Joseph McBride

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.

From my 2013 book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT THE DEAD SECRET SERVICE AGENT STORY There is also that curious case of the dead Secret Service agent. Persistent reports that a Secret Service agent was killed in Dallas on November 22 may or may not relate to unknown activities in Oak Cliff in the period between Tippit’s murder and Oswald’s capture, the inadequately documented events at the theater, or to other strange events surrounding Tippit’s death. Dallas’s WFAA announced, “We may report this bulletin that a Secret Service agent and a Dallas policeman were shot and killed here today. They were shot some distance from the area where President Kennedy was assassinated.” All three television networks reported the agent’s death as fact, and the Associated Press was similarly quoted on WFAA-TV reporting, “A Secret Service agent and a Dallas policeman were shot and killed some distance from where the President was shot.” The story was dropped by the news media after they received a carefully worded “denial” (with significant holes in it) at 3:40 p.m. by Robert A. Wallace, the assistant secretary of the Treasury in charge of the Secret Service: “No Secret Service man was injured in the attack on President Kennedy.” Note that this non-denial denial would not cover an agent’s death in another location that day in Dallas. And as was noted in Chapter 13, DPD Detective Marvin A. Buhk reported to Chief Curry on December 3 that Secret Service men had been involved in the hunt for the suspect in the Tippit killing. Some have theorized that the dead agent report may have been a cover story for spiriting Kennedy’s body out of Dallas by a means other than Air Force One or that the dead agent had attempted to warn the president of the impending plot. The Dallas Morning News reported that a man had run alongside Kennedy’s limousine a few minutes before the assassination, shouting a warning before being tackled by Secret Service agents from the followup car to Vice President Johnson’s vehicle, three car lengths behind the president. Vince Palamara, the leading expert on the Secret Service involvement in the assassination, has studied these matters carefully and has found anomalies and gaps in the record pertaining to some agents who might have been a candidate for the “dead agent.” One report (from an article by Penn Jones and Gary Shaw) was that a Dallas or Fort Worth agent posing as a postal inspector knew of the plot and left his office on the day of the assassination, saying, “Well, this is it,” and was never seen by his family again, although they continued to receive his paychecks. Palamara identifies this man as Chuck Robertson. Palamara also quotes the late Secret Service agent James K. Fox as saying, “We lost a man that day -- our man.” Fox, who was stationed in Washington, D.C., was asked “to get ready a detail of four to six agents to assist in retrieving the body and casket of the unnamed Secret Service agent,” reports Palamara. In a transcript of a tape in which the respected Scripps-Howard reporter Seth Kantor recorded his memories shortly after the events in Dallas (reproduced in one of the Warren volumes), there is this passage about a discussion in an office in Parkland Hospital shortly after the announcement of Kennedy’s death: A western union man who had been with us since we came down from from [sic] Andrews Air Force Base came into the office. A nurse asked him about a report that a Secret Service agent had been killed out on the street. He said that it was true. This was one of the immediate rumors which sprung [sic] up. It took several days for this particular rumor not to be believed in Dallas itself (fellow in Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall who got it from a friend who got it from a postman supposed to have been at the death scene that the shot and bleeding SS man was picked up and whisked away and it was all hushed up. Why? I asked. Because they even have to die in secret, he said. He and others hinted that maybe the SS man was in on the plot to kill the President.) The mention of the Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall Printing Company (JCS) in Dallas is intriguing, for this was the firm for which Oswald worked from October 12, 1962 (ten days before the Cuban Missile Crisis would become public) through April 6, 1963, doing photographic work. The firm did classified jobs for the U.S. Army and Navy on maps and photographs. It is one of the many mysteries of Oswald’s story -- most likely an indication of his intelligence connections -- that he could have obtained such a sensitive position with his record as a supposed defector to the USSR. As Armstrong writes in Harvey and Lee, “It is worth noting that while working on military jobs at JCS Oswald made no attempt to conceal his sympathies towards Cuba, Russia, and communism. He brought Russian newspapers to work, read them during his breaks, and spoke Russian with co-worker Dennis Ofstein. Apparently, no one at JCS was concerned.” That last point may not be entirely true. Oswald was fired in late March 1963 because he was “inept in this particular craft,” but not because of any other problem, according to the Warren Commission testimony of Robert L. Stovall, the company’s president. But the director of the firm’s photographic department, John G. Graef, testified that Oswald had friction with other employees and that his reading of a Russian newspaper at work “didn’t help” him avoid being discharged when business was slow. And as for the curious history of the dead agent story, is it possible that Tippit worked clandestinely for the Secret Service or some other U.S. government agency and could have been reported to be the “dead agent” before the official story began to coalesce? The reports that a policeman was killed along with the agent, and that the agent “had been killed out on the street,” are suggestive, even if the record is vague on what might have happened. It would not have been unusual for a police officer to have operated under cover for a U.S. federal law enforcement or intelligence agency. Alternatively, given the initial confusion about an agent and a policeman being shot on the street, seemingly in the same incident, could this have resulted from an incident, otherwise lost to history, in which Tippit, or whoever shot him, shot an agent? As was discussed in Chapter 14, the chain of evidence on Tippit’s service revolver was broken by the strange action of witness Ted Callaway. M. S. Arnoni, who wrote some insightful early commentary on the assassination and related events, asked these questions as early as December 1, 1963, in his article “Dark Thoughts about Dark Events” in the independent journal The Minority of One: “Was Lee Harvey Oswald a walking corpse, a fall guy, doomed even before the assassination to die? And if so, did he die after fulfilling an assassin’s role, or only as a decoy? Was the assassin condemned to death by the very people who assigned him to shoot? If so, when did the execution take place -- with the shooting of Lee Oswald, or with the shooting of Dallas Patrolman J. D. Tippit? The first reports of the murder of Patrolman Tippit also related that a Secret Service man had been wounded; since then, nothing has been heard about that Secret Service man. What was his relation to Patrolman Tippit; and is it possible that the two were shot in a duel between them?” I asked Jim Leavelle if he had heard anything about a Secret Service agent being killed that day in Dallas. Leavelle confirmed he had looked into the story, but thought it wasn’t true: “I’ve heard that, but I’ve asked some people about it. Nobody knows a thing about it. It’s never been brought to my attention that it happened out there where [Tippit] was. If there had been a Secret Service man hurt out there, we’d have known about it, I can assure you about that. [Forrest V.] Sorrels was chief of the Secret Service here, and we were real close. I can assure you that if there had been a Secret Service agent shot or killed or even hurt, wounded [in Dallas that day], we would have known about it. We worked together just like that.”

