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Posts posted by Roy Wieselquist
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James D,
Thanks for that The Nation article by James K. Galbraith. I've seen a lot by the younger Galbraith, but this one is great for its brevity AND its countering the garden-variety "liberal" consensus about JFK and Vietnam, here as put forth by Rick Perlstein. (RP's Nixonland is very decent, though wordy, can be used as a doorstop.)
Nam is the thing that drives me craziest about JFKA. Vietnam before and after 1964 is like day and night. I was only in fourth grade 11-22-63, but I had big ears. Listened to adults' conversation, read the newspapers. The word Vietnam was never mentioned. 1965, first mention of Da Nang, where our first combat troops were sent. Summer '64, Gulf of Tonkin Resolution abortion. Then, end of 1965, VN was all over the place. That execrable song "Ballad of the Green Beret(s)" was shoved down our throat, even in my sixth grade classroom. It was mass hysteria-hypnosis-psychosis. An Apocalypse that ushered in The New Dark Age.
Just a few facts:
-- We dropped 2-3 times more bombs on SE Asia than the entire world did in WW2, something like 8 million tons, including
Geneva Convention-illegal anti-personnel devices out the wazoo. JFK didn't drop a one.
-- We murdered around 2 million SE Asians, mostly farmers, women and children. When we napalmed/white phosphorused
villages, usually 3/4 of the burn victims were women and children. USA! USA!
-- Of the nearly 60,000 GIs killed, 61% were not yet 20 years old, not old enough to buy a beer today. Not one combat
death under Kennedy; there were only about 100 adviser/adventurers who mostly killed each other treating military
ordnance and equipment like toys, vision of things to come. Average combat KIA in WW2 was something like 27 years old.
-- There were a hundred My Lais, it was the rule, not the exception. Not one like it under Kennedy.
-- The war resulted in fragging - the most desperate measure of all desperate measures. The underground paper
GI Says offered a $10K cash ($50K today) bounty for Weldon Honeycutt, commander at Hamburger Hill. Officers
walked around on base with bodyguards. Truth about the thousands of frags and frag threats is suppressed to this day.
-- Bombs are still going off in Laos and Cambodia. None of them were put there by Kennedy.
John Kennedy refused to be bum-rushed into military conflict EVERY TIME. Historians who contend that "Oh well, we'll never know what he would have done in Vietnam" are perfect proof of what has happened to America. Day is night, and up is down. By that kind of thinking, we'll never know if Gandhi would have turned to animal mutilation in his 80th year, and Jesus Christ and the Apostles would have turned to robbing old ladies had He lived. We'll never know according to America's coprocephalic historians.
(Edited 9/12/16 for error in 2nd P -- year of Tonkin was wrong. Boy ol' LBJ got the war machine going fast!)
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Why did Humes think the back wound hit at a sharp angle?
-- He was incapable of doing a gunshot autopsy, had never done one before.
-- Someone who was REALLY in charge TOLD him that the ONLY gunman was in a sixth floor window, behind JFK. And Humes assumed that's like a New York skyscraper. 45 to 60 degrees???!!! That's right on top of Kennedy, as if he never got more than 40-50 feet from the base of TSBD.
-- We have to remember that there was no communication between Parkland and Bethesda. Humes didn't know about the throat shot until the next day. Then he had to change the whole report. The autopsy, officially, didn't start until 8 PM, SIX HOURS for the two locations to communicate. But no, that's too much to accomplish, someone making a phone call.
-- He was scared and pushed around.
-- Humes was American. Let's face it, we're dumb as rocks. In maybe the most chucklehead move at an autopsy EVER, he probed this back would with his little finger!! Though by doing that, we can be certain that the back wound was substantially larger than the original throat wound. For, surely even an American wouldn't force his digit, at least 5/8" wide, into a 1/4" hole.
-- Humes was American military, effectively dumber than rocks. Admit it. Vietnam and Iraq were something other than bad luck.
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James R. Gordon #98,
Difference in elevation, height above sea level, is not the only factor affecting the angle of a shot from South Knoll area. The tilt of the limo itself OFF the HORIZONTAL is just as important.
1 -- Elm Street has a down grade heading toward the TUP. It's a maximum of more than 3 degrees at the steps, around Z-313, and after. When JFK was behind the Stemmons sign, it was probably about 2 degrees or a hair more.
2 -- The forward tilt of the limo could have been a couple degrees, front wheels lower than the back wheels, just less air in the tires. Since SSA often rode on the back (but not during the shooting), there were probably adjustments made in the suspension to even that out. So the back was riding high, which could account for as much as 4 degrees.
3 --Greer decelerating, even braking, made the vehicle pitch forward some. I would put that at about 4 degrees.
(Sidenote: isn't it curious that Life "BROKE" the film at 207, like they dropped it right there on a sharp edge or something?)
So, the tilt of the limo down from the horizontal at Z-207 could have been 8 degrees, and easily 10 degrees at 313. Pictures from the TUP where Skinny Holland et al were standing -- it looks like you're looking down into a car before that vehicle reaches the bottom of the steps up North Knoll.
We forget how long that limousine was, about 20 feet, right? JFK was a long way from the windshield and the roof support. I would put him at least six feet behind that big flat roof support.
Add this 8 degrees (the downward tilt of the limo) to the 2 or 3 degree rise in elevation from the far end of the Post Office parking lot, and you have your requisite 10 degrees.
There IS a slim possibility that the first shot from SK, the throat-lung-back shot, I guess around 207, was "snoogied" by Greer's left ear, and UNDER the roof support, thus avoiding the windshield completely. Snoogy, I believe, is a technical shooting term meaning something like "thread the needle." Let's ask Prudhomme. Similarly, Kellerman heard/felt a shot pass by HIS left ear from behind, which shot made three damages to the windshield -- chrome trim (there was nothing harder than that old chrome), back of rearview mirror, and crack in the windshield itself. A South Knoll shooter may have been able to sight JFK through this "tunnel" by Greer's left ear at 207, but I think it's doubtful.
It's possible that this hypothetical SK gunman could see JFK's head at 207, between Nellie and John Connally, but that these two factors caused him to hit JFK's throat. One, the limo was slowing so drastically that the head did not drop as much as he was tracking, so that the bullet hit low. Two, he could have barely nicked that roof-support, causing the missile to deflect down. From the gunman's perspective, that shiny roof-support, probably polished aluminum, probably appeared as nearly a line, barely visible.
There's more, but just let me say that when I make a case for a South Knoll gunman, some researchers feel that ascribing the throat and back wounds to one bullet will reduce the bullet count to an unacceptable number. IMO, still, there was an absolute minimum of 8 shots, most likely 9, maybe as many as 10 or 11. Six definitely hit inside the limo. THREE hit JFK: 1. in throat, out back from SK; 2. in left temple, out right occiput from SK; 3. in right temple, out nowhere (frangible) from North Knoll. TWO hit Connally: 1. in back right armpit, out left and under right nipple; 2. in TOP of right wrist, out underside of wrist, into left thigh AND chrome plate around ashtray on back of front seat. (Walt Brown proved the impossibility of the first JBC bullet entering the outside of JBC's wrist from the chest. "He would have had to have been a contortionist." No one can turn his wrist that much.) And ONE hit no one in the car, but hit the windshield trim first. That probably came from a southwest window of TSBD sixth floor, like the two Connally shots. So 3 + 2 + 1 equals 6 shots just inside the presidential vehicle.
