Joseph McBride

Kamala Harris and now Gavin Newsom have kept Sirhan in prison unjustly for political advantage. Paul Schrade was a hero to help keep the case alive and to come to Sirhan's defense in later years.

The spurious dictabelt tape was a poison pill inserted by Mary Ferrell and other disinformation specialists to discredit the idea of a conspiracy in the JFK assassination.

The Belmont FBI memo on the night of 11-22-63, which I discovered in the 1980s and write about in INTO THE NIGHTMARE (I couldn't get an article about it into print in the 1980s, and Doug Horne discussed it in his volumes before I published INTO THE NIGHTMARE), mentions a bullet lodged behind the president's ear that they were in the process of obtaining. It probably was removed in the pre-autopsy "surgery." It never was entered into evidence. That memo and corroborating evidence (such as Secret Service and civilian eyewitness accounts of a bullet striking JFK there) is a smoking gun that destroys the Warren Report. And there are accounts of other bullets found but not entered into evidence.

I agree with you, David. And thank you for continuing to post photos and videos. Even though I disagree with you on most issues, you make a real contribution here, unlike some posters who visit just to snipe or make snarky comments and never add anything to the discussion or research.

When I first went to Dealey Plaza and met Penn Jones on the twentieth anniversary of the assassination, I asked him if he was also going to the (empty and sterile and insulting) Dallas monument that day. He said no, because "The holy ground is where the martyr falls."

I'm with Robert and Jonathan on this. This kind of violence could happen anywhere in this violence-prone country. It's sad wherever it happens.

Thanks much, Bob.

Podcasts are a great way to have a lengthy serious discussion about the case. Robbie Robertson is one of the good podcast hosts.

Some Kennedy memorabilia I missed: On May 12, 1962, I was part of his "honor guard" at the Milwaukee Auditorium and Arena for the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. After the room cleared, I went up behind the dais to look at the podium, which still had the presidential seal on it. I saw that the president had left some notes on his speech on the podium; I remember he was doodling sailboats on it. While I stood there for about five minutes debating about whether or not to take the notes (I was a well-behaved Catholic kid at the time), a Secret Service agent came up to remove the presidential seal. I asked him if I could have the notes. He took them and said, "No, because the president might have been writing something about Berlin." I was disappointed but moments later heard some commotion from behind the curtain. I pulled it open, and there was President Kennedy five feet from my face, passing as he walked toward a down ramp. I impulsively said, "Hi, Jack!," and he smiled and nodded. Then he turned and walked down the ramp into the limousine in which he would be killed the following year. That was the last of three times I met him.

Yes, but I will never part with my letter from JFK, which means much more to me.

I had a "Hello, My Name Is" nametag both JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy signed for me at the climactic rally in the Wisconsin presidential primary on April 3, 1960. She rarely signed a document with him. One went many years ago for $100,000. But mine burned up when my bedroom caught fire in 1962. That was the only autograph Jackie Kennedy signed at the rally in 1960 (that rally is the centerpiece of the classic documentary PRIMARY). I badgered her for about five minutes as she kept refusing, until one of her husband's aides said, "For Chrissake, Jackie, give the kid your autograph." I do have photos I took of JFK at the big rally. I was a volunteer on his campaign. Oh, and my mother made me wash my wrist a week after the big rally, despite my protests, even though Senator Kennedy had signed my wrist. My most prized possession is a letter from him on May 9, 1960, thanking me "for the diligent work you did in my behalf during the campaign." He signed it "Jack Kennedy."

Ron, the legal battle didn't go as far as court. I won out of court against Random House/Knopf and took my Capra biography to a new publisher, Simon & Schuster. I felt it wise to keep the battle quiet at the time but wrote about it eventually in FRANKLY.

