Joseph McBride

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.

All this going over old ground that has been covered in numerous books (etc.) is an apparent goal of some disinformation operatives who frequent this forum (and have been doing so with more regularity lately) to waste time and distract attention from genuine research. Most members here are interested in doing genuine research that attempts to advance the case, but not these other posters who have infested the site.

Some here may recall that Jean Hill's comment about a "little dog" in the backseat was not wrong, since Jacqueline Kennedy had been given a Lamp Chop puppet at Love Field and had it with her in the back seat. It resembled a little dog. Jean Hill was ridiculed unfairly for that. She made many misstatements, but that was not one of them.

Someone who tries to overthrow the government and kill the vice-president and the speaker of the House while attacking the Congress while it is in session to determine the outcome of a presidential election is not a conservative.

Long before the Kennedy assassination, the Mannlicher-Carcano was jokingly known as the "humanitarian rifle" because it was such a poor device for killing.