At least 2 shots missed the limo entirely. Most likely 3 or more. Most likely all intentional misses, they missed by so much.
Most of the rifles had sound suppressors. At least 7 rifles ringing Dealey Plaza that day. A least 5 of them fired. The South Knoll gunman struck JFK twice. From the front and above, slightly left; WAG -- 15 degrees to the left. The throat-lung-back path and the left temple-right occiput path point right back at him like a laser.
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The physical evidence in this topic PROVES that these three wounds lined up at the time of the gunshot:
1 -- circular throat wound/puncture
2 -- avulsed top right lung
3 -- elliptical, ragged back wound between spine, T-3 or 4, and scapula, lower than the throat wound, but not much.
And that wound 1 is the entrance and wound 3 is the exit for that one bullet around Z-207, no later than 224 as RP has it.
1 -- Doctors at Parkland judged the throat wound to be 4-7 mm. An average of that range is 5.5 mm, or a hair bigger than 22 caliber, say more like a .223 Remington high velocity job. The missile nicked the trachea on the right front (R Prudhomme #61), and "the trachea deviated to the left towards the undamaged lung (JR Gordon #65, approx.); that is, toward the left lung.
2 -- Starting with post #1, Robert Prudhomme, great illustrations of the chest cavity show how far up the lungs go. A descending shot from Kennedy's left-front "in the lower third of the anterior neck" that exited 5 i/2" down the back, would have to go through the top of the lung.
James Gordon #6 has Humes testifying to the size and shape of that damage to the top right lung -- an upside down pyramid-shaped bruise 5 cm (2 in.) across the top. The pleura MUST have been violated, though Humes not finding it or noting it means nothing.
3 -- We can take THE (main) back wound at 5-6" below the shoulder. TE Robinson, Sibert, Boswell, Berkley all put it there. The coat and shirt put it there as well, most undeniably. It was a ragged, elliptical hole, bigger than the throat wound. Humes never did probe UP, that I've heard of, when he finally used the metal probe. He wasn't running the autopsy. He'd been told repeatedly that THE gunman was behind and WAY up, the 6th floor oh my!, and that's why the dolt made the absurd guess that it was a 45 to 60 degree angle. "What, was he shot from a helicopter?!" Good one Bob Prudhomme, #11.
When Humes did the most probing of the back wound, it was at the end of the autopsy, which didn't end until something like 3 AM, right? This was well over 12 hours since JFK effectively died. Some kind of rigor mortis must have set in. The skin on the back can be moved around immensely, 2 inches either way. And Kennedy's right arm was raised when he was hit while behind the Stemmons sign. All this would change the APPARENT wound placements.
This shot would have had to have come from the South Knoll, off the left, south, end of the railroad bridge. Is this why almost no one sees the throat-back wounds as being from one shot? Some researchers who believe in this early shot from the South Knoll conjecture that the throat shot came through the windshield. But no, the windshield damage was done by the same bullet that put the massive ding in the chrome trim and dented the back of the rearview mirror. All three damages are together, in a line of sorts.
Maybe the biggest problem, for researchers, with a South Knoll shooter making that early throat (and back) shot is they don't think a shot could have cleared the windshield (with visors up too) AND the wide roof-support over the back of the front seat. I have ways to demonstrate that it could be done.
And there may have slight collarbone (clavicle) damage, and serious damage to the back-ribs coming off T3 and T4, but Humes was just about incapable of finding it. Does anyone know of any damage to the collarbone and/or the back ribs?
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Kathleen Collins #53, link to Robert Morningstar interview on Richie Allen show -- thanks for that. At around 27 minutes, they discuss JFKA specifically. At 35:00, evidence for a switch of JFK and JDT bodies. (Personally, I believe if the plot took anything from JDT for JFK's autopsy, it was only the brain -- whatever brain was at Bethesda wasn't Kennedy's. Every Parkland witness who saw the head closely said at least a quarter of the old gray matter was missing. There was at least that much in the back seat and on Elm St.)
35 minutes and change, RM tells why there were at least five gunmen. Nailed it.
45:00, the 1993 RM on Zapruder alteration. One of the most obvious deletions, seldom noted: the entire turn onto Elm St. is missing, when Z and Sitzman both said he was filming, and started the slow-mo. The War Con cut out that first shot that struck the street right beside the limo. AND they saved Greer the embarassment of everyone seeing him almost drive up on the curb, the rookie!
47:00, vapor trails in Z-film, reminiscent of Homer McMahon, trick shot artist who saw 8-11 shots at NPIC before they made the briefing boards. Spot on. I'll be checking out more of R Morningstar..
Somehow that led me to Doug Weldon and William Robert "Tosh" Plumlee. Both great about the South Knoll. TP is in some great topics on this forum.
K. Collins #54 -- you remember the clear round wound on top of left forehead. That's pretty much exactly how Father Oscar Huber described it while anointing a cross on his forehead, "a terrible wound over his left eye." [David Lifton p. 46] This shot came from the South Knoll and blew out the right occiput. The shot from the North Knoll was a frangible in right head that left particles all in that area, but didn't exit much if any. Bob Harris has it that a bit went out the left crown.
Here's a blowup of Cancellare (#1?) of the South Knoll with a definite shape of a man (Badgeman #2) to the right of the second from the RR bridge.
http://www.ronaldecker.com/southknollfigure.jpg
And here's the original:
http://s46.photobucket.com/user/Fourbrick/media/CANCELLARE_zpsiyhpkjh3.jpg.html
And here's a Ron Ecker topic from over ten years ago:
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5732
From that height, there's plenty of angle to clear windshield and roof support to strike Kennedy.
Okay, what does this have to do with how the body was wrapped? AHA!!! Again, David Lifton's "Best Evidence" (p. 590 and many other pages). "Admiral Osbourne alleged that at the start of the autopsy he saw an intact bullet roll from CLOTHING on the President's body and onto the autopsy table." Many saw that bullet and held it in their hands. Of course it disappeared.
But the important thing is that the slug didn't really roll from JFK's clothes like suit, shirt,etc. because he had been stripped in the emergency room, his personal clothes put in a bag, and given to the incomparably worthless and suspicious Bill Greer. And from what I've seen, the President's clothing was not examined at the autopsy!!! With bullet holes in them, blood spatter in definite patterns. It seems incomprehensible, but it looks that way.
No, the clothing that the intact bullet rolled from was BEDCLOTHING; that is, the sheets, some of how the "body was wrapped." My bet is that this bullet was either 1.) the final shot from S Knoll that went in left forehead and out right occiput, OR 2.) the first shot from S Knoll that went in the throat, nicked the right lung, and exited his back between T4 and shoulder blade (as in the shirt and jacket holes). A .223 high-velocity Remington from either Lucien Sarti or Jean Souetre or Michel Roux, the French-Corsican mafia.
QED -- How JFK's body was wrapped (part of it original sheets from Parkland) caught or trapped a bullet that worked its way out.
(Didn't mean to run on. Why do some have so much trouble getting to the point?)
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Kathy C.,
At the end of your post #51appears "GO TO: [EVIDENCE OF] LEFT HEAD WOUND". (Wow, that blog is a strange mix of the good and the weird, but sometimes that's where some good stuff is.) That link is a great summary of those who saw a bullet entry in JFK's left temple, which IMO is one the most neglected aspects of JFKA. Here's a direct link:
http://jackiekilledjfk.webs.com/leftheadwound.htm
It is excerpts from the work of Lifton, Palamara, and Gjerde. One of the best and most neglected witnesses to a left temple wound is Canadian Norman Similas, first noted in D S Lifton's Best Evidence, page 46. Similas was on the same side of Elm Street, 50 feet closer to the Triple Underpass than Hill and Moorman. DSL calls that the NORTH side of Elm, but oh well, just a typo I'm sure.
