Hugh G. Aynesworth and the Assassination of JFK

[Guest]

Thanks to Malcolm Blunt

 

 

Files set 1

Files set 2

Files set 3

Edited May 25, 2019 by Bart Kamp

[Robert Morrow]

I have a blog post about Hugh Aynesworth from July 29, 2023:

Robert Morrow Political Research Blog: April, 1967 - Lyndon Johnson was telling his Chief of Staff Marvin Watson that the CIA murdered JFK at the very time CIA media asset Hugh Aynesworth was preparing his hit piece on Jim Garrison of New Orleans!

Hopefully, this will be useful to someone.

 

[Robert Morrow]

Fred Litwin with an indepth blog post on Hugh Aynesworth:

https://www.onthetrailofdelusion.com/post/hugh-aynesworth-r-i-p?fbclid=IwAR2rsDlQTCziNp-rkwZC_gHDv1X_cKKIl1_s43nPiGj9aNVoWg1j85VKFTo 

 

[Robert Morrow]

Just before Hugh Aynesworth published his hit piece on Jim Garrison for Newsweek in 1967, he sent the article to the Lyndon Johnson White House for them to take a look at it. I think this information comes from the LBJ Library. George Christian in 1967 was the press secretary for the LBJ White House.

[Joe Bauer]

1 hour ago, Robert Morrow said:

Just before Hugh Aynesworth published his hit piece on Jim Garrison for Newsweek in 1967, he sent the article to the Lyndon Johnson White House for them to take a look at it. I think this information comes from the LBJ Library. George Christian in 1967 was the press secretary for the LBJ White House.

My God!

It's all right there in the above posted memo!

Aynesworth was a completely compromised disinformation agent provocateur for our government's intel agencies!

This memo SHOUTS out this truth!

[Robert Morrow]

Hugh Aynesworth on Friday, December 22, 1967 called George Brown, a founder of Brown & Root and one of Lyndon Johnson’s absolute closest friends and sugar daddies since the 1930s and told him that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison might try to implicate him in the JFK assassination. 12/27/1967 CIA memo:

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=55210#relPageId=12 

Reel 25, Folder G - GARRISON INVESTIGATION - VOL V. (maryferrell.org)

For decades at the LBJ Ranch there has been a picture of George Brown on the walls along with other very close LBJ friends. (LBJ Ranch home closed now for repairs).

[Robert Morrow]

Michael Granberry – Dallas Morning News – obituary of Hugh Aynesworth

https://reader.dallasnews.com/infinity/article_popover_share.aspx?guid=9ab93dc3-6d7c-4dd4-b281-b0959866e96f&share=true&appcode=DAMONE&fbclid=IwAR23j32SLdDa4vVTbspnKgLNlAyumg6W7S62cNfsWi1otUMEYnKjGzvhj_0

HUGH AYNESWORTH 1931-2023

Reporter who broke stories on JFK killing

Ex-DMN journalist died Saturday in Dallas at age 92

By MICHAEL GRANBERRY
Staff Writer
mgranberry@dallasnews.com

Hugh Aynesworth, a renowned Texas journalist who became an eyewitness to three key events surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and whose career was defined by that historic moment, died shortly after 9 p.m. Saturday at his home in northwest Dallas. He was 92.

His death was confirmed by his family, who did not specify a cause.

“No one knows more about murder and malice than Hugh, who has stalked politicians, movie stars, wayward preachers and priests gone bad, mad men, crazed widows and serial killers, for more than a half-century,” wrote Wesley Pruden, the former editor of TheWashington Times, in his foreword to Aynesworth’s 2003 book, JFK: Breaking the News.

Over the years, Aynesworth worked for a half-dozen newspapers, including The Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Times Herald, a wire service, Newsweek magazine and ABC’s 20/20.

He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize six times and finished as a finalist four times. His more than 70 years in journalism left the native West Virginian with a portfolio that included revelatory exposés of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who prosecuted a man he believed was tied to a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. The man, Clay Shaw, was acquitted.

Aynesworth never wavered in his belief that Oswald acted alone, pointing to hundreds of stories he wrote since 1963. As writer William Broyles once noted in a profile of Aynesworth published in Texas Monthly, Aynesworth ended up breaking “almost every major assassination story.”

