article "11/22/2013" (Dal-Tex roof photo)

[Don Roberdeau]

Good Day.... FYI, a recent "Texas Monthly" article

.... Included is a very interesting recent time-lapsed photo that was

captured from very close to the southwest corner of the Dal-Tex

Building roof line, where I first stood in 1988....

....Think of yourself also located at that Dal-Tex west face roof line

corner, then, you simply walk approximately 35' to 40' northward,

(towards your right in that photo).... During a well thought about,

well-planned MILitary OPeration (aka, a "MILOP"), with the 2 primary

established goals being 1) kill JFK, and 2) frame a "lone-nut", the

operational planners would place a very high, solid value for duplicating

as close as possible the nearly exact same vertical, horizontal, and

lateral bullet trajectory(ies) as a trajectory(ies) triggered from a "lone-

nut" "snipers lair" to, 1) fool witnesses with a shot(s) source from

above, behind, and to JFK's right, and, 2) fool the (predictable, military

controlled) forensic autopsy that they also knew must follow the attack.

http://www.texasmont...01/feature4.php

(QUOTE)

11/22/2013

In one year the entire world will turn its attention to Dallas to mark the

fiftieth anniversary of the murder of John F. Kennedy. The mayor hopes

to show off a city that has evolved into a sophisticated global destination.

But when it comes to the assassination, nothing is as simple as it seems

—and that is why Dallas is so worried.

by Mimi Swartz

DECEMBER 2012

(PHOTO)

http://www.texasmonthly.com/cms/dispImage.php?id=3882

Photograph by Darren Braun

Unlike so many people who have become part of the Dallas narrative,

Robert J. Groden doesn’t radiate the aura of a winner. He is a paunchy

67-year-old nebbish who drives a PT Cruiser and loves dining at Red

Lobster. He is tall, but he slouches. His color isn’t good, probably

because, by his account, he suffers from three kinds of heart disease.

His shaggy hair, doleful eyes, and chronic wince give him the mien of a

man locked in a perpetual if not entirely painful state of mourning, which

actually happens to be the case. Groden has devoted most of his adult

life to exposing what he believes to be a diabolical conspiracy to kill John

F. Kennedy. In better times, he wrote best-selling books on the subject,

assisted the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and pitched in

as a consultant for Oliver Stone’s JFK. But these days Groden can most

often be found selling his books, magazines, and DVDs from a battered

folding table on Dallas’s infamous grassy knoll, in the shadow of what was

once known as the Texas School Book Depository, where, depending on

your level of paranoia, Lee Harvey Oswald did or did not fire the shots

that killed the thirty-fifth president of the United States. “I would bet

money LBJ was up to his ears in it,” Groden told me after suggesting that

the assassination was instigated by some combination of organized crime

and the CIA. I half expected the crisply attired waiter hovering over us

at a fancy Design District restaurant—my choice—to ask us to leave.

In other words, in another city, in another time, Groden would be hard to

picture as a threat to anyone. But since moving to Dallas from the East

Coast, in 1995, he has been ticketed 81 times for minor offenses

—“harassed,” in his words—and in June 2010 he was arrested and spent

nine lonely hours in the Lew Sterrett Justice Center until a friend posted

bail. “All for selling a single magazine,” Groden told me in the dulcet tones

of his native Manhattan. Granted, JFK: The Case for Conspiracy displays

gory autopsy photos of Kennedy’s head, but there’s no law against that.

Pushed just a little too far by that nine-hour detention, Groden filed suit

against the city in federal court. “I believe in conspiracies, and I think

this was an obvious one,” Groden said of the continuing litigation, which

he sees as an attempt to silence him just as a critical date in the life of

his adopted hometown peeks over the horizon. “I don’t know why they

are so afraid of me,” Groden added. Besides the fact that he embodies

everything Dallas doesn’t want to think about ever again, I couldn’t come

up with a thing.