Excerpted from V Palamara in his JFK from Parkland to Bethesda, doctors at Parkland who saw a left temple wound:
-- McClelland
-- Jenkins
-- Porto
-- Baxter
-- Carrico
-- and Dr. David Stewart (my favorite, p. 43 in VP), who connects the small wound in left front to the blowout in right occipital. IMHO this shot came from high up on the South Grassy Knoll near the train tracks. And the shot to the head from the North, THE, Grassy Knoll was a frangible to right temple that exited (very little) left crown of head, as Bob Harris has described.
Also cited from Palamara, p. 86 -- the mysterious Hugh Huggins, AKA Hugh Howell, Marine and CIA undercover(?). HH called it perfectly: "I distinctly saw an entry wound to the left temple... (which)...exited the right side of the president's head, blowing out a section of skull and obscuring the entry wound of a second bullet that struck him from the right almost simultaneously."
My favorite left temple witness is Father Oscar Huber, invariably misspelled HuberT by his detractors, Jim Bishop et al.
I thought the mortician Thomas Evan Robinson also was a witness to the left temple wound (and that it was already plugged with wax by the time the body reached Gawler's) but it wasn't in this good list. There's another good listing of these witnesses, including Tom Robinson's handwritten historic list of observations, by Russell Kent, April 1996:
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/weberman/leftwounds.htm
But the left temple wound is not on this copy of TER's observations (some of it is cut off after his famous list). What IS on it that is monumental and woefully neglected IMHO is the notation of small holes in JFK's right cheek that had already been plugged with wax. I believe these were from debris shot up into JFK's face from a strike beside him in the street, as James Tague was struck by the flying debris of a bullet strike. As the often amazing Bob Harris has PROVEN, this early (first) bullet was fired as the limo was still making its turn onto Elm. That is, way before the extant Zapruder film begins. The Tina Towner movie and another from a similar perspective are burned up for several frames right at this point.
This post may seem far afield from the original topic "How JFK's body was wrapped," but the head was wrapped, and the wound in the left temple is in the head, so .... Anyway, Ms. Collins broached the subject, so blame her. I saw it brought up, and it's bugged me for years, the lack of concentration on the left temple wound, so I had to take the opportunity. I think it is deserving of its own topic, along with the SOUTH Knoll sniper team, woefully neglected, ignored, or what?
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In case anyone hasn't seen the video of Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to JFK at Madison Square Garden 5-19-1962, here it is,
courtesy of Ronnie Wayne at JFK Facts:
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Every May 29th, it hits me what we were robbed of -- a few more good years of John Kennedy's great humor. Forget Aristophanes, Swift, Rabelais. JFK was the funniest, wittiest man who ever lived. Sure, it was a sharp, dry, biting humor. But it was also kind and gentle and defusing.
When Joe, Sr. railed at one of the Kennedy girls for her excessive spending, I mean he went on about it, at a family gathering in front of the whole family. She ran off howling, and she was a tough young lady. When she came back, unknown to everyone, Jack had the anodyne ready: "Don't worry. Everything's fine. It's been settled. We've all decided that Dad will just have to work harder."
May 19, 1962, President K's birthday party at Madison Square Garden, are you kidding me?! Peter Lawford introduced the one and only Marilyn Monroe. Unfortunately, she wasn't entirely ready in her skin-tight, flesh-toned gown. He tried to drag it out. A few false starts from the band. Very unfortunately, when she finally appeared, Lawford called her "the late Marilyn Monroe." She was to be dead in less than three months, the day after Dorothy Kilgallen ran a column about her having an affair with a man "in the highest places." Supposedly, that was J Edna Hoover's job security for a while.
Miss Monroe's performance is one for the ages. First, a breathless, almost inaudible, perhaps off-key verse of "Happy Birthday." Then right into a very powerful, on-key rendition of "Thank You, Mr. President" to the tune of "Thanks for the Memories." Then she forced the whole joint into a sing-along of the end of Happy B-day. They went nuts.
How do you follow that? "I got a telegram tonight which said that, uh, as part of your birthday, I believe you should get a rise in pay. Signed, Roger." [Howls of laughter, but that's not enough} "And then it said: P.S. My birthday is next month." Everyone in the audience knew it was Roger Blough, President of U. S. Steel, whom JFK had just stood down over price increases. That was the planned joke.
Then a short, sweet off-the-cuff finish: "We're going from then (?) to Bobby Darin to Miss Carol to Miss Monroe, who left a picture to come all the way east. And I can now retire from politics after having had Happy Birthday sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome manner."
From The Kennedy Wit, compiled by Bill Adler, p. 29: On a trip to the West Coast, President Kennedy was asked by a little boy, "Mr. President, how did you become a war hero?" "It was absolutely involuntary. They sank my boat." Brevity, modesty, soul, wit.
There will never be another one like him.
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It is an often-asked conundrum, "Well, if it was such a massive domestic plot, then why did so many in the know, like Bobby Kennedy, NOT go public with it?" Sure, you have to allow some time for the shock to wear off. Evelyn Lincoln, on the way back to D.C.!, made a list of who she thought responsible. Her first five were: Johnson, Big Oil, Mafia, CIA, Florida Cubans. Why didn't she make some noise while the WARren COmmisioN was going on? She wasn't scared of anything: for herself, that is. Even Jackie's mother, Janet Auchincloss, knew soon after that Lyndon was behind her son-in-law's slaughter, and she was no wilting flower. No, they all feared for much more than themselves.
When President Kennedy's brains were shot out on a street in Texas, LBJ gained control of the nuclear football and biscuit. Before JFK's body was cold, as Mrs. Lincoln was not afraid to note, "He was crying commie plot to any who would listen." Our nuclear nemesis, the Soviet Union. Classic LBJ misdirection and fear-mongering.
A nuclear threat by LBJ would explain a lot. The last few days, I've been looking for back-up and can't find much. This presentation by John Newman, Friday 11-19-1999, at the Dallas JFK Lancer Conference seems to encapsulate best the mood of the time when LBJ was organizing the "investigation" that he could control:
http://www.jfklancer.com/backes/newman/newman_6a.html
Starting about 40% down, Newman elaborates on those early-day anecdotes we are so familiar with:
1. LBJ bullying Richard Russell to serve on the War Con: "...for the good of the country." Translation: for the good of the psychopathic skins of LBJ and his cronies.
2. LBJ playing the nuclear card to RR about rumors going around (oh my!), "...and kicking us INTO A WAR that could kill 40 million Americans IN AN HOUR." I never did get that one, but it sure worked on Russell and everyone else he used it on.
3. To RR's last objections about the time involved, "All you're going to do is evaluate the Hoover report he's already made." Translation: the fix is in and it's easy as pie.
4. Earl Warren reported, after composing himself from some serious crying jags, "Johnson feared war after the slaying of JFK," which "might lead to a nuclear war." Newman paraphrases the new President's mocking of Warren's objections thus -- "'No, excuse me. I stand on principle. Screw 40 million people. I want to tell the truth.'"
