Joseph McBride

August 10, 2022

As I looked into the faces of the police officers guarding

the line a block from Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963,

I felt that many of them looked uncomfortable and somewhat

ashamed at what they were being made to do that day. The

ceremony was not in honor of President Kennedy but a PR

exercise by the mayor et al. to further whitewash the corrupt

image of Dallas. To paraphrase Lady Macbeth, "Yet who would have

thought [JFK] to have had so much blood in him. . . . Here's

the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will

not sweeten this little hand."

August 8, 2022

The late David McCullough was a Skull & Bones member who practiced deceit in his books on Adams and Truman. A rather shameful figure. McCullough justified Truman's dropping of the two atomic bombs and distorted history to do so, as well as ignoring recent scholarship on why the bombs were not necessary in ending the war. He also was the keynote speaker at Dallas's 50th anniversary commemoration of the JFK assassination -- behind police lines, holding back dissidents, including me -- and never mentioned the assassination. He just gave a dull, anodyne recital of some of JFK's famous quotes. McCullough was a thoroughly establishment figure whose eminence came from his willingness to prop up America's official mythology.

https://hnn.us/articles/157.html

http://mobylives.com/Nobile_Pulitzer_speech.html

August 8, 2022

https://wilsonrobertd.podbean.com/e/jfk-assassination-joseph-mcbride-max-good/

Along with host Bob Wilson, I interview Max Good, the writer-director

of the documentary THE ASSASSINATION AND MRS. PAINE for two hours on

Bob's DON'T PASS ME BY podcast. Max was

speaking from San Antonio, where he was presenting his superb film

at the local film festival.

August 8, 2022

The Archives had one when I was researching Bush in 1988.

The city directories then were piled willy-nilly in a dusty

room I went through.

August 7, 2022

The National Archives also has many city directories.

I learned from one on New Orleans that George H. W.

Bush's CIA front Zapata Corporation had an office

in New Orleans in 1963.

August 7, 2022

Jim DiEugenio has done excellent work on the CBS coverup.

In my recent book POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA

AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY, I write extensively about CBS, the Washington Post, and

the New York Times and their roles in the coverup. I also

discuss how some members of the media

and some media organizations appear to have played suspicious

roles in the assassination itself and events leading up to it. Carl

Bernstein in his landmark article "The CIA and the Media" names

CBS, the New York Times, and Time-Life as the three leading

media organizations infiltrated by the CIA and doing work for

the Agency. Bernstein goes lightly on his former paper, the Post,

but that organization has long been a CIA front and now

is overt about it thanks to Jeff Bezos's business connections

with the Agency. Phil Graham, as mentioned above, was

a key player in Operation Mockingbird, and the Post

was heavily involved in getting LBJ to name his

Presidential Commission, aka the Warren Commission.

The Post has been printing disinformation about the assassination

ever since it happened, as has the Times. And CBS,

with its mendacious specials issued regularly, has

also been a fount of disinformation.

August 6, 2022

And then Marina marries a guy working for Collins Radio . . .

August 6, 2022

I have part of the Secret Service training film they

made about the assassination attempt on Reagan.

Reagan asked who was going to play him. They said

someone his size who looked like him. Reagan

volunteered to play the role in the long shots. So THE

KILLERS was not his last film acting role. Director

Don Siegel told me he cast Reagan as the villain

in that 1964 film to embarrass him because he knew

Reagan was going into politics.

August 6, 2022

From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE:

THE MATHER INCIDENT

Another puzzling but suggestive loose end of the Tippit murder and the flight of Oswald is the Carl Mather incident. According to the 1979 HSCA staff report “OSWALD-TIPPIT ASSOCIATES,” around the time of the hunt for Oswald in Oak Cliff, when “there were sirens blaring and police cars ‘all over the area,’” a veteran auto mechanic named T. F. White saw a suspicious man sitting in a car in the parking lot at the El Chico Restaurant at 110 West Davis Street, the corner of Davis and North Beckley Avenue. This central location for the fast-moving events of that afternoon in Oak Cliff was six blocks south of Oswald’s rooming house at 1026 North Beckley, eight blocks from the Texas Theatre, and six blocks from the scene of Tippit’s murder. White, who was working near the restaurant at the Mack Pate Garage at 114 West Seventh Street, “was also a part-time deputy of some nature,” as the HSCA put it with undue casualness in a 1978 report.

White had seen the car driving rapidly on Davis before it turned into the parking lot. According to the HSCA staff report, White “noticed a man sitting in an irregularly parked car in the restaurant parking lot; the car was slightly hidden by a billboard. The man in the car appeared to be hiding, according to the mechanic. All of the circumstances seemed so suspicious that the mechanic went across the street to get a better look. When he was about 10 or 15 yards from the car, the man turned around. The mechanic was able then to get a good look at his face; he saw also that the man was wearing a white T-shirt. He made a note of the license number of the car.” According to an FBI interview with the mechanic, “WHITE said he observed the man driving the car from the side of his face, and when he saw television pictures of LEE HARVEY OSWALD on the night of November 22, he believed the man he saw at the El Chico Restaurant parking lot was identical with OSWALD. He said the man sat in the car for a short period of time and then left at a high rate of speed, going west on Davis Street.” White said he had not reported what he saw because he was afraid at that time.

The incident, according to White, took place around 2 p.m., at a time when he said he see and hear police throughout the area; that, however, would have been around the time Oswald was being arrested at the theater. But White also said the incident occurred when he was hearing radio reports about a suspect being sought in Oak Cliff, so he might have been mistaken about the time of the incident, which could have taken place earlier than 2 p.m. White seemed a reliable source with both law enforcement experience and an expert knowledge of cars; he took the initiative to record the car’s license number on a piece of paper. This story was passed on by White’s employer, Mack Pate, to Wes Wise, a broadcaster for KRLD-TV (a CBS affiliate) in Dallas and a future mayor of the city from 1971-76. Pate approached Wise when he was giving a sports talk at the El Chico Restaurant on December 4, 1963. Wise looked into the story, persuaded White that it was his civic duty to cooperate with the assassination investigation, and discovered that the license was registered to Carl Amos Mather of Garland, Texas, a city in Dallas County northeast of Dallas. The information was passed on by Wise to the FBI, which investigated Mather. What they and others learned was extraordinary.