November 22, 2013, will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination

of JFK. For five decades, this most self-conscious of Texas cities has

attempted to work its way out of the shame it suffered internally and

externally because of this catastrophic event, and thanks largely to the

passage of time, it’s finally approaching what therapists like to call

“closure.” But as Mayor Mike Rawlings told the Dallas Morning News last

March, this particular occasion “is very important—unbelievably

important—as to our place on the world stage.” It is an article of faith

around city hall and among certain North Dallas power brokers that the

eyes of the world will be turned on Dallas that day—that this could, in

fact, be the biggest moment in Dallas history since, well, the

assassination itself. The arrival of Anderson Cooper, Bill O’Reilly, the New

York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, Telemundo, Al Jazeera, and

God knows who else is anticipated, and given the voraciousness of the

24/7 news cycle, they could actually appear.

Hence, official Dallas has reverted to type, sprucing up, anticipating

problems, and forming committees with super-secret plans—that is,

exercising complete control—in its attempt to honor the late president

while showing the world how much it has changed since the dark days,

when a preponderance of right-wing lunatics earned it a reputation as

the City of Hate.

Community leaders know there is a right way and a wrong way to host a

global event (oh, the sorry Super Bowl of 2011). The right way would

include introducing visitors—especially members of the international press

corps—to Dallas’s impeccable taste and blossoming diversity. Let guests

gaze upon the glorious Arts District, with its gleaming Winspear Opera

House and Nasher Sculpture Center. Let them take in the Margaret Hunt

Hill Bridge or sample a dinner prepared by Stephan Pyles or Dean Fearing.

Let them see how private funds have helped tidy up the once sorely

neglected Dealey Plaza and Texas Theatre, where Oswald was

apprehended.

Robert Groden and his ilk, however, represent the wrong way. History

has shown what can happen when things spin out of control where this

particular date is concerned. On the twentieth anniversary of the

assassination, for instance, a local provocateur named Joe Christ drove a

convertible through Dealey Plaza with Jackie and Jack mannequins in the

backseat. At a designated moment, the presidential dummy’s head

popped off, and fake blood spurted into the air. Then, just last year,

county commissioners considered and then—when the county judge

returned from vacation—nixed a plan to allow a British company to build a

174-foot Ferris wheel near the John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza. And in

September a visiting troupe from Chicago’s Second City comedy group

performed a skit in which Dallas community leaders debated the sale of

JFK bobblehead dolls on the fiftieth anniversary. Needless to say, they

did not receive a standing ovation.

Clearly, no one in the Dallas power loop wants to see a poorly dressed

mob occupying Dealey Plaza, chanting about conspiracies and cover-ups

—at least not while Wolf Blitzer is broadcasting worldwide. It’s a serious

game with uneven stakes. With exactly one year left to prepare for the

event, the city knows that if everything goes right—if nothing happens

but a tasteful ceremony honoring the slain president—the world will move

on in a nanosecond. But if anything goes wrong—anything at all—Dallas,

after fifty years of ignominy, will find itself right back where it started: at

best, mortified; at worst, vilified.

The Crescent Club, which crowns the office building at the Crescent,

perilously treads the border between good taste and self-parody.

Designed by Philip Johnson in the heyday of postmodernism, the

office-hotel-shopping complex is a witty pastiche of eighteenth-century

British architecture combined with the mansard roofs of the Second

French Empire and grillwork cribbed from Ashton Villa, a Victorian mansion

in Galveston. The penthouse of dining areas and cozy meeting rooms is

one of those richly paneled places modeled after private gentlemen’s

clubs, before that term became synonymous with strip joints. Until a

tuxedo-jacketed manservant adjusted the lighting on the crystal

chandelier from “night” to “day” in my assigned meeting room, I thought I

was going to have to ask for a torch.

It is an odd place to talk about inclusion and change, but there I was,

sitting around a table with Mayor Rawlings and Ruth Collins Sharp

Altshuler, the chairwoman of what had been recently christened “The

50th: Honoring the Memory of President John F. Kennedy.” They made a

good pair. Rawlings, a Democrat, is burly and silver-haired but, even in

fine tailoring, an unmistakable guy’s guy. He was in elementary school in

Kansas when JFK was shot. Altshuler has a light in her eyes that shows

she’s lost none of the zest that has seen her through her 88 years. She

was at the Dallas World Trade Center on November 22, 1963, waiting for

the president at the luncheon he never attended. Rail thin but hardly

frail, it isn’t hard to see how Altshuler could have run around in the same

circles as Sophia Loren and Gene Kelly. Nowadays she hobnobs with

George and Laura Bush and Margot Perot.