Bill Moyers, who "coordinated the President's visit to Texas from Austin," in the words of the HSCA, told the HSCA that it was his decision to remove the bubble-top from the limousine at Love Field. The HSCA reports that "The final decision in this matter was made by Bill Moyers. Moyers had been on the phone [from Austin] to [his Dallas representative] Ms. [Elizabeth] Harris, informing her that the President did not want the bubble. He told Harris to 'get that Goddamned bubble off unless it's pouring rain.' . . . Shortly thereafter the weather began to clear. Ms. Harris approached [Forrest] Sorrels [of the Secret Service] about the bubble-top and together they had the special agents remove the glass top."

That I don't know.

Thanks, Mr. Brancato. I have been busy on a book and with schoolwork, so just caught up with these posts. I saw THE LAST CAMPAIGN in the late 1970s. The filmmaker, Barbara Frank, showed it to me in 35mm in a screening room. It is excellent. She wasn't filming during the assassination; she was in the ballroom, not the kitchen. She resumed shooting and smuggled film out in her underwear. I've tried many times over the years to find out why the film has rarely been seen but have not been able to get a clear answer. All very mysterious. It played at the Deauville film festival in France. There obviously would be a market for it on homevideo for students of RFK's life and death and for general audiences interested in the Kennedys. It's a moving and intimate portrait of RFK on the trail at the end of his life. Thomas Noguchi went into academia after being forced out of his job in the coroner's office. As far as I know, Dan Moldea is the last person to have interviewed Thane Eugene (Gene) Cesar. Moldea reportedly controls Cesar's access to the media, which, as I said in the interview, is nil. Moldea seemed to support a conspiracy angle in an article he wrote for the Washington Post, but then his book did a reversal. Very disappointing. Re-reading it for this interview made me see that he includes a lot of evidence that would point to Cesar being the killer but that Moldea then tries to exonerate him through the lie detector method, which even J. Edgar Hoover didn't think was a good tool for law enforcement. I don't know any more about Manuel Pena than is in the books on the RFK case. Shane O'Sullivan might know. He's still on the case and does good work. I am looking forward to Lisa Pease's book. She is a superb researcher and writer. Her work for CTKA and Probe contains many classic articles. O'Sullivan's book and film are valuable as well. He also wrote a fine and disturbing article about the Sirhan parole denial for Russ Baker's WhoWhatWhy site. I explore in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE the possibility that Tippit was Badge Man. I hope you read the book. I don't want to summarize highly complex material about various aspects of the case in any simplistic way but would rather people read the full accounts in my book. As you may know, I provide evidence that Tippit was going after Oswald to hunt him down along with another policeman at a time when the Dallas police officially did not know who Oswald was (of course they did know who he was, but the official story was that they did not know his identity until they got him downtown, which happened about an hour after Tippit's death). This chase indicates Tippit and the other officer, Sgt. William Duane Mentzel, were part of a conspiracy to silence or capture Oswald. Mentzel reportedly had a traffic accident and did not get to the scene of the Tippit killing. I believe Tippit was lured into a trap to kill him. Part of the reason was to put the finger on Oswald as a cop-killer, since Oswald (one of the two Oswalds) was nearby, at the theater. And/or the Tippit shooting could have been to eliminate a participant in the conspiracy. My book goes into some possible suspects. After my book was published, I wrote more about the Tippit/Mentzel chase in an article for CTKA, http://www.ctka.net/2014/mcbride_01.html The theory about Tippit being substituted for Kennedy's body is implausible. However, I do think it highly likely that the coffin over which a gunfight almost occurred at Parkland was empty. There are indications Kennedy's body was taken out of the hospital by another route. This would have facilitated the body alteration. And from the viewpoint of the Secret Service and Kenneth O'Donnell, it evidently would have been worth a gunfight (even in Jacqueline Kennedy's presence) to prevent the empty coffin from being opened by Earl Rose. It would have exposed the whole conspiracy.

