On a Bright, Sunny Day in Dallas
Nov. 21st, 2003 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
arisbe> Gary North's REALITY CHECK
>
> Issue 294 November 21, 2003
>
>
> ON A BRIGHT, SUNNY DAY IN DALLAS
>
> This is the week of the 40th anniversary of Kennedy's
> assassination. There have been several television programs
> devoted to this event, especially on PBS.
>
> In this report, I'm going to present a missing piece
> of the puzzle, one that you have never heard about. It was
> not mentioned in the Warren Commission report. Oliver
> Stone did not include it in his movie, "JFK." It's not
> that this missing piece has been actively suppressed. It's
> that it was published in a little-known book that seemingly
> had nothing to do with the assassination. No one paid any
> attention. The book then sank without a trace. I bought a
> copy in a book remainder bin years ago, where books that
> don't sell well at retail are sold at dirt-cheap prices,
> and then forgotten.
>
> The Kennedy assassination has been studied in detail
> and written about by thousands of people. The amount of
> published information on the event is staggering. The
> basic outline has been known for years. But the devil is
> in the details.
>
> A majority of Americans say that they don't trust the
> Warren Commission's theory of the lone gunman. Yet nobody
> has offered anything like a plausible alternative that has
> gained the support of a significant minority of the general
> public or historians. That Lee Harvey Oswald doesn't seem
> capable of having fired all those shots is clear. The
> problem is in finding evidence for the necessary split-
> second coordination with a second assassin.
>
> An author trying to defend any assassination thesis
> must ignore or downplay implausible facts, either lone
> gunman facts or coordinated conspiracy facts. The
> resulting theories have all been implausible. That's the
> way facts are when you take a close look, from subatomic
> physics to the Big Bang.
>
> In this report, I am going to make three simple
> points: (1) history is very complex; (2) the writing of
> history is an inexact and highly biased art; (3) our lives
> and even our world turn on events that cannot be predicted
> or defended against.
>
>
> LEE HARVEY OSWALD
>
> Consider Lee Harvey Oswald in November, 1963. He was
> a former Marine. He was a former defector to the Soviet
> Union -- the first discharged Marine ever to defect to the
> USSR. He had renounced in writing his U.S. citizenship.
> At the time of this renunciation, he had written to one
> American official that he intended to turn over to the
> Soviets the Navy's radar codes, which he did. The Navy had
> to change its codes. He was not merely a defector; he was
> a traitor. Yet in 1962, he returned to the U.S. with his
> Russian wife, and nobody in Washington blinked an eye.
> They knew he was back. He was de-briefed by the CIA, which
> the CIA continues to deny, but for which there is written
> evidence: a "smoking document." The FBI, the CIA, military
> intelligence, and the Navy ignored him.
>
> In 1962, he tried to assassinate an anti-Communist
> retired general, Edwin Walker. He then moved to New
> Orleans, where he got involved with pro-Cuba activism as a
> one-man member of a local Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He
> was visible enough to have been filmed on the streets,
> handing out leaflets, and be recorded in a radio debate.
> The films and audio tapes still exist.
>
> Oswald had been a Marxist since his teenage years. He
> had been openly a Marxist in the Marines, yet he was given
> access to radar codes. In a letter to his brother, sent
> from Moscow, he had said, "I want you to understand what I
> say now, I do not say lightly, or unknowingly, since I've
> been in the military. . . . In the event of war I would
> kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the
> American Government -- Any American." Edward Jay Epstein,
> a specialist in the JFK assassination, noted two decades
> ago this week, "Although his letter was routinely
> intercepted by the CIA and microfilmed, no discernable
> attention was paid to the threat contained in it."
>
> Oswald returned to the United States in 1962. Epstein
> continues:
>
> After the failed assassination, Oswald went to
> New Orleans, where he became the organizer for
> the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Aside from
> printing leaflets, staging demonstrations,
> getting arrested and appearing on local radio
> talk shows in support of Castro that summer,
> Oswald attempted to personally infiltrate an
> anti-Castro group that was organizing sabotage
> raids against Cuba. He explained to friends that
> he could figure out his "anti-imperialist" policy
> by "reading between the lines" of the Militant
> and other such publications. In August, he wrote
> the central committee of the Communist Party USA
> asking "Whether in your opinion, I can compete
> with anti-progressive forces above ground, or
> whether I should always remain in the
> background, i.e. underground". During this hot
> summer, while Oswald spent evenings practicing
> sighting his rifle in his backyard, the Militant
> raged on about the Kennedy Administration's
> "terrorist bandit" attacks on Cuba. And as the
> semi-secret war against Castro escalated, Oswald
> expressed increasing interest in reaching Cuba.
>
> It gets even more interesting.
>
> Telling his wife that they might never meet
> again, he left New Orleans two weeks later headed
> for the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. To convince
> the Cubans of his bona fides -- and seriousness
> -- he had prepared a dossier on himself, which
> included a 10 page resume, outlining his
> revolutionary activities, newspaper clippings
> about his defection to the Soviet Union,
> propaganda material he had printed, documents he
> had stolen from a printing company engaged in
> classified map reproduction for the U.S Army, his
> correspondence with the Fair Play for Cuba
> Committee executives and photographs linking him
> to the Walker shooting.