QED -- It's all psychological projection. It's PPP: psychopathic psych projection. LBJ links telling the truth about JFKA to atomic Armageddon. "Sweep this under the rug for me and there won't be (I won't try to start) nuclear winter." For which many generals, authors of the "Sunday Punch" first strike on USSR, were more than willing. LeMay was ranging freely and Lemnitzer was running NATO in Brussels (we'd been kicked out of Paris), and Operation Gladio with fellow drunken psycho William K. Harvey.
Also, there's a wealth of evidence in LBJ's and MIC's past and future behavior, showing these tendencies when feeling threatened:
1. The various murders performed by Mac Wallace
2. Apocalypse Now in Vietnam
3. USS Liberty
4. MLK
5. RFK on the anniversary of USS Liberty
6. Indonesia, Congo, Middle East
Dear President Kennedy, happy birthday #99.
May you find more peace before your hundredth.
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James,
Thanks so much for this speech, 11-27-63, brief by Fidel standards. I had never seen it before. IMO, the best line in it is, "In fact, he [Jack Ruby] killed a dead man." For LHO surely would have been executed if found guilty in court. In all the millions of words I've read on the subject, I don't believe I've seen that idea, that thought, expressed so simply. Just one aspect of the preposterousness of the whole case.
Castro also lays out the absurdity of Oswald as fanatic, since he didn't take credit as every other fanatical assassin has through history. And the sheer impossibility of the alleged murder weapon, from beginning to end, is beyond belief; as if someone were trying to demonstrate the worst possible rifle for the alleged purpose. And finally, the absurdity of someone who DID plan to escape using his place of employment for the sniper perch?!?! That is; if he were a lone nut or a lone anything. Someone hoping to get away after such a crime would either 1) use somewhere else than where he works, or 2) have some kind of ruse and fairly elaborate help escaping if he did use his workplace.
JFK Facts had a good topic a while ago (wish I could find it easily) about Castro's 11-23 speech. A real stemwinder. I believe it took him four hours to get it all out. That also was VERY prescient, considering what we have found out since. Especially amazing was that Fidel focused on the preposterousness of LHO running a Fair Play for Cuba branch (one member each, LHO!) in both New Orleans and Dallas. The two most improbable cities on Earth for such a club. I can imagine the Cubans saying, "Those Yanquis have an inordinate capacity for swallowing nonsensical waste. The national religion and past-time must be coprophagia."
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Doug, that's a good short and sweet video. Under 4:00, you can't beat that for the modern attention-span. One minor thing that Hager repeats bugs me, if only because it's in a lot of the research on the subject -- that Cord Meyer (surely in on JFKA) was "Mary (Pinchot Meyer)'s HUSBAND." NOT when MPM was trysting at the White House. Cord and Mary divorced in 1958, had been separated a while before that. Their marriage was effectively over when their son was run over by a truck on the little highway in front of their house in 1956. And MPM and JFK probably weren't having their affair until well into 1962. Not that I think this is important in the big picture. But I have seen this detail bother newbies. And it really bothers me because, by comparison, LBJ was such a sadist, took more pleasure in humiliating his best "friends" by seducing their wives than he did in the s-e-x.
Also, this bothers me: the oft-repeated canard that Joe Sr.'s bootlegging (actually importation of quality gin and scotch from Canada and Ireland) was the source of most of his wealth. But that's a long story to get into.
Also, that the Mob stole the election for Jack. There was vote-tampering on both sides in Illinois and Texas. Anyway, the tie goes to the runner, right? As noted in Farewell America by the pseudonymous James Hepburn, Kennedy in 1960 ran the most scientific campaign ever seen. Caught everyone flat-footed.
Guess I'll have to send Mr. Hager a comment, though I will probably enjoy his book. A lot of big ideas there by the sound of it. Thanks for the heads-up. We might not have seen that it's coming out otherwise.
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Vince Palamara,
Thank you so much for this review-summary of the latest Hill-McCubbin offering about the Secret Service. Now I don't have to look at it. I get a kick out of your videos critiquing the Blaine-Hill-McCubbin apologia. You really did cause them to come forth with their swill in the early 2000s. No brag, just fact. Also, thanks to you, they have backed off their blame-the-victim excuses.
I have a big general question. I would be so grateful for any consideration of it. QUESTION: during the Ike years, 1953 to 1961, do you see a marked "Southernization" of the federal government in general, and the SS in particular?
The FBI too, it seems to me, was largely Southern when JFK took the reins January '61. I don't mean only born in the South and with a Southern accent; I also mean a Southern sensibility -- paranoid racism, cartoonish fear-mongering about communism, hatred of labor. Bill Greer was a native of Ireland, though an Orangeman not a Catholic, and he was a driver for the Boston Lodges before the high-school dropout somehow kissed enough ass to pull the strings to get him a berth with SS. He had a "Southern sensibility": a p.o.ed bi-otch toward all but the high and mighty.
As you point out in pp.53-7 of the new Hill book, Harvey Henderson was a thousand-time documented racist who gave Abraham Bolden, for one, a hard time and nothing but a hard time. Yet it blithely blows by Hill and the rest of the SS, "Aw, 'at's just ol Harvey being a good ol baw." Translation: It ain't me so why should I care?
It's my contention that the Southern aspect just loathed that "funny-talkin' smart-aleck Yankee" JFK. And he had the nerve to have a full head of hair and not crew-cut it in obeisance to our military overlords!!! I believe even that cheesed them.
One more small, general QUESTION: Did DDE let the MIC run off with the candy store or what?! Sure, on his way out the door, Ike said "Beware the MIC," and with a quavery voice. The incomparable slacker woke up for a minute and saw what he had let happen. He had to say something. I think the May 1960 nuclear summit with Kruschev was pretty much sabotaged with the downing of Gary Power's U-2 flight JUST BECAUSE the old fool didn't want to get off his butt in his last year. "But I don't WANNA go," which was fine with our (largely) Southern military thieves.
P.S. At the end of your review, that was a great nugget of info about Clint actually being relegated to the Spiro Agnew detail, though as SAIC for the silver-haired crook. Funny story, SA came to Winston-Salem, NC when I was a freshman '72-73 at Wake Forest U., a fairly conservative school even in those days of the Civil War over Nam. About 20 or 30 of us went to Agnew's outdoor oration. We brought little balloons filled with red paint (just like as you noted when LBJ went to Australia -- Ah, the memories), hoping to chuck em at the suits, AND pieces of barb-wire with profound messages taped to them like "How would you like it if YOUR backyard was littered with this?" All of it was confiscated as soon as we arrived. The police kept us in the WAY back. We screamed ourselves hoarse. Agnew made unflattering remarks about us draft-dodging cowards, but it was strained. His days were numbered, and he knew it. And to think mighty Clint Hill, the only SSA who actually did any part of his job 11-22, was there keeping an eye on me and my droogies.
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Please don't shoot the suggestion-messenger, but has anyone considered that Prayer Man could be Jack Edwin Dougherty?