Altshuler is a Dallas powerhouse, one of those gracious, old-line Texas

women who refuse to admit they have any clout while exercising it

masterfully. On this day, she let the mayor do most of the talking,

listening attentively while sipping coffee from a china cup.

“We felt we needed to get way out in front of this, and we felt we had

to do it in the right way,” Rawlings said intently. He got his first inquiry

about the city’s plans for the fiftieth anniversary on the forty-eighth

anniversary, from a Los Angeles Times reporter. Even though this

benchmark had not been on his radar, he was no stranger to the

importance of appearances: before Rawlings was elected, in 2011, he

had been a successful advertising and marketing executive and the head

of Pizza Hut. For Dallas, the anniversary is “the most important day from

an image standpoint,” he told me, adding, “We do not want to look like

we are sweeping this under the rug.”

Conover Hunt, a historian and consultant who was one of the creators of

the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which is located in the old

school book depository, often talks about the moment when “memory

becomes history,” when the horrific pain of catastrophe fades. Rawlings

decided early on that focusing on the trauma of the assassination would

not be good for anyone—not the Kennedy family, not the country, and

certainly not Dallas. “This is not about the Warren Commission,” the

mayor said of the commemoration, “this is about honoring the man.” The

planning for the 2013 event, in fact, can seem like the apotheosis of the

city’s post-1963 mind-set—the hyper-concern with taste and tone, the

need for hyper-vigilance, because others will be not just watching but

judging. To make sure the event planning does not become subject to

citywide debate or criticism, for instance, Rawlings has labored to control

the message: he and Altshuler have been named the official spokespeople

and have directed committee members to send all press inquiries their

way. Rawlings drafted Altshuler because he wanted “a chair who the

whole city recognized and who has taste.” She, in turn, started trawling

for donations, because private money is so much more acceptable and

admirable for such things than public money. “Only one person didn’t get

it,” Altshuler said, with a satisfied grin. “He was tired of the mea culpa,

but he said, ‘I’ll give you the money anyway because you called.’ ”

Earlier this spring, Altshuler helped put together a committee of

illustrious, politically correct, and pretty much beyond-reproach Dallasites

—philanthropists like Deedie Rose and Caren Prothro; business leaders like

Erle Nye and Bobby Lyle—and then basically did what she wanted when it

came to planning the program. On the day we spoke, she had embargoed

the details of the event but revealed that she had asked a friend who is

a prominent historian to read a few of Kennedy’s speeches. Using

another contact, she persuaded an esteemed choral group to perform.

Rawlings will be the only elected official to give a speech—eliminating any

potential grandstanding by, say, a certain Texas governor—and the

whole event will last no longer than forty minutes, including a moment of

silence at twelve-thirty, the time when the shots were fired.

Everyone in Dallas will be invited to come to Dealey Plaza—even the likes

of Robert Groden—but you’ll have to have a ticket to enter. “You’ve got

to take the attitude that we should embrace free speech in Dallas,”

Rawlings assured me. The city center will be cordoned off, Jumbotrons

will simulcast the program in other downtown venues, and security will be

tight, tight, tight. There are plans to pull in the rest of the world with

some kind of global bell-tolling ceremony. The committee also hopes to

mark the end of the occasion with a military flyover. “We wanted it to be

a serious, respectful event, something a bit profound, and we wanted it

to be simple,” Rawlings told me.

Transcribing my interview notes later, I wondered whether the mayor’s

use of the past tense showed that he had already jumped from planning

to execution or that his desire for simplicity had already faded from

memory into history.

A quick refresher for those born after November 22, 1963: back at that

time, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the dashing young president who was

going to lead America out of the fuddy-duddyness of the Eisenhower era.

