Michael Griffith

I came across this post while doing some research. I'm certain that others have already pointed this out, but the four photos that show a shirt do not, of course, show a coat worn over the shirt, and that the mild bunches shown in photo #4 and in the JFK shirt photo are not nearly large enough and high enough to account for JFK's rear clothing holes, both of which were over 5 inches below the top of their respective collars. Moreover, if a bullet struck the bunch seen in the final photo, the JFK shirt photo, it would have made three holes in the shirt, two in the overlapping layers of the bunch and one in the fabric beneath the overlapping layers. Finally, a word about the front shirt slits. They look nothing like a bullet hole. They are not the same shape or length or thickness. Part of the left slit (viewer's right) extends into the neckband, while the right slit (viewer's left) does not. The right slit is roughly half vertical and half diagonal, while the left slit is not as irregular. The initial FBI lab report did not attribute the slits to a bullet but stated that the slits could have been caused by a fragment. Also, the FBI found no metallic traces around the slits but did find metallic traces around the rear clothing holes. Moreover, the slits have no fabric missing from them, unlike all the other clothing holes.

Sorenson may have believed this, but he was wrong. We now know that JFK had a Cuba coup planned for early December 1963. After Dallas, Bobby even tried to get LBJ to let the coup proceed, but LBJ refused. Lamar Waldron covers this in some detail in The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination. LBJ's refusal shows that he was not part of the inner circle of the assassination plot, since the plotters appears to have hoped to use the assassination as an excuse to invade Cuba. I think LBJ knew that "something" was in the works against Kennedy, but I don't think he was one of the plotters.

You really think that the Russians would have attacked West Berlin with Nixon as president in response to the liberation of Cuba? I doubt that. If the Russians made no move against Berlin during JFK's invasion of Cuba, even though they regarded Kennedy as less hawkish/weaker than Nixon, it seems unlikely they would have attacked Berlin over Cuba with Nixon in the White House. The Russians were acutely aware that they would suffer far more severe losses in a nuclear exchange than we would. Besides, if we had liberated Cuba in 1961, there would have been no Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. All this being said, I should probably repeat that I mostly blame the CIA and the Joint Chiefs for the failure of the Bay of Pigs.

This video is sadly misleading, incomplete, and heavily biased. It repeats many of the standard far-left myths about JFK and Vietnam. I notice that not one of the experts interviewed for the video said anything about the massive aid that North Vietnam received from Russia and China, the 100K-plus Chinese troops who were stationed in North Vietnam, the thousands of Russian advisers who were stationed in North Vietnam, the murderous reign of terror that North Vietnam imposed on the south after South Vietnam fell, and the fact that South Vietnam, for all its many faults, was far less repressive and more democratic than North Vietnam, etc., etc.

I think it is now clear that there were at least two head shots. The autopsy report describes a fragment trail that ran from the EOP to the right orbit. The extant autopsy skull x-rays show a fragment trail that runs between the right-frontal region and a point upward and farther back on the skull that ends short of the cowlick area. It is inconceivable that the autopsy doctors missed the higher trail or mistook it for the lower trail. Now that the cowlick entry site has been debunked, that leaves the EOP entry site, but the EOP site is at least 2 inches below and on the opposite end of the skull from the right-frontal fragment cloud, and there is no trail that even remotely connects the EOP site with the fragment cloud.

I think the Zapruder film, altered or not, provides powerful evidence of multiple gunmen even before the head shot frames, i.e., the Z200-207 reactions and the Z226-232 reactions. At around frame 200, JFK's hand not only stops suddenly in the middle of a wave, but it also drops to the chin or throat level in a fraction of a second and stays at that level until he disappears behind the freeway sign at Z207. By frames 202-204, Mrs. Kennedy has made a sudden sharp turn to the right, toward her husband. When she reemerges into view at Z223, she is looking intently at JFK; obviously, her attention was drawn to him because the reaction that he had begun at around Z200 had become more noticeable while the car was behind the freeway sign. Beginning at Z226, Kennedy's body is visibly jolted sharply forward, and the position of his hands and elbows--particularly his elbows--changes dramatically, as they are flung upward and forward. The force and speed of these movements of his arms and elbows are quite startling when one compares frame 226, where they are first discernible, to frame 232 just 1/3-second later. Although the WC and the HSCA ignored these movements (they alluded to them but did not describe them), they are among the most dramatic and visible reactions in the entire Zapruder film. The Z200-207 reactions indicate a shot at Z186-188, and this appears to be the throat shot. The Z226-232 reactions indicate a shot at Z224-225.