In my thoroughly detailed 601-page book, FRANKLY: UNMASKING FRANK CAPRA, I write specifically about the attempts to stop my Capra biography, a legal battle that took up four years of my life but which I ultimately won. I am sure there many other examples of such corruption. But when I told my story at the time to a distinguished fellow author, a future winner of the Pulitzer Prize, he said, "This is the most bizarre story I ever heard. The worst thing I ever heard. . . . Offending Frank Capra is the least of it. It's a real mystery. I've never heard a story like this." I greatly admire Caro's biography of Robert Moses -- it and Boswell's Life of Johnson are the best nonfiction books I've ever read -- and Caro's first volume on Johnson was an inspiration to me when I wrote the Capra biography. I went with Gottlieb partly because he was Caro's editor. Caro let us down in Vol. 4, printing lies about the JFK assassination (including the myth about Rufus Youngblood jumping over the seat to shield LBJ with his body, which Senator Ralph Yarborough, who was riding in the back seat with LBJ and Lady Bird, told me did not happen). Caro in a 1985 lecture at the New York Public Library said that in coming volumes he would deal with what he called Johnson's "blood feud with the Kennedys, which is a drama of Shakespearean vividness," so I had expected more. But you don't get the big advances and prizes telling the truth about the Kennedy assassination. Nevertheless, even in Caro's Vol. 4, there is much valuable detail about the pressures Johnson was feeling that day. And Caro earlier showed how Johnson felt he simply had to become president. Well-informed readers can put together the puzzle ourselves.

This film is about Caro's relationship with his editor, Robert Gottlieb; it's made by Gottlieb's daughter. In my 2019 book, FRANKLY: UNMASKING FRANK CAPRA, I write extensively about Gottlieb. FRANKLY is an expose of corruption in the publishing industry and of an archivist (Jeanine Basinger of Wesleyan University) who tried (and failed) with Gottlieb to stop or gut my 1992 biography of Frank Capra, FRANK CAPRA: THE CATASTROPHE OF SUCCESS.

Thanks, Chris. I agree with you. Civility and being willing to listen to others in discussing and debating issues are important to everyone, including to those seriously researching the assassination. We see the effects of dissident voices on the assassination routinely being stifled by the mainstream media. We don't need that here.

Chris, you're still missing my point about what concerns me in this instance. Please read my message again, including the quote from JFK: "Let us not be afraid of debate or dissent -- let us encourage it."

Chris, see my previous post, please.

Thank you, Sandy.

Sandy, I appreciate your point, but it's not the glib political labeling that's the real problem, it's the blatant attempt of a poster to shut down speech someone disagrees with. Naturally I would never comply with such an edict, but in our censorious society today, people are trying to shut down opposing views of one kind or another. As JFK said, "Let us not be afraid of debate or dissent -- let us encourage it."

Sandy, Michael is being deliberately disingenuous. This is what he wrote and what I considered an attempt to stifle free speech on this site. Also, he indulges in ad hominem insults. Griffith: "If you want to share your far-left views about the Vietnam War, this is not the thread to do so. Chomsky is an abject loon. Anyway, we're talking about the point that if the plotters viewed the Vietnam War as a major motive to kill JFK, it is very hard to understand why they let LBJ so horribly mismanage the war effort." As I noted to you, I was writing my views on the Vietnam War and the JFK assassination.

THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA (1972) by Alfred McCoy is a great book of modern American history. He revised it as THE POLITICS OF HEROIN: CIA COMPLICITY IN THE GLOBAL DRUG TRADE (1973). Someone who denies or willfully ignores McCoy's findings does not understand one of the principal reasons the US fought a war in Vietnam.

You are being disingenuous, Michael Griffith. My post you wanted stifled or moved out of this Vietnam War discussion is in fact about the VIETNAM WAR (as Casey Stengel used to say, "You could look it up"). It just does not conform to your ideological views about the war, so you tried to smear it politically and stifle it.

Jim, what do you make of John Paul Vann's claim that some of the "advisors" in Vietnam during the Kennedy years were actively participating in combat? (This is in Neil Sheehan's book on Vann and the Vietnam War, A BRIGHT SHINING LIE.)

It wouldn't be the Mannlicher Carcano entered into what Oswald called the "so-called evidence" against him. That defective rifle was a plant, a prop.