Space flight, civil rights, a torch passed to a new generation, style—very

promise that would have energized post–World War II America was

personified by his presidency, and every hope was dashed on that day in

Dallas. This was an America that predated cynicism and irony, before we

knew about JFK’s dalliances with Marilyn Monroe and his supposed links

with the mob. That Oswald, the man believed to have killed Kennedy,

was shot on November 24 by a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby

—live, on network television—was simply incomprehensible; this was before

the nation had become inured to serial violence and reality TV. “With the

murder of Oswald, the Pandora’s box was opened,” said Conover Hunt.

Anyone looking for a scapegoat could find a perfect one in the city of

Dallas. Sure, it had Stanley Marcus selling couture to Princess Grace, but

it also had right-wing crazies like H. L. Hunt and General Edwin A.

Walker. In 1960 LBJ and Lady Bird were set upon by angry mobs who

accused them of being socialists; three years later Adlai Stevenson was

hit over the head with a sign by an anticommunist protester. Marcus

himself is said to have warned Kennedy not to make his November 1963

campaign swing through the city. As Lawrence Wright, who wrote about

the assassination in his coming-of-age memoir, In the New World, noted,

“At the heart of the Dallas-killed-Kennedy argument is a similar

presumption about Oswald: the community hated Kennedy so much that

Oswald felt licensed to act out our fantasy.”

No matter what you think about who killed Kennedy, the fact that Dallas

was blamed for his murder is indisputable. Residents experienced the

trauma up close and personal: “It was like a horror story unfolding in your

own backyard,” said Dallas native Lindalyn Adams, who worked with

Conover Hunt to establish the Sixth Floor Museum. For a time, the entire

city seemed to be suffering from PTSD. Psychologist James Pennebaker,

now head of the psychology department at the University of Texas at

Austin but then a professor at Southern Methodist University, completed

a study in 1988 that showed a dramatic spike in heart disease, murder,

and suicide in Dallas in the years following the assassination. (Suicide in

Dallas increased nearly 20 percent in 1964; the increase nationally was 4

percent.) It was impossible to escape the blame: Dallasites who admitted

their origins when traveling out of town were ejected from cabs and

restaurants. “Bang, bang, bang,” a non-English speaker once said to

Wright when he found out where he lived.

Dallas put itself on the path to recovery by being, well, Dallas.

Interestingly, the city never suffered financially from the assassination,

so there was plenty of money to distract an all-too-willing populace with

new buildings and new ideas. Erik Jonsson, who was elected mayor in

1964, formed a committee that in turn created “Goals for Dallas” to give

the city a road map with which to begin again. The Cowboys, who

started playing in 1960, began a nineteen-year winning streak in 1966;

the handsome all-American quarterback Roger Staubach was the person

most Dallasites wanted their sons to grow up to be like. In 1978 the TV

show Dallas made the city’s inhabitants look less like conspirators and

more like shrewd, glamorous tycoons you wouldn’t want to meet across a

boardroom table. When it came to the JFK assassination, then, the best

way to deal with it seemed to be to put your head down, think and act

positively, and ignore the subject. Many people just stopped talking

about it, even with their kids. Or they looked on the bright side, which

was the Dallas way. Wright told the Chicago Tribune that the

assassination was “a critical corrective for a political culture that was

out of control. It ennobled the city and gave it a conscience and made it

a more tolerant place to live.”

That kind of thinking worked 364 days out of the year. But it always

seemed that on November 22, somebody picked at the scab. “Someone

was either firing shots in Dealey Plaza (for an official investigation) or

asking to do so or giving a press conference about a new book,” Hunt

recalled. Dealey Plaza was left in a state of what Hunt called “passive

preservation,” meaning that it wasn’t plowed under, but it wasn’t fixed

up either. The 1970 Kennedy Memorial, a gleaming cenotaph of white

concrete designed by Philip Johnson and approved by Jacqueline Kennedy

Onassis, faded to a dingy gray.