>
> Oswald applied for a visa at the Cuban Embassy on
> the morning of September 27th, 1963. He said that
> he wanted to stop in Havana en route to the
> Soviet Union. On the application, the consular
> office who interviewed him, noted: "The applicant
> states that he is a member of the American
> Communist Party and Secretary in New Orleans of
> the Fair Play for Cuba Committee." Despite such
> recommendations, Oswald was told that he needed a
> Soviet visa before the Cuban visa could be
> issued. He argued over this requisite with the
> Cuban counsel, Eusebio Azque, in front of
> witnesses, and reportedly made wild claims about
> services he might perform for the Cuban cause.
> During the next five days, he traveled back and
> forth between the Soviet and Cuban embassies
> attempting to straighten out the difficulty.
>
> http://edwardjayepstein.com/archived/oswald.htm
>
> I generally trust Epstein as a researcher. His
> biography on Armand Hammer is a masterpiece. His
> investigation of Oswald was detailed, and his first book on
> the assassination became a best-seller, "Inquest" (1966).
> He later earned a Ph.D. from Harvard. He is no crackpot.
> He is a conventional historian of the assassination. He
> thinks the lone gunman thesis is correct. But what he
> wrote a generation ago about that lone gunman's activities
> before the assassination has yet to get into the textbooks.
> Epstein's findings about Oswald point either to the utter
> bureaucratic incompetence of military intelligence, the
> CIA, the FBI, and the State Department, or else to a
> conspiracy. Textbook writers do not want to consider
> either possibility.
>
> There is another factor: the media never did want to
> play up the fact that Oswald was a long-time traitor and a
> Marxist. From the day of the assassination, the media
> tried to blame the equivalent of "a vast right wing
> conspiracy" in Dallas. It was "the climate of right-wing
> opinion in Dallas" that pundits said had killed Kennedy.
> On the contrary, what killed Kennedy was a Marxist
> revolutionary, committed to violence philosophically, who
> had been allowed to return to the United States. But this
> truth has never been palatable to the media or the textbook
> writers.
>
> You think this has changed? Not a chance. On
> Thursday evening, November 20, PBS broadcast a recently
> produced one-hour show, "JFK: Breaking the News." It dealt
> with the power of television to cover live news, which was
> first demonstrated on that weekend in 1963. The show
> spends at least five minutes, and maybe more, on the right
> wing climate of opinion in Dallas. It shows that there
> were conservative Democrats who -- gasp! -- opposed
> Kennedy's liberal politics. The shame of it! The
> audacity! To oppose this great man! The fact that the
> liberal media actively covered up his daily adulteries,
> which were security risks, given the Mob connection of some
> of them -- a fact presented earlier in the week on the PBS
> documentary, "The Kennedys" -- is rarely mentioned, and was
> never mentioned until several best-selling books revealed
> all this in the late 1980's.
>
> The only reference to the truth in that documentary
> was a brief sentence in retrospect by CBS's Bob Shieffer
> ("Face the Nation"), who was a reporter in Fort Worth at
> the time, who admits that Oswald was a leftist, but of
> course a lone nut -- no climate of opinion, you see. This
> segment was shown long after Jane Pauly's voice-over and
> film clips had pilloried the anti-Kennedy Democrats as pig-
> headed, insensitive brutes. The media have never forgiven
> conservatives in 1963 for not buying into Camelot, despite
> the fact that the myth of Camelot was entirely Jackie
> Kennedy's, who convinced Theodore White to invent it after
> her husband died (another fact discussed on "The
> Kennedys.")
>
> The irony of this neglect of Oswald's Marxist roots
> was made greater by what followed the airing of "JFK:
> Breaking the News." PBS ran an updated version of
> Frontline's 1993 3-hour documentary, "Who Was Lee Harvey
> Oswald?" This superb documentary shows exactly who he was
> and what he was: a dedicated lifelong Marxist who wanted to
> do something big for the cause and big for his reputation.
> But it received little attention in 1993, and I doubt that
> it will receive much this week.
>
> The show also reveals that Lyndon Johnson was briefed
> on Oswald within hours, and he deliberately told the press,
> meaning the publishers and wire service owners, not to
> mention Oswald's time in Russia and his subsequent Marxist
> agitation in New Orleans. The implication -- never
> mentioned -- is that Johnson controlled the press.
>
> The narrator says that Johnson feared a world war, the
> assassination having come only a year after the Cuban
> missile crisis. I suggest an additional reason: Johnson
> did not want to let the American public know that this was
> a gigantic failure of the American intelligence community,
> meaning the same kind of Keystone Cops failure that has
> marked everything associated with 9-11, from before 9-11
> until today.
>
> Both shows are scheduled to be broadcast again by PBS
> on the afternoon of November 22.
>
> Neither documentary mentioned the following story.
> This is the one that has grabbed my attention ever since I
> bought and read that remaindered book.