My interview on the RFK case with Robert Wilson from The Sleuth Journal http://www.thesleuthjournal.com/rfk-interview/ SPECIAL Interview: Latest Developments In The RFK Assassination March 10, 2016 | By The Sleuth Journal By: Robert Wilson, Professor Joseph McBride Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of the RFK assassination, had his latest parole request denied on February 10, 2016. The hearing included a plea from RFK political ally and fellow shooting victim Paul Schrade requesting a new investigation into Bobby’s murder, including a letter from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being presented to the parole board. RFK Jr.’s request was written to then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. on September 25, 2012. These latest developments steered us to the expertise and wisdom of Prof. McBride to fill in the details. **Dedicated to Michael Canfield, co-writer of Coup d’etat in America Q: Many have said that Robert Kennedy would have prosecuted President Kennedy’s murder if it had been a conspiracy. Is there any validity in that statement? McBride: There are indications he was considering a new investigation if he became president, though some of his actions in that regard were ambiguous or indefinite. Robert Kennedy was still a work in progress when he died at age forty-two; Arthur Schlesinger Jr.‘s moving biography showed how rapidly he had been evolving in his last few years from the hardboiled political operative he earlier had been. It’s now known that RFK quietly had aides looking into the case for him, and he did some investigating of his own. On the very day of the assassination he asked John McCone, the CIA director, if any of his people had done it (McCone of course denied it). RFK also had an aide look into Jack Ruby’s Mafia connections in Chicago and elsewhere. A week after the assassination, RFK and Jacqueline Kennedy had a friend of JFK’s, artist William Walton, deliver a message in Moscow to the Soviet government: They said the Soviets had nothing to do with it and that it was a domestic rightwing conspiracy. But RFK moved too cautiously and also took some steps to block aspects of the investigation, probably because it could have exposed some of his and his brother’s actions against Castro.Researcher Joan Mellen believes RFK was also compromised because he had a team of trusted anti-Castro Cubans infiltrating the developing plot against his brother in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, and that Lee Oswald, whom the CIA was preparing as the patsy, was known to these men and RFK and was being watched by RFK’s agents. Maneuvering Oswald close to RFK, if that was the case, was a clever move on the part of the plotters to checkmate RFK. If that connection had come out in 1963 or ’64, who knows what effect it would have had on public perceptions of the case and of RFK himself? So part of the tragedy of both assassinations is that RFK was hampered and finally stopped in any concerted effort to punish those who had killed his brother. Q: RFK’s son Robert Jr. recently made a plea to investigate his father’s death. He also came out and had said RFK believed President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. How did that come about, and what was requested more specifically in terms of his father’s murder? McBride: Robert Kennedy Jr. has been a strong voice for justice in a number of important public controversies. He wrote an in-depth investigative article for Rolling Stone demonstrating that George W. Bush stole the 2004 presidential election in Ohio; most of the mainstream media have not acknowledged that, though no one has refuted his research. RFK Jr. told Charlie Rose in a live 2013 Dallas appearance that his father “was fairly convinced” that there had been a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, possibly involving “rogue CIA” elements, and that his father privately “was dismissive” of the Warren Commission findings of a lone gunman. RFK Jr. made clear he also believed that was the case, it was a highly significant development. It was the first important public statement by a member of the Kennedy family questioning the official story. Predictably, it received little national coverage. The mainstream media remain adamantly wedded to the official accounts of both murders. In a 2012 letter to then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., RFK Jr. also asked for a reopening of the case of his own father’s murder, but even such a statement from a victimized member of the family of the deceased has failed to achieve results. That shows the extent of corruption in this country and the powerful interests’ stake in denying the truth about that case. People should listen to what RFK Jr. has to say. Q: Paul Schrade made an appearance at Sirhan Sirhan’s recent parole hearing. What was involved in that, and what was Schrade seeking as an end-game in these circumstances? McBride: More than with the assassination of President Kennedy, the RFK assassination has usually seemed to most people as an open-and-shut case since Sirhan was indeed firing a gun and was apprehended at the scene. Most people therefore believed the LAPD’s claim that he was the lone gunman, and they have not studied the evidence. But Schrade, a labor activist and RFK volunteer who was wounded in the head during the shooting, has long maintained that Sirhan did not shoot the senator. Schrade was one of the five other victims of the shooting that night. He is now 91 and has been seeking justice in the case for many years. He appeared at the California parole hearing in February to urge the board to release Sirhan. Schrade said, “I am here to speak for myself, a shooting victim, and to bear witness for my friend, Bob Kennedy . . . . Gentlemen, the evidence clearly shows that Sirhan Sirhan could not and did not shoot Senator Bob Kennedy. . . . What I am saying to you is that Sirhan himself was a victim. Obviously there was someone else there in that pantry also firing a gun. While Sirhan was standing in front of Bob Kennedy and his shots were creating a distraction, the other shooter secretly fired at the senator from behind and fatally wounded him. . . . Indeed, the LAPD and L.A. County District Attorney knew two hours after the shooting of Senator Kennedy that he was shot by a second gunman and they had conclusive evidence that Sirhan could not — and did not — do it. . . . Sirhan, I forgive you.” The board rejected his detailed and eloquent plea, the fifteenth time Sirhan has been denied parole. As Schrade was speaking, a member of the board asked him to wrap it up, saying, “Quite frankly, you’re losing us.” Schrade responded, “I think you’ve been lost for a long time.” Q: Sirhan Sirhan claims to remember nothing of the alleged crime of shooting RFK, and yet at some point confessed to it “with twenty years of malice aforethought” (he said later that the time frame referred to the creation of the state of Israel; Sirhan is a Palestinian American, but he was only four when Israel was founded). Can you please unravel what lies underneath those seeming contradictions? McBride: There is a wealth of evidence that Sirhan was a programmed shooter. He had evidently been subject of extensive hypnosis before the event. He has always claimed not to remember clearly what happened during the shooting. He could have been programmed to shoot and then to forget that he had done so. His statements are credible. He was influenced by a mysterious woman in a polka dot dress and a man in a suit who both helped guide him into the kitchen where the shooting took place, and he had been influenced by strong drinks shortly before the shooting. The