Rick Jervis, USA Today, dials in with Lone Nutter Propaganda - 50 years later

[Guest Robert Morrow]

It is sad isn't it? Still dragging the corpse of the machine gun riddled Warren Report through the middle of the American MSM media 50 years later.

Web link: http://www.thecalifornian.com/interactive/article/20130809/NEWS/308090025/Dallas-prepares-50th-anniversary-JFK-assassination

Key sentence: "

Minutes later, Oswald struck."

Well, if Oswald struck from 88 yards to the rear why does JFK's head get knocked backwards? And what did Police Chief Jesse Curry say about Oswald?? Something like we can't put Oswald on the 6th floor with a gun in his hand ...

Rick Jervis - feel free to just flat out ignore 50 years of very fine JFK research.

Rick Jervis - USA Today:

The crowds that day were big even by Texas standards: 200,000 people swamping the 6-mile motorcade route to catch a glimpse of President John Kennedy and first lady Jacqueline.

That goodwill was shattered at 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 22, 1963, in one of the defining moments of the 20th century, when shots rang out from a sixth-story window, killing Kennedy and seriously injuring Texas Gov. John Connally, who with his wife, Nellie, was riding with the Kennedys.

Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested later that day for murdering the president with a high-powered rifle from a sixth-floor perch at the nearby Texas School Book Depository.

Americans know the rest of the story, told and retold in documentaries and countless books and frozen in iconic images — the Zapruder film of the killing; LBJ being sworn in as a stricken Jackie Kennedy looks on; JFK Jr.’s salute at the funeral procession — of a moment in time that grievously wounded the nation’s psyche.

As America mourned, Dallas struggled for years to shake the reputation that this crime handcuffed to it as the “City that Killed Kennedy” and the “City of Hate.” Dallas journalists were shunned across the USA and hate mail poured into City Hall and local newspapers.

The energy and great affection Americans had for this young and rising president was swiftly redirected into the form of public rage toward the place where it all happened.

Today, as the city approaches the 50th anniversary of the assassination, Dallas finds itself in a peculiar place, having to essentially host a national wake this November — marking one of the nation’s darkest days while insisting, still, that the events of that day are a wound from another era. This bustling metropolis of 1.2 million residents has moved past the notorious event. To wit, about four of five residents — 84 percent — weren’t even alive the day Kennedy died.

Even so, the specter of the killing lingers — from the Fort Worth hotel room where the Kennedys spent their last night together to the Dallas theater where Oswald was wrestled into handcuffs by police to Lee Harvey’s, a popular bar and grill in the city’s south side that capitalizes on the name of one of its most infamous residents.

“The assassination in many ways is still a current event in Dallas,” said Stephen Fagin, associate curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, housed in the building where Oswald took his lethal shots. “Barely a week goes by without mention of the assassination. It’s always there.”

The museum itself is a testament to the inner struggle the city endured as it debated whether to embrace its past or bury it forever. After the shooting, the seven-story brick building was abandoned, sold to developers and nearly razed to make room for a parking garage before Dallas County finally bought it and preservationists transformed the top two floors into a museum, Fagin said. Today, the Sixth Floor Museum draws 350,000 visitors a year, second only to the Alamo in San Antonio as the most-visited site in Texas.

“It took a long time for the city to get rid of those guilt feelings,” said Darwin Payne, professor emeritus at Southern Methodist University who covered the assassination as a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald. “For a long time, people blamed Dallas.”

The darkest day in Dallas history nearly didn’t happen. Rain pelted the city earlier that morning, which would have forced the motorcade to ride with covered roofs. But as the skies held and the sun poked through, Kennedy ordered the top down on his limousine. In grainy photographs, Jacqueline is seen beaming to the masses standing shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk.

Crowds were good earlier that week in Houston and San Antonio but nothing compared with the throngs that turned out in Dallas — nearly one-third of the entire city population — to welcome the president and his wife, said Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum. “Everyone was stunned by how many residents came out to see the Kennedys,” he said.