>
>
> THE BUBBLE TOP
>
> For those who explain history in terms of impersonal
> forces, the unique event is irrelevant. For those who
> favor a conspiracy view of history, the unique event has
> meaning only in terms of the conspiracy. As for me, I am a
> believer in the overwhelming significance of the unique
> event. Remove it, and everything would have turned out
> differently. Here is my favorite example of the unique
> event, itself the product of a series of unique events,
> that changed everything.
>
> Unique event: Late November can be cold in Dallas.
> But on that crucial day, it was warm. Forecasters had
> predicted cool weather. That was why Jackie Kennedy was
> wearing a wool suit.
>
> Unique event: Kennedy had spoken that morning in Fort
> Worth, 30 miles west of Dallas. Instead of driving to
> Dallas, the President and his entourage flew from Ft. Worth
> to Dallas, landing at Love Field. (There was no DFW
> airport in 1963. DFW was Lyndon Johnson's gift to air
> travel.)
>
> Unique event: At Love Field were stationed the cars
> that would carry the President and the others through the
> 11-mile motorcade trip to downtown Dallas. Both cars were
> convertibles. The President's car had a removable plastic
> bubble, just in case bad weather made it too cold or too
> wet for comfort.
>
> Unique event: Love Field that day had an outdoor phone
> line connected to the desk of "The Dallas Times Herald." A
> local reporter used it to phone in stories about the
> scheduled motorcade.
>
> Then came a truly unique series of events. Here is
> the published account by the on-site reporter.
>
> Just before the plane was scheduled to leave
> Fort Worth for the short flight to Dallas, the
> rewrite man, Stan Weinberg, asked me if the
> bubble top was going to be on the presidential
> limousine. It would help to know now, he said,
> before he wrote the story later under pressure.
> It had been raining early that morning, and there
> was some uncertainty about it.
>
> I told Stan that I would find it. I put the
> phone down and walked over to a small ramp where
> the motorcade limousines were being held in
> waiting. I spotted Forrest Sorels, the agent in
> charge of the Dallas Secret Service office. I
> knew Mr. Sorrels fairly well, because I was then
> the regular federal beat reporter. . . .
>
> I looked down the ramp. The bubble top was
> on the president's car.
>
> Rewrite wants to know if the bubble top's
> going to stay on, I said to Mr. Sorrels, a man of
> fifty or so who wore dignified glasses and
> resembled a preacher or bank president.
>
> He looked at the sky and then hollered over
> at one of his agents holding a two-way radio in
> his hand. What about the weather downtown? he
> asked the agent.
>
> The agent talked into his radio for a few
> seconds, then listened. Clear, he hollered back.
>
> Mr. Sorrels yelled back at the agents
> standing by the car: "Take off the bubble top!"
>
> Just over twelve hours later, I was part of
> the bedlam at the Dallas police station along
> with hundreds of other reporters. I went into
> the police chief's outer office to await the
> breakup of a meeting in Chief Jesse Curry's main
> office. I had no idea who was in there.
>
> The door opened and out walked several men.
> One of them was Forrest Sorrels. He looked tired
> and sad. And bewildered. He saw me and I moved
> toward him. His eyes were wet. He paused
> briefly, shook his head slightly and whispered,
> "Take off the bubble top."
>
> The history of mankind is filled with "what if" and
> "if only" events that surround every major event. In
> American history, this is one of the big what-ifs, yet it
> is still unknown to the public.
>
> A plastic bubble might not have stopped the bullets
> that hit the passengers in that limousine, but it would
> have given any sharpshooter concern. A bullet can be
> deflected. There is no guarantee that an undeflected
> bullet will hit its target, and a plastic bubble would have
> added greatly to the uncertainty. Would the assassin or
> assassins have pulled the trigger(s)?
>
> There is also no way to know if someone other than
> Forrest Sorrels might have decided after the plane landed
> to take off the bubble top. What we do know, and what Mr.
> Sorrels knew that day, is this: a seemingly peripheral
> question by a rewrite man, relayed through a reporter, led
> to a call downtown by a two-way radio. Assessment:
> "Clear." Events in Dallas on that fateful day were never
> clear again.
>
> This story would be known by almost no one, had it not
> been for the reporter's subsequent career, which justified
> a book publishing company's taking a risk by publishing his
> autobiography. The Dallas reporter subsequently became
> America's most prominent playwright-novelist-newscaster,
> Jim Lehrer, of the "Lehrer News Hour." His book is titled,
> "A Bus of My Own." It was published in 1992. It did not
> sell well.
>
> I suspect that more people have learned about this
> unique "what-if" event today than have learned about it
> over the last eleven years.
>
>
> JOHNSON REPLACES KENNEDY
>
> Our lives are influenced by events far beyond our
> capacity to perceive at the time or understand after the
> fact, let alone predict in advance. On that bright, sunny
> day in Dallas, Lyndon Johnson became President. He
> subsequently escalated a war in Vietnam that Kennedy had
> begun. America changed dramatically because the sun was
> shining in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
>
> The can-do optimism of New Deal political liberalism
> did not survive the Kennedy assassination and the war in
> Vietnam. Two months after the assassination, the Beatles
> arrived in America, setting off what was to become the
> counter-culture of the 1960's. But what we think of as
> "the sixties" actually began in February, 1964. November
> 22, 1963, remains the great divide.