CIA’s MKUltra program of using hypnosis and drugs to control assassins most likely had pinpointed him as a useful subject. Sirhan was induced by his corrupt legal team to confess to the crime. He should not have done so, but it’s hard for us to blame him considering the pressures he was under to buckle under to the system in hopes of some clemency down the road that has never been granted him. Q: A recording exists that is said to show thirteen shots at the scene of RFK’s murder, yet Sirhan’s Ivor Johnson held only eight bullets. Evidently the FBI has attacked the analysis of the tape. At the end of the day, what seems to hold water regarding this situation? McBride: The tape is good evidence. It was made by a freelance newspaper reporter named Stanislaw Pruszynski and recorded at least thirteen sounds consistent with shots in less than six seconds. It is consistent with the wealth of physical evidence that indicates more shots were fired than Sirhan could have fired. Lisa Pease, who is writing a book on the case, said recently on Black Op Radio that she has found Sirhan actually was firing blanks. He apparently was set up as a diversion to draw attention away from the real assassin shooting from behind the senator. Scott Enyart’s photographs of the shooting, taken from behind RFK, were seized by the LAPD and not returned. After a long legal battle to get them returned to him by the California State Archives, they were sent to Los Angeles in 1996 but reported “stolen” from a courier. That was of course highly convenient and suspicious. Enyart’s photographs probably would provide further evidence that Sirhan did not shoot Kennedy and might show the gunman who did. Q: Can you speak to the validity of DeWayne Wolfer’s work with ballistics in the conviction of Sirhan? McBride: The ballistics work that the Los Angeles Police Department and criminalist Wolfer introduced in an attempt to prove that Sirhan shot RFK is thoroughly unreliable and almost staggeringly messed-up. Every effort was made to twist the evidence to try to fit Sirhan’s gun, even though it could not have fired all of the shots. There were at least two other guns seen by witnesses in the kitchen — one belonging to “security guard” Thane Eugene (Gene) Cesar, who was walking immediately behind the senator — but they were not tested. A bullet was lost in the ceiling space and never recovered. It would have further demonstrated how Sirhan could not have fired all the shots, and it could have been linked to another gun. When the Ambassador Hotel unfortunately was demolished in 2006, with the complicity of the Kennedy family, no attempt was made to find that bullet. Other bullets evidently had been pried out of parts of the kitchen, as indicated by photographs taken by the police, but were not admitted into evidence. As in the murders of JFK and Officer J. D. Tippit, the ballistics evidence in the RFK case has been so compromised and is so inconclusive that it exonerates the people officially accused of the crimes. Q: What did you make of the recent statements of Nina Rhodes-Hughes, and her allegations that two shooters fired at RFK? McBride: She was an actress and Kennedy campaign volunteer who said she heard twelve to fourteen shots and that some came from a location other than Sirhan’s position. She said the FBI changed her story to make it seem as if she had heard eight shots. Her account matches other evidence and should be taken seriously.Q: If the FBI twisted the initial statements from the time of the killing, can we trust their work in this case overall? McBride: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover hated RFK, who was his boss at the Justice Department as attorney general and had diametrically opposite political views on most issues. The FBI covered up both the killings of JFK and RFK and was probably complicit in those murders along with the assassinations of Dr. King and Malcolm X. So the FBI is not worthy of trust in the RFK case because they were corrupt and hardly qualified as disinterested investigators. Q: Did any eyewitnesses claim to have seen more than one gunmen fire, or more than one person with a gun? McBride: Four witnesses saw another gun pulled in the kitchen besides Sirhan’s. One such witness was Donald Schulman, who told his employer, CBS News, on camera shortly after the shooting that Sirhan “stepped out and fired three times; the security guard hit Kennedy three times.” Another witness, television producer, Richard Lubic, said, “I was there next to Senator Kennedy’s right side after he hit the floor. While I was kneeling, I looked up and saw a guy in a security guard’s uniform a few feet to my left, standing behind Senator Kennedy. He had his weapon in his hand and was pointing it down in Kennedy’s general direction.” Cesar said he was knocked to the floor at the time of the shooting. Cesar admitted having drawn his gun, but denied firing it. There are also allegations that a third gunman fired in the kitchen. Q: How well developed was mind control in our government agencies by the time of RFK’s killing? McBride: Project MKUltra was an extensive CIA mind-control experimental program that was begun in the early 1950s, exposed in 1975 by the Church Committee, and officially terminated in 1973. Among its projects was to develop programmed assassins. It helped inspire the marvelous and eerily prophetic 1959 Richard Condon novel The Manchurian Candidate and the two film versions, the classic 1962 version and the so-so 2004 version. Many of the documents on MKUltra were destroyed at the order of CIA Director Richard Helms, who is a prime suspect in the murder of President Kennedy. Q: Some say RFK would not have won the nomination regardless of California’s victory. Was this actually true, as it is used to say a conspiracy was not needed to stop his presidential bid? McBride: It was not certain RFK would win the nomination, and he was trailing Hubert Humphrey even after the California victory, but RFK’s California win and momentum made it seem likely that he could get the nomination. Humphrey was tarnished by being Lyndon Johnson’s vice president and by supporting the Vietnam War, unlike RFK at that time. So RFK’s California victory was the tipping point that caused him to be killed. Eugene McCarthy was not a particularly strong candidate, despite having beaten RFK in Oregon, the first time a Kennedy had lost an election. RFK probably would have gone on to receive the nomination and to win the general election. The war would have been ended. His brother had been starting to deescalate the war when he was killed in 1963. The military-industrial complex needed to get rid of both Kennedys to continue the war. Noam Chomsky’s book on JFK and the war is hostile to JFK but makes the intriguing point that although it’s generally believed the war was lost by the United States, those who backed it “won” in a sense because they made so much money from it. They didn’t care about the Americans who were killed, let alone the millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians. Q: The autopsy was performed by Dr. Thomas Noguchi, then the chief medical examiner-coroner of Los Angeles County. What were his conclusions, and was he in any way pressured by the system that he served? McBride: Noguchi’s exemplary autopsy showed that the fatal shot was fired at close range on an upward angle from behind Kennedy, entering below his right ear. Explaining what he meant by close range, Noguchi said, “When I say ‘very close,’ we are talking about the term of either contact or a half inch to one inch in distance.” Sirhan was always in front of Kennedy, at a distance variously estimated at between one and six feet. Noguchi’s