Random, disparate "evidence":
1. JED has a distinguishing feature, very long arms, like PM. I think this set of pictures is from Bart Kamp #15 of this topic. Notice how much longer PM's arms are than everyone around him, especially in the top center blow-up:
http://www.prayer-man.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Prayer-Woman-Dead-and-Buried.jpg
other photos of JED:
http://www.reopenkennedycase.org/apps/photos/album?albumid=15916912
2. Of all TSBD employees, JED's whereabouts are the least known. His WC testimony, and all his known conversation about that crucial hour, is beyond crazy. He always had a handler/shepherd, like his father, police officer brother or TSBD supervisors, with him when he made any statements. And STILL, his WC statements are impossible. For instance, he claimed he was on the 5th AND 6th floors around 12:30 yet didn't see anyone. Said he was on the 5th, mere feet away from the West (freight) elevator, when he heard only ONE shot. He didn't see Williams, Jarman, and Norman, though they ran from the SE corner to the west wall, and made a lot of noise. And they didn't see Daugherty either, though they milled around in that area for a while. In short, JED wasn't on the fifth floor during the shooting. I think he was out front in the shadow. After performing his tasks for Truly and Ochus V. Campbell, especially the elevators.
Duke Lane has a great article about all this. "Only Jack Dougherty was AWOL during this crucial period..." The essay (2007) in full:
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=11126&page=3#entry121730
There's a great thread by Greg Parker and others about JED's WC testimony on, I believe, jfkmurdersolved or ROKC. But I can't find it at the moment; I'd never get this done. A monkey has more computer skills than me. Anyway, JED's testimony stands alone for its huh?-value. Though...I believe he gives many clues about what he was really up to.
3. JED had free run of the place, kind of a floater for Roy Truly and Bill Shelley. He never did have a job description. He arrived at work every day at 7, not 8 like the other hourly. The floor-laying crew, he was on some lists, not on others. He wasn't really helping them much, just came and went. [ASIDE: the condition of the 6th floor on 11-22 was some kind of Potemkin Village. A reporter looked around it in 1965; it was still unfinished.]
4. At the very end of Weigman, it looks like PM is turning to go back into TSBD, I believe. Preceding Marrion Baker and Roy Truly, I believe. Before that, he may have been as low as three steps down, causing some posters here to think he's shorter than he is. But look at the best Darnell photo of him. He towers above the woman in sunlight who is leaning against the center rail.
5. PM's hands raised to chest with elbows out may be a nervous gesture. One arm out drinking from a cup, it does look like that, but both out? It's eerily similar to JFK's gesture previous. Maybe JED knew shots were coming, or thought it possible, and has some kind of imitation reflex.
Speculation:
Jack Dougherty thought he was part of some kind of crew that went through the building before the parade, making sure everything was "OK." Then his duty was the elevators, with Troy West and Eddie Piper under him, making sure they didn't move without some signal -- a whistle, a bell hell I don't know. West stayed near his wrapping station, close to the elevators, during the parade. Piper was roving around, accosted on the 4th floor by DPD Baker. The elevators went off twice after 12:30, and started up again.
It's a whole lot longer story than that, but anyway, could Jack Daugherty be Prayer Man? This is enough of a mess of a post for now.
P.S. All this good investigation RE LHO as PM can still bear some good fruit if it nails down a big part of the machinations going on 11-22-63.
PPS Just for the record, I think LHO was the last white man in Dallas with a motive to shoot JFK. Now John B. Connally is another matter, IMHO. Ozzie popped Johnny Con twice for being the keystone of the coup, and for about a hundred other things. Three gunmen in 6th floor TSBD: Mac Wallace in SE window (sniper's nest), LHO 2 windows from SW window, Loy Factor in SW window. Jim Braden/Brading in Dal-Tex, Harry Weatherstone in Records Building. French-Corsicans (Souetre, Sarti, etc.?) on South Knoll. And who knows how many on the North Knoll.
Ozzie did his best to stop the coup, a herculean effort. Shooting JBC was the last -ditch way of making them pay SOMEthing.
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Last night, Clint Hill was on Chris Matthews the last five minutes. Of course he was there to talk about his new book, Five Presidents. He looks great for an 84-year old. There was nothing of any substance about JFKA because Matthews is a dyed-in-the-wool sweep-it-under-the-rugger. Hill waxed nostalgic about how friendly Kennedy was with the agents, knew their birthdays, knew about their families. But old Clint never seemed to get the JFK humor.
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Brad #6, you have the Silent Generation pegged to a T, those born 1928 to 1946. A better name for them is the Smirking, Sneering Generation. I'm a great believer in the Theory of Generations in four 18-year chunks for a total cycle of 72 years. BUT remember Aristotle's admonition, "In politics and ethics and all things human, the exception proves the rule." I feel Clint Hill is more forthcoming than the vast majority of those born in 1932. Along with 60-some others at Parkland he said the back of Kennedy's head was blown out and that blood, flesh and brain matter was all over the trunk and backseat. I don't believe he has ever denied that. Before JFK was out of the limo, CH told Merriman Smith, "Smitty, he's dead." Other SS repeatedly told him to keep his mouth shut, let the proper authorities put out the official statements, in true Silent Generation fashion. I feel sorry for The SG. Before they came of age, when they were helpless, the first of them saw the Great Depression and WW2 and the last of them saw WW2 and the perpetual Red Scare. Before their brains were completely formed, "Loose lips sink ships" and all that happy crappy was beaten into them. Those few at the end of the Silent Generation who were ahead of their time. like Lee Oswald and the Beatles, were all the more fierce in their denunciation of the ultra-right and their perpetual war-machine because they saw the insanity up close and personal. George Harrison had a great larf when his elders wagged a finger at him, "The draft, the military would do you whippersnappers some good!" GH shot back, "Yeah right. You're leaning on a cane, leaning up against a fence. What are you good for?"
The worst of the Lost and Greatest (Greediest) and Smirking Generations shoved Vietnam down the Boomers' (1946 through 1963) throats. They told us the military would give us some discipline. The dirty suppressed secret of Nam is that Boomer draftees stopped combat operations with the dirtiest, most desperate possible maneuver -- FRAGGING. Of the only two times I have ever seen the subject brought up in Congress, it was quickly squelched. Ain't no mutiny going on round here, no sir! After Hamburger Hill, the fragging was so bad that senior officers had to walk around on base with bodyguards. Enlistees were no longer issued grenades and handguns. They only had weapons and ammo when they went out in the field, which Nixon ended and replaced with Armageddon-like bombing. We dropped about 8 million TONS of bombs on Southeast Asia 1965-75, 3 to 4 times what was dropped in all of WW2. Unexploded ordnance is still going off in Laos. Courtesy of LBJ and the Greediest and Sneering Generations. LBJ could never shut out the noise of me homies booming, "Hey, hey (yuh chickens**t sneakthief ambusher) LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" During his daughter's wedding. In the wee hours every night.
Fragging is one of the keys to JFKA. I may be a minority of one with all the particulars of this small part of the story --
perceptive, ahead-of-his-time Lee Oswald, when he saw he couldn't stop the fascists' slaughter of decency 11-22-1963, popped one of the architects, John Connally. Twice. Once through the back near right armpit, out under nipple. And second, when JBC was turned perpendicular, through top of right wrist, out inside of right wrist; part of the slug went in JBC's left thigh (given to an ER nurse, then to SS, then it disappeared of course) and part of the slug put a big ding in the chrome plate around the ashtray mounted on the back of the front seat. This ding in the ashtray plate, like the extent of fragging in the Vietnam War, is one of the most suppressed pieces of evidence in JFKA. I know I saw it somewhere. Can anyone help me out with a source?