The HSCA found that Mather had been a “close friend” of Officer J. D. Tippit since 1958, when the two families had lived on Glenfield Street in Dallas. Mather told the HSCA that he and his wife, Barbara, had socialized with J. D. and Marie Tippit. The Mathers, who had moved to Garland in 1961, went to see Marie on the afternoon of the officer’s death “to express their condolences to Mrs. TIPPIT, and to assist her in any way possible,” the FBI reported on December 14, 1963, after interviewing Barbara Mather. She said her husband left work at 2 or 2:30 p.m. on November 22 and came home to pick up her and their two children. They arrived at the Tippit home about 3:30, and Carl stayed there until about 5, when he went home with their children. According to the HSCA’s March 1978 interview report by investigator Jack Moriarty, the Mathers’ “impression of J. D. was that of a hard working man determined to provide for his family in spite of the lack of potential for advancement. Knew he took various odd jobs to augment his income and seemed to spend what little free time he had with his family. Marie helped out by babysitting for 5 to 7 children on somewhat of a regular basis. On occasion, the Mather kids would be included.”

The question of the identification of the car seen in the El Chico parking lot became an issue in the HSCA investigation. When T. F. White initially described the incident to Wise, Wise made a note that the car White saw in the parking lot was a 1957 Plymouth four-door with Texas license number PP 4537. The FBI determined on December 14, 1963, that the Mathers owned a blue 1957 Plymouth with that license number. But FBI interviews that month clouded the description of the automobile. In one, Wise was reported to have said that the mechanic described the car as a red 1957 Plymouth; in another, White was said to have described the car as a red 1961 Falcon. There were a number of red cars drawing notice around Oak Cliff that afternoon, including the red 1964 two-door Ford Galaxie driven by Tippit murder witness Jack Ray Tatum. It seemed that the FBI’s excuse for dropping its brief investigation of the El Chico incident was that the color of the car mysteriously changed from blue to red, supposedly eliminating Mather as a subject of interest in the bureau’s investigation. Some have tried to explain this discrepancy with the unlikely theory that Mather’s license plate was borrowed for use on another car on November 22. But could there be a simpler explanation, that the FBI itself conveniently changed the color of the car in its reports? This would not be the only time the FBI tampered with or lied about evidence in the case.

Beyond his friendship with Tippit, Mather was no ordinary neighbor. He had eye-opening connections with the U.S. government in his job with Collins Radio. That Richardson, Texas, company (now part of Rockwell Collins) by 1963 had long been an important defense contractor. Collins provided much of the radio equipment for the U.S. military during World War II and the Cold War and supplied radio equipment for NASA. At the time of the assassination, Collins had close connections not only with U.S. intelligence but also with anti-Castro Cubans.

The HSCA interview of Carl Mather in 1978 reported, “Not that Carl isn’t used to being interviewed by government agents; he has a security clearance -- and has had since he started traveling with his company -- he’s been with them for 21 years now. Has traveled overseas. His specific function deals with the installation of special electronics gear in aircraft. One such assignment caused him to be quartered in Brandywine, Maryland as he worked for some period of time at Andrews Air Force Base working on ‘Air Force Two’ -- Vice President Johnson’s plane at the time.” That plane was a duplicate of the Boeing 707 President Kennedy had used on November 22 and Johnson took back to Washington, supposedly with Kennedy’s body.

Shortly before the assassination, at the end of October 1963, Collins Radio angered President Kennedy by supplying the ship, the Rex, that launched an unsuccessful assassination raid against Fidel Castro of the kind Kennedy was then trying to discourage. The Rex, a decommissioned U.S. Navy submarine chaser, was the flagship of the CIA’s JM/WAVE fleet. The Miami-based JM/WAVE station coordinated the highly provocative Cuban exile and CIA raids against Cuba that were putting pressure on Kennedy to escalate hostilities with Castro’s government during the still-tense period of diplomacy following the Missile Crisis of October 1962; the Joint Chiefs of Staff was applying similar pressure on the president to take military action over remaining Soviet weapons and forces on Cuba. Kennedy‘s moves to seek a rapprochement with Castro, following his pledge not to invade Cuba, were among the flash points of the animosity against the President among members of the Joint Chiefs and other militantly anti-communist rightwingers who considered him an appeaser and thought he had betrayed the anti-Castro cause. Kennedy’s tentative attempts to deescalate the guerrilla war in Vietnam were another cause of the military and other rightwing hostility toward him in the fall of 1963.

Furthermore, Collins Radio had been awarded a lucrative contract from the United States Information Agency in March 1963 to build nine short-wave transmitters in Southeast Asia, but the work was postponed when Kennedy cut the agency’s funding. The Wall Street Journal reported that April that Collins was planning to construct a radio communications system to link Laos, Thailand, and South Vietnam. “Collins also held the government contract for installing communications towers in Vietnam,” reports James W. Douglass in his 2008 book JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters. “ . . . In November 1963, Collins was at the heart of the CIA-military-contracting business for state-of the-art communications systems.” Following Kennedy’s murder, Collins Radio would become one of the defense firms benefiting from President Johnson’s widening of the Vietnam War.

A Collins vice president, retired Rear Admiral Henry Chester Bruton, a three-time winner of the Navy Cross and a former director of Naval Communications, may have met Lee Harvey Oswald, the former Marine and “defector” to the USSR, in Dallas in October 1962, the month of the Missile Crisis. Oswald’s CIA handler, George de Mohrenschildt, claimed that he took Oswald to Bruton’s Dallas home. But it is striking what differing accounts of Bruton’s knowledge of Oswald are given in de Mohrenschildt’s self-justifying manuscript I AM A PATSY! I AM A PATSY!, which he was writing at the time of his death in 1977 (it was published as an appendix in the HSCA volumes), and in Edward Jay Epstein’s 1978 book Legend. Both are clearly works of disinformation, but the fact that Oswald’s possible connections with Bruton and Collins Radio are presented so differently in these two competing works of disinformation may be a signal of the importance of this aspect of Oswald’s career and the need by various parties to obfuscate that history.