autopsy also showed that Kennedy was hit two other times from behind, and a fourth shot fired from behind went through his suit coat without hitting him. Noguchi was later run out of office for his unorthodoxy. Q: Who is Thane Eugene Cesar, what happened to him, and what do you come away from all of this thinking about him? McBride: Cesar at the time of the assassination was a rightwing American who was an avowed hater of the Kennedys and supported George Wallace (Cesar’s ethnicity has been variously reported; it has been claimed he is Cuban American, but Dan Moldea [see below] claims Cesar is “a mixture of English, French, and German stock”). Cesar was working for the defense contractor Lockheed and had a security clearance. He was supposedly doing crowd control at the Kennedy victory event as a private security guard for Ace Guard Service, his part-time employer, and was immediately behind Kennedy when the shots were fired, holding the senator’s arm with his left hand as they moved through the crowd. Cesar later went to work for Hughes Aircraft, another leading defense contractor, and he also had a security clearance there. Cesar disposed of the gun he had the night of the assassination, but it later was found. Cesar is still alive — last accounted for in the Philippines, after living in the Simi Valley area of Southern California — but was never charged and has never been properly investigated. Although Dan Moldea originally suggested he thought there was a conspiracy, his book on the case, The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive, Means, and Opportunity (1995), attempts to exonerate Cesar. Moldea relies on a lie-detector test (a notoriously unreliable methodology) despite the wealth of other evidence he details that shows Cesar had the motive, means, and opportunity to kill Kennedy. Ever since the book was published, Moldea has gone so far as to control Cesar’s access to the media, which is nil. Q: Two women were important on the scene, Sandra Serrano, and the girl in the polka dot dress. What can we glean from the events involving them, and what Ms. Serrano said under very intense interrogation? McBride: Serrano was a Kennedy volunteer who saw the girl in the polka dot dress coming down an outside staircase saying excitedly, “We’ve shot him! We’ve shot him! We’ve shot Senator Kennedy.” Serrano said a young man was with him. An older couple also saw and heard the two young people run past them and make those statements. The girl had been seen with Sirhan and was seemingly directing him. His own account seems to back that up. Serrano was subjected to unusually harsh treatment by the Los Angeles Police Department when she tried to tell her story. The girl in the polka dot dress has never been identified conclusively, although some have made speculations about who she was. Q: Has Sirhan served ample time compared with someone else who may have committed a similar crime? McBride: I would think so, since he did not kill Robert Kennedy. He has served a long time for someone who wounded but did not kill five people and who clearly suffered from diminished capacity at the time of the crime. Moreover, he never had an adequate trial, and much of the evidence was compromised or destroyed. The fact that he genuinely cannot remember the shooting clearly is used by the parole board to show that he doesn’t have sufficient remorse to be released. That is a Kafkaesque non sequitur. I would think the parole board should have listened to the impassioned plea for justice and forgiveness Paul Schrade offered at the most recent parole hearing. It’s also absurd to think that Sirhan is a threat to the public safety today. Q: At this point in time, could any chain of events turn this around? Can any truth and justice still be had at this point in time? What are the best and worst scenarios? McBride: A genuine investigation could still be done, and the existing evidence evaluated, and surviving witnesses (including Cesar) called to testify, but I’ve learned to be skeptical of the government’s ability to judge this kind of case fairly. The House Select Committee on Assassinations did valuable work unearthing information about the murders of JFK and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but none of that resulted in Justice Department action. And the HSCA’s own work was compromised in many ways. I believe the only way the truth about these cases can be served is through the work of independent researchers who write about them and through the statements for the historical record of witnesses such as Paul Schrade and others. Q: What was Special Unit Senator, and who were the men who ran it? Is there anything unusual in the choice and backgrounds of these men? McBride: The Los Angeles Police Department has long been a notoriously corrupt institution. Its task force to investigate the crime, called Special Unit Senator, was a sham and a whitewash, like the Warren Commission. The head of the LAPD unit, Chief Robert A. Houghton, even wrote their “Warren Report” on the case, Special Unit Senator, published in 1970. Members of the department were linked to the CIA, notably Lieutenant Manuel Pena, who was involved as well in activities surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy. The LAPD was complicit in the RFK assassination and should not have been allowed to investigate itself. The crime should be an open case, but nothing is done about it by the LAPD. Q: Are there good films and books on this case? McBride: Theodore Charach, a dogged early investigator, made an excellent low-budget documentary with Gérard Alcan called The Second Gun (1973). It can be seen on YouTube. Shane O’Sullivan did a more sophisticated, partly flawed, but fascinating documentary called RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy (2007); he also wrote an excellent book on the case, Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert Kennedy (2013). Other valuable books include The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (1978) by Jonn Christian and William Turner and The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover-Up, 1968-1991 (1991) by Philip Melanson.Independent filmmaker Barbara Frank made a brilliant and moving feature documentary on Kennedy’s California campaign, The Last Campaign (1978), that for mysterious reasons has long been unavailable. She was in the ballroom when the shooting took place in the kitchen. She began shooting again and smuggled her film footage out of the hotel in her underwear. Her film is important and should be in circulation. Orson Welles in 1975 rewrote a Donald Freed screenplay that portrays a conspiracy involving Sirhan as a programmed shooter. In that project, Assassin (or The Safe House), Welles would have played the programmer, who was based on Dr. William Joseph Bryan Jr., a hypnotist who was accused by Turner and Christian of programming Sirhan for the CIA. Sal Mineo would have played Sirhan (Mineo was murdered in 1976). That script should be filmed. Bob Wilson is a researcher who has studied the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, and written numerous articles on all of the cases. Professor Joseph McBride of San Francisco State University has written eighteen books since 1968, ranging from biographies of famous film directors to Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit (2013) and The Broken Places: A Memoir (2015). Prof. McBride has studied the murders of the Kennedy brothers since President John F. Kennedy was lost to bullets on November 22, 1963, and Robert Kennedy was shot shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, following his victory in the California presidential primary.