But the clearest evidence of Dallas’s ambivalence was the planned

demolition of the book depository, in 1972. Over the years there were

those, like cosmetics mogul Mary Kay Ash, who insisted that the

wrecking ball couldn’t come soon enough. “It was a scar,” said Jim

Schutze, a longtime writer for the Dallas Observer, “and what do we do

with a scar in Dallas?” But others, like Mayor Wes Wise, understood that

it was time to begin to make peace with the past by restoring the

Building and creating some kind of museum that would put the event in

context, locally and nationally. “The thing that propelled me was knowing

this had to be done for this city,” said Adams. “Because if (the book

depository) had been torn down, there always would have been a

question about what we were trying to hide.” It took eleven tortuous

years—battling Tom Landry, courting Ross Perot, enduring the

indifference of Washington, D.C.—to get the Sixth Floor Museum up and

running; when you hear the founders talk, they sound like Marines

struggling to raise the flag at Iwo Jima.

By the late eighties and early nineties, the typical story line seemed to

be that Dallas was learning to let go, and outsiders had forgiven and

forgotten—or they never even knew. “Twenty-four Years Later, City

Plans to Face Kennedy Slaying” was a Chicago Tribune headline in 1987;

the following year a story ran in the Tribune titled “Dallas Starts to

Confront the Memory.” Hunt told the paper that the completion of the

Sixth Floor was “a concrete manifestation of the community coming to

terms with this event.” On the thirtieth anniversary, Kane Patrick

Kennedy (a man who claimed to be a distant relative of JFK’s) attended a

gathering that drew three thousand people. On the fortieth anniversary,

five thousand people—yes, many of them conspiracy theorists—

assembled for a quiet vigil in Dealey Plaza. The Dallas symphony

performed that night. “Dallas Comes to Terms With the Day That Defined

It,” declared the New York Times. JFK’s death had finally made that

memory-into-history transition, taking its place alongside the

assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Like so many other controversies, it’s hard to pinpoint the beginning of

this one. Some people think the trouble started in March 2010, when

Erykah Badu—born in Dallas in 1971—stripped naked in Dealey Plaza and

collapsed where Kennedy was shot. She wasn’t having a breakdown; she

was filming a music video. (“Badu said she picked Dealey Plaza since it

was one of the most popular places in her hometown of Dallas,” WFAA

television reported.) By contrast, Groden thinks that a local makeover for

the 2011 Super Bowl—the first to be played in the Metroplex—was to

blame. But for whatever reason, the police announced a crackdown that

summer on vendors in Dealey Plaza.

So, on a bright sunny day in June 2010, a woman walked up to Groden’s

card table on the grassy knoll and asked to buy JFK: The Case for

Conspiracy. Groden took her $10, autographed a copy, and handed it to

her. The next thing he knew, a somewhat portly Dallas police officer

stepped out from behind one of the columns supporting the Depression-

era pergola and arrested him. His crime? Selling printed material in Dealey

Plaza without a permit, something he had been doing since 1995. Groden

was subsequently handcuffed and escorted to the county jail, where he

was stripped to his skivvies and searched, then forced to share a cell

with people who had, most likely, been arrested for far more serious

crimes. Police confiscated Groden’s collection of assassination materials

and deprived him of his medications. As if that weren’t discomfiting

enough, after he had gotten out on bail and hired a lawyer, Groden made

an unfortunate discovery—for Dallas. “As it turns out, what they charged

me with was not even really an arrestable offense,” he said.

In fact, Groden was charged twice. First, he was accused of selling

merchandise on public property. The problem was, as Groden learned, the

ordinance made specific allowances for the sale of publications. The city

then charged Groden for violating a different ordinance, one that required

him to get a permit to sell printed matter in Dealey Plaza. But it turned

out the park department didn’t sell such permits, and, probably worse,

the city was supposed to have signs in Dealey Plaza posting its rules but

didn’t. Or, as one of Groden’s pleadings would later state, “Thus, none of

said ordinances apply to Plaintiff’s First Amendment activities in Dealey

Plaza.” A municipal court judge agreed. By the time the city appealed,

Groden had already filed suit in federal court.

It was not surprising that Groden then developed a new conspiracy

theory. It centered on the desire of the Sixth Floor Museum to put him

out of business because he was the most legitimate person on the plaza

pushing an alternative theory of JFK’s death. “The other salespeople

don’t matter,” Groden explained. “They don’t have any credibility.”

