Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit (2013)

[Greg Burnham]

Joe,

I still need to get your book. Been real busy lately with COPA presentation and Dallas in Wonderland documentary. Looking forward to reading it soon.

[Karl Kinaski]

@Joseph McBride: since your book deals a lot with the picket fence area (your theorie is, that badge man was Tippit) and the pergola in front, I am a little bit perplex that you don't mention the following picket fence main-witnesses:


Jean Hill
Beverly Oliver
Ed Hoffman
Richard Dodd
James Simmons
J.S. Price


J.M. Smith and S. Weitzman (regarding the parking lot), you mention only once, quote:


"...gunmen firing from the grassy knoll were chased into the parking lot by Joe m. Smith and ()Seymour Weitzman..."


That's it.



Lee Bowers you only mention twice...quote:



1"...little people, like(...) Lee Bowers, those are the real heroes of the case..." and:
2. "Lee Bowers(...)saw a buff of smoke, or a flash of light at the edge of the fence..."


That's it.


At great length you mention only Gordon Arnold and Evelyn King, quote, kindle version of your book: "Into the Nightmare":

Edited August 31, 2013 by Karl Kinaski

[Gene Kelly]

Joe:

Warren Reynolds seems quite a person of interest. Do you (or others) know if anyone ever interviewed him in the subsequent years? The legend (published) is that he saw and chased Tippit's killer, but wasn't initally interviewed by authorities. He is also connected with the discovery of the bogus jacket. Then some one later takes a shot and tries to kill him... and he becomes a 'reluctant' observor of Lee Oswald as the shooter (the public perceives him as another example of witness intimidation). He is later drawn into the Warren investigation, but only at Edwin Walker's recommendation ... and hardly challenged in his WC interview. Yet he's then tied to the General (with allegatioins about sexuality) by a suspect mercenary and shooter (Hall) during the Garrision investigation. How did Reynolds suddenly drop out of everyone's sight? Its seems that he was much more than simply a used car salesman.

Gene

[Chris Newton]

Mr. McBride,

On the page posted above by Karl Kinaski, Evelyn King recalls that she and, (I assume, her brother though she isn't explicit but it's implied they took the same bus), her brother were students at SMU and took the bus over to Dealey Plaza to watch the Parade. Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if I could find a picture of either of them and try to match them up in any of the video or pictures taken that day at the plaza.

Unfortunately, neither the 1963, 1964 or 1965 SMU Yearbooks have anyone named Evelyn or Arthur King. I also, assume, since they were brother and sister that these were their true unmarried, last names (in Evelyn's case) and would have been the accurate names I'd expect to find in, at least one, those yearbooks. I checked 1965 on the off chance she wasn't a SMU student yet, and maybe got her years mixed up.

Is this sloppy journalism by Quinlan and Backes? Or is there some other explanation because I'd really like to believe her?

[Larry Hancock]

Chris, for reference, I spent over 5 years at two large state universities and you won't find me listed or a photo more than once because it cost...grin. I think I may show up in a couple of dorm group

photos because those are free.

Don't know if its relevant here. I would suggest you contact the University alumnae office or the registrar, if they were enrolled full time as degree students they should show up in the records, if part time maybe not.

Same thing if they were taking night classes or other types of non degree classes. Varies by school I suspect.

[William Kelly]

The above account seems to be taken from a Joe Backes' report on Casey Quinlin's Lancer conference talk from a few years ago. Casey was at DP twice and met Michael Browlow, who was a young boy witness to the assassination from Houston street, and who now joins Bob Groden at the Grassy Knoll to give tours of assassination hot spots. While Casey was there, and met Evelyn King, he didn't talk directly to her but she instead told her story to Brownlow, who in turn told it to Casey who delivered it to the Lancer conference which was reported on by Backes. So if some of the facts get a little muddled we can understand why.

According to Brownlow, Evelyn King is her real name, but since Michael Brownlow has himself used aliases and since she was too paranoid to talk to Casey, I think it possible that she gave Brownlow a name other than the one in which she was enrolled in school. It appears, from a micro analysis of the SMU year books for the relevant years, they did not desegregate until the mid-to-late 1960s, and it is possible, as Larry has pointed out, for certain students to avoid the yearbooks, as I did on occasion.

But in getting back to Brownlow on the telephone, - we have talked a number of times - he now says that although she didn't give him the name of her hometown or say where she lives, he now believes it is near Houston, and that she may have even attended school there. As far as I know we have not begun to research the possibility there's an Art and Evelyn King in Houston who fit the bill, and it's not Evelyn "Champagne" King, the Philadelphia soul singer. Evelyn King told Brownlow a lot of little details - like they were also friends or acquaintances with the groundskeeper of Dealy Plaza, the black guy who is one of those standing of the steps that lead down to the street.

Brownlow also said that Evenly's brother Art King had passed away a few years previous - in the early 1990s whiich should have produced an obit giving all the details of the family and where they were from, but zilch.

We have contacted almost every Art and Evelyn King in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area with no luck at all, though according to Brownlow, she promised to come back sometime during the anniversary, and we certainly should be able to convince her to tell her story to a reputable journalist in a protective way.

And if anyone does positively locate her, please don't post her private particulars on line but rather share them privately so we can approach her in a way that will lead to her talking, rather than clamming up.

Edited September 22, 2013 by William Kelly

[Chris Newton]

Larry and Bill,

The explanation that she/they may not show up in the yearbooks because of the "cost" or that they were attending in another status sounds reasonable. Although, even in the yearbook indecies there aren't any references, not a "not pictured", not a club, nothing. There are other students of color so the "it wasn't desegrigated yet" doesn't seem to apply. I don't think the "night school" supposition applies either, because the statement is that "she and her brother had just come from classes, taking the bus to Dealey Plaza" and arriving at approximately 12:12.

My purpose was to try and identify her not to shoot down her statement. I had hoped that when a potential witness makes a quantifiable statement that at the very least that part of it would be checked out by the individuals doing the original reporting. If it's found that "King" is not an alias I'll spend the time and the expense to call SMU. So I guess it's just wait and see.

It would have been nice if a photo could be produced of the two of them during the approximate era. She can't possibly look exactly the same now and the brother has passed, so what would be the harm?

[Joseph McBride]

I am glad Bill and Chris are doing more research on Evelyn King. It would be good to

hear more from her if she would want to talk, although I certainly understand her

reasons for privacy.

Edited September 25, 2013 by Joseph McBride

[Joseph McBride]

NOIR CITY magazine, Fall 2013

INTO THE NIGHTMARE

An Interview With Joseph McBride

Dan Akira Nishimura

San Francisco State University professor Joseph McBride has published seventeen books, mostly about film. Growing up an Irish Catholic, young Joe aspired to be a priest or (after discovering girls) a lawyer/politician. Those plans ended abruptly when President Kennedy, the man he and his family had campaigned for, was shot and killed. With everything he believed in turned upside down, McBride began a lifelong quest to discover the truth of what happened that afternoon in Dallas.