Epstein writes that de Mohrenschildt had insinuated himself into the social world of Admiral Bruton and his wife, Frannie, in the summer of 1962, visiting “almost every day to use the pool. . . . Towards the end of the summer, De Mohrenschildt [Epstein, unlike the HSCA and others, capitalizes the ‘De’] had told Bruton about a young ex-Marine he knew who had defected to the Soviet Union, become disillusioned with communism and returned to the United States. He hoped that Bruton might become interested in Oswald and help place him in a job in the electronics field. According to De Mohrenschildt’s recollection, Bruton abruptly changed the subject, so De Mohrenschildt did not press the idea. It was obvious to him that Bruton would not help. After this rebuff, De Mohrenschildt decided to introduce Marina to Mrs. Bruton as someone desperately in need of assistance.” According to Epstein, it was during a visit by de Mohrenschildt with Marina to the Bruton home on October 1, 1962, that Lee Oswald unexpectedly showed up. But Epstein claims that “Admiral Bruton was away in Europe on business for Collins Radio”; de Mohrenschildt’s manuscript, on the other hand, reports that Bruton was there and had an unpleasant encounter with Oswald. Epstein writes, “Bruton has no recollection of discussing Oswald with De Mohrenschildt, though he states that is certainly possible that he did. De Mohrenschildt claimed to vividly recall once even bringing Oswald over to meet Admiral Bruton and Bruton saying something to the effect of ‘Get this man away from me.’ Following the assassination, neither Admiral nor Mrs. Bruton were questioned by the FBI, Secret Service, Warren Commission, or any other investigation agency.”

If the meeting between Oswald and Admiral Bruton actually occurred during the crucial month of U.S.-Cuban tensions, it and the earlier overtures to the admiral on Oswald’s behalf may have been an attempt by de Mohrenschildt to place the ex-Marine with Collins as an employee or undercover CIA or Naval Intelligence agent. Or perhaps it was a way for Bruton to gain intelligence information from Oswald, who had worked in a radio factory in the USSR and had access to the top-secret U-2 spy plane program while serving with the Marines in Japan. Among Bruton’s specialties was electronic surveillance. Describing his career, Epstein writes,

He had been a lawyer in Virginia before becoming a submarine commander. Eventually he had risen to be director of naval communications. In this capacity he had undertaken to reorganize the global system which the Navy uses to communicate with and control the movements of all its submarines, surface ships, airplanes and missiles and also to pinpoint the location of enemy vessels. He had supervised this top-secret project until 1960, when he retired from the Navy and, as a vice-president, joined Collins Radio in Richardson, Texas, where he continued to work on modernizing and refining the communications system.

According to Peter Dale Scott, there was an Oswald connection with Collins’s October 1963 Rex mission. The renegade assassination/sabotage operation was sponsored by the MDC, the Movement Democrato Christiano, whose commando training camp near Lake Ponchartrain in Louisiana Oswald had tried to infiltrate, apparently on behalf of a U.S. government intelligence or investigative agency.

De Mohrenschildt portrays the supposed Dallas meeting between Admiral Bruton and Oswald as simply a social occasion to which George and his wife, Jeanne, brought the former Marine and his Russian wife to meet the admiral and his wife, Frannie (Jeanne LeGon de Mohrenschildt, who had been a dress designer, had worked with Abraham Zapruder in a Dallas clothing company). George de Mohrenschildt claims his “good friend” Admiral Bruton was disgruntled with his job with Collins. According to the Baron’s manuscript, Bruton “began talking disgustedly of his new job with Collins Radio, actually an important position he took after his early retirement from the Navy. He did not like the commercial aspects of his work. ‘I should have stayed in the Navy a bit longer,’ he said irritably, ‘I am made to be a salesman.’" That quote is suspect in itself because it seems a major distortion of Bruton’s actual position at the time with Collins Radio.

De Mohrenschildt’s account also claims that Oswald was in a rude, sarcastic mood in the presence of the retired admiral (“Here I saw for the first time [Lee’s] profound dislike for the military and especially for the brass”), and Bruton in turn was incensed by the ex-Marine’s antimilitary talk. “He is somewhat of a rebel and a little bit a Marxist,” De Mohrenschildt contends he apologetically told the admiral, who “could hardly restrain himself from telling Lee to stand at attention first and then to order him out of the house.” Four years later in Arlington, Virginia, the manuscript goes on, when de Mohrenschildt told the “absolutely flabbergasted” Brutons that the former Marine they had met in Texas was Kennedy’s alleged assassin, Frannie Bruton “became quite excited that she had entertained ‘that horrible individual,’” but the admiral, “being an adventurous man, was rather amused than appalled by this fortuitous acquaintanceship. ‘Well,’ he said jokingly, ‘we met Nixon and we also met Lee Harvey Oswald . . .’” De Mohrenschildt somewhat gratuitously adds that the Brutons were “incidentally long-time enemies of [former Navy man] Richard Nixon, whom they knew from his California days when he made his career ruining good citizens’ reputations.”

In Epstein’s starkly different account, Oswald’s unwelcome arrival at the Bruton home in the admiral’s absence disrupted George de Mohrenschildt’s plans to put Marina under the wing of Frannie Bruton. The reason for that scheme is not made clear in Legend, but perhaps de Mohrenschildt was already trying to dissasociate himself from the Oswalds; George and Jeanne left for Haiti in the spring of 1963 and never saw the Oswalds again after that. Oswald’s visit to the Bruton home, in Epstein’s version, disconcerted Frannie Bruton, who found him a “sleazy person,” but Oswald had a relaxed discussion over drinks with U.S. Army Captain Philip Weinert, a friend of Mrs. Bruton’s son who found Oswald unexpectedly thoughtful. But Epstein portrays de Mohrenschildt’s plans to put Marina under Frannie’s wing as dashed by Lee Oswald’s uninvited entrance on the scene, since he had “undermined all the efforts De Mohrenschildt had made to portray Marina as a wife who had been deserted by her husband. . . . Mrs. Bruton never saw Marina or Oswald again, nor did De Mohrenschildt ever again bring up the subject. When Admiral Bruton heard the story of the curious visit, he just shrugged; De Mohrenschildt had always seemed a bit odd to him.”

Beyond these obscurely dueling works of disinformation and Oswald’s possible intelligence connections with Collins Radio, much remains conjectural. Why Carl Mather, who worked for Collins, a man with such close connections to U.S. intelligence and links to Oswald and anti-Castro Cubans, was a “close friend” of Tippit, an obscure Dallas policeman, is unclear. It could suggest a possible Oswald-Tippit connection through Mather, and even a possible involvement by Mather in the events surrounding Oswald’s escape (with Mather’s Plymouth as a possible getaway car) and the Tippit murder. But since we know that Tippit was pursuing Oswald in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, why would Tippit’s friend be involved in helping Oswald escape? Could Mather’s political connections provide an explanation? If that were the case, could it lend credence to the theory that Tippit’s pursuit of Oswald was part of an Oswald escape plan somehow gone awry? The fact that another man was being taken into custody in the back of the theater around the same time Oswald was arrested might tie in with the incident of T. F. White witnessing a man resembling Oswald in a car not far from the theater. Perhaps the man White saw was the Oswald “double” (whether or not Oswald could drive a car is still a matter of dispute).