>
> Johnson's "guns and butter" spending policies expanded
> the Federal deficit. The war in Vietnam and the war on
> poverty had to be paid for. Johnson preferred to borrow
> and inflate rather than raise taxes, except for a minor and
> temporary 10% income tax surcharge in 1968. To hide the
> reality of the deficit, Johnson persuaded Congress in 1968
> to allow him to put the Social Security Administration
> surplus into the general fund's accounting system. Prior
> to 1968, the trust funds were outside of the general fund's
> accounting system. Ever since 1968, the government has
> counted undispersed trust fund income as present income
> receipts rather than as long-term obligations, i.e., debts.
> That decision made it easier for subsequent administrations
> to hide what is happening to the retirement schemes of
> Americans. It will have enormous effects for decades,
> beginning no later than 2011, when the baby boomers begin
> to retire.
>
> If the bubble top had been installed, it is doubtful
> that any of this would have happened. None of this was
> inevitable, humanly speaking. If there was a pattern here
> -- and I believe there was -- no conspiracy established it.
> (Read Psalm 2.)
>
>
> CONTROL OF AND BY THE PRESS
>
> We forget what America has become since that day in
> 1963. Presidential motorcades are no longer organized for
> public viewing. A convertible for a President is as old
> hat as a top hat at the President's inauguration -- last
> seen at Kennedy's inauguration. Presidents no longer make
> themselves visible to the public on the streets at
> scheduled events. Jimmy Carter walked up Pennsylvania
> Avenue on Inauguration Day in 1977. After "cousin John"
> Hinckley shot Reagan in 1981, things changed.
>
> In 1981, the press played the same game of "pretend
> it's not there." George Bush was in line to succeed
> President Reagan. Had Hinckley used a .38 or a .357, Bush
> probably would have succeeded to the Presidency. In the
> ancient game of "Who Wins?" he would have been the obvious
> winner.
>
> The day after the failed attempt, the following story
> was released on the news wires by the Associated Press. It
> was run in the "Houston Post." It was run almost nowhere
> else. On the day of the assassination, Scott Hinckley, the
> brother of John, was scheduled to have dinner with Neil
> Bush, brother of George W. Bush and son of then-Vice
> President Bush. The Hinckleys were initially reported as
> having made large donations to George Bush Sr.'s
> presidential campaign, but the family denied this, and
> there was no follow-up by the press. The story of the
> hastily cancelled dinner engagement received virtually no
> attention by the media. Only the Web has kept it alive.
>
> http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38432f49307d.htm
>
> Had the press investigated the story, some reporter
> might have come across the curious fact that the Bushes and
> the Hinckleys are related. The genealogical link goes back
> to the same founding father, Samuel Hinckley (1652-1698).
> On this, see this genealogical site:
>
> http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~addams/presidential/bush.html
>
> No one in the media noticed this until my wife's
> brother-in-law began working on the family tree of my wife
> and her sister. He came across the web site, with its link
> to Samuel Hinckley, whose name did not register with him,
> and he sent me the information on the Bush connection. I
> saw "Hinckley," and the alarm bell went off. I looked more
> closely. The genealogist had not missed the connection.
>
> Samuel Hinckley m. Martha Lathrop (see 8732, below)
> Samuel Hinckley m. Zerviah Breed
> Abel Hinckley m. Sarah Hubbard
> Abel Hinckley m. Elizabeth Wheeler
> Alfred Hinckley m. Elizabeth Stanley
> Francis Edward Hinckley m. Amelia Smith
> Percy Porter Hinckley m. Katherine Arvilla
> Warnock
> John Warnock Hinckley m. Jo Anne Moore
> JOHN WARNOCK HINCKLEY (b. 1955), attempted
> assassin
>
> I released this information in my October 5, 2001
> issue of REALITY CHECK, "News Stories That Are Somehow Not
> Worth Pursuing." This story remains not worth pursuing in
> the eyes of the media. No one picked it up. I did not
> think anyone would.
>
> If you think that the media have learned their
> collective lesson, you are naive. The same suppression
> goes on. Consider 9-11. Consider United Airlines Flight
> 93 over western Pennsylvania. The media ignore the
> obvious: debris was scattered up to eight miles away from
> the crash site. Are we to believe that this debris
> bounced? No, we are to believe the story of the brave
> victims who crashed the plane. We are not to inquire about
> that scattered debris. We are to forget about it. No
> establishment reporter asks the obvious: Was the plane shot
> down high above the landscape? Were it not for the Web,
> these facts would be lost.
>
> http://www.flight93crash.com
>
> http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30682
>
>
> CONCLUSION
>
> It is a grand illusion to believe that what we do
> today can immunize ourselves from the fallout from the
> seemingly random events of life. We can buy gold, we can
> live in gated communities, but the hard realities of life
> penetrate the high walls of our long-term plans.
>
> Uncertainty is a fact of life. This is why we should
> rejoice that there are entrepreneurs out there who put
> their capital on the line to assist future consumers in
> their quest to reduce uncertainty. Someone must deal with
> uncertainty. Capitalism's great gift to mankind is that it
> allows specialists to do this merely for the opportunity to
> reap a profit by opening their wallets to the possibility
> of losses. This is a cheap price for services rendered.