His arduous research has culminated in the publication of Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit. President Kennedy’s death “set me firmly on my course to be a professional writer rather than a politician.” True to his Irish roots, McBride shows innate storytelling abilities as he describes his grief, anger and eventual resolve to set the record straight about that terrifying weekend in November 1963. Like a bespectacled Philip Marlowe, McBride follows the trails of clues wherever they lead, poring through documents, interviewing relatives, law enforcement officials, and eyewitnesses -- and ultimately butting up against Washington insiders like Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush family juggernaut, and the editors of the supposedly “liberal” publications, The Nation, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

While maintaining the principles he was raised with, he’s become a political gadfly, willing to take on all sides. Our interview took place as Tea Party Republicans had managed to do something even the murder of a President couldn’t accomplish -- a partial shutdown of the government.

Noir City: Joe, we greatly appreciate your taking the time to discuss your new book. First question: Are the premiums on your life insurance paid up?

Joseph McBride: Thanks for your concern, Dan. Numerous witnesses to the assassination and related events have been killed, as well as various players in the actual plot, but relatively few reporters (Jim Koethe and Bill Hunter are among the people on the pioneer JFK assassination researcher Penn Jones’s “mysterious deaths” list). That’s not to say this kind of thing does not still happen in America from time to time (the violent death of Michael Hastings is certainly suspicious), but when you investigate the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of Officer Tippit, you have to plough along and not succumb to fear or intimidation. The weapon most often used to attack researchers in our society is ridiculing them as “conspiracy theorists” or worse; you have to ignore that and become proud of such labels.

On a related note, my father, Raymond E. McBride, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal, asked President Kennedy in May 1962, “Do you ever worry about being assassinated?” Kennedy replied that he couldn’t think about being assassinated, because it would be hard for him to do his job if he did. He should have worried about it more -- and there is evidence he was aware of increasing danger, even speaking about it on the morning of his death -- but he was fatalistic and had to do his job. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in his autobiography, “A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.”

NC: You’ve been studying the JFK assassination since it happened. Twenty

years after that, you began your active investigation. In 1993-1994, you conducted a number of interviews in and around Dallas, uncovering some previously unreported aspects of the case regarding Officer J. D. Tippit’s murder. Why have you waited another twenty years to publish your findings?

JM: I have been following the case from a few minutes after Kennedy was shot. I ran from my high school to a radio in a nearby drugstore to listen to the breaking network news reports. The first reports I heard from about 12:40 onward said the shots came from the front, from the railroad bridge or from the grassy knoll. By 1 p.m., the reports started saying all the shots came from behind, from a building called the Texas School Book Depository. My early awareness of how the story was being altered, without explanation, helped me realize by the end of that day that Oswald was innocent. That and my belief in his statements of innocence on live television.

I followed the case sporadically until the late 1970s, when I began reading about it seriously. I launched my own investigation in 1982. From then until Into the Nightmare was published this June, I read about it and studied it every day (as I continue to do). I had several periods of on-site research in Washington and Dallas in the eighties and nineties. Why did it take so long to complete the book? Part of the reason was that I had other jobs to do to earn a living (including writing other books), but this subject was always my avocation. And so much was coming out in the way of documents (millions of pages of previously classified U.S. government documents were released in the 1990s as a result of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act), and other independent researchers were making valuable contributions in various areas of this highly complex case.

It took me this long to fully understand as much of the case as I do and to be able to assemble and make clear all my findings. The actual writing of the book took nine years. I spent two years writing one chapter -- and rewrote it entirely four times -- before breaking it into two chapters. It was the hardest book to write that I’ve ever tackled, and I am pleased that I was able to finally complete my long labor of love.

NC: In the back cover photo, you look like either a young missionary or a junior spook with the CIA. What was your approach in contacting people years after the fact? Were you provided introductions by other researchers or did you have to make cold calls? You appear to have established a good rapport with your subjects. Was it tough trying to find common ground?

JM: I did it the old-fashioned way, going to Dallas and making phone calls to people to ask for interviews. I found some in the phone book and had to track down others with help from other researchers and so forth. You learn in doing investigative reporting and books that one interviewee can help lead to others; it’s a question you always ask people. Of course, it was not easy finding some witnesses: many have died, vanished, or moved away --some out of fear.

I was remarkably fortunate to find some highly important interview subjects, such as J. D. Tippit’s father, Edgar Lee Tippit, who had never been interviewed before, and J. D.’s mistress Johnnie Maxie Witherspoon, who had rarely been interviewed. Both gave me remarkably insightful interviews. Two of my most revealing interviews were with Detective James Leavelle, the lead detective in the Tippit case, and Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade. I questioned both of them closely about the case and its many flaws and elicited admissions from them about how weak the case was against Oswald for both shootings and why they concentrated on trying to nail him for the Tippit killing. Oswald was never even arraigned for the murder of President Kennedy, only for the murder of Officer Tippit, although he was charged with both crimes.

NC: W. Penn Jones, Jr., who became your mentor, reminded me of the newspaper editor in Billy Wilder’s Ace in Hole (1951). Small town papers seemed to be the only ones asking the tough questions back then.

JM: Penn is one of my heroes. There are heroes in this case, but they are the “little people,” the witnesses who bravely came forward and the independent-minded reporters and researchers who dug into the case despite all odds and endured much ridicule and other abuse. Penn edited the Midlothian Mirror, in a small town outside Dallas, and was a relentless and fearless reporter in the old-fashioned shoe-leather tradition. Even before the assassination, his office was firebombed.

He started researching the case the day Kennedy was killed but said, “I didn’t believe it was a conspiracy ’till Sunday mornin’. That’s how naive I was.” But he was unstoppable for many years until Alzheimer’s brought him down by the early 1990s. I met him in Dealey Plaza on my first visit there on the twentieth anniversary of the assassination in 1983, when he was leading his annual memorial service on the grassy knoll, and we had an instant rapport. He reminded me of my friend Samuel Fuller, the great writer-director, another old newspaperman with a gruff exterior and a warm heart, and a passion for the truth. I visited Penn frequently on my visits to Dallas. He advised me, as he did others, to “Pick one aspect of the case, one that hasn’t been studied enough, and research the hell out of it.”

NC: You interviewed James R. Leavelle, the policeman in the Stetson handcuffed to Oswald when he was shot by Jack Ruby. Leavelle told you they’d been treating the JFK assassination like “a South Dallas n killin’.” My God, it was the President of United States! A judge in the Jack Ruby trial told Leavelle basically the same thing about Oswald’s murder. What was going through your mind when you heard that?

JM: I was stunned. Leavelle did preface that comment with “As the old saying goes back then.” But he said it with a little smile, as if he were genuinely amused by the remark. Evidently it was a common view among the Dallas police. Many of them, according to Penn Jones and others, were Ku Klux Klan members. I was stunned when I was interviewing retired Dallas Police Detective Morris Brumley, who had been a boyhood friend of Tippit, and Brumley pulled out his KKK regional membership card (signed by the Grand Dragon in 1959). Brumley claimed he had “infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan for the Dallas Police Department” from 1957 through 1959. But when I asked about his activities with the Klan, he said, “Oh, hell, I went out some places -- you went out and whipped the niggers, you know, castrate ’em if you catch one with a white woman, you know, stuff like that.” When you hear shocking comments such as that, as an investigative reporter you don’t object but keep the person talking to find out as much as you can for the record. If you express your outrage, they would stop talking. I was able to get many people to say things you might not expect and that helped reveal the mindset of Dallas in 1963 and other significant insights into the case.