I can't take anyone seriously who mocks a researcher by using a derisive nickname (such as "Jimbo"). Anyone who stoops to juvenile mockery automatically loses a debate.

http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2013/11/as_camelot_died_a_staten_islan.html This interview with Hubert Clark includes his statements that Curtis LeMay was at Andrews when Air Force One arrived; that Jacqueline Kennedy entered the autopsy room; and that he (Clark) doesn't think there was a lone assassin. Maybe he is not accurate on some of this, but that's what he said. His account of confusion with the ambulance(s) and the coffin(s) is sketchy here but suggestive.

Thanks, Jim. That period leading up to the assassination is filled with foreboding, even more in retrospect, in both our political history and our cultural history (cf. the foreshadowing of the assassination plot and coverup, complete with a "grassy knoll," in John Ford's 1962 film THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE). The blacklisted screenwriter Abe Polonsky was a friend of mine, and when I asked him about AMERICAN GRAFFITI, which I like very much, he expressed astonishment that "anyone could be nostalgic for 1962." When I interviewed Richard Lester, he noted that A HARD DAY'S NIGHT reflects the optimism people had in the early sixties, even though there was really no reason for it. Those were the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the nuclear saber-rattling of the Joint Chiefs, after all.

going to pieces after the assassination http://www.amazon.com/Broken-Places-Joseph-McBride/dp/1943784124/ref=la_B001IZ1KM8_1_13?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1446720475&sr=1-13&refinements=p_82%3AB001IZ1KM8 My friends at this site and in the assassination community may be interested in my most recent book, just published, THE BROKEN PLACES: A MEMOIR, my first since INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT. This (other) longtime labor of love is not primarily about the assassination or my research but partly about the period in which those events occurred and the shattering (but enlightening) impact they and other factors had on me as a teenager. The book is now available from Amazon.com. See an excerpt below dealing with my response to the assassination. THE BROKEN PLACES: A MEMOIR by Joseph McBride In The Broken Places, Joseph McBride, an internationally acclaimed American cultural historian, recalls his troubled youth in the Midwest during the 1960s. Searingly immediate and yet reflective, this is the author’s memoir of his breakdown as a teenager and triumphant recovery. It gives an unsparing look at physical and psychological abuse, family dysfunction and addiction, sexual repression, and Catholic guilt. And at its heart, this is a haunting, often joyous love story. The Broken Places offers an unforgettable portrait of Kathy Wolf, a brilliant, vibrant, shattered young Native American woman who taught Joe how to live even though she could not save herself. Kathy’s life exemplifies what Ernest Hemingway wrote, “The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.” This extraordinary love story will move you and disturb you. Joseph McBride was born in Milwaukee and educated at Marquette University High School and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He lives in Berkeley, California, and is a professor in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University. McBride is the author of seventeen previous books, including biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg; three books on Orson Welles; and Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit. Available from Amazon.com An excerpt from THE BROKEN PLACES: [My parents] were both newspaper reporters, my father a veteran feature writer, columnist, and rewrite man for the [Milwaukee] Journal and my mother a local and national political reporter for the Sentinel, worldly people who were fully engaged with the hectic workaday world of politics, business, and crime. Raymond and Marian Dunne McBride (called “Toni” by everyone) were masterful reporters with graceful writing styles, influential, well-regarded, the opposite of recluses. My mother had also been active in the Democratic Party and served as the state vice chairman during John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1960. She had brought me into his primary campaign as a volunteer. While covering the White House for the Sentinel, she later helped the dean of Washington journalists, Helen Thomas, break down the barriers against women at the National Press Club. Thomas wrote me about my mother in 2005 that she “always admired her; great journalist.” My parents talked shop at our dinner table each night, helping educate us seven children with a fairly sophisticated and precocious understanding of politics and journalism. . . . I found bitter amusement in the fact that to the readers of the Milwaukee Journal, the McBrides were the source of (mostly) jolly entertainment in a column my father wrote called “All in the Family.” Years before Archie Bunker was created (a character with whom my Dad, who spent most of his home life muttering nasty remarks in front of the television his easy chair as he drank himself blotto each night, unfortunately would find much to identify with), the McBride version of “All in the Family” provided a highly sanitized “comical” account of our family doings in the Green Sheet. Twice a week, amidst the comic strips and the “Dear Mrs. Griggs” advice column, my Dad deftly amused the readers with the antics of the seven McBride children, ages six through seventeen, pictured in ascending order in a cartoon at the head of the column, waiting to use the bathroom in the morning. My father is pounding on the door with my mother, my sister, and two little brothers in back of him; evidently I’m the one inside, working on my zits or maybe studying a skin magazine. In later years I would come to appreciate the column’s frequent charm and graceful prose. It was the verbal equivalent of a Norman Rockwell painting, folksy and warm and idealized, a form of wish fulfillment that papered over an ugly reality. But it was only a minor embarrassment to us children until, little by little, bits of reality began to intrude into the column. . . . My