"Proof" that JBC's wrist wound was due to a second shot from LHO (in the 4th or 5th window west of the "sniper nest" [where Mac Wallace was] -- you can tell from the left-right angle) ------- you'll notice that you can't turn your wrist around enough for a bullet to enter the backhand side of wrist for it to come out on the underside of wrist. It'll be a glancing blow. (Don't know if that gives a good picture.)
Back more directly to the topic (sorry for having run on), I am almost certain that the taciturn Clint Hill would be more "permission to speak freely" if he could be got away from his handlers, especially McCubbin and Gerald Blaine. Sidenote: GB was in AUSTIN during the coup, setting up for the next stop of the trip. And he acts like the biggest Dallas SS expert. I don't get that. CH defers to LMcC and GB in every forum I have seen, at least five of them. It's heartbreaking. I have seen him alone only once, on 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace way back in the 70s. And he was obviously having serious psych issues. He had a hard time composing himself; blamed himself hugely, strangely. The SS who did the best at the critical time!
The right interviewer could get good ole Clint to vent. I nominate Josiah Thompson. Those two old birds could get on famously. Starting in the 60s and all through the years, JT has encouraged many clams to open up. The angry, taciturn O.P. Wright, head of security at Parkland; the fearful, taciturn Darrell Tomlinson, who found the planted slug (a pointy one, the wrong one!) on the wrong stretcher long after the shooting. Nice try, Jacob Leon Rubenstein. Better luck next time.
I also nominate Doug Caddy to be Clint Hill's interlocutor. If Mr. Hill had only an inkling of Mr. Caddy's bona fides, at every historic juncture since the 40s, Jackie's old bodyguard may be very hail fellow well met.
The great SS expert, Vince Palamara, has always been met with anger and/or silence when trying to communicate with Hill and Blaine. VP has some great videos about that on-line.
The questions from David Andrews, #7, are better starting points than the questions from Brad Milch #2. (Jeez, Brad, you sound like me whenever I get the rare, truncated chance to talk with an expert or witness, though I may be learning this -- you have to start easy.) I can speak to DA #7, question 2.): "Can you describe any occasions when JFK got out of the limo and approached the crowd?"
I can't remember the exact spot along the route this happened -- President Kennedy stopped the limo and got out and pressed the flesh with a bunch of parochial school kids when he saw the sign (something like): "President Kennedy -- please stop and say hello to us!" The teacher had thought of it and it worked. What a beautiful final human interaction for John Fitzgerald K.
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Brad Milch,
If Lisa McCubbin appears with Clint Hill, as it appears she will, don't expect any of those good questions to be given any serious consideration. From what I've seen of her co-writing in the Kennedy Detail books and her appearances on C-Span with various Kennedy SSA, she is a guardian at the gate of the Lone Nut Theory. I get the idea CH is being handled when he's at a public forum with McCubbin and his old SS mates.
One thing amazing about Clint Hill, he looks as good or better now than he did in the late 1970s. As he is not shy about telling himself, he was drinking and smoking himself to death in his basement after retiring. Then he had some kind of turnaround. If he has seen much of the independent JFKA research, he could be a valuable source about those concerns you raise before he goes to that big Lincoln Continental in the sky.
I'm looking for back-up that the back shot was an exit wound, that someone close behind the president saw a spray come OUT the back between T4 and shoulder blade.
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Paul Brancato #8, It appears that no one can prove GJ was in L.A. during RFKA. I removed that from my post above, #6. For years Dan Hardway was pretty sure it was him in the Ambassador ballroom. June 1968 GJ was stationed in Athens (where else?), but how much trouble would it have been for him to fly to the West Coast for a few days? JFK Facts has several good topics about GJ. He's somewhat of a specialty for Jeff Morley.
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In her last days Dorothy was palling around with Joan Crawford, of Mommie Dearest and Pepsico infamy. JC really pushed herself onto DK at that time. That sure looks suspicious.
After DK wrote an article in 1957 about Frank Sinatra that was only slightly less than worshipful, His Mobster Majesty carried on a vendetta against her that only ended a few months before her death. The psychopathic anger of Old Brew Eyes is unappreciated; perhaps the press is still cowed. As an example having to do with our dear Jack: in a ridiculous fit of rage, FS took a sledgehammer to his fairly new helicopter pad when JFK had to end Frankie Snot's White House visits. And remember this bizarro-world event -- Frank, Jr. was "kidnapped" about two weeks after JFKA. The Mob was trying to divert some attention away from JFKA. Little Frankee loaned his "abductors" a few bucks for gas. What a phony put-up job that was. Frankie, Sr. and the Mob inured themselves to "offing" women (remember, Mafia PR holds that they only butcher the menfolk) when they murdered Marilyn Monroe 8/62 because she "mistreated" their hero Joltin Joe DiMaggio. They got away with it, and see what happens? They think they can get away with anything.
The importance of Margaret "Flo Pritchett" Smith cannot be overestimated. She was the only genuinely married woman JFK ever had an affair with. The wife of that East German officer doesn't count because everyone was running around with her; they were married in name only. Mary Pinchot Meyer was long-divorced from Cord, four or five years by the time MPM was trysting at the White House.
On a radio talk show a few years ago (2012 or 2013 I guess), I spoke with the author of a new DK biography. I can't find the book on the web now; maybe it was a minor publishing house. I can't remember her name or the title; twould take a while to find it in my notes. I'm pretty sure she wasn't Lee Israel. Anyway her book sounded tepid about Dorothy's murder. She didn't sound comfortable discussing Pataky, Crawford, or Sinatra as possible aids to Dorothy's demise. But she was sure as can be that DK believed JFKA was a massive right-wing plot and had quite a lot of evidence for that.
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That was a GREAT interview. These were striking:
-- ONI files were never sent to ARRB. (My guess is they were destroyed like the SS documents RE JFKA.)
-- The woman who was putting together the ONI index on LHO was summarily fired.
-- The HSCA interview of James Jesus Angleton is missing.
-- DiEugenio sounds way more young and vigorous than he should for his age. Maybe in all his research he's discovered some Kennedy Fountain of Youth.
In the document dump October 2017, I'll be most interested in seeing the George Joannides files. It's almost inconceivable to me that the CIA guy who was running DRE in Miami, AND who had safe houses in Miami and Nawlins, was the same guy who was the CIA liaison for HSCA, AND Joannides' Cuban connections weren't known for years. Which points out that the right hand, the US gubbament, doesn't know what the left hand, the Military Industrial Intell Complex, is doing.
And David Morales was in L. A. during the RFKA. I hear Shane O'Sullivan has backed off contending that that was GJ and Gordon Campbell in the Ambassador ballroom with the military bearing in the "at ease" position. But I tell you, there's no fascist like a Greek fascist. I knew a few when I lived in the D.C. area. During the various "socialism" scares in Greece at the end of WWII (the :"Greek Civil War"), the Greek Nazis were the first to use napalm B against civilians, with the help of the good old USA of course. And boy did they use it.
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Jon, one more thing. I have observed that military veterans fall neatly into two groups, unlike anything else in nature or society. Group one sees their service as a rounding experience paid for by American labor, whom they appreciate all the more due to their free globetrotting, housing, grub, clothing, and medical care. Group two is the resentful lunatics. Their pet name for civilians is "dirtbags." They tell themselves they have been "fottin fer are fraydumb," in Confederatese. When really they are too lazy and cowardly to do productive work, which they sneer at.