NC: In The Parallax View (1974), witnesses to an assassination are being killed off one by one. Reporter George Frady (Warren Beatty) discovers the Parallax Corporation, a school for assassins. They administer a test, a video of still images that traces the evolution of a killer. It’s an extremely disturbing film-within-a-film. In your research, you found the Rorschach blot test administered to J. D. Tippit by the Dallas police shortly after he was hired. Like the Warren Beatty character, Tippit was found to be antisocial and, of course, kept his job.

JM: That’s an intriguing parallel. The Rorschach test concluded, “This man appears to be wholly devoid of any imaginative faculties. . . . His grip on reality is below the average. Errors of judgment may be expected.” And the examiner wrote that Tippit actually held the test cards edgeways to handle them, “a very unhealthy sign.” This is the only such test in Tippit’s police personnel file, but it should have raised alarm bells in the department, one would think. The examiner wrote that Tippit was “within the limits of the average in that his thinking corresponds with that of the community at large,” which tells us something about Dallas and its police department.

I found abundant evidence that Tippit, until his death, was suffering from what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from his experiences in World War II. One manifestation was that he had trouble looking people in the eye -- he would look down at his feet or look away. This can be a fatal flaw for a policeman. Tippit’s father told me that during the background innvestigation for Tippit’s hiring, a minister who knew them told the Dallas Police Department, “He’s a good boy but he’s no policeman.” That should have caused concern as well. Tippit’s friend Morris Brumley told me, “I don’t think he met people real well. He was real quiet. He wouldn’t say xxxx if he had a mouthful.” Tippit’s father told me that after the war, J. D. “was nervous, I would call him. There were many who came back wild. The war ruined a lot of people’s nerves. It took several years before J. D. settled down. He had it pretty rough as a paratrooper, jumping out of planes. His nerves was shot for a few years.”

He was clearly a man with serious psychological issues. He had killed a man with another officer in the line of duty and on another occasion was attacked by a disturbed man with an ice pick, causing him to limp for the rest of his life. While he left few traces of his political views, Tippit moved in the circles of the extreme right in Dallas and could have been recruited for the plot by some of those contacts. His father told me that J. D. had uncanny shooting ability.

NC: As a boy in 1962, I was greatly disappointed that The Manchurian Candidate wasn’t the traditional war movie I was hoping for. I think I fell asleep. I can now appreciate the satire and marvel at its unintended prophecy. Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) has an evil mother played by Angela Lansbury. What about her real-life counterpart, Ruth Paine, Oswald’s local CIA handler? Did you try to track her down?

JM: That first adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate is a great film, and the novel by Richard Condon is the book I’ve read most often (seven times, compared with six for David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest). Condon’s novel is astonishing and somehow seems almost totally new every time I read it.

I did not interview Ruth Paine for my book, because I wasn’t investigating Oswald’s background primarily. Other researchers have done so in great depth, most notably John Armstrong in his book Harvey & Lee, which finally convinced me that the theory that there were two people using Oswald’s identity is correct. I did go hear Ruth Paine give a talk in September 2013 to the Sonoma Valley Historical Society in northern California. She is eighty-one and still lucid and disciplined in her telling of what in spycraft would be called Oswald’s “legend.” The questions at the event had to be written and were screened; I put in three but only one was asked. I wanted to know why after her home in Irving, where she lived with Marina Oswald, was thoroughly searched for two days by the Dallas police and sheriff’s departments, she kept turning up key pieces of evidence supposedly incriminating Lee Oswald. That question seemed to rattle her a bit, and she launched into a long account focusing partly on the Russian-language letter supposedly by Oswald that was used, speciously, to link him to the attempt to murder General Edwin Walker.

Some intriguing nuances emerged during her talk, mostly between the lines; C-SPAN was there videotaping the event, so you and your readers can see it eventually. I wish they had asked her my other questions, including one about her and her sister’s involvement with the CIA.

NC: Frank Sinatra’s other assassination movie, Suddenly (1954), would be forgettable without the ironic Kennedy/Sinatra connection. If I recall the plot correctly, the Sinatra character and his cronies don’t have a political ax to grind -- it’s just business. Is a contract hit man scenario feasible with the JFK assassination? The shooting itself, aided intentionally or not by the Secret Service, was perfectly executed but the cover-up was botched from the beginning.

JM: After the Dealey Plaza hit succeeded, it seems that the plot was starting to unravel, necessitating some improvisation; the scapegoat, Oswald, was captured alive and needed to be silenced. The cover-up has worked well in some ways, especially by snowing and/or intimidating the mainstream media into compliance, to this day. But the public is smarter than the media; seventy to eighty percent of the American public has never believed the official story. A contract hit against President Kennedy is likely, at least in the case of some of the three or four gunmen, although we can’t be sure of their identitties. Various people have been suggested as possible killers, and I explore the possibility that Tippit may have been “Badge Man,” the man in a Dallas policeman’s uniform who was photographed firing from behind the concrete retaining wall on the grassy knoll.

NC: In the mid-to-late 1960s, Time and Life would occasionally dole out stories pertaining to the assassination. You describe how the Zapruder film, the home movie shot by clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder, was released piecemeal and without attribution until later. Another series in Life magazine that I recall dealt with the Oswalds. Marina Oswald was portrayed as a young innocent, a sweet Russian girl who got in with the wrong crowd. She’s elsewhere been exposed as a Mata Hari-like femme fatale with Soviet intelligence connections. Was she a Russian spy who got turned by the CIA?

JM: Dallas FBI Special Agent James P. Hosty, Jr., who was monitoring the Oswalds before the assassination, writes in his 1996 memoir, Assignment: Oswald, that he suspected both Marina and Lee of being KGB sleeper agents. Marina’s uncle, with whom she lived in Minsk, was a lieutenant colonel in the MVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, an agency with secret police authority, and she may have been used in KGB “honeytrap” intelligence operations to ensnare American “defectors” (including another one, Robert Webster, before Oswald). She may have been “turned” even before the assassination to work for American intelligence, along with Ruth Paine.

Marina certainly did everything she could after the assassination to cooperate with the American authorities to help frame her husband. She was under duress, literally held prisoner by the Secret Service and threatened with deportation. She has told so many conflicting and false stories over the years that her more recent statements about Lee being innocent don’t hold any more weight than her earlier statements to the contrary.

NC: In Goodbye World (2013) a character with government experience understands the meaning behind the President’s coded message when he appears on television after a Y2K meltdown. When a beat-up looking Oswald was brought before the television cameras, he professed innocence and asked for legal assistance. As a sixteen-year-old, you saw the pathos of the moment and sympathized with his situation. Has anyone to your knowledge analyzed Oswald’s words for a message he may have been trying to communicate to his CIA and FBI handlers? Was he trying to maintain deep cover? Or, do you think he realized the game, whatever it was, was up?