Since Carl Mather was said to have been a close friend of Tippit’s, why would he have had a connection of some kind, however indirect and perhaps unwitting, with Tippit’s murder? Wes Wise told the HSCA in 1978 that when he had dinner with the Mathers and a New York reporter shortly after the assassination to discuss the incident allegedly involving their car, Carl Mather was “so upset” and “agitated” that he was “too nervous to eat.” We know that Oswald had intelligence connections and with the CIA in particular. The fact that both he and Collins Radio were involved with anti-Castro Cuban exiles is suggestive, as is the link between Mather and Lyndon Johnson. In yet another of the many strange “coincidences” surrounding the case, Marina Oswald even went on to marry a Collins Radio employee, Kenneth Porter. But we are missing some key information and linkages that would make more sense of this obviously important piece of the November 22 puzzle.

Exactly how and why these interests and connections intersected during that climactic period in Oak Cliff, and whether they had to do with the Oswald double seen being escorted out of the Texas Theatre by the Dallas police (under “arrest”) while the other Oswald was being taken into custody is only partially clear. Was Collins Radio involved in communications linkages for the conspiracy operations that day, including helping transmit messages to and from and about Officer Tippit? And perhaps, as the incident with the car in Oak Cliff might suggest, could Collins Radio also have been involved at even deeper levels with the patsy, his double, and Officer Tippit? Roger Craig’s account of learning quickly at the School Book Depository, via a non-public radio, that an officer had been shot in Oak Cliff is a further piece of evidence suggesting that such a link, involving unofficial radio communications, might have existed. When Mather’s boss at Collins at the time, James Pickford, was interviewed by the HSCA’s Jack Moriarty in December 1978, Pickford pointed out that Collins Radio until 1959 had a subsidiary at Redbird Airport, the small airport southwest of downtown Dallas, where some have speculated Oswald might have been trying to get to in order to escape.

In JFK and the Unspeakable, James W. Douglass offers the following speculation in an attempt to sort out the mysterious incident in Oak Cliff reported by White: “The Oswald double, after having been put in the police car in the alley, must have been driven a short distance and released on higher intelligence orders. Unfortunately for the plotters, he was seen again soon.” Since White’s report of spotting the man in the car in the El Chico parking lot places the incident around the same time Oswald, under arrest, was being driven downtown in a squad car from the Texas Theatre under arrest, the man White saw, in Douglass’s analysis, must have been the Oswald double. Wise, the former Dallas mayor, in a 2005 interview with Douglass, reflected on the situation and asked, “Well, you’re aware of the idea of two Oswalds, I guess?”

Douglass further speculates:

After the Oswald double’s quick release following his Texas Theater arrest by the Dallas Police, he may have been given a Mather car to use that had a state-of-the-art Collins Radio for effective communications. The Oswald double keeping a low profile in the El Chico parking lot was apparently waiting to receive an order. Thanks to T. F. White’s jotting down the license plate that was on the double’s car, the government then had to disassociate that license as much as possible from Mather. But fortunately it was done clumsily, and White’s documentation of the license plate provided a trail that led back to the CIA.

It is extremely frustrating that the FBI failed to follow up on these solid and possibly critical leads that might have helped supply some of the rumored but elusive connections among Oswald, Tippit, and elements of the U.S. intelligence and military. The Mather incident is an unresolved nexus of involvement that might have helped unravel the assassination and the murder of Tippit. A portion of an HSCA staff memo on “Oswald and Tippit” released in 1994, listing “Areas requiring further research and investigation,” discusses the Mather automobile incident in the context of asking, “was there any relationship between Tippit and LHO? . . . The authorities traced the license to a car belonging to good friends of the Tippits. Has this lead been checked?”

The HSCA sought testimony from Carl Mather in 1978. G. Robert Blakey, the HSCA’s chief counsel and staff director, applied to U.S. Attorney General Griffin Bell for an order compelling Mather’s testimony and inexplicably “conferring immunity upon Carl Amos Mather” for that testimony, in which Mather could not explain how his car’s license number could have been seen on a car in the El Chico parking lot with a driver resembling Oswald. In addition to some possible connection with the fleeing patsy and Mather’s acknowledged friendship with the dead policeman, perhaps the connections between Collins Radio and various matters relating to national security also could help suggest why Mather felt he needed immunity and why it would have been granted by the U.S. government even during such an important investigation.

By giving Mather immunity and evidently not pursuing the matter further, the HSCA, like the Warren Commission before it, showed that it did not want to know too much about Oswald or Tippit.

August 3, 2022

I was on the Chatsworth baseball diamond location of THE BAD NEWS BEARS watching

the filming. I reported on it for Daily Variety and Sight and Sound.

I remember interviewing some of the child ballplayers, who

were dissing star Tatum O'Neal because of her much

higher salary. The unit publicist wisely turned to me and

said, "Remember they are kids." I was interested in the

film mostly because it was directed by Michael Ritchie,

who made such fine satirical films as THE CANDIDATE

and SMILE. Ritchie also attended my high school, Marquette

University High School in Milwaukee, whose most famous

graduates are Spencer Tracy and Pat O'Brien.

Since we're on this forum, I will recall that I was in the cafeteria line at Marquette when I learned from the student manning the counter that President Kennedy

had been shot. I laughed, thinking he was joking, but

his face told me he was not. So I spun around and ran two blocks to

a drugstore that had a radio and listened to the network

news reports from 12:40 onward. For the first twenty minutes

they said the shots came from the right front, from the railroad

bridge or the hill (soon to be called the Grassy Knoll); but when

the radio reports by 1 o'clock all started saying, without explanation,

that the shots all came from behind, in a building called the Texas School Book

Depository, my reporter's antennae went up, and it started to raise

my skepticism about the official story, which I was not believing

by the end of the day.

When I came back to high school at 1:30 on November 22,

it was for Religion class. The scheduled topic that day was "The Ethics of Murder." Our erudite Jesuit priest, Father Charles Shinners, went ahead with it, and though the class was interrupted by a PA announcement of the president's death, after which we stood in silent prayer, the only other mention of what happened that day was when my classmate Mike Weber, whose head was down on the desk, suddenly lifted it to cry out, "Oh no! LYNDON JOHNSON is president!"