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Jon,
I served nearly 30 years in residential construction, and some hospital, factory and warehouse work, then 15 years in education. In short I did the dirty, difficult, dangerous fundamental labor of this nation AND paid for the war-machine through my labor and my various companies' taxes. Also, starting in 1971, I was the five-star general and the buck private of Friends of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I got them in everywhere, helped them print their underground pape: it was no GI Says, but still. I was, and still am, a real stinker, as we used to say where I grew up in western Mass. In 1966 my parents kidnapped me and brought me to the Quaker oasis in the South, the Guilford College area of North Carolina, only because my father's job moved south due to the Industrial Flight from the North in the mid and late 60s, after the Confederates got rid of our man Jack. So, from relatively safe bases (also Asheville, NC and a few places in MD and northern VA), I have been a Spy in the House of Hate for 50 years.
I could tell you stories but I don't want to brag. Oh OK, one. When I was a freshman at Wake Forest U '72-'73, VP Spiro Agnew came to town, Winston Salem, NC. There weren't many of us Few at that school, but about 20-30 of us showed up there "to demonstrate." We brought visual aids, little balloons filled with red paint (symbolic blood) to chuck at the suits and pieces of barbed wire with profound messages taped to them like "How would YOU like it if YOUR backyard was littered with this?" Of course all that crap was confiscated as soon as we got there, and we were made to stand in the far back as we screamed ourselves hoarse, chest to chest with WS police. We couldn't get arrested because WS's finest were, and still are to my knowledge, methodical and none of us would have dreamed of assaulting a law officer. The newbie who was blocking me looked younger than 18-year old me, and begged me not to make him arrest me, some cock-and-bull story about his year-old daughter in the hospital having her tonsils out and he could go visit her right after, as long as he "didn't have any paperwork to do." (hint, hint) Anyway, Agnew resigned shortly after that. The balance was tipped in little old Winston Salem when even law enforcement realized he was garbage.
So yes, in short, I have served all my adult life in the U. S. military, the good, un-armed militia, not the Confederate military. Also the good police; I drive a Crown Vic. Ever read G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday? I'm Sunday, the lowly-looking beat-walker who's really in charge.
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Oh yes, it matters more than ever that President Kennedy was killed. We are controlled by the Radical Right, though most of us don't realize it, like frogs boiled slowly. And there are the masters, our overlords, who prefer it this way and aren't about to ring the clarion bell. We entered a slow-burning Dark Age at the end of 1963. Sort of analogous to the Cold War, not a totally hot conflagration, just a fitful, fits-and-starts descent into that movie, Idiocracy. But as Stan Ridgway sings in Another Lost Weekend, "Things could be worse."
To understand our current situation, it's necessary to go back, at least, to the First American Civil War. The year before Lincoln was murdered by a conspiracy (much bigger than the courts admitted), 1864, John Smith Dye [i had Joseph Dye Smith originally, sorry.] published a book titled In the Adders' Den (plus long sub-title). It's all about the American Slave Power (ASP). In it, JDS proves that the two previous presidents who died in office, W H Harrison and Zachary Taylor, were poisoned to death. It wasn't "pneumonia" and "cholera"; it was arsenic. Before the war, the South, aided by NY bankers and European aristocrats, prepared for war by transferring military weapons and ordnance to Southern control. There was the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 (once they had bumped off Taylor, who said he would personally hang the governor of South Carolina if he lifted one finger to secede). Both of these "compromises" came about through Southern murder, intimidation and bribery. It is in their DNA to attempt to enslave; they despise, and are allergic to, honest labor, would rather kill/be killed than work for a living. Going forward from JDS, both Warren G. Harding (on his way to investigate the Teapot Dome Scandal -- the Southern military was again robbing the nation of the new gold, oil) and FDR (see Webster Tarpley) were poisoned to death, WGH quickly by Southern soldiers and FDR slowly by a female White Russian painter in the South.
As someone sent a warning letter to JFK, every president who was elected in a year ending in zero starting in 1840 -- every 20 years (plus WHH from 1848 who died 1850) -- left the White House NOT under his own power. It has to do with the decennial census and the quadrennial election which only falls on a Zero Year preceded by an even number, but that's another story.
The Southern military coup of 1963 was much more "successful" than the attempted coup of 1861; remember, as good ole Sam Grant noted in his Memoir, "the South was an armed camp" during the ACW. But THAT out-in-the-open rat's-nest was stomped enough to stop them from exporting their slavery disease. After the first Johnson, Andrew, there was not another president from a former slave-holding state until Harry Truman in 1945, followed by comatose slacker Ike, followed by a respite with JFK, then real Hell came to America with the ascendance of LBJ. As the best proof of America as a depository of morons, many best-selling historians contend that LBJ merely continued JFK's Vietnam policy, or at least "we can never know whether Kennedy woulda prosecuted the war as LBJ did." Right. Just like we'll never know if Jesus Christ, in his mid-30s, and the Apostles would not have turned to rolling old ladies for the odd denarius. And we'll never know if Gandhi, in his 81st year, would not have turned to animal mutilation. Jesus didn't make it to 35 and Gandhi didn't make it to 80, so we'll never know. A normal child of five with the bare facts can see this is a perverse delusion. But not a substantial number of Americans.
On Southeast Asia, we dropped 3 to 4 times more tons of bombs than were dropped on Europe and Asia in all of WW Two. All because they would not be our slaves. There were a thousand My Lais. At Quanggai alone, early in Johnson's war, three-quarters of those who were horrifically burned by napalm were women and children. We are only "good" at killing and maiming the weak and helpless. The obvious truth about Vietnam is still obscured to the American mainstream. Here's a brief of the most suppressed fact: My boys, the Boomers, mutinied starting in 1967. My boys started fragging the Southern, slavery-loving 2nd looies fresh out of the academies who thought they were going to make their promotions from the blood and guts of the good working boys who were plucked from the farms and factories back Stateside. There was never anything like it. Congress and the Pentagon refused to allow it to become public that there were thousands of fraggings and threats of fraggings every year; in Congressional hearings, a mere mention of it was cut off immediately. That's the biggest reason LBJ wouldn't seek another term after Tet in January-February 1968 -- his own draftees had stopped his war, and there was nothing he could do about it, and he was scared he was going to be fragged. Hamburger Hill, May 1969, the last Southern combat atrocity of the war against our own, resulted in a $10,000 bounty ($50,000 cash today) offered for the CO, Lt. Col. Weldon Honeycutt, offered in the underground newspaper GI Says. (try finding out anything about Honeycutt on the internet, you can't do it.) There were several attempts. After that, infantry assaults were "definitely out." Nixon changed it to a purely bombing war, combat troops effectively out by the end of 1972. But still, in 1972, there were an official 551 frags -- 86 dead, over 700 injured. So there is a limit to the Southern, military takeover of 1963, especially when my boys, the Boomers got in there.
If you doubt the Southern Military took over, read Kay Griggs and Sibel Edmonds. KG tells about American, mostly Southern, ex-military who are the world-wide assassins-for-hire. We have Blackwater, which morphed into Xenon. The worst now is an organization called Craft International LLC;, sniper Chris Kyle was an early bigshot in it. The Boston Marathon Bombing was lousy with Craft rent-a-mercenaries. Sibel Edmonds has exposed Gladio B, operating mostly in the Middle East. Her interviews and blog, Boiling Frogs Post, are great. In the Civil War of the 1860s, the work-allergic South learned they are no good at OPEN warfare. It shouldn't be too long before they learn that they are good at NO warfare. They can start wars and prey on women and children, but they are no good at good wars or finishing any war.