They included his exposé of Oswald’s escape route in the aftermath of the shooting and the first interview with Marina Oswald, the assassin’s widow. She informed Aynesworth of something shocking she’d omitted from her testimony before the Warren Commission: that she persuaded her husband, in the months before Kennedy’s death, not to assassinate Richard Nixon. Aynesworth was also the first to publish Oswald’s diaries.

“Hugh was the person who set the mark,” said Gerald Posner, whose book about the killing of JFK, Case Closed, was a Pulitzer finalist. “He was cut from a cloth we don’t get any longer, which is, when you say the phrase ‘investigative journalist,’ he would have said that ‘investigative’ was redundant — that’s just what he did. He was a damn good reporter. Excellent reporter. And investigating was part of it. There was no bigger story, and Hugh covered a lot of big stories.”

Aynesworth “had an advantage that nobody can reduplicate in studying the case later on,” Posner said. “He was there at the beginning. He had early, contemporaneous conversations with many of the key people.”

And that alone, Posner contends, helped identify Oswald as a lone wolf. “If there was something wrong or fishy in the police investigations, or [Jack] Ruby’s murder of Oswald, or Oswald and Marina, the guy that would have had it as a headline in my view would have been Hugh Aynesworth. He wouldn’t have shied away from any of that. He would have been chasing it with both guns blazing.”

Aynesworth also wrote insightful pieces on serial killer Ted Bundy and self-professed serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. In 1986, Aynesworth and Jim Henderson, his colleague at the Dallas Times Herald, finished as Pulitzer finalists, winning praise from the judges “for their persistent and thorough investigation of self-proclaimed mass murderer Henry Lee Lucas, which exposed him as the perpetrator of a massive hoax.”

Frequent collaborator

Aynesworth co-authored seven books with Stephen Michaud, including one on Bundy. In 2019, less than three years before his 90th birthday, Aynesworth appeared in and served as co-executive producer of the Netflix series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, which became a viral sensation. Aynesworth appeared again in the Netflix series on Henry Lee Lucas titled The Confession Killer.

It was not surprising that Aynesworth would be so gifted at getting interviewees, even Bundy, to open up. He was a gentle, avuncular man with dark hair and soulful eyes and — as is often the case with great journalists — an air of innocence that complements an innate gift for listening, for being fully present. He was the kind of man whom people, even Bundy, felt comfortable sharing things with, no matter how dark or weird or endlessly painful they happened to be.

Michaud and Aynesworth first met at one of Aynesworth’s numerous career stops, New York-based Newsweek magazine, where the older journalist became Michaud’s editor and valued mentor.

He recruited Aynesworth to work on the Bundy project, Michaud once said, calling him “a premier investigative reporter. Besides that, he’s a really talented interviewer.”

Because he was the father of two women who were then teenage girls, Aynesworth found Bundy increasingly hard to stomach. He also grew weary of Bundy being utterly unwilling to cop to a single crime, until he and co-author Michaud resorted to a clever backdoor strategy. Having Bundy speak in the third person worked like magic, Aynesworth said. The authors asked Bundy to “imagine” the crimes and how the killer might have committed them. Bundy reveled in the role, but before then, it felt like a waste of time.

“We jockeyed back and forth for weeks. I spent at least 60 hours with him, in a little old cell. We hated each other,” Aynesworth said.

It was almost as though Bundy had a split personality, one in first person, the other in the third person. The former, in Aynesworth’s words, was nervous and arrogant and completely uncooperative.

Even before adopting the third-person strategy, Aynesworth said Bundy was proud of what he’d done, without ever admitting it.

Once, when he asked him a question, Bundy slapped the reporter’s knee and said, “You know better than that. How many years have you been a journalist?”

“More than you’ve been a killer,” Aynesworth said.

Seeing parallels

Not that the public was always willing to believe. He once said he learned the hard way that some people will never believe the truth, regardless of how much eye-popping evidence is put in front of them.

He believed, without a doubt, that Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy, which at times made him an object of ridicule and contempt among conspiracy theorists, many of whom relied, in his view, on egregiously false information.

Did he ever see parallels between Kennedy’s death and the Bundy case?

