Joseph McBride

Beverly Oliver is a fraud. The Babushka Lady can

be seen shooting a motion picture film, not still pictures; see how

she pans her camera steadily as the presidential

limousine passes her.

I don't see a hardcover or paperback available

on Amazon, only a Kindle edition.

The role of CBS in founding the Fair Play for Cuba

Committee (which I discussed earlier in this thread) is

striking instance of how involved the media were

before and after the assassination in creating

the Oswald "legend" and in other activities

surrounding the assassination.

There is ample evidence of the bullet "lodged behind the President's ear."

I write about this and other bullet evidence in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE:

 

THE BELMONT MEMO

 

What happened to the bullet fired by Badge Man? The most likely answer can be found in an FBI memo written on the night of November 22, 1963, but rarely mentioned in the extensive literature surrounding the case. The memo by Alan H. Belmont, the assistant director of the FBI, indicates that a bullet was secretly removed from President Kennedy’s head and never placed into evidence. According to Belmont, the bullet was “lodged behind the President’s ear,” a fact never disclosed by the Warren Commission or the HSCA. This crucial document invalidates the official version of the assassination that only three bullets were fired, all from behind, and that none was recovered during the autopsy at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. Other evidence about the fatal crossfire, including a gunshot wound to the president’s right temple, as well as the abundant evidence that the president’s body was secretly altered to disguise his wounds and their sources, supports the information in this memo.

 

It was written at the FBI’s Washington headquarters some time after 9:18 p.m., presumably EST, by the man who headed the bureau’s investigation of the assassination, and was addressed to Associate Director Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover’s personal aide, with copies indicated to four other high-ranking FBI men. The memo was written to summarize a telephone call Belmont had made to Dallas Special Agent in Charge J. Gordon Shanklin at 9:18. That time was inserted in handwriting after the first typed sentence of the memo. It meant that their conversation occurred while President Kennedy’s body was in the autopsy room undergoing the sham ritual of the official autopsy. The Belmont memo begins:

 

I talked to SAC Shanklin in Dallas. He said arrangements have been made with Carswell Air Force Base to fly one of our Agents up to Washington with the rifle that was recovered by the police together with the fragments of the bullet taken from Governor Connally and the cartridge cases. I told SAC Shanklin that Secret Service had one of the bullets that struck President Kennedy and the other is lodged behind the President’s ear and we are arranging to get both of these. . . .

 

I discovered the Belmont memo in 1985, buried among the same 98,755 pages of FBI documents released to the public in 1977-78 that produced the 1963 J. Edgar Hoover memo mentioning “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” (discussed in Chapter 10). At the time I came upon the Belmont memo, I could find no record of anyone writing about its revelation of a missing bullet that struck the president in the head, surely a major finding in the case. In December 1985, I called Mary Ferrell, the Dallas assassination researchers’ “gatekeeper,” and, because of her reputedly encyclopedic knowledge of assassination documents, asked her whether she had seen or heard of this memo. I asked her on a confidential basis and secured her promise not to tell other researchers about it. She said, “Ask any writer the world over, I never tell one writer another writer’s information.” She said she had not known of the Belmont memo and agreed it was highly significant. She called it a “startling” find. I subsequently sent her a draft of an article I wrote about the memo, and she praised it as “a great job.” She also said she would feel free to mention the memo to other researchers now that I had told her about it. That experience in which she violated our agreement of trust opened my eyes to her essentially duplicitous role as an official assassination “clearing house” and information conduit.

 

The article I wrote about the Belmont memo, which I continued to work on through 1987, was declined by several publications. The editors did not dispute any part of my research. One publication (The Progressive) rejected it without comment. One editor to whom I submitted it frankly expressed his wariness and confusion over a revelation that so strongly refutes the official theory of the case. I finally stopped trying to get it published.  As time went on, I read very few books or articles on the assassination that even mentioned the bullet “lodged behind the President’s ear.”

 

The memo is reproduced in the document appendix of Dale Myers’s 1998 book on Tippit, but without any comment on Belmont’s statement about the bullet. That indifference might seem baffling if it weren’t so typical of Myers’s head-in-the-sand approach to information that conflicts with the simplistic official story. The one book that goes into some detail on the Belmont memo is the third volume of Horne’s Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, which aptly describes the memo as “containing explosive content.” Horne’s fourth volume adds that in the illicit pre-autopsy surgery, in addition to the removal of parts of Kennedy’s skull and brain to obliterate evidence of a frontal wound or wounds in the head, and the removal of a number of bullet fragments, “A bullet may also have been removed from behind the right ear (per the FBI headquarters memo written the night of the autopsy from Alan Belmont to Clyde Tolson).” Horne’s exhaustive study of the medical evidence and the falsified autopsy discusses how this memo provides additional confirmation of surreptitious tampering with the president’s body to remove evidence of gunfire from the front and from weapons other than the so-called “Oswald rifle.”

 

The body alteration theory has remained controversial despite David Lifton’s in-depth and authoritative research in Best Evidence, but, as was mentioned earlier, Horne and the ARRB went beyond Lifton and actually found eyewitnesses (mortician Tom Robinson and U.S. Navy corpsman Ed Reed) to put on the record about the secret pre-autopsy craniotomy on the president’s body. Horne believes it was performed by the chief autopsist, Dr. James J. Humes, Commander, MC (Medical Corps), U.S. Navy, with the assistance of the other autopsist, Dr. J. Thornton Boswell, Commander, MC, USN, and possibly a third, unknown doctor. Horne’s revised timeline of the events at Bethesda that night places the time of this craniotomy at 6:50 to 7 p.m., and says that Humes surgically removed evidence of “a bullet’s entry from very high up in the right forehead above the right eye”: “significant portions of brain tissue from the forebrain, to eliminate any evidence of a bullet track which would prove there was a shot from the front”; and at least ten bullet fragments. Horne notes that it was during this procedure that the bullet lodged behind the right ear also may have been removed, as the Belmont memo indicates. Horne’s estimate of the relatively short time frame of the body alteration jibes with the account by Janie B. Taylor of her uncles witnessing the clandestine surgery, for as the ARRB’s report of its interview with her states, “The doctor was working at a very ‘hurried’ pace and was done within a few minutes, at which point he left the autopsy room.”