The turnout was so impressive that Nellie Connally turned to Kennedy and famously said, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”

Minutes later, Oswald struck.

Ironically, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in 1968, and Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles later that same year proved that high-profile murders were a product of the time — not the location — and helped Dallas shed its bad rap, Payne said. Other things that helped the city move out of the shadow of the killing: the success of the Dallas Cowboys NFL team in the 1970s, and the TV series Dallas, a pop culture giant of the ‘70s and ‘80s, he said.

Dallas moved on. But sites across the city associated with the killing remain as steady reminders of that haunting day in November.

The Texas Hotel

Officials at the Hilton Fort Worth downtown make no effort to hide the fact that the Kennedys spent their last night together in Suite 850 of their hotel — then known as the Texas Hotel — before heading to Dallas. In fact, it’s woven into orientation training for new hires and written into the first line of the hotel’s website description.

The grim factoid draws thousands of guests and corporate meetings each year, general manager Dave Fulton said. “It hits the senses in ways I’ve never seen before,” he said. “People want to say, ‘We had our meeting in the place where JFK had his last meal.’ “

Suite 850 is gone after decades of renovations to the hotel, which was a Sheraton and a Hyatt before becoming a Hilton in 2006, Fulton said. But visitors could stay at Standard Room 808 today, the approximate location where the two-bedroom suite once stood, and look out the window where the Kennedys would have seen crowds waiting in a pelting rain for a glimpse of the first couple.

Photos spread across two walls in the hotel’s second-floor foyer show Kennedy giving a speech outside the hotel and later alongside his wife at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast inside the hotel’s ballroom. The couple then took a motorcade to the airport for a short flight to Dallas’ Love Field.

On each floor of the hotel, elevators open to a framed black-and-white photograph of the Kennedys exiting the hotel and climbing into a car that would take them to the Fort Worth airport before departing to Dallas.

DeAnn Baker, 56, considered a variety of hotels before attending a convention recently in Fort Worth. But when she heard about the Hilton’s famous guest, she chose it immediately.

“It’s a little painful,” Baker, of California, said of staying at the hotel. “But it’s an important part of our history.”

Dealey Plaza / Grassy Knoll

Probably the best-known site associated with the assassination is Dealey Plaza and its adjoining grassy knoll (the latter a ground zero for conspiracy theorists). The site was swarmed for years after the shooting as visitors took in the scene of the crime of the century. Kennedy’s motorcade was passing the plaza when Oswald’s bullets rang out.

A white, painted “X” on Elm Street directly in front of the plaza marks the exact spot where the fatal bullet found Kennedy. The plaza has been preserved much the way it looked 50 years ago except for a few plaques guiding guests. Today, visitors dash out to busy Elm Street for a quick photo standing over the X or to glance up at the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository where Oswald perched his rifle.

A plaque points to the stone pedestal where Dallas resident Abraham Zapruder stood and shot his infamous home video — providing investigators with the only frames of the fatal shots. Nearby, conspiracy theorists set up photos and short videos on folding tables describing the “second gunman” theory (all better explained on DVDs for sale).

Strolling across the plaza, Mark Refowitz, 61, visiting from San Clemente, Calif., was instantly transported back five decades to his Bronx, N.Y., junior high classroom when the principal came over the loudspeaker to announce that President Kennedy had been killed and that classes would be dismissed. He remembered people crying and the stark conversation he had with his mother later that day over why things like that happened.

“It’s a historical marker,” Refowitz said of the plaza and grassy knoll. “It’s one of those indelible events that happen in your life that you never forget.”

Texas School Book Depository

For years after the shooting, the seven-story brick building where Oswald fired his shots sat empty and in disrepair. It was almost knocked down to make a parking garage, bought by private developers, and nearly burned to the ground by arsonists, said Fagin, the associate curator of the Sixth Floor Museum.