“Oh, my, yes,” Aynesworth said in 2019. “It started out the same, with people thinking the accused was not guilty. In the Kennedy thing, it’s taken wings of its own, of course.”

And then he paused. “The strain on me has, at times, been difficult.”

As Aynesworth once pointed out, with a rueful sigh, “There are now more than 200 different conspiracy theories.” Money, he said, is always at the core. In other words, there was never any money in believing that Oswald acted alone, despite a preponderance of evidence.

To add his own voice to posterity, Aynesworth in 2015 wrote November 22, 1963: Witness to History, a memoir based on his own extraordinary connection to a fateful event.

On the day Kennedy came to town — Nov. 22, 1963 — Aynesworth was 32 and working for The Dallas Morning News, covering the early years of NASA. That Friday, he walked to Dealey Plaza, hoping to get a glimpse of the president and his motorcade as it drove through downtown Dallas.

After hearing three shots and being engulfed in the chaos surrounding the moment, Aynesworth fished a utility bill out of his pocket and began scribbling notes. He asked a young boy standing nearby if he could buy his fat wooden pencil. The boy agreed, with Aynesworth turning over whatever loose change was in his pocket.

Interviewing dozens of witnesses, Aynesworth was standing next to a police motorcycle when its radio blared the news of a random shooting in Oak Cliff.

Thinking it might be related, he ended up at the corner of 10th Street and Patton Avenue, where Dallas police Officer J.D. Tippit lay dead. Soon, Aynesworth found himself in the Texas Theatre, where police believed the gunman might have beeen hiding.

Witness to history

Aynesworth witnessed Dallas police arresting Lee Harvey Oswald, who almost succeeded in killing a second police officer. Multiple witnesses later identified Oswald as having killed Officer Tippit. Aynesworth’s friends and colleagues often said they admired his rare ability to get to know the human beings affected by historical events. Those included Marie Tippit, the officer’s widow.

“She was a very nice, kind, ladylike woman,” Aynesworth said in 2021, after she died, noting how much he admired the grieving widow for the way in which she mothered her children in the aftermath of a horrifying event. “She did so much to keep them pretty much straight.”

But Aynesworth’s connection to what some have called the crime of the century didn’t stop at the Oak Cliff corner where Oswald killed Tippit.

Two days later, Aynesworth drove to the Dallas police station, where in the basement Oswald was undergoing what most believed would be a routine transfer from the city jail to the county jail.

By then, Oswald was the suspect in two homicides, which ended the lives of Tippit and Kennedy. But in the basement, Oswald became the third homicide connected to the president’s death.

Gunning him down was Dallas strip club operator Jack Ruby, whom Aynesworth had known for years. Moments before walking to Dealey Plaza to see the president’s parade, Aynesworth saw Ruby eating lunch in the second-floor cafeteria at The News, whose building was then at the corner of Young and Houston streets. Ruby routinely went to the paper to place ads for the Carousel Club, his Commerce Street nightspot that was popular among police and newspapermen.

Years later, Aynesworth said he had once seen Ruby descend the stairs from the Carousel Club to the sidewalk on Commerce, holding a man by the scruff of his neck. He proceeded to beat the man senseless with the butt end of his gun, which, Aynesworth said, Ruby always kept with him.

Born in Clarksburg, W.Va., on Aug. 2, 1931, Aynesworth grew up poor. He was only a year old when his father died. His widowed mother provided for the family by taking in laundry. His aunt cleaned houses, including one owned by a man who later provided Aynesworth with $100 so he could purchase books in college. Aynesworth graduated from high school in Nutter Fort, W.Va., then attended Salem College before dropping out after one semester to become a full-time journalist.

He began his newspaper career in 1948, working in his home state as a freelance writer for the Clarksburg Exponent-Telegram.

He next worked for a pair of newspapers in Fort Smith, Ark. In 1950, he became a sports columnist at the Fort Smith Times Record, earning $32 a week. He served as sports editor of the Fort Smith paper from 1952 to 1954.

He later worked as a columnist for the Arkansas Gazette and as editor of the Southwest American in Fort Smith, Ark., before becoming state editor for United Press International in Denver in 1959.

In Denver, he was stabbed in the throat by an unknown assailant who broke down his apartment door. While still bandaged from the attack, he interviewed with and was hired by The News in 1960.