>
> -------------
>
> -- Been to the Daily Reckoning Marketplace Yet? --
>
> If not, you ought to see what you've been missing.
>
> Want to read more from our regular contributors? This
> is the place to find it.
>
> We've collected some of the best financial advice and
> commentary available anywhere and presented it to you
> all in one place. Take a look:
>
> http://www.dailyreckoning.com/marketplace.cfm
>
> -------------
>
> To subscribe to Reality Check go to:
>
> http://www.dailyreckoning.com/sub/GetReality.cfm
>
> -------------
>
> If you enjoy Reality Check and would like to read more
> of Gary's writing please visit his website:
>
> http://www.freebooks.com
>
> -------------
>
> If you'd like to suggest Reality Check to a friend,
> please forward this letter to them or point them to:
>
> http://www.dailyreckoning.com/sub/GetReality.cfm
>
> -------------
>
> E-mail Address Change? Just go to Subscriber Services:
>
> http://www.dailyreckoning.com/RC/services.cfm
>
> and give us your new address.
>
> *******
> Please note: We sent this e-mail to:
> Frank Purcell <mentor@arisbe.net>
> because you or someone using your e-mail address subscribed to this
> service.
>
> *******
> To manage your e-mail subscription, use our web interface at:
> http://www.agoramail.net/Home.cfm?List=RC-Only
> Or to end your e-mail subscription, send a blank e-mail to:
> RC-Only_unsub@agoramail.net
> To cancel or for any other subscription issues, write us at:
> Order Processing Center
> Attn: Customer Service
> P.O. Box 925
> Frederick, MD 21705
=====
Looking for an opportunity? http://arisbe.estarnetwork.com/.
>
> Issue 294 November 21, 2003
>
>
> ON A BRIGHT, SUNNY DAY IN DALLAS
>
> This is the week of the 40th anniversary of Kennedy's
> assassination. There have been several television programs
> devoted to this event, especially on PBS.
>
> In this report, I'm going to present a missing piece
> of the puzzle, one that you have never heard about. It was
> not mentioned in the Warren Commission report. Oliver
> Stone did not include it in his movie, "JFK." It's not
> that this missing piece has been actively suppressed. It's
> that it was published in a little-known book that seemingly
> had nothing to do with the assassination. No one paid any
> attention. The book then sank without a trace. I bought a
> copy in a book remainder bin years ago, where books that
> don't sell well at retail are sold at dirt-cheap prices,
> and then forgotten.
>
> The Kennedy assassination has been studied in detail
> and written about by thousands of people. The amount of
> published information on the event is staggering. The
> basic outline has been known for years. But the devil is
> in the details.
>
> A majority of Americans say that they don't trust the
> Warren Commission's theory of the lone gunman. Yet nobody
> has offered anything like a plausible alternative that has
> gained the support of a significant minority of the general
> public or historians. That Lee Harvey Oswald doesn't seem
> capable of having fired all those shots is clear. The
> problem is in finding evidence for the necessary split-
> second coordination with a second assassin.
>
> An author trying to defend any assassination thesis
> must ignore or downplay implausible facts, either lone
> gunman facts or coordinated conspiracy facts. The
> resulting theories have all been implausible. That's the
> way facts are when you take a close look, from subatomic
> physics to the Big Bang.
>
> In this report, I am going to make three simple
> points: (1) history is very complex; (2) the writing of
> history is an inexact and highly biased art; (3) our lives
> and even our world turn on events that cannot be predicted
> or defended against.
>
>
> LEE HARVEY OSWALD
>
> Consider Lee Harvey Oswald in November, 1963. He was
> a former Marine. He was a former defector to the Soviet
> Union -- the first discharged Marine ever to defect to the
> USSR. He had renounced in writing his U.S. citizenship.
> At the time of this renunciation, he had written to one
> American official that he intended to turn over to the
> Soviets the Navy's radar codes, which he did. The Navy had
> to change its codes. He was not merely a defector; he was
> a traitor. Yet in 1962, he returned to the U.S. with his
> Russian wife, and nobody in Washington blinked an eye.
> They knew he was back. He was de-briefed by the CIA, which
> the CIA continues to deny, but for which there is written
> evidence: a "smoking document." The FBI, the CIA, military
> intelligence, and the Navy ignored him.
>
> In 1962, he tried to assassinate an anti-Communist
> retired general, Edwin Walker. He then moved to New
> Orleans, where he got involved with pro-Cuba activism as a
> one-man member of a local Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He
> was visible enough to have been filmed on the streets,
> handing out leaflets, and be recorded in a radio debate.
> The films and audio tapes still exist.
>
> Oswald had been a Marxist since his teenage years. He
> had been openly a Marxist in the Marines, yet he was given
> access to radar codes. In a letter to his brother, sent
> from Moscow, he had said, "I want you to understand what I
> say now, I do not say lightly, or unknowingly, since I've
> been in the military. . . . In the event of war I would
> kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the
> American Government -- Any American." Edward Jay Epstein,
> a specialist in the JFK assassination, noted two decades
> ago this week, "Although his letter was routinely
> intercepted by the CIA and microfilmed, no discernable
> attention was paid to the threat contained in it."