own blowup over the column was late in coming because my father seldom wrote about me. There were no funny stories to tell about my life in those days. I did not engage in any of the normal teenage shenanigans. I didn't smoke, drink, or drive a car. I didn't go out on dates (my flower hadn’t bloomed). As a high school senior [at Marquette University High School], I had no friends outside my schoolmates, mostly the handful of boys who worked with me on our monthly newsmagazine, The Flambeau Monthly, a slick publication slavishly modeled on Time magazine. That was the extent of my social life, my only genuine recreation. All I did otherwise was study, go to church, and jerk off. But a clash over the column was inevitable, and it came in my senior year, that October 27, 1964, when my Dad wrote a piece called "Chess Moves." The column’s complaint was that “It’s hard to outsmart a teenager.” My father thought I was testing parental authority by staying up too late doing my homework (four hours a night by that point). After noting that I was an honor student and stayed up long into the night studying, my Dad wrote, “This may seem admirable, but too much study possibly is as dangerous as too little.” His oldest son would come to the breakfast table “bleary-eyed from hours of study.” The column detailed my Dad’s battles with me over my schedule -- an attempt to impose an 11:30 curfew on studying, his struggles to wake me at 7 each morning, and my coming to breakfast in my pajamas to read the paper and eat before I dressed -- all of which struck him as acts of defiance. Although the column manifested a vague concern with my possibly “dangerous” health situation, it missed the actual seriousness of the situation, showing no sense of any deeper underlying causes. Still, it was an inchoate cry for help. A very public outcry it was too, delivered to the entire city of Milwaukee, one of the most unpleasant side effects of having parents who wrote for newspapers. They tended not to take our problems to psychologists or psychiatrists who might actually be able to help us but perhaps might have been seen as threatening their authority; only in occasional desperation did they send me to irresponsible quacks who didn’t do a bit of good. In any case, my parents were Catholics, and generally in those days you were supposed to take your problems to the priests. My father reported in his column about me that after he succeeded in getting me to show up fully dressed at breakfast, it did not last long. Then the column reached the conclusion that would get me in trouble. He told the readers that after more of this struggle ensued with his son, “a little later he asked if he could get some pills to keep him awake in the morning. "'Boys your age can’t be on drugs,' I said curtly, but I’m preparing rebuttals for his next arguments." Since I rarely bothered to read "All in the Family," I didn't know what my father had written about me until the following day, when Father McGinnity stopped me in the hall at Marquette and asked if it was true that I was "on drugs." Afraid of punishment, I said my father didn't know what he was talking about. I have to give Father McGinnity credit for seeming to be the only person in Milwaukee (population then: 741,324) who responded at all to my father’s cry for help, but it is a shame in retrospect that I couldn’t be honest with the priest about the spiritual and physical struggle that was affecting my health. And it’s unfortunate that he let the matter drop. If we had been able to deal with the problem frankly, I might have received the help I needed at a time then. Around that same time, a classmate who worked with me on the Flambeau Monthly asked, “Are you OK?,” and I became uncomfortable with his probing question and stare, mumbling a false affirmative. Today, a student so visibly afflicted with health problems might get more attention at school. But in those days not only parents but also teachers and school administrators seemed almost entirely oblivious to such problems. Since I was barely eating as well as getting too little sleep, and my weight was plunging so rapidly, it is clear in retrospect that my problem not only should have been visible, but that it was as much physical as psychological, the blending of afflictions that are now seen as interrelated symptoms of anorexia nervosa. Back then, that term was little known to the general public, and it would not enter common discourse for than a decade. Severe eating disorders and their psychological causes were not much understood; today we recognize that anorexia can stem at least in part from fear of the onset of puberty. Subconsciously I was reacting against the onset of uncontrollable sexual drives, natural impulses that were stigmatized by my church, teachers, and family as sinful, and my reaction was to severely punish my body. Early studies of anorexia connected the illness with religious fasting and self-starvation, a condition so frequent among religious women in the Middle Ages (including some who were later canonized) that it was sometimes referred to as anorexia mirabilis. But my problems, our family’s problems, were shrouded in a heavy fog of taboo and denial. Even though my father may have meant well, in his own clumsy way, I did not take it kindly that he went public with his sketchy apprehensions about my health, particularly after Father McGinnity had accosted me in the hall with his worry about my drug-taking. That night at the dinner table, I screamed and cried when my father tried to make light of the situation. My mother took my side, contending as she sipped a beer that the column showed a "pretty goddam warped sense of humor." My father retreated to the living room with a bottle of wine to drink himself into oblivion in front of the television. I broke my curfew with impunity after that, studying past two every night. In early November, about a month before my second run at the SATs (Scholastic Aptitude Tests), I bought a box of NoDoz tablets to keep from falling asleep at my desk. I took the SATs with an unhealthy degree of seriousness because they would be critical in determining whether I would be accepted at Harvard, the school of my choice. I cared so intensely about that potential achievement that I kept taking the SATs over and over