Indeed, the Sixth Floor staff does seem dedicated to the idea that

Oswald killed Kennedy from his perch in what is now the prime corner of

the museum, which annually welcomes around 350,000 people. To its

credit, the museum doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the toxic

atmosphere that pervaded Dallas at the time of the assassination; the

infamous black-bordered ad that “welcomed” Kennedy to the city is

prominently displayed (paid for by a group of right-wing businessmen, it

asked, among other things, why JFK had “scrapped the Monroe Doctrine

in favor of the Spirit of Moscow”). But the exhibits are less focused on

the messier elements of the assassination. Scant attention is given to

alternative theories, and on the day I visited, the bookstore, while big on

nifty copies of Jackie’s jewelry, did not sell a single book that suggested

anything but that JFK’s death was the work of a lone gunman.

According to Groden, the museum’s conspiracy-averse viewpoint can be

explained by an early agreement between the city and the museum that

the latter would follow the Warren Commission’s line, which, conveniently

for Dallas, doesn’t involve any loony theories about Jack Ruby and late

oilmen like Clint Murchison. It could also be that the Sixth Floor shows

what it shows because it believes Oswald acted alone, a notion

supported by the failure of any government commission to come up with

much evidence indicating a conspiracy after nearly fifty years of trying.

But for whatever reason, Groden’s arrest and subsequent lawsuit have

presented what political consultants like to call “bad optics,” particularly

after Groden’s lawyer discovered a few emails in which the Sixth Floor

security guards reported the presence of vendors in Dealey Plaza to the

police—i.e., go get ’em!—and another from the CEO of an influential

group of boosters thanking the police “for the continued efforts to rid the

downtown area of criminals.”

While the traditional media largely ignored the fight, Jim Schutze most

decidedly did not. The Observer’s bearded, laconic gadfly—he refers to

Dallas’s power elite as “people who have had too many toddies”—started

pecking away at the city’s hypocrisy, turning a dying argument about

who killed Kennedy into an all-too-lively debate about free speech.

Maybe it was a little disconcerting that Schutze’s blog posts were

accompanied by a photograph of him aiming a large shotgun at the

reader, but you had to give him credit for calling Groden’s arrest “a jack-

boot operation to enforce official dogma on the assassination.” Another

story carried the headline “The Sixth Floor’s Message to History: Just

Hush Now.”

Nicola Longford, a plucky Brit who has run the Sixth Floor for the past

seven years, and Carol Murray, the Sixth Floor’s cheery public relations

representative, looked like deer in the headlights when I asked them

about the Groden controversy. At a meeting in their office next door to

the old book depository, Longford noted that Dallas still needed to “work

through” the trauma of the assassination. “You don’t have to scratch

very deeply to see very oozy wounds,” she told me. She and Murray also

talked a lot about “trying to maintain a balanced point of view” inside the

museum while also trying to maintain a modicum of order outside, on its

doorstep. “We have concerns when visitors complain to us,” Murray

told me.

“There is a level of discord and a complete irrationality on certain

topics,” chorused Longford, who clearly had found herself in the center

of more than a few discordant, irrational debates.

When I called back to follow-up on Groden, she told me that she couldn’t

say anything because of the litigation. “We don’t like to be dragged into

a situation that has turned rather nasty,” she explained. “We’re just

trying to stay out of it.”

That will probably be impossible because of another controversy that

cropped up last fall. Since 1964 a group of conspiracy theorists, led more

recently by an organization called the Coalition on Political Assassination,

have met on the grassy knoll for a moment of silence on the anniversary

of JFK’s death—that is, at twelve-thirty on November 22. As crowds

grew over the years—particularly after the release of Oliver Stone’s

movie—COPA applied for and routinely received nonexclusive permits from

the City of Dallas for their confabs. Then, a few years ago, someone had

the smart idea to apply in advance for space on Dealey Plaza in 2013.