>
> Oswald returned to the United States in 1962. Epstein
> continues:
>
> After the failed assassination, Oswald went to
> New Orleans, where he became the organizer for
> the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Aside from
> printing leaflets, staging demonstrations,
> getting arrested and appearing on local radio
> talk shows in support of Castro that summer,
> Oswald attempted to personally infiltrate an
> anti-Castro group that was organizing sabotage
> raids against Cuba. He explained to friends that
> he could figure out his "anti-imperialist" policy
> by "reading between the lines" of the Militant
> and other such publications. In August, he wrote
> the central committee of the Communist Party USA
> asking "Whether in your opinion, I can compete
> with anti-progressive forces above ground, or
> whether I should always remain in the
> background, i.e. underground". During this hot
> summer, while Oswald spent evenings practicing
> sighting his rifle in his backyard, the Militant
> raged on about the Kennedy Administration's
> "terrorist bandit" attacks on Cuba. And as the
> semi-secret war against Castro escalated, Oswald
> expressed increasing interest in reaching Cuba.
>
> It gets even more interesting.
>
> Telling his wife that they might never meet
> again, he left New Orleans two weeks later headed
> for the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. To convince
> the Cubans of his bona fides -- and seriousness
> -- he had prepared a dossier on himself, which
> included a 10 page resume, outlining his
> revolutionary activities, newspaper clippings
> about his defection to the Soviet Union,
> propaganda material he had printed, documents he
> had stolen from a printing company engaged in
> classified map reproduction for the U.S Army, his
> correspondence with the Fair Play for Cuba
> Committee executives and photographs linking him
> to the Walker shooting.
>
> Oswald applied for a visa at the Cuban Embassy on
> the morning of September 27th, 1963. He said that
> he wanted to stop in Havana en route to the
> Soviet Union. On the application, the consular
> office who interviewed him, noted: "The applicant
> states that he is a member of the American
> Communist Party and Secretary in New Orleans of
> the Fair Play for Cuba Committee." Despite such
> recommendations, Oswald was told that he needed a
> Soviet visa before the Cuban visa could be
> issued. He argued over this requisite with the
> Cuban counsel, Eusebio Azque, in front of
> witnesses, and reportedly made wild claims about
> services he might perform for the Cuban cause.
> During the next five days, he traveled back and
> forth between the Soviet and Cuban embassies
> attempting to straighten out the difficulty.
>
> http://edwardjayepstein.com/archived/oswald.htm
>
> I generally trust Epstein as a researcher. His
> biography on Armand Hammer is a masterpiece. His
> investigation of Oswald was detailed, and his first book on
> the assassination became a best-seller, "Inquest" (1966).
> He later earned a Ph.D. from Harvard. He is no crackpot.
> He is a conventional historian of the assassination. He
> thinks the lone gunman thesis is correct. But what he
> wrote a generation ago about that lone gunman's activities
> before the assassination has yet to get into the textbooks.
> Epstein's findings about Oswald point either to the utter
> bureaucratic incompetence of military intelligence, the
> CIA, the FBI, and the State Department, or else to a
> conspiracy. Textbook writers do not want to consider
> either possibility.
>
> There is another factor: the media never did want to
> play up the fact that Oswald was a long-time traitor and a
> Marxist. From the day of the assassination, the media
> tried to blame the equivalent of "a vast right wing
> conspiracy" in Dallas. It was "the climate of right-wing
> opinion in Dallas" that pundits said had killed Kennedy.
> On the contrary, what killed Kennedy was a Marxist
> revolutionary, committed to violence philosophically, who
> had been allowed to return to the United States. But this
> truth has never been palatable to the media or the textbook
> writers.
>
> You think this has changed? Not a chance. On
> Thursday evening, November 20, PBS broadcast a recently
> produced one-hour show, "JFK: Breaking the News." It dealt
> with the power of television to cover live news, which was
> first demonstrated on that weekend in 1963. The show
> spends at least five minutes, and maybe more, on the right
> wing climate of opinion in Dallas. It shows that there
> were conservative Democrats who -- gasp! -- opposed
> Kennedy's liberal politics. The shame of it! The
> audacity! To oppose this great man! The fact that the
> liberal media actively covered up his daily adulteries,
> which were security risks, given the Mob connection of some
> of them -- a fact presented earlier in the week on the PBS
> documentary, "The Kennedys" -- is rarely mentioned, and was
> never mentioned until several best-selling books revealed
> all this in the late 1980's.
>
> The only reference to the truth in that documentary
> was a brief sentence in retrospect by CBS's Bob Shieffer
> ("Face the Nation"), who was a reporter in Fort Worth at
> the time, who admits that Oswald was a leftist, but of
> course a lone nut -- no climate of opinion, you see. This
> segment was shown long after Jane Pauly's voice-over and
> film clips had pilloried the anti-Kennedy Democrats as pig-
> headed, insensitive brutes. The media have never forgiven
> conservatives in 1963 for not buying into Camelot, despite
> the fact that the myth of Camelot was entirely Jackie
> Kennedy's, who convinced Theodore White to invent it after
> her husband died (another fact discussed on "The
> Kennedys.")