He covered the space program for The News until the assassination changed his career. In 1967, he moved to the Houston bureau of Newsweek as bureau chief. He then returned to the Times Herald, becoming its investigative chief in 1975.

Witness to history

All along, there were memorable moments. He served as a pallbearer at Jack Ruby’s funeral. He played basketball with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

“All of a sudden, this Jeep drives up and a bearded gentleman gets out and puts on his tennis shoes and joins us,” Aynesworth said. “I’d been having trouble getting an interview, and after that, it came a little easier. I told him that I would let him win.”

“He interviewed Kennedy while he was taking a shower, during the 1960 presidential campaign,” said his eldest daughter, Allyson Aynesworth. “And he interviewed President Johnson while he was lying in bed in his pajamas at his home in Johnson City.”

Despite having interviewed so many characters from what she called “the underbelly” of life, including serial killers, con artists and mobsters, “he never succumbed to being cynical,” Allyson said, noting that his colleagues once nicknamed her father “the dean of Dallas journalism. He remained intellectually curious and helpful, which is why I think he lived so long.”

Recapping his career, Aynesworth once told an interviewer, “I’ve been offered bribes and threatened and maligned and witnessed some of the most horrifying events of our lifetime.”

The most horrifying, of course, was Kennedy’s death.

In Posner’s words, it demeans Aynesworth’s legacy to ignore his reporting and conclude that the assassination was something it wasn’t — a conspiracy.

“He watched it go from a simple murder investigation into one of the most famous who-dun-it conspiracy theories of modern America political history, completely out of the control of what good reporting could do to rein it in,” Posner said. “That’s a perspective, a perch, that had to be very, very frustrating for someone like him.”

Aynesworth covered every U.S. manned space flight from the first Mercury orbital voyage by John Glenn in 1962 to the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. He reported on the hunt for the killer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and the 1993 Waco siege by federal agents that ended in the deaths of more than 70 Branch Davidians.

Aynesworth is survived by his wife, Paula Butler Aynesworth, and two daughters, Allyson Aynesworth and Allysa Aynesworth. His son, Grant Aynesworth, died in 2014.

[Robert Morrow]

Rachel Rendish is a longtime JFK assassination researcher based in Texas. She lives reasonably close to Dallas in the north Texas area. Rachel used to be very good friends with Marina Oswald who was quite repulsed when Rachel mentioned that she had been one of Ilya Mamantov's students at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Ilya Mamantov's was one of the interpreters who was recruited to speak for Marina Oswald and Marina felt that Mamantov would often twist her words to portray Oswald in the most negative light.

Rachel Rendish had dealings with Hugh Aynesworth as she came across him in the Dallas area in her JFK assassination research.

Below Rachel Rendish tells the time that Hugh Aynesworth offered to show Rachel a blackmail sex tape of Marina Oswald. Below is the text of the email that Rachel Rendish sent me on 12/27/2023 at 11AM CST:

Rachel Rendish:

QUOTE

So Robert this what I want to say. 

Over the years I have been told some crazy dooky about Aynesworth. If half of it is true we are looking at a very bad person.

 

Hugh may be dead but sometimes the bad things a person did need to be known and live on in minds of others for a little bit of justice for their victims.  During one of my Daryl Howard Marina Porter visits I had been delicately told the details of Marinas personal life after the assassination.  She was lonely and terrified and covering by partying spending money and men often felt the needed to take a shot at her. After all a trophy story.  Hugh was one of those. Scoring points for his agency checks living as an Intel asset he could appear to be a great journalists. It's not hard to do when your being guided by the agency. 