JM: Apparently he was waiting for legal representation or for other help. We don’t know for sure what he was saying under interrogation, because a complete and reliable record apparently was not kept. We have learned that on Saturday, November, 23, Oswald made two mysterious phone calls from the Dallas jail. One was to an unknown party, and then he tried to place a call to a former U.S. Army Counterintelligence agent living in North Carolina, John David Hurt, but that the police wouldn’t put the call through. That attempt to reach out to a man who may have been a contact in a “cutout” system may have helped seal Oswald’s fate.

NC: If he were a fall guy, the self-confessed “patsy,” what could he have thought his mission in Dallas was?

JM: I believe Oswald was infiltrating the plot against Kennedy for the FBI and did not realize he was being set up by the CIA and others to be the fall guy. The Dallas police knew who he was. I learned that Officer Tippit and another policeman were secretly sent in pursuit of Oswald shortly after the assassination and before he was officially regarded as a suspect, which is proof of a conspiracy to scapegoat him, if not to kill him. It’s known that he had delivered a message to the FBI shortly before the assassination, which was destroyed after he was killed.

The Dallas Morning News reported in its edition published the morning he was killed that Oswald was interviewed by the FBI on November 16th. Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, a former FBI agent, told me that Oswald had spoken with the FBI’s Hosty “Within a day or two [before the assassination], I don’t know exactly.” We don’t know what Oswald was telling them, but he was involved with anti-Castro Cubans and other rightwing elements, most likely as an infiltrator, and may well have been trying to help stop the plot. An FBI informant named “Lee” helped stop a plot against Kennedy in Chicago when he was to visit there on November 2, 1963, a trip that was called off at the last minute because the Secret Service and Chicago police couldn’t find all the conspirators. This incident was hushed up until Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden eventually managed to reveal it.

NC: Jacqueline Kennedy was quoted as saying of her blood-stained clothing, “I want them to see what they have done to Jack.” It’s curious she would use “they.” It may have been a figure of speech referring to the haters she knew were out there. Still, she was there in the limousine, heard and felt the shots, probably knew instinctively the bullets were coming from more than one direction. Was she interviewed by the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee on Assassinations?

JM: I think her comment, made to several people that day, and her conspicuous refusal to change her clothes, indicated knowledge of a crossfire. Mrs. Kennedy was interviewed by the Warren Commission, rather gingerly and sketchily, but not by the HSCA. The commission didn’t ask her probing questions. Comments she made about her husband’s wounds were censored from the Warren volumes and only later revealed. It’s known that she and Robert Kennedy soon realized that this was a right wing plot. They had an emissary tell that to the Soviets shortly after the assassination, while assuring them they didn’t believe the USSR had anything to do with it. The Kennedy family, for complicated reasons, has largely kept silent publicly about the case.

NC: Do you believe Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade’s story that it was Jackie Kennedy who demanded that her husband’s body be brought back to Washington, thereby canceling the legally mandated autopsy about to be performed at Parkland Memorial?

JM: There’s no genuine evidence that Mrs. Kennedy was the one who insisted on taking her husband’s body from Parkland. Kennedy aides and Secret Service agents used that as an excuse to break the law by refusing the Dallas County medical examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, the right to conduct the autopsy. He did the impeccable autopsies on Tippit and Oswald, and if he had been allowed to do the autopsy on Kennedy, the plot would have been blown. So it was literally a matter of life or death for those parties to steal the coffin, which I believe may have been empty. Guns were drawn against Dr.. Rose and Dallas policemen. The body may have been spirited out a tunnel from Parkland. This is one of the most disturbing incidents in the case, and it made a great impression on me when I first learned about it in William Manchester’s 1967 book The Death of a President, November 20-November 25, 1963. When I interviewed Henry Wade, he took responsibility for letting the coffin be removed from Dallas. But he expressed misgivings, admitting that Dr. Rose “could have done a better job. . . . And that [military] autopsy was probably the poorest autopsy I ever saw. . . . I probably made a lot of mistakes.”

NC: We’ve talked about the “doubling” that occurs in Vertigo (1958), an Alfred Hitchcock trademark. Unlikely as it seems, there were three men named Tippit or Tippett on the Dallas Police Department in 1963. That made it convenient for witnesses to backtrack on testimony. You also mention the speculation about multiple Oswalds. Strangely, J. D.Tippit possessed some of the qualities incorrectly attributed to Oswald by the Warren Commission, one being that he was an expert marksman. Another point rarely discussed that you relate in the book is the planned attempt on the President’s life not long before Dallas. Could you tell us about the “patsy” in that scenario?

JM: Investigative journalist Edwin Black wrote an outstanding 1975 article on the plot against Kennedy in Chicago on November 2, 1963, the day South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated. The Chicago plot was foiled by the Chicago police, the Secret Service, and the FBI, although they didn’t catch all the hit men, and the plot was hushed up. Kennedy’s trip to Chicago was canceled at the last minute. The apparent patsy was Thomas Arthur Vallee, a Chicago mirror image of what Oswald was said to be: a thirty-year-old ex-Marine who had been assigned to a U-2 base in Japan, had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic by military doctors, and later had trained anti-Castro Cubans to assassinate Castro. Vallee had a job in a warehouse overlooking Kennedy’s motorcade route and was arrested that morning after being found with weapons and ammunition. There also were also plots against Kennedy that November 18 in Tampa and Miami, Florida. Despite all this, the Secret Service protection for Kennedy in Dallas was far more lax than usual.

NC: In a previous Noir City interview, you spoke at length about Orson Welles. You’ve written that he planned a movie to be called either Assassin or The Safe House, from a screenplay by Donald Freed (Executive Action [1973]). The story was about Sirhan Sirhan and the Bobby Kennedy killing. That film never got made, but you quote Oliver Stone’s remarkable comment that Welles should have directed JFK. Do you recall Welles saying anything about either Kennedy assassination?

JM: Not to me. But I’ve read Welles’s fine screenplay Assassin, his rewrite of Freed’s script on the subject. It deals with Sirhan being brainwashed in a safe house by an intelligence programmer who would have been played by Welles himself. Welles shows Sirhan being set up as the patsy in a plot run by the FBI and carried out by a paramilitary group.

This script is based on documented evidence. Sirhan did not shoot Robert Kennedy. The autopsy by Dr. Thomas Noguchi showed that the fatal shot to the head was fired from behind, from less than one inch on an upward trajectory. Sirhan was always in front of Kennedy, firing from a standing position, and at least three feet away. His shots wounded other people. There were more shots fired than Sirhan’s gun held.

The likely suspect for Kennedy’s actual killer is security guard Thane Eugene Cesar, a right winger who was following immediately behind Kennedy. This is another assassination, like those of JFK and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which used a patsy. Scapegoats are often used to conceal the true nature of such plots and blame them on supposed “lone nuts” in order to distract the public from the actual political implications.

NC: Not to minimize its importance, but pushing through civil rights legislation seems to have given LBJ effective liberal cover, at least for a time. Isn’t that right?