In the late 1970s, Dallas County bought the building and preservationists led by Lindalyn Adams led a charge to raise funds and turn the sixth and seventh floors into a museum. Today, visitors peruse panels and photographs that detail Kennedy’s rise to prominence and his arrival in Dallas, and follow a path to the window where Oswald fired at the motorcade, a perch surrounded by textbook boxes just as the killer left it.

Besides offering context to the event, the museum serves as a symbol of a city choosing to embrace its history, rather than shun it, Fagin said.

“The Sixth Floor Museum is all about us,” he said. “It’s about who we are as a community and how we’ve stepped out of the long, dark shadow of history.”

Parkland Memorial Hospital

In the waiting room of the radiology department at Parkland Memorial Hospital, a small bronze plaque attached to a column reads: “ORIGINAL SITE, TRAUMA 1, NOVEMBER 22, 1963.”

It’s one of the few signs in the hospital reminding visitors that one of the most notorious events in U.S. history ended at the facility.

After the shooting, Secret Service agents rushed Kennedy and Connally the 3 miles to the hospital. Kennedy was wheeled into Trauma Room 1 in the hospital’s emergency room at about 12:40 p.m., said Ronald Jones, who, as the hospital’s chief resident at the time, was one of a handful of doctors who tried to revive the president.

Kennedy’s eyes were open and he appeared serene though he showed no signs of breathing, Jones said. Outside, Secret Service agents, shotgun-toting policemen and anxious onlookers swarmed the hospital’s parking lot waiting on word of the president’s condition. Despite the efforts of a half-dozen surgeons and specialists, Kennedy was pronounced dead about 12 minutes later, Jones said.

Two days later, Oswald was wheeled into Trauma Room 2 — where doctors saved Connally’s life — after being shot in the stomach on live television by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Some of the same doctors, including Jones, worked to resuscitate Oswald. He was later pronounced dead in surgery.

Another plaque down the hall from cardiology explains how the hospital became the temporary seats of the U.S. and Texas governments while the president and governor were worked on. The trauma rooms are now gone, demolished to make way for a bigger, renovated emergency room. Patients and hospital staff busily walk the halls, many of them oblivious to the events that occurred there five decades ago. Next month, the film Parkland is set to hit theaters, explaining the incident from inside the hospital.

For months after the shooting, those 12 minutes inside Trauma Room 1 lingered in Jones’ mind. Over the years, they’ve subsided, though the moment never fully left him, said Jones, now 80, who went on to become chief of surgery at nearby Baylor Medical Center.

“I had never seen a president before. There had never been an assassination of a president during my lifetime,” Jones said. “And here, by some miraculous odds, you were at the right place at the right time to treat the president of the United States who had just been assassinated. The odds of that happening must be infinitesimal.”

East 10th Street

Freshly paved tennis courts stand just north of the corner of East 10th and North Patton streets in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas. Mariachi music blares from passing cars and the gleaming new campus of W.H. Adamson High School is just down the street.

A sign in the corner of the tennis court’s parking lot, however, reminds passersby of the street’s role in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. It was here that, after killing the president, Oswald shot and killed Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit with a .38-caliber pistol — hitting him three times in the body and once in the face — after being stopped for questioning. The event led police on Oswald’s trail.

Eduardo Gutierrez, 70, said he had no idea that sliver of history had occurred just outside his home when he bought the three-bedroom house on East 10th Street 17 years ago. He soon found out, though, when documentary film crews repeatedly showed up to film the corner. He said he remembers being a 20-year-old shoemaker in Guanajuato, Mexico, when he heard of Kennedy’s assassination. The whole town mourned.

“It’s very tragic,” Gutierrez said. “At the same, it’s something we should never forget.”

The sign in the parking lot reminds onlookers that Tippit left behind a wife and three children and was posthumously awarded the medal of valor from the National Police Hall of Fame. “Although the intersection of 10th and Patton streets has changed,” it reads, “Officer Tippit’s actions and subsequent murder at this site are remembered for setting into motion a series of events that led directly to Oswald’s arrest.”