 

One night a rebel jfk historian called me to run up to Prego Pasta House. Aynesworth was in the bar. A perfect time to visit in person.  I jumped at the chance. I walked in and was introduced and I wanted to ask him a question about Ted Bundy. My friend also mentioned I was interested in the women of the Jfk case. Hugh was asked to debrief Bundy while incarcerated. Also write a book on him. I asked Hugh if Bundy mentioned Pullman Wa?  One night our family was finishing dinner when Cheryl Friar crashed thru the front door. Pale and gagging straining to say a man tried to put her in his VW. My dad jumped up and walked with her down the road but no one was there. He took her home. Later we realized her description fit Bundy. Cheryl had lovely long red hair and she fit his target. Hugh said he faintly remembered  Bundy saying something about WSU but he would have to check his tapes. Then he moved the conversation to The assassination. Who have I interviewed? I always kept that vague and he asked about Marina.  I told him yes I had a few chances to talk with her. What do you think of her? I told him.my mother always felt bad for her and actually Marina and I had a miraculous and dissastetous first meeting. All in all I think she is the most important witness standing. I liked her. Tapping the bar he turned and whispered he had something he would like to show me.  He had a film that might change my opinion of her. I surprised him. Oh yes I know all about that film and how you boys set her up.  She said that was the item you always used for blackmail. I have absolutely No Interest in seeing it. He was stunned. Paula his wife came in and gushed awhile about her wonderful husband.  That was the end of it. I had another occasion to put him on the spot at a PI meeting. I asked about the chain of evidence being broken when and how he gained access to sell oswalds diary to Life Magazine.  I think it should be mentioned that he was key in blackmailing and controling Marina oswald porter for decades. Hugh got us all where we are today. He should be recognized. 

 

UNQUOTE

[Pat Speer]

14 hours ago, Joe Bauer said:

My God!

It's all right there in the above posted memo!

Aynesworth was a completely compromised disinformation agent provocateur for our government's intel agencies!

This memo SHOUTS out this truth!

That's not what it says at all. He played footsie with the LBJ administration while trying to take down Garrison. He wasn't alone. A lot of people, including some in the JFK research community, thought Garrison was only in it to make a name for himself, while trashing America to the rest of the world. 

This playing footsie is not something he alone was doing, moreover. It's what most journalists do. They give the rich and powerful a heads up and a chance to respond, in exchange for access. Sometimes they bury a story in exchange for an exclusive. Sometimes they willingly serve up propaganda in exchange for a look behind the curtain...that they can later write about in their memoirs, etc. 

 

[James DiEugenio]

I do not agree.

And the proof is in the actual article.  Which Newsweek published.

That article was a pile of utter BS.  Worse, it was really black propaganda, as if written by a CIA agent, (Which many think Hugh was.)

What access was necessary?  He was not trading for anything except protection.

What do I mean by that?  See, someone like Sy Hersh will tell you he talks to the CIA about his books.  And sometimes, there is some truth in them, like his biography of Kissinger.  Sy does not ask for anonymity.  He tells you he confered with Halpern for example.  Halberstam is another example e. g. in his first Vietnam book, The Making of a Quagmire.  He makes no bones about talking to the Pentagon.  And that book showed it.

But Hugh, in this case, simply made up stuff, which he had a habit of doing.  And he wants to be legally protected for that. It is not at all a matter of access.  Prime example: bribing a witness is a crime, as he tried to do with Manchester. This is what Hugh was bartering for.  David Chandler was another one.  Chandler got protected by the governor.

Hugh was protected also.

 

[Robert Morrow]

14 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

I do not agree.

And the proof is in the actual article.  Which Newsweek published.

That article was a pile of utter BS.  Worse, it was really black propaganda, as if written by a CIA agent, (Which many think Hugh was.)

What access was necessary?  He was not trading for anything except protection.

What do I mean by that?  See, someone like Sy Hersh will tell you he talks to the CIA about his books.  And sometimes, there is some truth in them, like his biography of Kissinger.  Sy does not ask for anonymity.  He tells you he confered with Halpern for example.  Halberstam is another example e. g. in his first Vietnam book, The Making of a Quagmire.  He makes no bones about talking to the Pentagon.  And that book showed it.

But Hugh, in this case, simply made up stuff, which he had a habit of doing.  And he wants to be legally protected for that. It is not at all a matter of access.  Prime example: bribing a witness is a crime, as he tried to do with Manchester. This is what Hugh was bartering for.  David Chandler was another one.  Chandler got protected by the governor.

Hugh was protected also.