JM: Johnson was a tragic figure. I believe he was involved in the plotting of the assassination, though the evidence brought forth to date is largely circumstantial. He was certainly the one who made the cover-up possible, since he had the power to control the military autopsy, the FBI investigation through his close friend J. Edgar Hoover, and the Warren Commission, whose actual title was the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. And Johnson secretly gave the order on November 24, 1963, to widen the Vietnam War. Kennedy had been in the process of trying to wind it down and withdraw. Johnson was in serious danger of not only being dropped from the 1964 ticket but also of going to jail because of corruption investigations taking place at the time of the assassination, including a hearing taking place at that exact moment in Washington.

Johnson’s telephone conversations reveal that as early as the spring of 1964, he knew widening the war would be futile but that he felt powerless to stop it. Those in the military-industrial complex who put him in power (he was owned and operated by Brown & Root, the Houston construction company that became part of Halliburton in 1962) forced him to wage the war for their profit. The war then killed the Great Society and shadowed Johnson’s accomplishments in civil rights and other areas. Johnson’s senior advisers, “The Wise Men,” ordered him in March 1968 not to run for re-election following the Tet Offensive, Johnson told Henry Brandon of the Sunday Times of London in a conversation later that year: “The only difference between Kennedy’s assassination and mine is that mine was a live one, which makes it all a little more torturing.”

NC: Liberal icon Bill Moyers was one of Johnson’s “boys.” You repeat the shocking charge, something you won’t hear on the next PBS pledge drive, that Moyers helped determine the route of the motorcade to pass through Dealey Plaza and had the bubbletop removed from the presidential limousine. I’m wondering how a mere vice-presidential aide could have had that much power? Wouldn’t that be the Secret Service’s call?

JM: Moyers, who was deputy director of the Peace Corps at the time, had worked closely with Johnson and flew from Austin to Love Field to join him immediately after the assassination; he went on to work in the Johnson administration until 1967 as his de facto chief of staff and as press secretary.

Moyers was an advance man on Kennedy’s trip to Texas and was involved in the decision to hold Kennedy’s speech in the Trade Mart, which caused the motorcade to go through Dealey Plaza. But he was not the prime instigator of that decision. Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell, whose actions were highly suspicious, seems to have been the main decider, along with Texas Governor Connally and the Secret Service. Moyers also was on a committee that helped publicize the trip; he insisted that the motorcade route be published, which was natural enough since his job was partly to ensure maximum attendance on the motorcade route, but which wouldn’t be done today for security reasons. Moyers also was the recipient of the infamous memo from Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach on November 25 urging that a cover-up be put in place and that the public had to be convinced that Oswald was the lone gunman. Perhaps all this helps account for why Moyers has never written his memoirs, which would surely be an interesting book.

NC: You describe our current form of government as a “limited police state.” That’s still better than the actual police state of the Bush/Cheney years, wouldn’t you say?

JM: I use the word “limited” before “police state” because we still have some of our freedoms, such as the freedom to criticize the government in the press and in books, although Obama and Bush/Cheney have tried to stifle the media as part of their repressive measures. So we are not a fully totalitarian state at present. But we have lost many of our civil liberties since 9/11, and Obama, despite pretending to be a liberal, in some ways is even worse than Bush/Cheney. Obama claims the right as President to kill even American citizens, as he has actually done. His drone program is a targeted assassination program that is contrary to all of our supposed democratic principles. The Fourth Amendment basically does not exist anymore. I could go on and on about the crimes of Bush, Cheney, and Obama, but perhaps former President Jimmy Carter said it best in July 2013: “America has no functioning democracy at this moment.” He was referring largely to the illegal surveillance programs that now target us all. This was even before the Republicans tried to shut down the government. Everyone now realizes we have a dysfunctional government. All this is a result of the Coup of 1963, whether people understand that or not. Many people are in denial about what happened to our country when President Kennedy was killed. It was the end of our experiment with democracy.

NC: The War Powers Resolution of 1973 has tried to check presidential power since Kennedy’s time. But, with Kennedy, “they” genuinely felt the need to kill him. The Tea Party just spent most of October 2013 holding the government hostage without firing a shot. Previously, Bill Clinton was subject to very effective character assassination. Unless you believe the theory that Monica Lewinsky was a Mossad agent, it was self-inflicted on Clinton’s part, but you get my point about assassination by other means?

JM: Garry Wills, in his 2010 book Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, argues that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the postwar imperial presidency by giving one man the power to wage war unilaterally and wipe out nations. The War Powers Resolution is a relatively weak attempt by Congress to rein in that presidential power. President Kennedy was trying to stop the war in Vietnam that he had helped launch; there is little doubt that he would have done all he could to resist pressures to widen the war and certainly would not have widened it to the extent Johnson did. But when asked early in his presidency what most surprised him about the job, Kennedy replied that it was how little power he actually had. Obama made a similar comment early in his presidency. The President in some ways does have great power, but he is subject to the tremendous influence and pressures of what Eisenhower in his farewell address warned about, the “military-industrial complex.” There are other ways to remove presidents, such as cooking up or revealing scandals, but Kennedy was a serious threat to the war machine that badly needed and wanted a large-scale war in Vietnam.

NC: Unlike Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King held no office. By 1968, the most important civil rights legislation was already in effect. To militant blacks, King was politically irrelevant. Even radical whites found him too tame. Was his assassination vindictive rather than practical? Was it connected to either of the Kennedy assassinations?

JM: Dr. King actually was considered a major threat to the establishment at the time of his death. He had come out against the Vietnam War a year before his death, despite the misgivings of some of his associates, and was determined to link the war to racial oppression. He was also turning his focus more and more to economic issues with his Poor People’s Campaign, challenging the basic injustice in the distribution of wealth that still plagues us today. So he was someone who was feared and targeted for those reasons. The King family lawyer William F. Pepper’s 2003/08 book An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King is authoritative in laying out the facts that can be ascertained about the actual plot that killed Dr. King. According to Pepper, the Memphis police department was involved in the plot, with at least one of their men as part of the hit team, and U.S. military intelligence and Carlos Marcello’s mob operation also participated. James Earl Ray was only a patsy, like Oswald. The similarities between the King assassination and those against the Kennedys are telling about the forces arrayed against all three men in that era of violent assaults on those trying to bring about social change and a more rational foreign policy.

Professor McBride has done four Black Op Radio interviews and has written and narrated two shows for their YouTube series Fifty Reasons for Fifty Years.

Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit is published by Hightower Press, Berkeley, and is available exclusively from Amazon.com.

####

[John Dolva]

...

I believe Oswald was infiltrating the plot against Kennedy for the FBI and did not realize he was being set up by the CIA and others to be the fall guy. - while I think this is likely true in structure a little step to the right and that could just as likely be all part of a tendency to gain credibility or cover on many instances and a from FBI into the plot doesn't address a move into the FBI in the first place. Given that the south was/ is so saturated with racism an adherence to such thinking means organs of state power, overt and covert necessarily are saturated by such. Then the far right militants always have a pal in the system. Oswald entered this milieu with a story. All that would be needed to control such is to agree and to give that person a role, one that conforms with that persons personal view of self. and then otherwise irrelevant to the purpose.