America, 4.5% of world population, spends more on the military than the rest of the world put together. That means that, per capita, we spend 20 times what the rest of the world spends. The military didn't take over in 1963?!?! We are their slaves. How could it be any worse? It's why we are the only developed nation without basic, universal health care. It's why we have more violent, horrific gun crime.
Part of the problem is the species homo sapiens. We have a knack for letting criminal oligarchs pay desperadoes to kill the leaders who are for the people. Ephialtes, Julius Caesar (see Michael Parenti), Jesus Christ, A Lincoln, Alexander II, James Garfield, FDR, JFK to name a few. H G Wells predicted that in five million years we would devolve into two separate species, Elois and Morlocks. But I believe it's somewhat cyclical. When a limit is reached, a certain critical mass, the good people stop putting up with it. Witness the Boomers stopping the Vietnam War from within and without.
What's worse than the Southern military takeover of USA is how we have been infected with their hatred of fundamental labor. Farming, building, forestry, mining, fishing used to be recognized as noble work, important work. Now we despise both the labor and the laborer, though it is what creates wealth. It doesn't have to stay this way. I don't believe it will. (Ouch. I have run on.)
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Paul Trejo #278 (about 10 pages ago),
I don't want to harp on this issue that seems so small: about the baggage-handler job offer at Love Field that Ruth withheld from both Lee and Marina.
You say, "Ruth wasn't beholden to LHO...(He) now had a job. Period. That was the goal, not to be LHO's personal servant."
This is illogical on the face of it. IF RP cared so much about Lee supporting his family, then a much better-paying job is much more support. In today's money, it's the difference between making $7.50/hour and making $10.00 an hour. That's all the difference in the world at the poverty level. Not to mention that a job at an airport has much more potential for advancement compared to a job moving school books from one box to another. How much trouble is this one sentence, "TEC called about an opening at the airport as a baggage-handler."?!? If she were ever going to give Lee a message, that would be at the top of the list. And she not only did not tell Lee, she never told Marina about it. I've seen countless lies of omission like this, in work and social situations. Every time, there is an ulterior motive for keeping this information away from someone who assumes it is forthcoming. Sort of a hidden manipulation.
Ever since early October, when LHO came back to the Dallas area from his sojourn In Nawlins and (maybe) Mexico City, he had made numerous inquiries. One avenue paid off but it was ruthlessly withheld. I wouldn't treat a dog like that.
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Paul Trejo,
I must add more rebuttal to your statement in #235 that there was no coup in 1963.
On only the subject of the change in US foreign policy, you have probably read Jim DiEugenio's concise article, something like, "Reversal of U. S. Foreign Policy after 1963, EXCEPT Cuba and Vietnam." (because those two have been beaten to death) I'd link it here from my bookmarks, but I'm a techno-moron. Establishment historians do their darnedest to show that there has been nothing but continuity since WWII. And it can appear that way. What America did to Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s looks fascistic enough. Persia wouldn't play ball with the West over their oil and United Fruit wanted to make an extra dollar on bananas over and above the millions already made. So we had to destroy those two sovereign nations. And Patrice Lumumba was slaughtered as Kennedy took office, so what happened in the 60s and 70s was just more business as usual, right?
But no. With JFK out of the way, American and world fascism got going in earnest. [A gross error was here RE Dominican Republic. The following is what it should have been] 4-28-65, LBJ sent 42,000 troops to restore the anti-Juan Bosch military junta; 9-65, LBJ sent Marines to end another revolt when Bosch tried to return. But Indonesia may take the cake for the nastiest genocide of all time. CIA, Dutch and Belgians already had the list of PKI supporters when we shot Jack's brains out in Dallas. So, when the coast was clear, we murdered Sukarno and then methodically murdered his ilk until they were all gone. Historians put it at 400K, 500K tops, but it was at least a million, maybe two. And that's two million of the best and bravest. Sukarno's successor, military strongman and Western henchman Suharto ruled for more than 30 years, until the late 1990s.
Israel got the Bomb, despite everything JFK's admin had done to prevent Mid-East destabilization. Before Jack's body was cold, it was full speed ahead for Zionism's nuclear WMDs. And then in June 1967 at the start of the Six Days' War, a year to the day before RFK was gunned down in Los Angeles, LBJ and Mossad did their worst to send USS Liberty, a communications ship, to the bottom of the Mediterranean.
Central America, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Congo again destabilizing nearly the entire African continent. A shortlist.
Then there's Vietnam and Southeast Asia, LBJ's pride and joy. There's never been anything like it. This is when the Military-Industrial Complex took over for good, though we didn't notice, like the frogs boiled slowly. Just three quick facts: 1. We dropped eight million TONS of bombs on SE Asia, 2-3 times what was expended all over the world in WWII. 2. 61% of the American boys who were killed in action hadn't seen their 21st birthday, not old enough to buy a beer today. 3. 1968 saw 108 official fraggings. It was actually several times that. In fact the Boomer draftees mutinied and ended the Vietnam War. Nixon merely codified it.
None of the above happened on Kennedy's watch.
The characteristics of a fascist nation/society:
-- marriage of big business and government
-- bloated, monstrous, bellicose military. America, 4.5% of the world's population, spends as much on "national defense" as the rest of the world put together; so, per capita, Americans spend about 20 times more than the rest of the world. We are the slaves of the military. They think they are immensely superior to civilian "dirtbags," their pet name for us. That's why USA is the only developed nation on Earth without universal health care, another thing stopped with the end of Kennedy
-- genocide (above), then along comes Dubya Bush who sees to the violent death of about two million Iraqis, in a blase fashion
-- racism, both FOR whites and AGAINST non-whites
-- vehement nationalism USA! USA! USA!
-- anti-labor, anti-democracy
-- a far-right oligarchy that gives special treatment to the wealthiest; i.e., the rich pay a smaller proportion of their income, due to a chaotic morass of tax codes, than working folk
So the far-right was not victorious 11-22-63?! How could they have been more victorious?
Another thing: KKK, Birchers, American Nazi Party, etc. are not the only far-right. They are only the most OPENLY far-right. CIA, DIA, MIC, Big Oil, Big Finance, they're all the same thing. They look down their nose at the workingman and fear nothing more than actually having to labor manually. This nation was founded upon slavery. The far-right's only concern is keeping it that way. Wage-slavery is still slavery. It's even better for the masters; they get the fruits of labor without any of the worries about labor's living conditions.
The John F. Kennedy Quiz
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted · Edited by Roy Wieselquist
Ramon, I'll take a stab at this. I see problems with 3 questions, which I wouldn't necessarily call "wrong."
#19: How many children did Jack and Jackie have? The answer "4" is not offered, perhaps because the stillborn Arabella is not considered a child. Though it would have been nice if Ms. Dove had noted this in her explanation for the answer.
#23: "35th President" -- an idiotic pet peeve of mine -- JFK's PRESIDENCY was the 35th, but he was the 34th President, unless Grover Cleveland was two men. GC is called the 22nd and 24th presidentS because he served two non-consecutive terms.
#25: (something like) "What country did we invade 3/15/61?" The only correct answer, The Bay of Pigs, is not a country of course. This is the only question that I see that is phrased wrongly, oddly. I'd like to declare the body of water behind my house, Troublesome Creek, a sovereign nation, but the neighbors already think I'm strange.
Will you please give your answer about which question is wrong, and SOON? It's bugging me.