>
> The irony of this neglect of Oswald's Marxist roots
> was made greater by what followed the airing of "JFK:
> Breaking the News." PBS ran an updated version of
> Frontline's 1993 3-hour documentary, "Who Was Lee Harvey
> Oswald?" This superb documentary shows exactly who he was
> and what he was: a dedicated lifelong Marxist who wanted to
> do something big for the cause and big for his reputation.
> But it received little attention in 1993, and I doubt that
> it will receive much this week.
>
> The show also reveals that Lyndon Johnson was briefed
> on Oswald within hours, and he deliberately told the press,
> meaning the publishers and wire service owners, not to
> mention Oswald's time in Russia and his subsequent Marxist
> agitation in New Orleans. The implication -- never
> mentioned -- is that Johnson controlled the press.
>
> The narrator says that Johnson feared a world war, the
> assassination having come only a year after the Cuban
> missile crisis. I suggest an additional reason: Johnson
> did not want to let the American public know that this was
> a gigantic failure of the American intelligence community,
> meaning the same kind of Keystone Cops failure that has
> marked everything associated with 9-11, from before 9-11
> until today.
>
> Both shows are scheduled to be broadcast again by PBS
> on the afternoon of November 22.
>
> Neither documentary mentioned the following story.
> This is the one that has grabbed my attention ever since I
> bought and read that remaindered book.
>
>
> THE BUBBLE TOP
>
> For those who explain history in terms of impersonal
> forces, the unique event is irrelevant. For those who
> favor a conspiracy view of history, the unique event has
> meaning only in terms of the conspiracy. As for me, I am a
> believer in the overwhelming significance of the unique
> event. Remove it, and everything would have turned out
> differently. Here is my favorite example of the unique
> event, itself the product of a series of unique events,
> that changed everything.
>
> Unique event: Late November can be cold in Dallas.
> But on that crucial day, it was warm. Forecasters had
> predicted cool weather. That was why Jackie Kennedy was
> wearing a wool suit.
>
> Unique event: Kennedy had spoken that morning in Fort
> Worth, 30 miles west of Dallas. Instead of driving to
> Dallas, the President and his entourage flew from Ft. Worth
> to Dallas, landing at Love Field. (There was no DFW
> airport in 1963. DFW was Lyndon Johnson's gift to air
> travel.)
>
> Unique event: At Love Field were stationed the cars
> that would carry the President and the others through the
> 11-mile motorcade trip to downtown Dallas. Both cars were
> convertibles. The President's car had a removable plastic
> bubble, just in case bad weather made it too cold or too
> wet for comfort.
>
> Unique event: Love Field that day had an outdoor phone
> line connected to the desk of "The Dallas Times Herald." A
> local reporter used it to phone in stories about the
> scheduled motorcade.
>
> Then came a truly unique series of events. Here is
> the published account by the on-site reporter.
>
> Just before the plane was scheduled to leave
> Fort Worth for the short flight to Dallas, the
> rewrite man, Stan Weinberg, asked me if the
> bubble top was going to be on the presidential
> limousine. It would help to know now, he said,
> before he wrote the story later under pressure.
> It had been raining early that morning, and there
> was some uncertainty about it.
>
> I told Stan that I would find it. I put the
> phone down and walked over to a small ramp where
> the motorcade limousines were being held in
> waiting. I spotted Forrest Sorels, the agent in
> charge of the Dallas Secret Service office. I
> knew Mr. Sorrels fairly well, because I was then
> the regular federal beat reporter. . . .
>
> I looked down the ramp. The bubble top was
> on the president's car.
>
> Rewrite wants to know if the bubble top's
> going to stay on, I said to Mr. Sorrels, a man of
> fifty or so who wore dignified glasses and
> resembled a preacher or bank president.
>
> He looked at the sky and then hollered over
> at one of his agents holding a two-way radio in
> his hand. What about the weather downtown? he
> asked the agent.
>
> The agent talked into his radio for a few
> seconds, then listened. Clear, he hollered back.
>
> Mr. Sorrels yelled back at the agents
> standing by the car: "Take off the bubble top!"
>
> Just over twelve hours later, I was part of
> the bedlam at the Dallas police station along
> with hundreds of other reporters. I went into
> the police chief's outer office to await the
> breakup of a meeting in Chief Jesse Curry's main
> office. I had no idea who was in there.
>
> The door opened and out walked several men.
> One of them was Forrest Sorrels. He looked tired
> and sad. And bewildered. He saw me and I moved
> toward him. His eyes were wet. He paused
> briefly, shook his head slightly and whispered,
> "Take off the bubble top."
>
> The history of mankind is filled with "what if" and
> "if only" events that surround every major event. In
> American history, this is one of the big what-ifs, yet it
> is still unknown to the public.
>
> A plastic bubble might not have stopped the bullets
> that hit the passengers in that limousine, but it would
> have given any sharpshooter concern. A bullet can be
> deflected. There is no guarantee that an undeflected
> bullet will hit its target, and a plastic bubble would have
> added greatly to the uncertainty. Would the assassin or
> assassins have pulled the trigger(s)?