August 3, 2022

Thanks for posting this, Vince. I admire

Brian Lamb's interviewing style and expertise

and am grateful he put me on C-SPAN. The story was

big news for ten days until the CIA broke its

rules and issued a (false) denial about Bush

being in the CIA before he became its director.

Then the MSM dropped the story, believing the lie.

I knew the story would be vindicated eventually.

Various book writers and others have expanded

on it, including Russ Baker, who starts his

book on the Bushes with my discovery of

the Hoover memo. The Nation wouldn't print my

third article on Bush, a well-documented article about his relationship with

James Parrott; Victor Navasky advised me to avoid

the Kennedy assassination because it is a "quagmire."

So I wrote 35 pages on Bush and Parrott and the

assassination in INTO THE NIGHTMARE.

Posted August 2, 2022 · August 2, 2022

The Hickey theory is preposterous on its face

and is merely a distraction.

August 2, 2022

On the legal concerns of Warren Commission staff member Alfredda Scobey, etc., from my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE:

A SHAM INVESTIGATION

The Warren Report, which devotes much of its space to Lee Harvey Oswald’s biography, material largely irrelevant to the actual case, is devoid of much detail about J. D. Tippit or any real probing of the highly confusing and incomplete physical and eyewitness evidence surrounding the officer’s shooting. Sylvia Meagher refers to the commission’s “profound lack of interest in Tippit” and adds in her 1967 book, “We know strangely little about Tippit.” The commission’s lack of curiosity can be explained, at least in part, by its preordained conclusion that Oswald shot both men and by the fact that the Tippit killing was treated as one of the primary pieces of evidence that Oswald shot Kennedy. The reasoning was so circular it could cause vertigo.

The extent to which the commission was reluctant to conduct a genuine investigation of the Tippit killing is revealed in some of its unpublished documents. It was not until May 8, 1964 -- five months after the commission was formed and more than halfway through its investigation -- that a staff member, Alfredda Scobey (a protégée of Georgia senator and commission member Richard Russell), wrote a memo to General Counsel J. Lee Rankin stating, “As far as I can tell, none of the areas is responsible for handling any of the background or connections of Officer Tippit. Since he has been linked to both Oswald and Ruby by various rumors and since he was a principle [sic] figure in the events of November 22, I was wondering if any investigation of him has been undertaken.”

Rankin handwrote a note on her memo to assistant counsel Howard P. Willens: “Mr. Willens -- Please follow up.” Willens had been responsible in December 1963 for drawing up the areas of investigation that teams of Warren Commission lawyers would pursue, and came up with six such areas. As Edward Jay Epstein notes in Inquest, “This plan, it should be noted, did not provide for a separate investigation into the murder of Dallas Policeman J. D. Tippit. Instead, the Tippit investigation was considered to be part of the Area II investigation of the identity of the President’s assassin.” Thus, it was decided ahead of time that Tippit would be viewed only as having being slain by Oswald, the primary, if not sole, focus of the commission’s sham “investigation.” Rankin also responded to Scobey’s memo of concern by writing FBI director J. Edgar Hoover on May 11 to request that the Bureau conduct “a limited background investigation” of Tippit, including investigation of his record in the Dallas Police Department and interviewing of his family and his associates in and outside the police force. Rankin concluded, however, by stressing:

In the course of each of these interviews, as well as any others which you believe are appropriate, we would like the Bureau to inquire whether Officer Tippit had any associations with Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack L. Ruby. As I am sure you are aware, this request is designed to obtain certain basic information which can be relied upon to refute unfounded allegations which have developed in the course of this investigation.

In other words, the commission didn’t want to be told any bad news about Tippit. The slain patrolman had, after all, been given a hero’s funeral televised live in Dallas, and both Robert Kennedy and President Johnson had called his widow to express their condolences and admiration for what was then thought to be his bravery in confronting the fleeing assassin. Jacqueline Kennedy also exchanged warmly emotional correspondence with Marie Tippit and sent her an inscribed photo of the Kennedy family.

Hoover replied in kind to Rankin’s request for a sham investigation, filing a nineteen-page report submitted by the Dallas FBI office eight days later. The report was published in Volume XXVI of the commission’s supplementary materials. (This is how the request and the report are reassuringly described, apparently without consciously facetious intent, by Bugliosi in Reclaiming History: “Because the Warren Commission’s investigation of the assassination was so very comprehensive, it even included a ‘limited background investigation’ of Officer J. D. Tippit and found nothing suspicious.”) The FBI report indeed gives the appearance of thoroughness in its coverage of the basic biographical data on Tippit and his family members but is superficial and scanty on the question of whether Tippit could have been involved with Oswald and Ruby, relying on predictable denials by Tippit’s widow and his fellow policemen.

Tippit was dutifully described by his immediate supervisor for the last ten years of his life, Sergeant Calvin Bud Owens, as

a morally upright person and a person about whom he had never heard anything derogatory. Sergeant OWENS rated TIPPIT as an average officer in work performance, who was well-liked, used good common sense and, as such, was a “good officer.” According to OWENS, TIPPIT had off-duty, part-time jobs [as a security guard] at Austin’s Barbecue and Stevens Park Theatre and, because of this, “didn’t have time to do any wrong.” TIPPIT was a devoted family man, who spent what free time he had either at home or with relatives. TIPPIT was well-liked by all the other officers. . . . OWENS described TIPPIT as a quiet, shy person.

These generally rosy descriptions do not match evidence subsequently developed suggesting that Tippit was a policeman of below-average rather than average performance (in eleven years on the force, he had never received a promotion) and other evidence that Tippit had been carrying on an extramarital affair and appeared to be chronically overextended financially, working the extra jobs to help pay the mortgages on two houses. The FBI reported Owens told them that “TIPPIT appeared to be resigned to the fact that, because of his limited education, he would be unable to advance very far within the Police Department, and TIPPIT appeared satisfied with his work. OWENS stated he believes TIPPIT took promotional examinations, but had no information as to the results, but believes that the lack of promotion was due to a lack of education.” Dallas Police Detective Morris Brumley, a boyhood friend of Tippit’s who attended school with him in Clarksville, told the FBI in 1964 that Tippit was “not ‘sharp enough’ to pass promotional examinations given by the Police Department.” Rio Sam Pierce, a lieutenant in the patrol division who “knew him fairly well,” told Larry A. Sneed for No More Silence, “Tippit was just a plain home boy who shuffled as he walked and seldom made eye contact. After many years as a patrolman, he was never promoted because of that inability to make eye contact and because he couldn’t do well on tests. Promotion required a written exam and an interview. In both cases, he would have failed.”