to keep improving my score, an obsessive process that made me increasingly agitated and collapsed my few remaining reserves of energy. My father’s column seemed to fumble around the key but unspoken question, Why was I so driven to overwork? I felt I knew part of the reason why that was the case, but I would have been hard put to articulate it to anyone, since it rested on such troubling foundations, and at the time I did not fully understand what was happening to me. Nor could I have explained then the overriding reason: Although I had tried to rebel in grade school by doing poorly in my studies, a cry for help that failed, now I was trying to win approval from my parents and society by doing the opposite. It was a year earlier, in December 1963, that I had first consciously recognized I was developing a monomania about my studies. What was the urgency of that need? I remember clearly recognizing then another, more specific trigger for that development, one that had contributed to my sense of mounting desperation. I was aware then that it must have something to do with the murder of President Kennedy just a couple of weeks earlier, and that my overcompensating reaction was some form of the grieving process. I felt a crushing weight of depression and disillusionmen, a sense of being abruptly cut off from the person I thought I was in a way I could not entirely comprehend and did not have the tools to examine. There was a numbness, a void caused by the loss of another of my major illusions, the props of my shaky existence, that needed to be filled somehow. Why I sought a refuge in accelerating my studies so frantically rather than in some other form of achievement was unclear to me then. It was only much later, when I could view this period in hindsight -- with what Wordsworth called “emotion recollected in tranquillity” -- that I realized I threw myself headlong into the thickets of schoolwork, a maze that had no limit or exit, partly as a way of blotting out the terrifying questions raised by the president’s death and because it was the only way I knew how to do so. And though the escalating battle between my religious faith and my sexuality seemed, at the moment, even more urgent than this bewildering political calamity, for which there already seemed no clear explanation, I knew in some inchoate fashion that my heretical feelings about these two major crises in my view of life, personal and political, were coming together to contribute to my emotional, spiritual, and physical isolation. After I had worked as a volunteer for JFK in the Wisconsin presidential primary and met him three times (once in 1962 when he was president), his inspiration was what had led me to my planned career: I had it all mapped out, to attend Harvard, study law, and enter politics, probably running for Congress. When I had answered a question from Kennedy about his book Profiles in Courage at a small “Kids for Kennedy” rally my mother organized at the Wauwatosa Civic Center in March 1960, he quipped, “I hope I don’t have to run against you in 1964.” He then launched into a humorous anecdote about a boy who, upon meeting French President Charles de Gaulle, advised him on his foreign policy. But now that I had to face the realization that my candidate had been murdered and the government seemed strangely uninterested in solving the crime, I was losing another of my bedrocks, my faith in the American democratic system as well as in my religious beliefs. Where there had been faith now I was starting to see mostly lies and insane delusions. When I watched Dr. Strangelove shortly after the assassination, with my friend Dick Benka in February 1964 at the Tosa Theater in Wauwatosa, that black comedy about nuclear war brought about another paradigm shift in my view of the world. The film made recognize that world events I had found simply frightening could also be thoroughly absurd. Rekindling the subversiveness engendered in our Baby Boomer generation by Mad magazine in the 1950s and ’60s, Dr. Strangelove helped me see that I should question authority and not to follow it so blindly. I could not fail to notice that the psychoses that cause these men of power to blow up the world in Dr. Strangelove have twisted sexual roots. I did not have to be convinced that sexual impulses could be so explosive, but to discover that sexual pathologies could also be hilarious was somehow a promise of liberation. Nevertheless, these developments in my life, drawing together inflammatory political and sexual revelations, involved incremental realizations; painfully so. I ploughed ahead blindly with my Harvard ambitions, mostly out of inertia, as I can see now. My suppressed anxieties about my future plans ironically made me all the more determined at the time to follow through on that goal. My quest for a National Merit Scholarship, which I thought would be the catalyst that would make everything happen for me, became the conscious center of my universe, almost a form of magical thinking. But in fact, all my philosophical underpinnings were coming unmoored at once; the pillars of my existence were beginning to topple systematically, inexorably. That is a dangerous, if potentially creative, situation, and so I was in the disorienting throes of a life-threatening struggle over my illusions as I approached my crisis point both physically and psychologically by November of 1964. . . .

http://intothenightmare.com My website for my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT has been updated to include recent videos, articles, interviews, reviews, and news. Joseph McBride

http://jfk-thecontinuinginquiry.com/our-newsletter.html http://www.amazon.com/Into-Nightmare-Killers-President-Kennedy/dp/1939795257

Gene, Thanks for your kind words. I am glad you appreciate my research. I've been studying the case since day one and will continue to do so. Dale Myers predictably attacked my book, and I wrote a response on the CTKA site that you will find interesting. I go into Westbrook and the wallet. Others may find more on Westbrook. I reported what I found. I tried to locate Gerald Hill for an interview but could not reach him. Larry Sneed interviewed him, and I quote that. I have a fair amount about Hill in the book.

http://garyrevel.com/jfk/mcbride2.html

Thanks, Vince!