 

Jim DiEugenio:

QUOTE

But Aynseworth was worse than that. One example: after Gurvich got him a purloined copy of a trial brief, Aynseworth went up to the Clinton-Jackson area to talk those strong witnesses out of their stories before the Shaw trial. (Destiny Betrayed, p. 367) A key witness up there was Sheriff John Manchester who identified Shaw as the driver of the car carrying David Ferrie and Lee Oswald. When the agent/reporter could not talk the local lawman out of his story, Hugh did what James Phelan and Walter Sheridan later did. He tried to bribe him with the offer of a well paying and easy job. I rather like Manchester's reply: "I advise you to leave the area. Otherwise I'll cut you a new asshole." (Mellen, p. 235)

UNQUOTE

 

[Robert Morrow]

Hugh Aynesworth's letter to Life Magazine with suggestions for an article on the JFK assassination. I think Aynesworth was pitching them for him to do a story.

[James DiEugenio]

It figures this is to Holland McCombs.

McCombs put the kabosh on the original inquiry by getting rid of both Tink Thompson and Ed Kern, who were the guys digging up the most interesting material.

Thompson disagreed with me on that one, but it turned out that Malcolm Blunt later discovered just how close McCombs was to Shaw and his lawyers.

And he also found out that the inquiry did not end after Tink and Kern were cashiered. It went on until at least 1968 since Patsy Swank was still filing reports.

If you take a look at what Kern and Tink dug up and then you read the results of that inquiry as published by Life, you can see why Tink wanted to write his book.  BTW, McCombs even gave Specter the right of reply to their very weak story anyway.

So McCombs and Hugh was a pretty likely match.

[Benjamin Cole]

On 12/28/2023 at 1:41 AM, Pat Speer said:

That's not what it says at all. He played footsie with the LBJ administration while trying to take down Garrison. He wasn't alone. A lot of people, including some in the JFK research community, thought Garrison was only in it to make a name for himself, while trashing America to the rest of the world. 

This playing footsie is not something he alone was doing, moreover. It's what most journalists do. They give the rich and powerful a heads up and a chance to respond, in exchange for access. Sometimes they bury a story in exchange for an exclusive. Sometimes they willingly serve up propaganda in exchange for a look behind the curtain...that they can later write about in their memoirs, etc. 

 

PS-

I have been in and out of journalism for 45 years (I still work half-time for a financial news wire-service).

I never heard of anyone showing copy to officials before publication.  Almost always, something like that would be viewed as compromising the product. 

When I freelance for somewhat puffy real estate publications, they sometimes show copy to people covered in their stories to make sure no one is inadvertently offended, and thus a sponsor or advertiser driven off. 

It may be in today's highly politicized environment, left- and right-wing "journalists" in DC run copy by their favored officials and party figures.

But I have not worked in DC since the 1980s. 

Are you imagining what is common practice? 

 

[Pat Speer]

1 hour ago, Benjamin Cole said:

PS-

I have been in and out of journalism for 45 years (I still work half-time for a financial news wire-service).

I never heard of anyone showing copy to officials before publication.  Almost always, something like that would be viewed as compromising the product. 

When I freelance for somewhat puffy real estate publications, they sometimes show copy to people covered in their stories to make sure no one is inadvertently offended, and thus a sponsor or advertiser driven off. 

It may be in today's highly politicized environment, left- and right-wing "journalists" in DC run copy by their favored officials and party figures.

But I have not worked in DC since the 1980s. 

Are you imagining what is common practice? 

 

Maybe I've watched too many movies, but my understanding has long been that when it comes to political journalism, access is everything. You want access, you gotta play footsie. I know Johnson and Nixon cut people off if their reporting made them look bad. And we've seen that happen with Trump--where he essentially banned CNN from the press room for asking too many questions, and allowed people who scarcely qualified as journalists--internet super-patriots who echoed whatever he said--to fill up his press conferences with softball questions, which were clearly orchestrated. 

Veteran Reporter: "Mr. President, I think America would like to know if you had an affair with that porn star. Did you?"

Trump: "Sit back down. I didn't call on you. I am calling on you. (Points at someone no one has ever seen before.) Well, hello young lady."

Young Lady No One Has Seen Before or Since: "Why thank you Mr. President. I would just like to know what you plan to do about those anti-American criminals at the DNC, who broadcast messages 24/7 throughout the third world telling the world's vermin they should come here." 

Trump: "I'm glad you asked... I am going to..."