The Warren Report describes Tippit as “an officer with a good record during his more than 11 years with the police force” and quotes Chief Curry’s testimony that Tippit was “a very fine, dedicated officer.” Curry went on to paint a slightly qualified portrait of

a rather quiet, serious-minded young man. He seemed to be very devoted to his family, and he was an active church man. . . . He was not a real aggressive type officer. In fact, he seemed to be just a little bit shy, if you were to meet him, I believe, shy, retiring type, but certainly not afraid of anything. I think in his personnel investigation it showed that during, as he was growing up, sometimes his shyness was mistaken for perhaps fear, but that it only took a time or two for someone to exploit this to find out it wasn’t fear. It was merely a quiet, shy-type individual.

In light of the myriad problems with the physical and witness evidence, it is unlikely that if Oswald had lived, he could have been convicted of the Tippit killing or, indeed, in the assassination of the president. Scobey admitted as much when she offered her own partial dissent from the Warren Commission’s sloppy case in her article “A Lawyer’s Notes on the Warren Commission Report” in the January 1965 issue of the American Bar Association Journal. The former commission staff member, who had resumed her distinguished career in the Georgia bar, writes that a defense attorney, had Oswald lived, would have been able to exclude a great deal of evidence from a trial. She points out that many pieces of evidence had been improperly obtained or otherwise made known by the police in a manner prejudicial to Oswald. Furthermore, many of the links allegedly connecting him with various criminal activities, including both the assassination and the April 10, 1963, attempt on the life of Major General Edwin Walker, only existed in the accounts of Oswald’s widow, Marina, who could not have testified against her husband in court. (Scobey hints at the elements of coercion Marina faced from authorities but does not discuss how the widow’s cooperation had been obtained partly through threats of deportation to her native USSR. Marina’s many conflicting statements over the years, as she came to change her public views as to whether her husband was guilty of killing Kennedy, render her various accounts of the case and her husband’s character virtually unusable for the historical record.)

As for the Tippit murder, Scobey writes:

There remains the question of whether the Tippit murder would be admissible. As a subsequent similar offense it would be excluded. As part of a subsequent escape attempt it could not be shown until it first had been shown that an effort was being made to arrest him. Here the prosecution might succeed, on the proposition that the description being circulated of the President’s assassin was sufficient to raise an inference that Tippit intended to hold Oswald for questioning. However, the testimony of Mrs. Helen Markham, an eyewitness standing on the street corner, was merely that after the men talked, Tippit got out of the car on one side and Oswald walked forward on the other and shot him.
This witness was hysterical. Her initial description of Oswald, as well as facts she stated regarding the time of the occurrence, was inaccurate [Scobey’s point about the time discrepancy is dubious; see Chapter 13]. Her original identification of Oswald in a line-up occurred after she had been given sedatives, and she remained hysterical for several hours after the event. The admissibility of the Tippit murder, accordingly, is at least arguable.

Assuming it to be admissible, however, as part of the general flight picture, the transcripts show the usual contradictions which arise to plague the prosecution. Domingo Benavides, the eyewitness closest to Oswald, refused to identify him. . . . [Scobey goes on to discuss problems with the witness accounts given by Barbara Jeanette Davis and Virginia Davis, William W. Scoggins, and William Whaley, and with the police line-ups.] Oswald’s remonstrances against being placed with other persons in the line-up were so pronounced that any person could have picked him out as the accused without ever having seen him before. There are, however, a number of other witnesses who, while they did not see the actual shooting, did see Oswald leave the scene, and who would not be easy to attack.

Though Scobey tries her best to prop up the Warren Report’s case against Oswald, her honesty in admitting its flaws makes her sporadic efforts on behalf of the commission seem labored (her reference to witnesses who saw Oswald leave the scene, for instance, fails to note that their identifications of him were as tainted as those by Scoggins and Whaley). Indeed, it is hard to argue with Meagher’s conclusion in Accessories After the Fact: “In an adversary proceeding, the prosecution would have been hard put to sustain the validity of any of the arguments posed in the Warren Report, and defense counsel would have delighted in demolishing the so-called evidence, point by point.”

August 2, 2022

Detective Jim Leavelle, the lead detective in the Tippit

case, told me it had nothing to do with the assassination.

Well, it did, partly in the sense that the DPD twisted

and falsified it to make Oswald seem guilty of both crimes.

He was arraigned only for the Tippit murder, not for

the murder of President Kennedy, although he was

charged with both crimes and was guilty of neither.

Also, Leavelle's statement was what would be called

in Watergate terms a "modified, limited hangout," because

Tippit was lured into a police trap while he and fellow

Officer Mentzel were hunting down Oswald as the patsy in the

assassination, from over an hour before the DPD

apprehended Oswald and at a time when they allegedly

did not know his identity. But in fact they knew who

he was and where he lived (and so on). There is more than one

reason that could have led the DPD to set up that trap. I

discuss these in INTO THE NIGHTMARE.

August 2, 2022

I watched IN THE LINE OF FIRE again last night.

At one point the would-be presidential assassin

played by John Malkovich, who calls himself "Booth,"

while taunting the Secret Service agent played by Eastwood

(modeled to some extent on Clint Hill) about the failure

to save Kennedy, repeats the lie about Kennedy supposedly

telling the agents to get off the back bumper of his limousine

(even though Hill rode on it part of the time in Dallas). Even

in plot terms it makes no sense for the Malkovich character

to use this to make Eastwood's agent feel even more guilty,

since it is the lie some agents use to blame JFK for his

own death, as Vince Palamara has demonstrated.

August 1, 2022

About Mary Ferrell from my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE:

THE GATEKEEPER

After it became clear to me that the introduction into evidence of the audiotape on which the HSCA based its halfhearted conclusion of conspiracy was designed to discredit the whole investigation, I became keenly interested in tracing the provenance of the tape to see how this could have happened.