 

Officially, according to the account Dr. Humes gave in his testimony before the Warren Commission, the autopsy “began at approximately 8:00 p.m. on that evening. You must include the fact that certain X-rays and other examinations were made before the actual beginning of the routine type [sic] autopsy examination.” The latter statement, though vague, may have been Dr. Humes’s oblique/CYA way of accounting for the earlier craniotomy without specifically acknowledging it. Humes told the commission, “The president’s body was received at 25 minutes before 8.” Horne writes that the time Humes gave for the body’s arrival at Bethesda was “intentionally misleading, deliberately off by an hour.” Horne’s arrival time of 6:35 p.m. is based on an after-action report by former Marine Sergeant Roger Boyajian, NCO-in-charge of the Marine Corps security detail at Bethesda that night. The Keystone Kops confusion of dual casket entries detailed by Lifton and Horne was a frantically improvised attempt to clandestinely reunite the body, which actually arrived in a body bag inside a plain metal shipping casket, with the more expensive ceremonial Dallas casket, which was empty when it was offloaded from Air Force One into an ambulance on live television at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

 

The literally life-or-death nature of the confrontation at gunpoint between federal and Dallas authorities over whether the coffin could be removed illegally from Parkland Hospital was ostensibly over the issue of whether the autopsy should be held in Dallas or Washington -- the strange scene so vividly described in Manchester’s The Death of a President. As was discussed in Chapter 6, that confrontation might have been caused by the coffin being empty during the tug-of-war between Trauma Room 1 and the hallway at Parkland, which under no circumstances could have been revealed by the Secret Service, or the whole conspiracy would have been blown.

 

The Belmont memo sheds more light on the November 26, 1963, report on the autopsy by FBI agents Francis X. O’Neill, Jr., and James W. Sibert, who witnessed the autopsy and wrote that there had been prior “surgery of the head area, namely, in the top of the skull.” Horne quotes questioning of these two agents by the ARRB’s general counsel, Jeremy Gunn. Neither agent said he had seen the Belmont memo before the ARRB showed it to them in 1997, and both said they had heard no mention at the autopsy of that bullet “lodged behind the President’s ear.” Horne’s theorizing that the bullet in question was removed by Dr. Humes in his pre-autopsy craniotomy without Sibert and O’Neill being present can help account for why the two FBI agents were unaware of the details of that illicit operation beyond the oral indication from Dr. Humes himself at the autopsy that there had been “surgery of the head area.” Horne describes that as a “panicky oral utterance” by the chief autopsist that inadvertently helped give away the plot to alter the body. If the agents were truly unaware of the removal of ballistics evidence at the pre-autopsy craniotomy, as Horne believes they were, that can also account for their later disavowals of knowledge of body tampering other than for their confusion over Dr. Humes’s statement and their awareness of the puzzling absence of any bullet in the body at the autopsy (including the absence of a bullet in the possibly fabricated and non-exiting “back wound”). As the Sibert-O’Neill report puts it,

 

Inasmuch as no complete bullet of any size could be located in the brain area and likewise no bullet could be located in the back or any other area of the body as determined by total body X-Rays and inspection revealing there was no point of exit, the individuals performing the autopsy were at a loss to explain why they could find no bullets.

 

One of the autopsists, Dr. Boswell, told a closed session of the HSCA in 1977, “Initially Admiral [George C.] Burkley [the White House physician] said that they had caught Oswald and that they needed the bullet to complete the case, and we were told initially that’s what we should do, is to find the bullet. Following the X-rays we realized that that was not possible, that there was no bullet there, except fragments.” This statement may be artfully misleading. CE 399, the so-called “magic bullet” the Warren Commission claimed went through both Kennedy and Connally’s bodies and had been found on Connally’s stretcher at Parkland Hospital (another controversial assertion), eventually would be used as “the bullet to complete the case.” Humes evidently had found a different bullet in Kennedy’s head, one that would never be produced as evidence.

 

The Belmont memo gives strong official weight to the theory that at least one shot from the Grassy Knoll hit President Kennedy in the right temple and strengthens the strong possibility that two head shots occurred virtually simultaneously. The preponderance of evidence (also including photographic and eyewitness and ballistics evidence) indicates that this fatal bullet that struck Kennedy in the temple may well have been the one fired by Badge Man, and that this bullet fired from the front was the one that blew out the back of the president’s head. That was a wound the doctors and nurses at Parkland Hospital all reported, contrary to the claim in the autopsy report that the far more massive head wound seen at Bethesda, destroying much of the top and side of Kennedy’s head, was caused by a bullet that entered in the back of his head, fired from behind.

 

The FBI memorandum about the bullet that was never entered into official evidence contradicts not only the official autopsy report but also the official findings of the FBI, the Warren Commission, and the HSCA. And yet Alan Belmont was in a position to be notified about the actual evidence, since he was in charge of the bureau’s investigative divisions and as such had the responsibility for the investigation of the prime suspect in the assassination, Lee Oswald. So the existence of this document, whose release in a massive FOIA dump of FBI documents (mostly overlooked by the media) must have been an accident, is one of the major indications of a coverup of critical evidence that, if it had been made public in 1964, would have radically changed the nature of the case.

 

Most of the rest of the Belmont memo deals with what might seem standard instructions to Shanklin to give the Dallas police about how to investigate the case. But the FBI had a number of reasons for concern about that local investigation. Before the official line on the case was clarified in Washington, Dallas law enforcement officials were admitting that the early ballistics and fingerprint evidence on Oswald was inconclusive, and Deputy DA Bill Alexander’s threat to charge Oswald with being part of an international communist conspiracy was causing alarm among President Johnson and his close aides, who were busy putting a lid on such speculation. The Belmont memo demonstrates the FBI’s concern over the DPD being out of their control and jurisdiction (after all, the assassination was not a federal crime) as well as doubts about the DPD being in disarray and whether it had the ability or inclination to handle this extraordinary case with ordinary professionalism. But the Belmont memo also demonstrates the uncertain state of mind that prevailed at FBI headquarters on the night of the assassination, the bureau’s understanding that the early ballistics and other evidence on Oswald actually were inconclusive, and their anxiety (as well as that of the Johnson White House) to find evidence linking Oswald to both murders. As the Belmont memo continues,

 

I told Shanklin that it appeared the rifle was highly important particularly as Oswald is making no admissions and leads should be set out to immediately check this rifle as well as the telescope sight. Shanklin said this was being done. I told Shanklin to also see if the police want us to make a ballistics test on the pistol which shot the police officer and if so to forward the pistol and the bullets to us for examination. I told Shanklin if the police don’t want to release the pistol to us, he should find out all about it; that is, make, caliber, how many bullets were fired, etc. . . .

 

I told Shanklin that President Johnson has been in touch with the Director [Hoover] and wants to be sure we are on top of this case and is looking to the FBI solving the case. . . .

 

The concern FBI headquarters was feeling over the weakness of the case against Oswald was shared by the DPD, as Detective Jim Leavelle admitted to me when he reported that Captain Fritz asked him to make sure they had a good case on Oswald for killing Tippit, in the event that they didn’t have enough on Oswald for killing Kennedy.