Witnesses to the shooting quickly called police as Oswald fled to West Jefferson Boulevard and the Texas Theatre.

The Texas Theatre

Built in 1931, the Texas Theatre in the city’s Oak Cliff neighborhood has had its share of history: It was briefly owned by eccentric American billionaire Howard Hughes and was the first theater in Dallas with air conditioning. But it’s most famous for its brief visitor on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963. After killing Officer Tippit, Oswald slipped into the theater without paying. Shortly after, 15 police officers swarmed the building and, after a brief struggle, arrested Oswald and charged him in the killings of Kennedy and Tippit.

Not long after the incident, the two-story theater was abandoned, nearly turned into a furniture warehouse and almost destroyed by fire. Local activists purchased the building in 2001, and in 2010, Aviation Cinemas bought and refurbished the theater to its original décor, said Barak Epstein, the company’s president.

Today, the theater features a hip bar serving cocktails and $3 cans of Lone Star beer, shows a variety of independent films and Hollywood blockbusters and hosts music concerts. Tourists still stream in, wanting to see where Oswald was nabbed. If there’s no movie playing, Epstein patiently points out the spot: right side, third row from the back, second seat in.

Hanging on a wall in the second-floor foyer is a framed original movie poster of War Is Hell, the film the assassin was watching when the cops closed in on him. It’s signed by one of the film’s actors, Tony Russell: “For the Texas Theater: My first movie, Oswald’s last. 11.22.63.”

Epstein said he hopes visitors appreciate the Texas Theatre for more than just its moment of infamous history. Still, the Oswald footnote is good for business.

“It’s not the only thing we do. We’re a functioning business,” Epstein said. “But we embrace it.”

Dallas, 50 Years Later

Today, the metropolis is more concerned with the Cowboys’ upcoming season and the arrival of a new Trader Joe’s than its stigma as the place where Kennedy was killed. Besides being too young to remember the incident, many people here are also transplants from other parts of the USA, Mayor Mike Rawlings said.

In the wake of the tragedy, Dallas leaders united to burnish the city’s image. Led by then-mayor Erik Jonsson, founder of Texas Instruments, the city launched “Goals for Dallas,” an ambitious long-term plan that led to improvements to schools and libraries, an expanded convention center and new City Hall, said Payne, the Southern Methodist University professor emeritus.

The efforts also led to the creation of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, today the fourth-largest airport in the world in number of flights and a major economic engine in the region, he said.

“Gradually, attention moved away from the assassination, even in Dallas,” Payne said.

The city will observe the 50th anniversary with the tolling of church bells, military flyovers and readings of Kennedy speeches by renowned presidential historian David McCullough.

Though forever changed by Kennedy’s assassination, the city is no longer defined by it, Rawlings said.

“It was tragic,” he said. “Yet that light that shined on Dallas helped reinvent it.”

[Ron Ecker]

Media-wise, Americans today are living in the 1950s Soviet Union. "Pravda! Read all about it!"

And they don't even care.

[Pat Speer]

I'd bet Jervis has no clue about the assassination, and was just following the company line: "Oswald did it, it's official; let's not make waves by saying his guilt is still in doubt."

Edited August 9, 2013 by Pat Speer

[Guest Robert Morrow]

I'd bet Jervis has no clue about the assassination, and was just following the company line: "Oswald did it, it's official; let's not make waves by saying his guilt is still in doubt."

John Siniff, the Cover Story Editor for USA Today returned my call. I excoriated him for USA Today directly saying Oswald killed JFK (forgot to mention USA Today also said he killed Tippit). Siniff said that he had read the Warren Report and that "we" have determined that Oswald was up on the 6th floor TSBD shooting and killing Kennedy.

Seriously - he sourced the Warren Report. I told him that was like reading a John Gotti investigation of a mob hit. He asked for my views of the JFK assassination and I told him.

What is going on here 50 years later? People like John Siniff and scores of others just want to be ignorant, they want to be in a comforting denial. Facts don't matter. The truth is so discrediting to the American narrative. It is like some people truly want to believe Deepak Chopra when he said he could levitate with yogic flying.