Well, far be it from me to defend Curtis LeMay (since I think he was a war criminal who should have been prosecuted for war crimes after WWII), but 13 Days presents a distorted portrayal of LeMay and the other Joint Chiefs. 'Thirteen Days' is more a fantasy tale – Baltimore Sun

In other words, Greenwald drags his partisan politics into the JFK case. Gee, who was president from 2008-2016? What was his name again? I'm fairly certain he was a liberal Democrat named Barack Obama, right? And, umm, who had huge majorities in Congress from 2008-2010? Did Greenwald sharply criticize Obama and the 2008-2010 Congressional Democrats for doing absolutely nothing to release those JFK assassination records? I think that's ridiculous.

Good for Senator Klobuchar. I wish she had gained more traction in the Democratic presidential primaries in 2020.

Thanks for the info. Just to give you some idea of prices on Kindle books, Dr. Mantik's new book JFK Assassination Paradoxes and Monika Wiesak's new book America's Last President both sell for under $10 as Kindle books, even though both are hundreds of pages long (and Mantik's book includes numerous graphics as well). Based on the excellent content in the free Kindle preview of the book that I just read, I hope the book sells really well and gets wide distribution. I'm just afraid that $19.95 will lose the book quite a few would-be buyers.

Larry, if you know John Hunt, you might tell him that he should consider lowering the price. $19.95 is rather high for a Kindle book. Also, he should consider putting it on Kobo and Smashwords as well. Anyway, the book looks excellent. I just finished reading the free Kindle sample of the book. I'll add it as a recommended book on my RFK assassination website.

Exactly. Hardway and Lopez were and are convinced that Oswald did go to Mexico City, but that he did not visit the Cuban Embassy or the Soviet Consulate. Richard Case Nagell was adamant that Oswald went to Mexico City because Nagell met up with him there. Also, it's highly doubtful that the "Oswald" who called the Soviet Consulate was the real Oswald, since the man spoke atrocious, barely intelligible Russian.

I don't see what's "extreme" about that belief. It is the standard Catholic-Protestant teaching about gender. Well into the 1960s, it was the belief accepted by the majority of Americans. Nor do I see how holding this belief imposes it on other people's lives. As I've said, my Christian church teaches something a bit different from this. It teaches that gender is a part of our eternal identity but that we were born male and female as spirits in our pre-mortal life, and that our gender is based on the gender with which we were born as spirits before we came to Earth. Now, as for the topic of this thread, I think the evidence is indisputable that a sizable and vocal minority of Republicans in the 1960s held radical views about JFK, i.e., viewed him as a traitor, as a willing communist sympathizer (if not an actual communist), as dangerously inept in foreign policy, as weak on national defense (a wholly unfounded charge), and as a socialist in dealing with the economy and the budget (a very odd charge given his tax-cut proposal, his farm policy, his monetary policy, and his conservative approach to the budget).

My religious belief is that God does not decide the gender of a child because each person's gender is a part of his or her eternal identity. In my church's teaching, a child is born a male because he was a male in heaven before he was born on Earth. I had a son who dabbled for about two years with transgenderism. He decided he wanted to be, or that he really was, a female. He changed his name and began taking gender-transition hormones. After about two years, he decided he was making a big mistake, stopped taking the hormone prescription, halted his transition, and returned to acknowledging his birth gender.

Not in the least bit, at least not to me. The lone-gunman theory does not call into question the validity of our form of government and does not cause us to doubt our intelligence agencies, our law enforcement agencies, and our news media. The conspiracy theory does all of these things.