 

When Belmont wrote his memo on the night of November 22, he apparently was somewhat behind the time of the removal of the bullet “lodged behind the President’s ear,” since it probably had been removed more than two hours before he spoke with Shanklin, but despite his guilty knowledge of that piece of evidence, he may not have been fully updated on the minute-by-minute doings at Bethesda.

 

The official findings in the case would claim that the only ammunition recovered from the assassination was CE 399, the almost entirely intact though slightly deformed bullet allegedly turned over to the Secret Service at Parkland Hospital that afternoon (the one to which Belmont presumably is referring when he writes after 9:18 p.m. that “Secret Service had one of the bullets that struck President Kennedy”); two bullet fragments removed from the president’s head and some smaller fragments detected on the X-rays but left in his head; five fragments found in the presidential limousine, also presumed to have come from the fatal head shot (i.e., from CE 399); and fragments supposedly from CE 399 found in the body of Governor Connally (that bullet, however, was missing too little metal to be the plausible source of so much damage and so many fragments). Some bullet fragments were left in Connally’s body when he died in 1993; his family prevented the removal of those fragments, which would have further discounted the possibility that the “magic bullet” could have caused his wounds after supposedly going through Kennedy’s body first.

 

The Warren Report does not account for a bullet “lodged behind the President’s ear” among the three shots it says were fired. The HSCA, although contending that a second gunman fired at the president as his car approached the Grassy Knoll, claimed that the shot missed both Kennedy and Connally. The Belmont memo, on the other hand, is the smoking gun that provides explicit proof of the suppression of evidence by the federal government while supporting the extensive photographic and eyewitness evidence of a second gunman on the knoll.

 

The memo also provides what would seem to be the crucial missing piece of evidence that would conclusively demonstrate the accuracy of Lifton’s controversial Best Evidence, which makes an already strong case that the Bethesda autopsy was faked and the body altered to make it appear that all of the shots were fired behind the president by a lone gunman from the Texas School Book Depository. Ironically, since Lifton evidently did not know about the Belmont memo, he chose to disregard two well-placed sources who told him that a bullet was lodged in the area of the president’s right temple at Bethesda.

 

Those sources were President Kennedy’s Air Force Aide, General Godfrey McHugh, and Coast Guardsman George Barnum, who assisted in the autopsy and was told about the bullet that night by Admiral Burkley. McHugh referred to the bullet while describing the photographing of the president’s body: “[T]hey started fixing it up very well. You see, again, people keep on saying that his face was demolished and all; he was in absolute perfect shape, except the back of the head, top back of the head, had an explosive bullet in it and was badly damaged.” (Lifton wrote that he “tended to discount” McHugh’s report because “No bullet was removed from the head at autopsy, and I supposed McHugh meant that he inferred there had been an explosion, from the damage he saw.”) Barnum said that he and other men involved in the autopsy were taking a coffee break at Bethesda sometime after midnight when Admiral Burkley came in and described the trajectories of the two bullets that he said had hit Kennedy, “The second shot striking him above and to the rear of the right ear, this shot not coming out.” (Drawing no connection with the similar report by McHugh, Lifton thought “Barnum’s report was incorrect on the head shot not exiting.”)

 

Sibert and O’Neill had been dispatched to Andrews Air Force Base with orders from FBI headquarters “to stay with the body and to obtain bullets reportedly in the President’s body.” The bullet described in the Belmont memo might explain another previously mysterious document signed by the two FBI agents. On the night of the assassination, they signed a receipt to Captain J. H. Stover, Jr., commanding officer of the U. S. Naval Medical School (the immediate superior of the autopsy surgeon, Dr. Humes), stating: “We hereby acknowledge receipt of a missle [sic] removed by Commander James J. HUMES, MC, USN on this date.” The fact that this “missile” (or bullet) did not turn up in the X-rays of the president’s head, which revealed only fragments, nor in the Sibert-O’Neill description of the body, is a further indication that “surgery” was indeed performed on Kennedy’s body before the two agents saw the body, and that the bullet was removed during that surgery before Humes began the official autopsy.

 

Horne hypothesizes that this receipt for a “missle” [sic], actually prepared by Chester H. Boyers, chief petty officer in charge of the Pathology Department at Bethesda, was originally referring to the bullet “lodged behind the President’s ear,” but was later passed off as referring to two small bullet fragments. An HSCA report of its interview with Boyers states, “He said even though the receipt states that a ‘missile’ [sic] was recovered, this is in error; only fragments were recovered.  Boyers never saw a fully intact missile.” But the report also states, “In concluding, Boyers said that the pathologists concluded that the President was shot from behind with two missiles,” showing that he used the word “missile” to mean “bullet.” Horne writes of Boyers, “If he was present in the morgue immediately after the body’s first arrival at 6:35 [prior to the arrival of the official ambulance carrying  Jacqueline Kennedy and the empty Dallas coffin], he would have witnessed the illicit post mortem surgery on the skull -- the modified craniotomy witnessed by [Navy X-ray technician] Ed Reed and [civilian mortician] Tom Robinson -- and may well have witnessed the removal of a bullet that had been lodged behind the ear (presumably the right ear, near the site of the exit blowout witnessed in Dallas at Parkland Hospital).”

 

Once the FBI had its hands on CE 399 on the night of November 22, the bureau had a crucial component of its case against Oswald as the lone gunman. Further evidence of chicanery involving bullets might be seen in apparently conflicting FBI documents found at the National Archives about the receipt of that bullet (or two bullets) that night. This discrepancy was reported in 2006 by John Hunt in an essay entitled “The Mystery of the 7:30 Bullet.” One handwritten document gives the time of receipt as 8:50 p.m. EST, when a bullet was turned over to FBI SA Elmer Lee Todd by Secret Service Director James J. Rowley at the White House. Another document, a summary of evidence, has a handwritten notation giving the time as 7:30 p.m. when Robert A. Frazier of the Firearms and Toolmarks Division of the FBI Laboratory received a bullet. CE 399 supposedly was transported from Parkland Hospital to Washington by the Secret Service, and both of these FBI documents ostensibly are for the “Bullet from stretcher,” but the notations of two separate times of bullets reaching FBI custody raise a question about whether these memos could refer to separate bullets. Perhaps the bullet received at 7:30 is the one that had been “lodged behind the President’s ear” and had been removed shortly before that by Dr. Humes. Hunt’s essay includes a copy of the Belmont memo.

 

Around the time Belmont spoke with the FBI’s Dallas SAC J. Gordon Shanklin at 9:18 p.m., Dr. Humes was probing what was left of the brain and the president’s shattered head in the crowded autopsy room, filled with military and other personnel as well as the medical personnel who belonged there. The autopsist expressed consternation (probably feigned) over not being able to find any bullets, only small metal fragments. But well before 10:45-11 p.m., when the formal autopsy was concluded, the other bullet the FBI had been “arranging to get” was no longer in the body and had already disappeared from the official evidence in the case, even though it may have made its way from Bethesda to the FBI Laboratory three hours earlier.