According to Fort Worth researcher Jack D. White, the tape was first brought forward by Gary Mack, who took it to Mary Ferrell, the supposedly self-appointed den mother of assassination researchers in Dallas (Dallas Tippit researcher Greg Lowrey called her “The Gatekeeper”). But according to Mack, who worked with Penn Jones on his newsletter The Continuing Inquiry, Jones gave him the original clue and a copy of the tape. Mack, a former Fort Worth NBC-TV announcer who changed his name from Larry Dunkel while working as a disk jockey, eventually turned into a lone-nut theorist after he became the curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at the former Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza, which exists primarily to debunk conspiracy theories while misleading and distracting tourists at the site of the murder. Its raison d’être seems to be to protect the image of Dallas by attempting to perpetuate the Warren Commission’s version of events. Mack’s ally Ferrell supplied favored researchers with documents from her ample files (since her death in 2004, available online at maryferrell.org), and she has been hailed by many researchers for her supposedly self-effacing generosity toward the cause of history. In an article on the acoustics evidence, Myers discusses the provenance of the tape and cites Mack’s 1979 report that Jones originally suggested they look into the question of a stuck microphone on a police motorcycle that blocked a radio channel during the motorcade. “Penn was of the opinion that the communications were jammed on purpose,” Mack wrote. Mack thought such a police radio tape might contain sounds of shots. Jones provided a tape that was of insufficient quality to work with, but Ferrell came up with a better one. Ferrell, White said, tracked down a first-generation copy of the tape made from a police Dictabelt and presented it to the HSCA.

As I later found after making contact with Mary Ferrell myself, she actually had deep connections with U.S. intelligence. She was a member of the Agency of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), founded by CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, who many researchers believe helped organize the Kennedy assassination plot and the framing of Oswald in particular. Ferrell’s excuse for being a member, that she was infiltrating the organization to learn more about U.S. intelligence, seems laughably transparent. “We know Mary Ferrell has many contacts with the FBI and other government agencies,” Lowrey told me. “I’m also suspicious of her association with Hugh Aynesworth,” the Dallas reporter who covered the case from the first day and has long been an opponent of conspiracy theorists, as well as serving as an FBI informant during the Garrison case. “You can start in any direction,” said Lowrey, “and ultimately it will lead you to [Ferrell]. You will come back to her.”

Ferrell was a legal secretary for the Socony Mobil Oil Company in Dallas at the time of the assassination. As well as putting her in the circle of big oil in Dallas, the Mobil association gives Ferrell at least a tangential link to some key Kennedy assassination characters, including people involved in oil, the White Russian community, and U.S. intelligence. Volkmar Schmidt, a German-born Dallas petroleum geologist who claimed he tried to turn Oswald against General Walker and therefore felt “a terrible responsibility” for the Walker assassination attempt and the Kennedy assassination, told researcher William E. Kelly in a 1995 interview that in 1963 he worked for a Dallas branch of Mobil, the Field Research Laboratory of the Magnolia Petroleum Company. Schmidt said he met George de Mohrenschildt and Ruth Paine, the Oswalds’ CIA handlers, and Paine’s husband, Michael, “through the circle of young professionals at the Magnolia labs.” It was at a February 22, 1963, party arranged by Everett D. Glover, a chemist with the labs, at a house he shared with Schmidt, that Schmidt had a long talk (“about two solid hours”) with Oswald about Walker and other political topics, including Kennedy and Cuba (Schmidt claimed Oswald was “hateful” toward Kennedy, and that he tried to turn that feeling against Walker, telling Oswald the general was a racist and “kind of a poopoo”). At the same party the Oswalds were introduced to Ruth Paine; Glover told the Warren Commission that Ruth spent most of her time that night speaking with Marina in Russian. As well as by George de Mohrenschildt and his wife, Jeanne, the party was attended by others from the Magnolia labs and by George’s oil industry friend Samuel Ballen. Armstrong writes in Harvey & Lee, “There is little doubt the purpose of this social gathering was to provide CIA operative George DeMohrenschildt the opportunity to introduce Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina to CIA operative Ruth Paine. During the next 10 months, until November 22, 1963, Oswald’s activities were closely monitored by either DeMohrenschildt or Mrs. Paine” [italics in original].

Mary Ferrell was a lifelong Republican who disliked Kennedy (Lowrey put it more strongly: “She hated John Kennedy; it was no secret”), and she admitted in 2000, “I didn’t even care enough to go down on Elm Street to watch the motorcade.” A feature on Ferrell in the Dallas Morning News on the twentieth anniversary of the assassination in 1983 mentions that she was downtown that day “but didn’t bother interrupting her lunch” to see Kennedy. The writer, Brad Bailey, hinted at the strangeness of this paradox in her career: “Mrs. Ferrell didn’t particularly like Kennedy as a president or as a fellow Catholic. . . . So she has a hard time explaining the fireproof library building in her Oak Lawn backyard with floor-to-ceiling shelves containing virtually every document ever published on the assassination. Nor can she easily explain the additional 25,000 pages of FBI documents spread across her living room floor or the clippings and papers that fill another room.”

The most I could get from Ferrell when I asked about her motivation, a question that seemed to momentarily take her aback in our last conversation in December 1992, was the vague response, “I just didn’t think they went to Oak Cliff and picked up the man who did it in a darkened theater. Somehow it just didn’t make sense.” Ferrell was surprisingly equivocal on some of the most-discussed topics surrounding the assassination. She said she refused to see Oliver Stone’s JFK because when reporters called her, “I was really glad I didn’t have to lie and say I didn’t like it or I did like it.” As for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison himself, she told me, “I loved Jim Garrison -- I wavered between thinking he’s insane and thinking he’s a genius.” And as for Oswald, she said that if people “come to me and say, ‘I think Oswald acted alone, and do you have documentation?,’ I just politely say, ‘Go somewhere else.’ Everything I do is based on Oswald did not act alone. Not that he didn’t act. I don’t know.” And the Morning News reported in 1983 that despite all her research, she had “given up hope of deciding what really happened that day in Dallas. ‘We have now had about four major investigations, and I consider that the truth is still hidden from us,’ she says.”

Some of the explanation for what that newspaper described as Ferrell’s “compulsion” to serve as a repository and clearing house for assassination research can be found in another paradox about Ferrell. Her obituary in the Morning News referred to how she “worked more than thirty years as a legal secretary for a law firm and also in the Governor’s office in Austin.” She was a conservative who kept close to the power center of that era in Texas by working for Democrats, including Governor Dolph Briscoe in 1973-74, and she was “a close personal friend” of John Connally, Lowrey noted.