This is one reason that I find it so very odd, if not bizarre, that WC apologists claim that many people embrace the conspiracy view of JFK's death to avoid facing the supposedly deeply disturbing implications of the lone-gunman theory. This turns reality on its head. I would truly love to believe that JFK was killed by a lone, disturbed assassin, and that there was no conspiracy of any kind behind his death. That would be a comforting thing to believe. The idea that JFK was killed by some lone nut is far less disturbing than the idea that a powerful, high-level conspiracy murdered him in a public execution and then launched an extensive cover-up.

For many years, I regarded JFK's handling of the Bay of Pigs as cowardly and shameful, even for a number of years after I came to believe he'd been killed by a conspiracy. Many, if not most, conservatives still feel this way. This is one of the first things that most conservatives will mention to support their claim that JFK was weak and timid in dealing with communism.

Oliver was actually very well educated, but that didn't prevent him from turning into a radical, fringe right-winger. He was a professor of classics and languages at the University of Illinois. He was one of the founders of National Review. But, starting in the '60s, he became increasingly radical and fringe. William F. Buckley parted ways with him in 1964 over an article he wrote about the JFK assassination. Oliver proved to be so radical that he got kicked out of the John Birch Society in 1966 after claiming that the world would be a better place if all Jews were "vaporized." In the last years of his life, his rabid anti-Semitism even led him to reject his long-time belief in Christianity. He concluded that Christianity was a Jewish plot and part of his imaginary worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

The "somehow" is that Biden is a liberal Democrat and most of our news networks are dominated by liberal "journalists." Just compare their coverage of Biden with their coverage of Joe Manchin. Even though Manchin's voting record is about 70% liberal, most liberals view him as a traitor and a closet Republican. The folks who wear "tolerance and inclusion" on their sleeves and lecture everyone else about being "tolerant and inclusive" are very intolerant and biased toward anyone who disagrees with them.

If this is true, then one wonders why the CIA and the FBI have so fiercely objected to releasing all the files. On most JFK-case issues, I find Litwin to be a dogmatic, unconvincing WC apologist. I find it incredible that he still denies that Oswald worked with Banister, Ferrie, and Shaw. However, I agree with Litwin on many historical issues and enjoy and agree with most of his posts in the USMB's History subforum. It's too bad he has such a gaping blind spot when it comes to the JFK case.

The FBI was monitoring news stories out of Dallas from 11/22/63 onward for quite some time. Memos and files don't always tell the whole story, and sometimes they tell a false story. I find it hard to believe that the FBI and others in the cover-up "missed" the Dallas newspaper and TV stories about the Tague curb shot. I suspect they tried to avoid generating any paperwork on it, and to avoid acknowledging it, for as long as possible. I am not disputing that the perceived timing problem of the non-fatal hits on JFK and JBC appears to have played the driving role in the formation of the SBT, but I also suspect that at least a few folks knew about Tague's wounding early on and that this may have also played a role.

Harold Weisberg documented that the Tague curb shot was known and reported much earlier than June 5: As we have seen, Tague's wounding . . . and the fresh "hole," "scar," or "mark" as it was variously referred to, was known immediately and reported immediately, first by the police and the sheriff, and during the next two days by the newspapers and TV. (Never Again, pp. 505-506; cf. pp. 454-463)

One of the first things I realized a few years after I began to study the JFK case was that "professional historians" are frequently uninformed and unreliable--and very biased.

This is good exposure, since Fox News has the largest audience of any of the cable TV networks. Bravo to Tucker Carlson for having you on. I'm sure that Tucker's stance is distressing to fellow Fox News analyst Sean Hannity. Hannity is a decent and sincere neocon, but he swallows the lone-gunman myth hook, line, and sinker. I still can't believe that Fox lets Mark Fuhrman have his own show on Fox Nation. I get that people can repent and change and turn over new leaves in life, and perhaps Fuhrman has done so. However, he's never publicly admitted and apologized for his brutalization of certain black suspects when he was with the LAPD, nor has he confessed to planting evidence in the OJ Simpson case. I think Fuhrman should have done some serious jail time for his crimes, and I would never even consider giving him his own show until he confessed his crimes.

Good for them. Perhaps they were emboldened by Tucker Carlson's pro-conspiracy primetime monologue a few days ago. Whatever the case, the more media figures who speak out, the better.