 

With the body altered, the autopsy concluded, and the “Oswald rifle” and CE 399 in hand, the basic elements of the framing of Oswald were complete in time for him to be charged with the assassination at 11:26 p.m. CST (12:26 a.m. EST), when Captain Fritz signed the complaint. Previously Oswald had only been charged, shortly after 7 p.m. CST, with the murder of Tippit.

 

Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service agent riding in the front seat of the limousine, after describing a “flurry” of shells coming into the car, told the Warren Commission, “There have got to be more than three shots.” The bullet mentioned by Belmont is one of several reported to have been recovered from the assassination but not placed into evidence. The other bullets unacknowledged by the commission include:

 

* A bullet the FBI said caused a shallow, non-exiting wound in the president’s back, in contradiction of the subsequently formulated single-bullet theory. The FBI’s Supplemental Report of January 13, 1964, states that “Medical examination of the President’s body had revealed that the bullet which entered his back had penetrated to a distance of less than a finger length” (the source of that information was the Sibert-O’Neill report on the autopsy). There were conflicting reports about what happened to this bullet. The FBI Summary Report of December 9, 1963, says that “there was no point of exit, and that the bullet was not in the body” at the autopsy, but The Journal of the American Medical Association on January 4, 1964, wrote that the bullet which caused the back wound “was recovered during the autopsy.” The Washington Post of December 18, 1963, drawing on “the as yet unofficial report” of the autopsy pathologists, stated that the bullet “was found deep in his shoulder” (note the report that the bullet was “found”); the Post later wrote that the story had been “confirmed prior to publication by the FBI.” (Some critics contend that this bullet and CE 399 may have been one and the same, and that the original evidence was manipulated to accommodate the single-bullet theory. But CE 399 appears to have been planted, and though it may have been fired from the “Oswald rifle,” it was fired by someone other than Oswald.)

 

* The shallow back wound, if it was not artificially created at Bethesda to support the single-bullet theory, could also have been caused by another officially unexplained bullet reported by Rear Admiral David P. Osborne, chief of surgery for Bethesda Naval Hospital, who told the HSCA that a bullet fell from the president’s clothing at Bethesda.

 

* A bullet was reported in the press at the time to have lodged in the president’s throat or lung; the bullet in the throat “ranged downward in his chest and did not exit,” the New York Times quoted Dr. Kemp Clark, the attending neurosurgeon at Parkland Hospital, as saying on November 26, 1963. The 1968 Ramsey Clark Panel chosen by the Justice Department to examine the official autopsy photographs and X-rays (which themselves contain serious alterations) noted that “several small metallic fragments” could be seen at the top of the right lung on the X-rays; autopsy photographs of the interior of Kennedy’s chest are missing from the National Archives. The government has never officially released Kennedy autopsy photographs, which were leaked by a Secret Service photographer, James K. Fox.

 

* A bullet was found embedded in the grass on the south side of Elm Street about ten minutes after the assassination. A series of photographs taken by Dallas press photographers James Murray and William Allen apparently show it being removed by a plainclothesman whose identity has never been determined but who places the object in his pocket (some have claimed he was FBI SA Robert Barrett, who later was present at the Tippit murder site, but Barrett is clearly not the man in these photos). This bullet (identified as such in the November 23 issue of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram) could have been fired either from behind or in front of the president; various witnesses reported hearing a shot or shots that did not hit the car. One of these shots might have been responsible for the wound in the cheek of spectator James Tague, who was standing at ground level in front of the Triple Underpass; his wound was caused either by a fragment or by a ricocheting piece of pavement. Dallas Deputy Sheriff Al Maddox told Larry Sneed in No More Silence, “[Deputy] Buddy Walthers, who later became my partner, later told me about a bullet that had hit a manhole skirt on the south side of Elm Street. . . . He also told me about some guy who was hit by a chip in the face and blood trickled down his face. . . . [And Walthers] did show me a bullet that he claimed he found in Dealey Plaza which he may have eventually given to his son.” Walthers (who was shot to death by an escaped convict while on a case with Maddox in 1969) appears in some of the pictures of the bullet being removed from the grass on November 22 by the unidentified plainclothesman. In the sequence of stills printed in the Shaw-Harris book Cover-Up, Walthers also can be seen picking up something from the ground. The shot that ricocheted and caused something to strike Tague may have been a different shot from the one that hit the manhole skirt and embedded itself in the grass.

 

* An object that may have been a bullet was spotted by the Clark Panel in alleged autopsy photographs of the president’s brain. The panel reported it saw “a gray brown rectangular structure measuring approximately 13 x 20 mm [0.5 by 0.8 inches, about half the size of an unbroken rifle bullet]. Its identity cannot be established by The Panel.” “Is there perhaps a bullet buried in the formalin-hardened brain?” Charles G. Wilber asks in his 1978 book Medicolegal Investigation of the President John F. Kennedy Murder. This object was ignored in the original autopsy findings and by the Warren Commission, but it is unlikely that it could have been the bullet “lodged behind the President’s ear.” The brain has been missing since 1966. Since much of the brain was blasted out by the head shot(s) and more of it removed in the clandestine pre-autopsy craniotomy, very little was left to be examined in the official autopsy. So photographs of the brain and purported measurements of it by the U.S. government are probably not of President Kennedy’s brain but of some other brain that was substituted for it as part of the coverup.

 

The commission’s account of only three bullets fired in Dealey Plaza (and its production for the record of only one bullet) is simply farcical in light of these accounts of multiple bullets. The commission’s lack of reliability in this aspect of the case is no accident and not an indication of incompetence. Ballistics evidence is often the crux of a murder case. Confronted with such a sorry array of “so-called evidence” in this crucial area of investigation, it’s hard to avoid seeing it as the centerpiece of a massive coverup. And when missing bullets are coupled with the difficulty of matching bullets and bullet fragments from Dealey Plaza with weapons and wounds, the ballistics evidence in the president’s shooting becomes just as unreliable as the ballistics evidence in the Tippit shooting. When the reports of bullets fired at Kennedy but not entered into evidence are considered, CIA photographic analyst Homer McMahon’s account to the Assassination Records Review Board in 1997 seems all the more credible. McMahon’s statement that when he worked on a version of the Zapruder film during the weekend of the assassination, he thought he saw JFK reacting to six to eight shots fired from at least three directions (as described in Chapter 4), probably brings us close to what actually happened.