A riveting interview. I'm going to have to read and reread a lot. I have issues with aspects, but overall I think a very relevant contribution to this ongoing investigation.

also I wonder if you could expand on an answer to the question :

NC: Not to minimize its importance, but pushing through civil rights legislation seems to have given LBJ effective liberal cover, at least for a time. Isn’t that right?

[B. A. Copeland]

...

I believe Oswald was infiltrating the plot against Kennedy for the FBI and did not realize he was being set up by the CIA and others to be the fall guy. - while I think this is likely true in structure a little step to the right and that could just as likely be all part of a tendency to gain credibility or cover on many instances and a from FBI into the plot doesn't address a move into the FBI in the first place. Given that the south was/ is so saturated with racism an adherence to such thinking means organs of state power, overt and covert necessarily are saturated by such. Then the far right militants always have a pal in the system. Oswald entered this milieu with a story. All that would be needed to control such is to agree and to give that person a role, one that conforms with that persons personal view of self. and then otherwise irrelevant to the purpose.

A riveting interview. I'm going to have to read and reread a lot. I have issues with aspects, but overall I think a very relevant contribution to this ongoing investigation.

also I wonder if you could expand on an answer to the question :

NC: Not to minimize its importance, but pushing through civil rights legislation seems to have given LBJ effective liberal cover, at least for a time. Isnt that right?

I think a possible interpretation could be that Johnson, being more right winger than liberal essentially, was ultimately "handed" JFKs civil rights plans which could certainly cause Johnson to be viewed as left leaning.

[Susan Klopher]

Long term memory increases, and short term memory decreases, as we age. There good psych research behind this. As an editor, I'd be interested in what an old man has to say (Tippet) about what happened on the day of the JFK assassination, re his son.

[Thomas Graves]

Long term memory increases, and short term memory decreases, as we age. There good psych research behind this. As an editor, I'd be interested in what an old man has to say (Tippet) about what happened on the day of the JFK assassination, re his son.

Susan,

What you say about psych research on long-term versus short-term memory is fascinating to me for the following reason.

A few years ago I interviewed a (since deceased) ninety-something year old former ONI special agent who admitted to me that he had "very probably" conducted an investigation of Oswald at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro right after Oswald "defected" to Russia not only because El Toro was in the agent's assigned Naval District, but also because, well, the agent just happened to be "the best investigator the ONI had."

He told me that he was a very close friend of fellow Texan Paul Bentley, the cigar-chomping polygraph-specialist Dallas Police Officer who helped drag Oswald out of the Texas Theater, and he had also known most of the Dallas FBI agents, etc, back in the day due to his working with them on his many ONI-related visits to Dallas over the years.

Paul Bentley on youtube:

Now, getting back to the memory deal, when I asked the retired ONI special agent some "trick questions" to kinda set him up and test his long-term memory, I decided to ask him how long the small ship was that he had commanded during WWII (his answer ended with "and a half-foot" and was "off" from Wikipedia's specs for the ship by only -- and exactly -- one foot), so that kinda impressed me regarding his long-term memory. Then I asked him if he remembered where he was when he heard that Peal Harbor had been attacked, and he immediately said "Brownwood, Texas," which also favorably impressed me.

But when I asked him the sixty-four thousand dollar question, he just sat there and looked at me like the proverbial deer in the headlights, and said that for the life of him he just couldn't remember.

The question of course was "Where were you when you heard that President Kennedy had been shot?"

It's absolutely amazing which memories fade away completely over the years, isn't it. Probably just the personally unimportant ones or maybe just the ones that are just too gosh darned painful to recall.

By the way, when I asked him where the Dallas ONI office was situated in 1963, he said that it was "across the street, it was in the Postal Building, it was in the building that Kennedy was killed from." Which makes me think that although Kennedy wasn't necessarily shot from the Terminal Annex Building, the observation post / command post might very well have been in one of it's upper-floor offices.

Just sayin'.....

Good luck with your research,

--Tommy

PS the correct spelling of the guy you're talking about is "Tippit." not "Tippet." Just a little friendly "tip" for you...

PPS In case anyone is interested, the retired ONI special agent I interviewed on tape a few years ago was Robert D(avid) Steel, Lt Cmdr U.S. Navy, retired.

I sent the tape of Steel's interview to the great researcher and blogger Bill Kelly, but I don't know if he ever transcribed it correctly and completely. The last time I checked his blog site a couple of years ago, he hadn't. Unfortunately, I didn't make a "dub" of the tape for myself to keep and Bill Kelly has refused, so far, to return the original to me. I guess he lost my mailing address or e-mail address or something, or maybe the tape was "lost" or "accidentally erased"...

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKkellyW.htm

Edited March 19, 2015 by Thomas Graves

[Thomas Graves]

Long term memory increases, and short term memory decreases, as we age. There good psych research behind this. As an editor, I'd be interested in what an old man has to say (Tippet) about what happened on the day of the JFK assassination, re his son.

Susan,

What you say about psych research on long-term versus short-term memory is fascinating to me for the following reason.

A few years ago I interviewed a (since deceased) ninety-something year old former ONI special agent who admitted to me that he had "very probably" conducted an investigation of Oswald at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro right after Oswald "defected" to Russia not only because El Toro was in the agent's assigned Naval District, but also because, well, the agent just happened to be "the best investigator the ONI had."

He told me that he was a very close friend of fellow Texan Paul Bentley, the cigar-chomping polygraph-specialist Dallas Police Officer who helped drag Oswald out of the Texas Theater, and he had also known most of the Dallas FBI agents, etc, back in the day due to his working with them on his many ONI-related visits to Dallas over the years.

Paul Bentley on youtube:

Now, getting back to the memory deal, when I asked the retired ONI special agent some "trick questions" to kinda set him up and test his long-term memory, I decided to ask him how long the small ship was that he had commanded during WWII (his answer ended with "and a half-foot" and was "off" from Wikipedia's specs for the ship by only -- and exactly -- one foot), so that kinda impressed me regarding his long-term memory. Then I asked him if he remembered where he was when he heard that Peal Harbor had been attacked, and he immediately said "Brownwood, Texas," which also favorably impressed me.

But when I asked him the sixty-four thousand dollar question, he just sat there and looked at me like the proverbial deer in the headlights, and said that for the life of him he just couldn't remember.

The question of course was "Where were you when you heard that President Kennedy had been shot?"

It's absolutely amazing which memories fade away completely over the years, isn't it. Probably just the personally unimportant ones or maybe just the ones that are just too gosh darned painful to recall.

By the way, when I asked him where the Dallas ONI office was situated in 1963, he said that it was "across the street, it was in the Postal Building, it was in the building that Kennedy was killed from." Which makes me think that although Kennedy wasn't necessarily shot from the Terminal Annex Building, the observation post / command post might very well have been in one of it's upper-floor offices.

Just sayin'.....

Good luck with your research,

--Tommy

PS the correct spelling of the guy you're talking about is "Tippit." not "Tippet." Just a little friendly "tip" for you...

PPS In case anyone is interested, the retired ONI special agent I interviewed on tape a few years ago was Robert D(avid) Steel, Lt Cmdr U.S. Navy, retired.