John Judge, the executive director of COPA, told me that he was first

informed by a park department representative that permits were not

given out years in advance. Then, in the fall of 2011, Judge learned that

the Sixth Floor had somehow managed to get, for the first time in Dallas’s

history, an exclusive permit for the plaza from November 18 to 24. Judge

and his group were victims of a preemptive strike by the city.

The explanation for the exclusivity, according to a story that ran in the

Morning News, was that no one responsible for the now officially

sanctioned commemoration-to-be wanted anything like the “carnival

atmosphere” that had prevailed in the past. More discussions followed

that did not turn out well. There was some debate, for instance, over

whether COPA’s moment of silence conflicted with the city’s moment of

silence—because the city now had control of twelve-thirty.

Judge phoned Altshuler and asked whether a representative of COPA

might join her committee. He might as well have asked to join the bigwigs

of the Chinese Central Government. Altshuler said no, and when Judge

asked if a member of his group could address the committee, he was told

to put his request in writing. When he did, she wrote back, mentioned

her advanced age, and said, “I have no authority in these matters.”

Judge also approached the mayor’s office, and he is still waiting for a

response.

Somewhere around that time, Judge cracked that he might have to

occupy the grassy knoll in 2013. Within a few days, he was no longer

kidding, and he posted a letter online saying, “I am calling on the national

network of Occupy groups to join us as well as the thousands of

researchers, authors, critics, and concerned citizens who know the truth

about the Kennedy assassination, or at least suspect that the official

version is wrong, to join us there. If there is not enough democracy left

in America to ask questions in public about the assassinations of JFK,

RFK, MLK, Malcolm X and others on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s murder

. . . then those who killed him have won.”

And that is where it stands now, with a lawsuit from COPA possibly

joining the lawsuit filed by Groden, threatening to put a damper on the

city’s plans for that solemn ceremony followed by a somber flyover.

“We’re sort of exhausting our remedies at this point,” Judge told me in

October. “I would hope it doesn’t have to go to a lawsuit to assert our

First Amendment right.”

His statement put me in mind of all those folks who’d told me they were

optimistic about Dallas’s ability to finally lay the past—and its shame—to

rest. One of the most certain was Pennebaker, who’d examined Dallas’s

psyche in the post-assassination years. “I would predict that the fiftieth

anniversary is the beginning of the official end,” he told me. “There are

not that many people alive who remember this event at all. This

generation will be redefining and ultimately forgetting it.” Pennebaker

suggested that if you visit a place where something tragic happened five

hundred years ago, time will have diluted the pain and the horror just as

Conover Hunt has theorized. “That’s the next phase for Dallas,”

Pennebaker said. “Wow, look at this—history happened here.”

For Dallas, that moment can’t come soon enough.

(END QUOTE)

Best Regards in Research,

++Don

Donald Roberdeau

United States Navy

U.S.S. John F. Kennedy, CV-67, plank walker

Sooner, or later, The Truth emerges Clearly

For your key considerations....

Homepage: President KENNEDY "Men of Courage" speech, and Assassination Evidence, Witnesses, Suspects + Outstanding Researchers Discoveries and Considerations.... http://droberdeau.bl...ination_09.html

The Dealey Plaza Map Detailing 11-22-63 Victims precise locations, Witnesses, Films & Photos, Evidence, Suspected bullet trajectories, Important information & Considerations, in One Convenient Resource.... http://img835.imageshack.us/img835/3966/dppluschartsupdated1111.gif

(new info, 2012 updated map)

Visual Report: "The First Bullet Impact Into President Kennedy: while JFK was Still Hidden Under the 'magic-limbed-ricochet-tree' ".... http://img504.images...k1102308ms8.gif

Visual Report: Reality versus C.A.D. : the Real World, versus, Garbage-In, Garbage-Out.... http://img248.images...ealityvscad.gif

Discovery: "Very Close JFK Assassination Witness ROSEMARY WILLIS

Zapruder Film Documented 2nd Headsnap: West, Ultrafast, and

Directly Towards the Grassy Knoll"....

http://educationforu...?showtopic=2394

T ogether

E veryone

A chieves

M ore

For the United States:

http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/

[Michael Schweitzer]

Excellent analysis, Don. And thank you for the post.