 

Accounts of some of the closest eyewitnesses to the assassination give further corroboration to the Belmont memo’s report of a bullet “lodged behind the President’s ear.” William Newman, who was standing on the north side of Elm Street just to the right of the president, said that the shot hit the president near the right ear. Emmett J. Hudson, who was standing on the steps alongside the retaining wall on the knoll very close to Badge Man, said the bullet struck “a little bit behind the ear and a little bit above the ear” on the right side of the president’s head. Along with Secret Service Agent George Hickey, Agent Sam Kinney, who was also in the followup car behind the presidential limousine, and motorcycle officer Bobby W. Hargis, who was riding to the president’s left rear, all said that the shot hit Kennedy in “the right side” of his head. Texas Highway Patrolman Hurchel Jacks, who was driving the convertible carrying Vice President and Lady Bird Johnson and Senator Yarborough, said that when he saw Kennedy lying in his limousine upon arrival at Parkland, “it appeared that the bullet had struck him above the right ear or near the temple.” And when White House Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff (also an eyewitness) officially announced the president’s death to the press, he said the fatal bullet “entered in the temple, the right temple.” Film footage exists of Kilduff pointing to that area of his own head as he makes the announcement.

 

The trajectory of the bullet “lodged behind the President’s ear” indicates a shot from close range on the Grassy Knoll. Whether it was fired from behind the retaining wall or behind the picket fence will have to remain a matter of conjecture due to the alteration of the wounds and the autopsists’ failure (under orders from military officers present at the autopsy) to track the trajectories of the wounds. Furthermore, that bullet that hit Kennedy in the right side of his head may have been a hollow-point bullet; McHugh referred to a bullet in the “top back of [Kennedy’s] head” as an “explosive bullet,” one that causes greater damage than an ordinary bullet. It is also possible that an explosion caused by two virtually simultaneous head shots may have occurred, although if so, it evidently did not obliterate the point of entry of the bullet in the right temple, since Belmont indicates the bullet was still lodged there until some point in the proceedings at Bethesda.

 

Close study of the Zapruder film caused some researchers to perceive a double motion of the president’s head at the moment of the fatal shot or shots -- he appears to be thrown violently forward very briefly, almost imperceptibly without a frame-by-frame viewing of the film, and then more obviously backward with even greater violence, in what could have been a crossfire. Secret Service Agent Clint Hill, who was leaping toward the presidential limousine when the fatal shot(s) occurred, told the commission, “[W]hen I mounted the car it was -- it had a different sound, first of all, than the first sound that I heard. The second one had almost a double sound . . . which could have been caused probably by the hard surface of the head. But I am not sure that that is what caused it.” Hill wrote more specifically in his November 30, 1963, statement to the Secret Service that the second shot “had a different sound --- like the sound of shooting a revolver into something hard. I saw the President slump more to his left.” It was as a result of that shot, Hill told the commission, that “The right rear portion of his head was missing. It was lying in the rear seat of the car. His brain was exposed. . . . At the time of the shooting, when I got into the rear of the car, [Mrs. Kennedy] said, ‘My God, they have shot his head off.’” Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman gave a similar description of the fatal shots: “[I]t was like a double bang.” Numerous other witnesses attested to hearing two different kinds of sounds during the gunfire. For example, S. M. Holland’s recollections of the four gunshots he heard having two different kinds of sounds indicate he perceived two weapons being fired. Holland, with his lifelong knowledge of weapons, told Josiah Thompson, “It would be like you’re firing a .38 pistol right beside a shotgun, or a .45 right beside a shotgun . . . one is not near as loud as the other.” Thompson asked, “And the third shot was not so loud [as the three others Holland heard]?” Holland replied, “Oh no, the third shot was not so loud; it was like it came from a .38 pistol, compared with a high-powered rifle.” The third and fourth shots, Holland said, came “Pretty fast together. They weren’t simultaneous . . . They were ‘boom-boom.’”

 

Horne concludes that a shot hit the president’s temple but is uncertain whether it was fired from behind the stockade fence or from the Badge Man position. He writes that this shot “hit the President above and slightly behind the right ear, and created a massive tangential wound (that represented both entrance and exit) in the right rear of his skull -- the blowout seen by Clint Hill in the limousine, and by the Parkland medical staff.” Horne notes, “I believe the smoke Holland saw was from the rifle fired well to his left, from where the fence meets the overpass (as if wafted down the fence line), but that the pistol shot he heard may have been caused by the .45 caliber weapon that caused the large tangential wound in the right-rear of the President’s skull.” Horne also believes a shot was fired from the Dal-Tex Building and hit Kennedy low in the posterior skull. (It must be noted that Horne unfortunately also subscribes to the theory, first proposed by Newcomb and Adams in Murder from Within, that Secret Service Agent William Greer, the driver of the limousine, fired a pistol shot that hit Kennedy in his left temple, where some Parkland witnesses claim to have seen a wound. This theory suffers from the defect of being without any plausible evidence that Greer fired a shot.)

The possibility of crossfire was seemingly given support by the HSCA’s acoustical finding that the third and fourth shots occurred just seven-tenths of a second apart. That so-called evidence, based on the dubious DPD Dictabelt, was largely responsible for the HSCA finding that Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” The committee “concluded that the testimony of witnesses in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963 supported the finding of the acoustical analysis that there was a high probability that a shot was fired at the President from the grassy knoll. There were also witness reports of suspicious activity in the vicinity of the knoll.”

Although the HSCA found that it was “Scientific acoustical evidence [that] establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy,” its report states that “the shot from the grassy knoll missed President Kennedy” and that he was hit only from behind. The report identifies a position behind the picket fence on the knoll (the so-called “acoustical position”) as the one from which the Dictabelt recordings indicated a shot was fired, although the report hedges by saying that the matches of four impulses on the Dictabelt with gunshots fired in the committee’s 1978 acoustical reconstruction in Dealey Plaza “did not, however, prove conclusively that the impulses on the 1963 [DPD] dispatch tape did, in fact, represent gunfire from the book depository or grassy knoll.” The HSCA found “no physical evidence of where a shot from the grassy knoll might have hit,” and since it concluded that Kennedy was struck in the head by the shooter firing from the Book Depository “less than one second after the shot from the knoll,” it claimed “there would have been little apparent reason for a gunman on the knoll to fire a second shot.” Oswald was named as the gunman firing from the Depository, but the committee found itself “unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.” As previously discussed, the acoustical “finding” seems to be a piece of disinformation deliberately planted on the committee to discredit its findings of shots from the knoll and thereby discredit its conclusion about a conspiracy. Anomalies found on the recording soon made it seem dubious evidence, although the acoustical “finding” cleverly was made to appear in synch with actual evidence from more reliable sources of double-sounding gunfire.

