hear the interview. Leavelle was the lead detective in the Tippit case, so he may well have been thinking about Tippit. He indicated to me in an interview for my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE that Captain Fritz wanted him to make a strong case against Oswald for killing Tippit because they didn't have a case against him for killing Kennedy. Of course, they didn't have a case against Oswald in the Tippit killing either, and Leavelle, in his guarded way, admits some of the problems with what Oswald called "the so-called evidence" regarding the Tippit murder. ******** Now archived: Bob Wilson's interview with me about the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit and related topics (the assassinations of JFK, RFK, Lincoln et al). We went for three hours and forty-five minutes, so we dug into a lot of topics in depth. This segment starts about 86 minutes into the program. Sinatra returns from time to time to lend that Rat Pack/Kennedy vibe. https://www.spreaker.com/user/tfok_florida/the-plastic-ono-band-ed-klienman-joseph-

I will be talking about the murder of Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit (the "Rosetta Stone" of the events of November 22, 1963) this evening (Sunday, Sept. 11) with host Bob Wilson on his Antennae Radio show on Debbie Scott's Radio Network. My segment of the show begins about 8 p.m., Eastern time, with a song or two before we talk. We will discuss my research into the Tippit murder for my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT (2013), including my finding that Tippit and another officer were assigned by the DPD to hunt down Lee Harvey Oswald before Oswald's identity was officially known to the police, how Tippit drove into a police ambush, and why Oswald was not guilty of killing him. We will also discuss the continuing controversies surrounding the case and recent developments in it. https://www.spreaker.com/show/bob-wi...nae-radio-show Here's a print interview I did with Bob Wilson on Tippit and JFK: http://garyrevel.com/jfk/mcbride2.html

That comment by the Washington Post is the reductio ad absurdum of lone-nut theorizing.

Senator Ralph Yarborough, who was riding with LBJ two cars behind President Kennedy, told me in 1988, "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."

The erroneous report on James Brady being dead was made by Maureen Santini of the Associated Press. She was in the White House press room when she heard someone say that Brady had been killed. Apparently without checking to confirm the story, she called it in, and it went out on the wire before it was retracted. I used to work with Santini at The Wisconsin State Journal before that. When I learned that she had been the source of the false report on Brady, I was not surprised.