Siniff bio: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/educate/college/careers/journalism/careers/siniff.htm

Edited August 9, 2013 by Robert Morrow

[Pat Speer]

I'd bet Jervis has no clue about the assassination, and was just following the company line: "Oswald did it, it's official; let's not make waves by saying his guilt is still in doubt."

John Siniff, the Cover Story Editor for USA Today returned my call. I excoriated him for USA Today directly saying Oswald killed JFK (forgot to mention USA Today also said he killed Tippit). Siniff said that he had read the Warren Report and that "we" have determined that Oswald was up on the 6th floor TSBD shooting and killing Kennedy.

Seriously - he sourced the Warren Report. I told him that was like reading a John Gotti investigation of a mob hit. He asked for my views of the JFK assassination and I told him.

What is going on here 50 years later? People like John Siniff and scores of others just want to be ignorant, they want to be in a comforting denial. Facts don't matter. The truth is so discrediting to the American narrative. It is like some people truly want to believe Deepak Chopra when he said he could levitate with yogic flying.

Siniff bio: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/educate/college/careers/journalism/careers/siniff.htm

Well, heck, Robert, the answer is right there in Siniff's bio. University of Texas. Longhorns. Not exactly a haven for those who think clearly on these matters.

[Guest Robert Morrow]

I'd bet Jervis has no clue about the assassination, and was just following the company line: "Oswald did it, it's official; let's not make waves by saying his guilt is still in doubt."

John Siniff, the Cover Story Editor for USA Today returned my call. I excoriated him for USA Today directly saying Oswald killed JFK (forgot to mention USA Today also said he killed Tippit). Siniff said that he had read the Warren Report and that "we" have determined that Oswald was up on the 6th floor TSBD shooting and killing Kennedy.

Seriously - he sourced the Warren Report. I told him that was like reading a John Gotti investigation of a mob hit. He asked for my views of the JFK assassination and I told him.

What is going on here 50 years later? People like John Siniff and scores of others just want to be ignorant, they want to be in a comforting denial. Facts don't matter. The truth is so discrediting to the American narrative. It is like some people truly want to believe Deepak Chopra when he said he could levitate with yogic flying.

Siniff bio: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/educate/college/careers/journalism/careers/siniff.htm

Well, heck, Robert, the answer is right there in Siniff's bio. University of Texas. Longhorns. Not exactly a haven for those who think clearly on these matters.

Pat, actually down in here Texas there are a lot of people who know *exactly* how depraved Lyndon Johnson was. So many people have outrageous stories about LBJ. & there are a lot of folks (maybe not a majority) that know corrupt the Bush family is, too. Jeb Bush is a graduate of the Univ. of Texas. (I have an MBA -1990- from UT also.)

The Daily Texan, where Sinoff worked at, has had some good and knowledgeable editors in the past. One in particular was a young man David Armstrong who in 1988 was writing some solid stuff on the 1980 October Surprise dealings of the Reagan campaign with the Iranians.

But having said that, the "Establishment" in Texas and in Austin, the universities, the local papers, the political parties, is in serious cover up mode when in comes to both Lyndon Johnson and the Bushes. The truth is just too discrediting and not pleasant.

[Guest Robert Morrow]

I wonder how many times this year we are going to hear declarative sentences from the MSM that Oswald killed JFK (or Tippit for that matter)? USA Today with a front page story has already chimed in with their declarative sentences.

August 9th was the New York Times turn:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/10/us/mystery-from-the-grave-beside-oswalds-solved.html?emc=edit_tnt_20130809&tntemail0=y&_r=0

"But in the half-century since a slight, sallow man named Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy, so much continues to be said about the assassination that the various conspiracy devices and theories are nearly as familiar as the tragic event itself. The Magic Bullet theory. The Zapruder film. The Umbrella Man. The Mafia. Jack Ruby. Fidel Castro."

As well as some name calling: "obsessive assassination buffs"