 

The case against the patsy, Oswald, made by both the Warren Commission and the HSCA, and reliant on the “so-called evidence” of the magic bullet and the defective Mannlicher-Carcano rifle he did not own, was not clouded by the presence of the bullet “lodged behind the President’s ear.” That bullet, although officially recorded in a November 22, 1963, memo written by the man in charge of the FBI’s investigative divisions, and therefore responsible for the case against Oswald, conveniently sank into the Orwellian “memory hole.”

Indira Gandhi, herself later a victim of assassination,

said it best: Kennedy "died because he lost the support of his peers."

From my book POLITICAL TRUTH, about Jean Stafford and Marguerite Oswald:

 

It has been argued that [Lyndon] Johnson, in covering up the assassination, acted relatively “benignly” in doing so to prevent a nuclear war with Russia or Cuba, if they were found responsible. That was the argument Johnson presented to [Earl] Warren, who also has been given the benefit of doubt by some commentators as participating reluctantly in a “benign” coverup; it is reported that after their meeting about his heading the commission, he left Johnson’s office with tears in his eyes. Those who consider Johnson a more witting member of the conspiracy before the fact would dispute how benign his indisputable involvement in the coverup after the fact actually was.

[Peter Dale] Scott nevertheless gives Johnson credit for thwarting what he calls “phase one” of the conspiracy, a plot designed to provoke an invasion of Cuba by framing the patsy as a pro-Castro, pro-USSR sympathizer, and a possible nuclear confrontation with the Soviets. That stigmatized identity was manufactured from day one with the help of the media, including Hendrix [the CIA-connected, Miami-based Hal Hendrix of the Scripps-Howard News Service] and Clare Boothe Luce, even though Oswald was only posing as a Castroite communist while actually working as a U.S. government asset and informant. Oswald’s involvement with the government — which was rumored from the beginning in various quarters; publicly proclaimed by his mother, Marguerite; and leaked to the Warren Commission soon after its formation — obviously had to be covered up in the process of claiming that he acted for purely irrational psychological reasons. So little discussion of that topic appeared in the press in the initial months, and Marguerite Oswald was widely mocked as a nut and reviled as a shameless seeker of publicity and financial advantage. Although with her erratic behavior and relentless self-promotion, Marguerite sometimes came off as her own worst enemy, it was obvious that there was a concerted effort in the media to avoid taking anything she said seriously and instead to malign her. One of the most vicious books dealing with the case was A Mother in History (1965), a portrait of Mrs. Oswald by the well-known short story writer and novelist Jean Stafford that seemed little more than a smear job rather than an attempt to understand the subject, even from a critical viewpoint.

Thanks for continuing to post these valuable clips and shows, David.

Unfortunately, it seems at the moment that they won't play.

At least the ones I tried did not play.

Brigadier General Lewis B. (Chesty) Puller was the most-decorated

Marine in American history. He won his fifth Navy Cross in Korea

for commanding the rear of the First Marine Division in the epic

retreat from the Choisin Reservoir. When Puller heard the situation

in Korea described as a stalemate with the forces of Communist China,

he snapped, "Stalemate, hell! We've lost the first war in our history,

and it's time someone told the American people the truth about

it. The Reds whipped the devil out of us, pure and simple."

From my recent book POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY, a passage dealing

with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and other matters:

 

The day after the assassination, Castro gave a lengthy speech on Cuban television and radio analyzing with remarkable immediacy and acuity how rightwing domestic forces probably were behind the assassination. Castro read from American press reports to show that attempts were already being made to blame the assassination on Cuba and the USSR. On the day of the assassination Cuban exiles and journalists involved with their CIA-connected activities, including the Miami-based Hal Hendrix of the Scripps-Howard News Service, spread stories to other members of the media about Oswald. They circulated claims of actual and fabricated involvements by Oswald with anti-Castro Cubans and his alleged trip to Mexico City in the fall of 1963, during which he was impersonated.

 

In a striking example of how some of the media were involved as possible accessories in suspicious pre-assassination activities, Life magazine actually helped finance some of the CIA covert operations against Cuba after the Bay of Pigs debacle. Time Inc. and its publisher Henry Luce provided financial backing for raids against Cuba, as had his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, the playwright and rightwing politician. She also helped support the CIA-backed DRE, the radical Cuban exile organization that Oswald attempted to infiltrate in the summer of 1963. Clare Luce also leaked supposedly incriminating information about Oswald to the media immediately after the assassination. She claimed to have received a telephone call on the night of the assassination from one of the Cubans implicating Oswald in a plot to kill Kennedy by the Cuban government. Such propaganda, which was quickly and widely spread in the print and television media, evidently was intended to prompt a U.S. retaliatory attack against Cuba, a situation that evidently caused genuine concern for President Johnson, who did not favor such action.

 

Among the most provocative CIA operations the Luces helped support was Operation Tilt, the Bayo-Martino-Pawley mission in June 1963. The raid was run by William Pawley, a rightwing businessman, diplomat, Flying Tigers principal, and CIA operative; Cuban exile activist Eduardo Perez (Eddie Bayo); and Martino, along with CIA Miami station chief Theodore Shackley. Their mission ostensibly was undertaken to exfiltrate two Soviet officers from the island who would proclaim that the USSR had not removed its missiles or nuclear warheads after the Missile Crisis as it had agreed to do. The raid was linked to another CIA-mob attempt to kill Castro. A Life staff writer, Richard Billings, went along to help document the mission in a story for the magazine that, in the end, never appeared.

 

As Scott writes, the failed Bayo-Martino-Pawley raid “could have been planned precisely to blackmail the CIA and Life into an assassination cover-up. On November 22, Life, hearing of the assassination, dispatched Billings to coordinate the hyperactive Life team in Dallas that swiftly bought up the Zapruder film and the rights to Marina’s story. A principal in both preemptive purchases. . . . was Billings’s relative-in-law C. D. Jackson.” Billings later played key roles in various aspects of the coverup apparatus: he helped infiltrate and undermine Jim Garrison’s investigation of the CIA’s role in the assassination, served as editorial director of the ultimately compromised HSCA, and cowrote a Mafia-did-it disinformation book The Plot to Kill the President (1981) with G. Robert Blakey, the HSCA’s chief counsel and staff director.

Although Castro told his people on November 23 that not enough was yet known about the events in Dallas or about Oswald, the accused man was unknown to the Cubans, Castro said, and there were many “strange” and contradictory allegations about his background, such as claims that he had both pro-Castro and anti-Castro sympathies. Castro questioned both Oswald’s ability to return so easily to the U.S. after defecting to the USSR and his heading what the Cuban leader correctly noted was a nonexistent New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. As it emerged later, that was part of Oswald’s attempt, under the direction of the CIA and David Atlee Phillips, to help create a “legend” for himself as a faux pro-Castro Communist without realizing why he was being used.