I sent the tape of Steel's interview to the great researcher and blogger Bill Kelly, but I don't know if he ever transcribed it correctly and completely. The last time I checked his blog site a couple of years ago, he hadn't. Unfortunately, I didn't make a "dub" of the tape for myself to keep and Bill Kelly has refused, so far, to return the original to me. I guess he lost my mailing address or e-mail address or something, or maybe the tape was "lost" or "accidentally erased"...

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKkellyW.htm

bumped

Edited March 19, 2015 by Thomas Graves

[Steven Gaal]

A few years ago I interviewed a (since deceased) ninety-something year old former ONI special agent who admitted to me that he had "very probably" conducted an investigation of Oswald at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro right after Oswald "defected" to Russia not only because El Toro was in the agent's assigned Naval District, but also because, well, the agent just happened to be "the best investigator the ONI had." // GRAVES

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
FERRIE NAVY (Wiki,GAAL,jfkfacts.org)

=

Early life

Ferrie was born in Cleveland, Ohio. A Roman Catholic, Ferrie attended St. Ignatius High School, John Carroll University, St. Mary's Seminary, where he studied for the priesthood, and Baldwin-Wallace College. He next spent three years at the St. Charles' Seminary in Carthagena, Ohio. He suffered from alopecia areata, a rare skin condition, which results in the loss of body hair and whose severity increases with age. Later in life, to compensate for his hair loss, Ferrie wore a reddish homemade wig and fake eyebrows.^[4]
In 1944 Ferrie left St. Charles because of "emotional instability."^[4] He obtained a pilot's license and began teaching aeronautics at Cleveland's Benedictine High School. He was fired from the school for several infractions, including taking boys to a house of prostitution.^[5] He then became an insurance inspector and, in 1951, moved to New Orleans where he worked as a pilot for Eastern Air Lines, until losing his job in August 1961, after being arrested twice on morals charges.^[6]
Ferrie was involved with the Civil Air Patrol in several ways: He started as a Senior Member (an adult member) with the Fifth Cleveland Squadron at Hopkins Airport in 1947.^[7] When he moved to New Orleans, he transferred to the New Orleans Cadet Squadron at Lakefront Airport.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@---------------

http://www.mybaseguide.com/navy/43-767-15275/nas_jrb_new_orleans_marine_forces_reserve

Marine Aircraft Group, Detachment C, originated in 1946 at the New Orleans Lakefront Airport under the name Marine Air Detachment (MAD). Under the command of Lt. Col. L.H. McCulley, MAD activity supported Marine Fighter Squadron 143.

MAD was redesignated as Marine Air Reserve Training Detachment in September 1953, and in November 1957, MARTD relocated from New Orleans Lakefront Airport to its present location at NAS JRB New Orleans. MARTD was awarded the Fourth Marine Aircraft Wing Commanding General’s Proficiency Award in 1969, 1971 and 1974 and was runner-up in 1973.

+++++++++++++++++++++

@@@@@@@@@@@@@-------------------------

POST ASSASSINATION FERRIE NAVY (ONI) connection

Ferrie Navy connection

http://jfkfacts.org/assassination/news/a-pilot-in-training-remembers-david-ferrie/
Flights with Cubans
“He was actively engaged with Cubans. My USMC classmate recalls flights on the weekend to Picayune, Mississippi, in a DC-3 for their training.”
“The company that had the government contract was called ComAir and was operated by a retired USAF Lt.Col whom I never met. This sounds like CIA to those of us with a military background….,” Bauer wrote.

+++++++++++++++++++++

@@@@@@@@@@@@@-------------------------

Bill Kelly ++

Rufus Taylor & Dallas ONI SA J. Mason Lankford, Jr.

===================

Please visit Greg Parker's ReopenKennedycase blog at:
http://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/t161-mason-lankford

=

The links to all of these sources work correctly at his blog.

U.S. Social Security Death Index for Mason Lankford
first name: Mason
last name:Lankford
birth date:14 October 1921
social security number:462-14-0308
place of issuance:Texas
last residence:Fort Worth, Tarrant,
Texaszip code of last residence:76112
death date:16 June 1997
estimated age at death:76
https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.2/C65F-GPZ/p_12979762014

J. Mason Lankford, Jr. devoted much of his life to the fire service. A native of Texas, Mason served in various capacities, including Tarrant County (TX) Fire Marshal. When Congressman Curt Weldon (PA) sought congressional support for a Fire Caucus, Mason recruited the Texas delegation, including then-House Speaker Jim Wright, who was a pivotal player in its successful launch.

John Mason Lankford Jr. (1921-1997), better known as Mason Lankford, is best known as a firefighter and Fire Marshal of Tarrant County (Fort Worth), Texas. His dedication, service and promotion of the firefighter’s agenda are legendary. In fact, the prestigious Fire Service Leadership Award of the Congressional Fire Services Institute is named for him.

But Lankford is of interest to Kennedy assassination researchers as well, for the following reasons:

From 1948 to 1972, he was employed by either General Dynamics or its Convair Division as Director of Security, or in other security related positions. GDs security division was probably a nexus for DISC – the Defense Industrial Security Command – a central organ of the military-industrial complex.

In this capacity Lankford would certainly have been acquainted with two other GD Security officers who figure prominently in the Lee Harvey Oswald story – I B Hale and Max Clark. In fact, there is an interesting incident associating Max Clark with Lankford’s mother, Grace, and his sister, Catherine Russell:

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=136635&relPageId=2

There is also a link between Lankford and Roscoe White. In his capacity at the security office, Lankford provided verification of employment at Convair for White on his 1963 application with the Dallas Police Department. White had been employed at Convair from 8 May 1956 to 28 July 1956, and was eligible for rehire – implying a positive recommendation. For unknown reasons, White did not list this employment in his application; rather, the DPD investigator got the information from White’s stepfather, and contacted Lankford directly for the verification.

It is interesting that Robert Oswald was employed at Convair during this period in 1956 as well, suggesting the possibility that Robert and Lankford may have known each other long before their interactions of 1963. Also, although of course Convair was one of the largest employers in Fort Worth at the time, it is at least possible that Roscoe White and Robert knew each other then also. Further, there is some overlap between White’s period of employment and Lee Harvey Oswald’s presence in Fort Worth prior to his Marine Corps enlistment. Is it possible that all four – Lankford, Roscoe White, Robert Oswald and LHO – knew each other in 1956?

Lankford’s investigative and intelligence roots ran deep. In addition to his occupations of firefighter and director of security, he had a role as board chairman of the Texas Board of Private Investigators and Private Security Agencies.

The Victoria Advocate, 24 August 1972, p. 1
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=J41HAAAAIBAJ&sjid=SX8MAAAAIBAJ&pg=2490,3403630&dq=mason-lankford&hl=en

More importantly, in November of 1963, and likely long before that, Lankford was a Special Agent for the Office of Naval Intelligence in Dallas, reporting directly to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rufus Taylor.

http://contentdm.baylor.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/15poage-arm&CISOPTR=13197&REC=1 (go to page 5 and following).