Ferrell was even closely connected to those who determined the route of the Dallas motorcade. It was in 1964, soon after the assassination, according to Lowrey, that Ferrell became a legal secretary in downtown Dallas to Eugene M. Locke, who headed the law firm of Locke, Purnell, Boren, Laney and Neely and was also the head of the State Democratic Executive Committee of Texas. (Ferrell claimed on various occasions that she did not start working for Locke until 1967 or 1970. Locke died in 1972.) In addition to heading a major law firm and having oil, land, and construction interests, Locke in his official position with the state party helped plan the presidential trip to Dallas. A crucial meeting that helped decide on the route of the motorcade -- violating Secret Service regulations by causing it to make a sharp turn from Houston onto Elm Street, past the Texas School Book Depository, slowing the motorcade to eleven miles an hour in the kill zone -- was held in Locke’s office, although Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell apparently was responsible for the final decision that determined the route. (See more on Locke and that meeting in Chapters 15 and 16.) Lowrey suggested, though without having proof, that Ferrell could have helped her soon-to-be-employer Locke with those arrangements. That seems more of an educated guess when one considers that her husband, Hubert (Buck) Ferrell, who worked for Eagle Lincoln-Mercury in Dallas at the time of the assassination, supplied some of the cars for the motorcade, and that Mary Ferrell said her own car was used in the motorcade when “They quickly ran out of cars.” According to assassination researcher Todd Wayne Vaughan, who interviewed both Ferrells, Mary supplied her own recently purchased 1964 Ford Mercury Colony Park station wagon for the motorcade, and it was used as one of the “VIP” cars.

My dealings with Mary Ferrell in 1985-86 were what made me aware of her duplicity. I first called her to ask her confidential advice about a previously unknown FBI document I had found that seriously undermined the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman theory, and she betrayed my trust (see Chapter 15). After being thus alerted to her dishonest modus operandi, I began delving into her dubious background and concluded that after the assassination she set up shop with the backing of the federal government to serve as a clearing house and watchdog in Dallas, doling out favors while actually going about her main business of keeping tabs on what researchers were doing and selectively, subtly feeding them disinformation. As a result of her clever application of spycraft and her faux-motherly act, many researchers naively regarded her as a guru with a disinterested dedication to the truth. When I called her again in 1992 to request an in-person interview about her background and involvement in the case, she pressed me hard to find out what aspects of the assassination I was researching, and when I carefully gave her only general answers, saying that my areas of interest included the roles played by researchers, she refused to meet with me and said she didn’t want to be interviewed about her own background. Lowrey said, “Mary stays in the shadows. Her agenda is subtle and devious: ‘What are you going to do with it?’” Penn Jones gave me some good advice: “Stay away from her.”

Ferrell’s production to the HSCA of the tape made that allegedly contains audio impulses demonstrating that four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza seemed suspiciously timely to me. It seemed to buttress the notion of conspiracy but more likely was cleverly orchestrated by Ferrell to discredit it in due course, like a planted mine sure to go off and destroy everything that surrounded it. Anomalies and ambiguities surrounding the tape itself made the HSCA’s belated “discovery” and endorsement of four shots dubious. That was probably seen by Blakey and others on his staff as a convenient late-arriving fig leaf with which to cover themselves by suggesting a conspiracy while not investigating its participants fully and honestly. The problems surrounding the tape were manifold, including debatable photographic evidence of the police motorcycle with a stuck microphone that supposedly recorded the sounds, claims by some skeptics that the tape actually was recorded about a minute after the assassination, and above all the inherent difficulties of interpreting the sound impulses allegedly found on the tape and synching those impulses with films of the assassination (including the altered Zapruder film). These problems would keep various experts, conspiracy theorists, and lone-nutters alike busy for years of debate, sometimes switching sides back and forth to add to the confusion. That may have been the point of the whole exercise initiated by Mary Ferrell with the collusion of Gary Mack. In the process, many studies were made, and much ink was consumed, but the subject only became more intractable, as, indeed, it seemed to me almost from the beginning, given the near-impossibility of reconstructing credible gunshots from a belatedly produced Dictabelt recording made in part with a police microphone of uncertain location.

By so badly muddying the waters, the claim by the HSCA about shots being recorded on the tape most probably was intended to distract attention from the actual likelihood that more than four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza. This was among the more sophisticated and effective disinformation ploys launched against the finding of the truth of what happened in November 1963, but just one of the many obfuscatory maneuvers that began the first day and continue to the present. “All this stuff that went to the HSCA from the nucleus of people revolving around Mary Ferrell probably was concocted by mixing it with half-truths,” Lowrey noted. “Their MO is propping up a story and then shooting it down -- damn effective.” The HSCA Report, while saying that there were two gunmen, nevertheless claims that a single shot from the Grassy Knoll, the closer of the two alleged firing locations, missed, and blames Oswald (who was in the second-floor lunchroom of the Depository at the time) for firing all the shots that hit Kennedy, Connally, and bystander James Tague. Researcher Jack White, who continued to believe that “shots are recorded on the tape,” nevertheless aptly called the HSCA Report “a half-horse, half-zebra, half-assed kind of report.”

The HSCA, in my view, largely succeeded in disproving the (naive) notion that this case could be investigated fairly by a government up to its eyes in direct involvement in the planning, execution, and coverup of the crimes themselves. Like the Warren Commission investigation before it, the HSCA investigation also turned up a wealth of evidence and fresh leads that, ironically, cast doubt on its own conclusions. A further problem was that some of the HSCA’s work product, including reports of witness interviews, did not reach the public until the 1990s, delaying both its utility and its ability to cast doubt on the HSCA’s own conclusions. The material was sealed until after the film JFK helped provide the impetus for the establishment of the ARRB, which helped free six millions of pages of previously classified material in U.S. government files. That material has proven invaluable in filling in some of the important gaps in our information about the case and in calling attention to previously hidden aspects of these events.

Despite the flaws of the HSCA investigation, with all the genuine revelations that were being made about the case in the 1970s, as well as all the controversy engendered by true and false leads, the seeds of doubt were being widely sown again throughout the land. If I had been led astray from the initial evidence I heard with my own ears on the afternoon of November 22 and from my sense that first evening that Oswald was telling the truth in denying involvement in the killings of Kennedy and Tippit, I was now beginning to reclaim my first impressions as the truth.

August 1, 2022