 

The FPCC itself was an intelligence operation designed by the CIA to entrap American dissidents. The organization was actually founded in 1960 by two CBS reporters who had covered Castro’s rise to power, Robert Taber and Richard Gibson. After Oswald was manipulated by the CIA to appear to be a Castro sympathizer in his guise as a FPCC member, the Agency and its anti-Castro DRE organization used their media contacts on November 22 to use that connection as part of its propaganda operation against him, including radio and television interviews he had given in New Orleans. The claim that Oswald had visited the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy in Mexico City that fall was also part of that “legend” but orchestrated without his involvement. Oswald probably reported to government agencies on Cuban exile activities in Dallas, including gun-running operations. Ruby had also been involved in gun-running to Cuba, and there was a Cuban exile “safe house” on Harlandale Avenue that Oswald may have visited in the Oak Cliff neighborhood near where he and Ruby lived and Officer Tippit was shot.

 

“Anyone who is not a half-wit, who has a little common sense,” Castro declared on November 23, would recognize that “the most reactionary forces in the United States” were most likely orchestrating the events in Dallas. Castro accurately raised the possibility that Oswald was a CIA and FBI operative as well as “the danger of some frame-up. . . . Was there perhaps in certain civilian and military ultra-reactionary circles in the United States, a plot against President Kennedy’s life?” Castro asked if Oswald might be “an instrument” of forces trying to use the assassination as a pretext for another invasion of Cuba and possibly a preemptive nuclear war. The Cuban leader thought it especially telling that the assassination occurred in the wake of Kennedy’s agreement not to invade Cuba and his signing of a nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union in August 1963.

Some of the 1/6 Capitol attackers were armed (it's not

entirely clear how many and with what), but a reason many

were not is that carrying handguns is illegal in DC,

and they didn't want to get stopped and arrested

for that violation. There were, however, caches of weapons

in hotels and motels just outside DC ready and waiting to be

brought in if some of the ringleaders gave the

signal. 

Robbie is getting quite an impressive array of interviewees

covering a wide spectrum and does a good job interviewing

people on this complex subject. I am pleased to have been one of them.

Keep up the good work, Robbie! It's also great to see someone

so young (24) so passionate about the case (I told Robbie

he is the same age as Oswald, who had quite an astonishing

life in that short space of time).

Corrupting a target's bodyguards is standard practice

in assassinations. Just look at MACBETH for how

Shakespeare shows the Macbeth couple getting

the king's bodyguards drunk so they are in no

state to protect him. Rowley should have fired

all the agents for breaking the rule about drinking

on duty and for getting inadequate sleep and leaving

the president basically unprotected. That they

were not fired but simply chastised was a key

element of the coverup. And it enabled some

to present themselves in a false light in history.

Both Johnson and Hoover did not have faith

in the Secret Service, partly as a result of 11/22.

These videos have been removed on YouTube.

That line of Pesci's was from Winston

Churchill, who said it about Russia/the USSR.

I love how Mr. Griffith denies 1/6 had any connection

to 11/22 and maintains that without reading a recent book that

argues that case.  Rejecting an argument without

reading about it is a common way to maintain one's beliefs,

especially if they are drawn from a limited information

base chosen according to predisposition.

That is exactly what happened. I don't know if you

read newspapers or watch the news on TV or if you

are simply in denial. As for the connections of the

JFK assassination to 1/6, see my book POLITICAL

TRUTH: THE MEDIA AND THE ASSASSINATION

OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY, which traces how the

breakdown of belief and faith in the government following

the Coup of 1963 led inevitably

to many other ills in the body politic, including the attempted coup by Trump.

This may be relevant to your question; from my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE:

The Tippits’ “marriage was in trouble,” Greg Lowrey told me, pointing out what is now obvious but was concealed from the public at the time of the officer’s death. One report, printed in Myers’s book, has it that in 1963, Marie Tippit showed up at Austin’s Barbecue and made what a teenaged patron, Louis Cortinas, called a “big stink” while she questioned employees about J. D.’s relationship with Johnnie Maxie Thompson. Austin Cook reported in our interview, “The first thing I knew [about the romance], was Marie called me and asked me who put those flowers on the grave out there that said, ‘To the best man I’ve ever met or ever will meet,’ or something like that. I didn’t know. That could have been a lot of people. Then I found out, I don’t know how long it took me to find out, but it was probably a year before I found out all the truth about it, and I still don’t know all of it.”

When I asked Johnnie Maxie if she left the flowers, she admitted, “Well, I did. I was pretty crazy about him, and I couldn’t go to the funeral. It didn’t last very long, and we didn’t have the kind of relationship where we got to know each other very well.” What message did she leave with the flowers? “I might remember it but I wouldn’t repeat it.”

Yes, Pyle was supposed to have been based on Lansdale. Greene

was once asked how his novels could seemingly predict future

crises. He said it was because he would read the New York Times

carefully each day. He would not read every story but would read

all of the first three pages or so and at least the headlines of

every other story in the front section. But the truth was that

his deep connections in British intelligence were keeping

informed about hot spots to watch. He would go there on

journalistic cover assignments to do his research.

The Caine/Noyce version of THE QUIET AMERICAN is pretty good, though not as good

as the novel. I have not seen the earlier Joseph L.

Mankiewicz version, which is supposed to be a travesty

and flagrant distortion of the book.

 

BTW, Greene once said the best training for a young

writer is to work for a conservative newspaper. I assume

he meant you have to learn how to navigate around restrictions

and learn to tell the truth by reporting accurately and in

a foolproof way, while on a "liberal"

newspaper you were given more license, which tends to

make a reporter complacent and encourages

one to slant his/her stories ideologically. I found what

Greene said to be true about the conservative paper

for which I worked, The Wisconsin State Journal, a

morning paper. The liberal Capital Times, an afternoon

paper, had a chance to hire me at the same time

but didn't; the managing editor told me a while later that I would

have been happier on his paper, but I doubt it. His paper was

very lax in many ways.

 

And they shamelessly plagiarized many

of my stories, because we staffed government meetings at night that they

didn't bother to cover. We shared a print shop

and printing press. The Cap Times became so brazen about it that

they would literally just lift the type of my stories and print

them without credit. So one time someone inserted a line

at the bottom of a story, "Stolen from The Wisconsin State

Journal," and sure enough, the story ran with that line intact.

It embarrassed them a bit, but not enough to make them do their

own legwork. (I wrote a few stories for the Cap Times earlier,

and they pusillanimously apologized for a couple of

accurate features I wrote exposing problems at the university.

The State Journal never did that to me. But the Cap Times did run a letter I wrote

in 1966 [published December 7] dissenting from

the Warren Report, my first writing on the Kennedy assassination.)