At approximately 1:00 PM, on November 26, 1963, J. M. LANKFORD, Special Agent, Office of Naval Intelligence, Dallas, Texas, personally appeared at the Dallas Field Division. Mr. LANKFORD advised SA John J. FLANAGAN that approximately fifteen minutes previously an informant of his had contacted him concerning JACK RUBY and LEE HARVEY OSWALD.

LANKFORD stated that his informant, ROBERT KERMIT PATTERSON, an admitted homosexual, has been furnishing information to ONI for some time. He has, in the past, furnished signed statements to the Office of Naval Intelligence setting forth his homosexual activities with young servicemen….

Patterson, a former Navy man, lived at the YMCA and an associate Donald C. Stuart and operated a TV and radio repair shop with Charles Arndt, who also lived at the YMCA. Two weeks previous Ruby and a man who appeared to be Oswald visited there shop Contract Electonics at 2533 Elm St. Stuart also worked at KLIF.

Letter to Admiral McDonald from Adml. Rufus L. Taylor also mentions Tracy Thurlo Pope, ex-Navy. P.24
http://contentdm.baylor.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/15poage-arm&CISOPTR=13197&REC=1

Admiral McDonald 27 Nov. 1963

Rear Admiral Taylor

Oswald Killing

1.Information from our Dallas office provides names of several persons connected with Ruby and Oswald. Robert Kermit Patterson, admitted 6J (homosexual), contacted resident agent Dallas about 1330 CST yesterday and said he had information in regard assassination of President Kennedy. Patterson said he and one Donald C. Stuart operated Contract Electronics, 2533 Elm Street, Dallas. About two weeks ago, Jack Ruby/aka/Rubenstein and subject Oswald visited Contract Electronics and wanted work done on a microphones at Ruby Carousel Night Club, Dallas. On this occasion ruby told Oswald to write names of Patterson and Stuart in Carousel guest book. Contract Electronics did the requested mike work at the Carousel and were paid by Negro employee. The Senior Resident Agent at Dallas has taken Patterson to the FBI Dallas for further interrogation. Neither Stuart nor Patterson has discussed above information with anyone else, according to Patterson. The files at DIO 8ND are negative on Stuart.

2.In this office we have a file on Patterson and another person not mentioned in the above message by the name of Tracy Thurio Pope. Pope is the one that first pointed out Patterson. Patterson was in the Navy and is now out. Pope was in the Navy and is out, Service No. 599 29 44, AA, USN. There is no Navy record on Stuart. This morning we had a meeting here to make sure that everybody is informed and that the FBI is getting everything it needs.

3.The above information certainly raises questions as to Ruby’s real motives in killing Oswald. We have all been interested in what seemed to us to be a look of recognition on Oswald’s fact when he spotted Ruby.

4.BuPers is being kept currently informed of information of the sort contained in paragraph 1 and 2 above.

Very respectfully, Rufus L. Taylor

Copy to: REVIWED BY NCIS (ONI) JFK TASK FORCE
On 12-17-93
RELEASE IN FULL

Furthermore, Lankford had an association with the Secret Service. He was on “old acquaintance” of Texas-based SS agent Mike Howard. In fact, Lankford assisted Howard in securing Fort Worth for JFKs November 21-22 visit. Other SS-ONI cooperation might have been effected through William Greer and Forrest Sorrels.

http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=ST&s_site=dfw&p_multi=ST&p_theme=realcities&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0EAF8F4846223408&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM

Fort Worth Star-Telegram – November 23, 1993 – 15
Guarding the OSWALDS An ex-security supervisor recalls preparing for Kenendy’s visit to Fort Worth – then having to watch over the family of his assassin,…

Lankford’s actions following the assassination, detailed in the above article, are interesting. “Frustrated and worn out, heartsick and physically ill, Lankford tumbled into bed that Friday night. For two days he refused to even get up to eat.”

Several interpretations come to mind. First, maybe Lankford was just overworked. Second, maybe he was overwhelmed by grief. Third, perhaps he was just sick. Or fourth, maybe he was very, very worried.

At any rate, by Sunday morning, November 24th, Lankford seems to have recovered. Mike Howard called him to request that he accompany him along with the security team protecting Marina and Marguerite Oswald. The site of their seclusion, the Inn of the Six Flags at Arlington, was chosen by Lankford (implying, perhaps, that Lankford was more in control than the official story relates?).

Also present at the time, or shortly thereafter, was Robert Oswald. Interestingly, in his notes dealing with this period, Robert refers to Lankford familiarly as “Mason”, suggesting that maybe the two had, indeed, known each other in the past (although Robert misspells Mason’s last name as “Langford”).

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=95751&relPageId=30
Lankford was also involved with LHOs funeral and burial. He seems to have been a “prime mover” in an attempt to have LHOs body cremated, rather than buried. This is reported by morticians Paul Groody and Allen Baumgardner, as well as by Robert Oswald. In fact, the process went so far that cremation forms were actually typed up, although the family members finally decided against it. Why, it must be asked, was Lankford so eager for cremation?

http://www.newspaperarchive.com/FlashViewer/FreeArticlesPreview.aspx?img=112857505

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2457&dat=19800908&id=ZXM-AAAAIBAJ&sjid=rFkMAAAAIBAJ&pg=4750,3133122

One way to interpret Lankford’s role is that he was a mid-level ONI operative, responsible for implementing and coordinating directives from above, and handling lesser operatives below. It is not unreasonable to infer that he may have been a true ONI handler for both Roscoe White and LHO – as opposed to caretakers like DeMohrenschildt or the Paines – for whom Lankford may also have been a handler or at least a coordinator. Thus his concern while LHO was still alive, and seeming relief when he died. But even in death, LHO was dangerous.

That is it insofar as the assassination is concerned. But a couple of other associations might be of significance.

First of all, Mason Lankford’s father, John Mason Lankford Sr., was an employee of Temco in the early 1950s, suggesting a possible relationship with David Harold Byrd.

Dallas Morning News, 20 November 1953, p 14. Available at genealogybank.com

Also, there is an association with Amon Carter, whose wife at one point employed Marguerite Oswald.

http://books.google.com/books?id=UXO1AAAAIAAJ&q=%22mason+lankford%22&dq=%22mason+lankford%22&hl=en&ei=YeWBTuWcKYyEtgfk9ojoAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CFMQ6AEwBw

Finally, it should be noted, whether a coincidence or not, that according to the1947 Fort Worth city directory, the Ekdahl/Oswald/Pic family was … well… nearly a neighbor of the Lankford family. At any rate they lived about a half-mile apart: theEkdahl/ Oswalds at 1505 8th Avenue, and Mason Lankford at 2211 West Magnolia.

Even closer was Oswald’s school. Had he been so inclined, Lankford would have needed to walk only 3 or 4 blocks to see first-grader Lee Harvey Oswald playing at the Lily B. Clayton Elementary School yard.

++++++++++++++++++++
>>>> SUMMARY <<<<<<<<<

• FERRIE RECRUITED OSWALD FOR ONI (FERRIE HAD CONTINUED NAVY-ONI CONNECTIONS POST ASSASSINATION)
• ONI MONITORED ASSASSINATION per GRAVES ONI man (see post # 149 above)
• ONI cremated OSWALD
• 

Edited March 19, 2015 by Steven Gaal