 

The reason I got the job on the State Journal was

that my grandfather, John G. McBride, an art

teacher at Superior (Wis.) Central High School

for forty years, had persuaded the principal not to flunk out one of

his students, Dan Fitzpatrick, who was not doing well in his other studies. My grandfather

argued that the young man had genuine art talent. So

Dan Fitzpatrick finished school and went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes

for editorial cartooning on The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The editor of the State Journal

when I applied was Dan's brother Larry Fitzpatrick, who

told me that's why he was hiring me. To quote Portia in THE

MERCHANT OF VENICE, "How far that little

candle throws his beams,/So shines a good deed

in a naughty world."

William H. Sullivan's eye-opening admission in 1972

about why the US was still fighting the Vietnam War caused a brief

stir when I reported it for The Wisconsin State

Journal and it was sent around the world by the AP.

The news was eclipsed by his revelation in my coverage of that same

speech on the University of Wisconsin, Madison, campus that the Paris peace

talks were about to resume. Sullivan tried

to deny his revelation about the peace talks and his unusually candid admission about the war. I produced my notes showing that he said what I reported.  Then he tried

to claim the event and his speech had been

off the record. I produced the letter from

the university group inviting our newspaper to

cover the speech.

 

From my recent book POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA

AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY:

 

[In his 1976 book, THE YANKEE AND COWBOY WAR: CONSPIRACIES FROM DALLAS TO WATERGATE AND BEYOND, Carl] Oglesby further interprets an earlier coup, President Johnson’s forced “abdication” in 1968, as the outcome of the internal power struggle between the “Cowboy” faction that LBJ represented and the Eastern “Yankee” elite. Oglesby writes that Johnson’s grudging agreement not to seek another term as president, “as well as his switch to a negotiated settlement line on Vietnam,” was a “bloodless power play.” The North Vietnamese Tet Offensive of January 1968 and the international Gold Crisis that resulted from the weakening of the U.S. economic position by the war caused Johnson to be forced out of power by his “Wise Men,” the group of senior leaders who regularly advised him on policy as a kind of shadow government (the epitome of what’s meant by “deep politics”). Drawn largely from the leadership of the Eastern establishment, they included Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge, Douglas Dillon, and George Ball. On March 25, 1968, they told Johnson the war could not be won the way he was pursuing it and that he could not run for another term as president.

 

Johnson surprised the nation by announcing “his” decision on television six days later. He was bitter about it and, according to the chief American correspondent of the Sunday Times of London, Henry Brandon, Johnson told him later that year, “The only difference between Kennedy’s assassination and mine is that mine was a live one, which makes it all a little more torturing.” Oglesby interprets that forced abdication as a Yankee power play by the Wise Men. He writes that they wanted to “break off [from the Cowboys] a war believed to be unwinnable except through an internal police state, both sides fighting for control of the levers of military and state-police power through control of the presidency. Johnson’s Ides of March was a less bloody Dallas, but it was a Dallas just the same: it came of a concerted effort of conspirators to install a new national policy by clandestine means. Its main difference from Dallas is that it finally did not succeed.”

 

That the ouster from office of Kennedy’s successor resulted in America eventually losing the war in Vietnam was another tragic historical irony. After Nixon’s ascension in place of Johnson, the new president wound down the war diplomatically but with excruciating slowness while expanding the war enormously in terms of American firepower. That devastating escalation was partly made possible by Nixon’s canny decision to end the draft, which helped reduce domestic dissent. His maddening gradualism in bringing the war to the conclusion he had promised in his 1968 campaign but did not deliver during his tenure in office was the subject of a question put to a member of his administration at an event I covered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1972, as a reporter for The Wisconsin State Journal.

 

Henry Kissinger’s deputy William H. Sullivan (who later was serving as the U.S. ambassador to Iran when the hostage crisis erupted in 1979) was asked at that event why the U.S. was still in Vietnam. He answered that it was because the U.S. needed to control the oil in the South China Sea. That kind of candid public revelation about realpolitik and the economic causations of war is most unusual among government officials. What I reported was picked up by the Associated Press and went around the world on its wire, although it was eclipsed by another revelation I reported from the same event, Sullivan’s comment that the Paris peace talks soon would be resuming. Following the stir both statements caused, Sullivan claimed he had not made them. I produced my notes to prove that he had. Then it was claimed that Sullivan’s speech to a university organization had been off-the-record. I produced a letter from that organization inviting our newspaper to cover his appearance on campus. Studies of the Vietnam War rarely discuss the importance of oil in motivating the long U.S. presence there.

 

Revisionist (i.e., truthful) historians such as Oglesby and [Peter Dale] Scott attempt to make sense of these often-hidden aspects of modern American history. They analyze them as part of the workings of the deep state, a line of inquiry that helps clarify the seemingly mad spectacle of American foreign policy from Watergate and Vietnam and continuing through all the internal battles and external crises that have followed. That history takes us through the terms of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and careens catastrophically from 9/11 to the attempted Trump Coup. The parade of nearly constant destructive upheavals and calamities our country has undergone since the end of World War II demonstrates the continuing validity of Scott’s 1993 thesis about the regularity of “perceived threats” in modern American history and how those threats have been resolved through “collusive secrecy and law-breaking” and how they “deserve to be regarded as periodic readjustments of the open political system in which we live.” Even though the Cold War ended in 1991, such upheavals and readjustments, often carried out by violent means, remain the norm in the conduct of American foreign policy and the central role the military-industrial complex plays in our national life. By studying the functioning of the deep state that way, Scott writes, “we should look within, not outside, the political status quo, if we hope to understand the [Kennedy] assassination.”

 

Graham Greene, in his 1955 novel THE QUIET AMERICAN, tried to alert

the world about the US taking

over the failed French war in Indochina (which was half

paid for by the US). 

In a Gallup poll taken after the My Lai Massacre was

revealed, half of Americans said they approved of it.

I have found over the years that this split among Americans is

not uncommon on important issues. During the depths

of the illegal Bush/Cheney regime, around 70 percent

of Americans, or more, said they approved of torture.

And note our current impasse.

Michael, have you listened to the audiotapes

online of President Johnson in 1964 discussing the

war with Sen. Richard Russell? Johnson admits

the war cannot be won but that he is powerless

to stop escalating it. You should ask yourself

why. And Russell accurately predicts the

US involvement would last 10 years and that

we would lose 50,000 troops and the war.

Well, it's debatable, David, but it looks like the puppet in this image at Love Field.

I had an interview scheduled with Jean Hill, in which I would have asked

her many other things as well as this, but she abruptly canceled it without

explanation. I had met her in Dealey Plaza and chatted for a while, and

she seemed willing to talk. I wanted to confront her with her many changes

of story over the years. Probably she figured that would happen.

The "DC" man in Dealey Plaza looks considerably

older than Felipe Santiago.