>
> There is also no way to know if someone other than
> Forrest Sorrels might have decided after the plane landed
> to take off the bubble top. What we do know, and what Mr.
> Sorrels knew that day, is this: a seemingly peripheral
> question by a rewrite man, relayed through a reporter, led
> to a call downtown by a two-way radio. Assessment:
> "Clear." Events in Dallas on that fateful day were never
> clear again.
>
> This story would be known by almost no one, had it not
> been for the reporter's subsequent career, which justified
> a book publishing company's taking a risk by publishing his
> autobiography. The Dallas reporter subsequently became
> America's most prominent playwright-novelist-newscaster,
> Jim Lehrer, of the "Lehrer News Hour." His book is titled,
> "A Bus of My Own." It was published in 1992. It did not
> sell well.
>
> I suspect that more people have learned about this
> unique "what-if" event today than have learned about it
> over the last eleven years.
>
>
> JOHNSON REPLACES KENNEDY
>
> Our lives are influenced by events far beyond our
> capacity to perceive at the time or understand after the
> fact, let alone predict in advance. On that bright, sunny
> day in Dallas, Lyndon Johnson became President. He
> subsequently escalated a war in Vietnam that Kennedy had
> begun. America changed dramatically because the sun was
> shining in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
>
> The can-do optimism of New Deal political liberalism
> did not survive the Kennedy assassination and the war in
> Vietnam. Two months after the assassination, the Beatles
> arrived in America, setting off what was to become the
> counter-culture of the 1960's. But what we think of as
> "the sixties" actually began in February, 1964. November
> 22, 1963, remains the great divide.
>
> Johnson's "guns and butter" spending policies expanded
> the Federal deficit. The war in Vietnam and the war on
> poverty had to be paid for. Johnson preferred to borrow
> and inflate rather than raise taxes, except for a minor and
> temporary 10% income tax surcharge in 1968. To hide the
> reality of the deficit, Johnson persuaded Congress in 1968
> to allow him to put the Social Security Administration
> surplus into the general fund's accounting system. Prior
> to 1968, the trust funds were outside of the general fund's
> accounting system. Ever since 1968, the government has
> counted undispersed trust fund income as present income
> receipts rather than as long-term obligations, i.e., debts.
> That decision made it easier for subsequent administrations
> to hide what is happening to the retirement schemes of
> Americans. It will have enormous effects for decades,
> beginning no later than 2011, when the baby boomers begin
> to retire.
>
> If the bubble top had been installed, it is doubtful
> that any of this would have happened. None of this was
> inevitable, humanly speaking. If there was a pattern here
> -- and I believe there was -- no conspiracy established it.
> (Read Psalm 2.)
>
>
> CONTROL OF AND BY THE PRESS
>
> We forget what America has become since that day in
> 1963. Presidential motorcades are no longer organized for
> public viewing. A convertible for a President is as old
> hat as a top hat at the President's inauguration -- last
> seen at Kennedy's inauguration. Presidents no longer make
> themselves visible to the public on the streets at
> scheduled events. Jimmy Carter walked up Pennsylvania
> Avenue on Inauguration Day in 1977. After "cousin John"
> Hinckley shot Reagan in 1981, things changed.
>
> In 1981, the press played the same game of "pretend
> it's not there." George Bush was in line to succeed
> President Reagan. Had Hinckley used a .38 or a .357, Bush
> probably would have succeeded to the Presidency. In the
> ancient game of "Who Wins?" he would have been the obvious
> winner.
>
> The day after the failed attempt, the following story
> was released on the news wires by the Associated Press. It
> was run in the "Houston Post." It was run almost nowhere
> else. On the day of the assassination, Scott Hinckley, the
> brother of John, was scheduled to have dinner with Neil
> Bush, brother of George W. Bush and son of then-Vice
> President Bush. The Hinckleys were initially reported as
> having made large donations to George Bush Sr.'s
> presidential campaign, but the family denied this, and
> there was no follow-up by the press. The story of the
> hastily cancelled dinner engagement received virtually no
> attention by the media. Only the Web has kept it alive.
>
> http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38432f49307d.htm
>
> Had the press investigated the story, some reporter
> might have come across the curious fact that the Bushes and
> the Hinckleys are related. The genealogical link goes back
> to the same founding father, Samuel Hinckley (1652-1698).
> On this, see this genealogical site:
>
> http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~addams/presidential/bush.html
>
> No one in the media noticed this until my wife's
> brother-in-law began working on the family tree of my wife
> and her sister. He came across the web site, with its link
> to Samuel Hinckley, whose name did not register with him,
> and he sent me the information on the Bush connection. I
> saw "Hinckley," and the alarm bell went off. I looked more
> closely. The genealogist had not missed the connection.
>
> Samuel Hinckley m. Martha Lathrop (see 8732, below)
> Samuel Hinckley m. Zerviah Breed
> Abel Hinckley m. Sarah Hubbard
> Abel Hinckley m. Elizabeth Wheeler
> Alfred Hinckley m. Elizabeth Stanley
> Francis Edward Hinckley m. Amelia Smith
> Percy Porter Hinckley m. Katherine Arvilla
> Warnock
> John Warnock Hinckley m. Jo Anne Moore
> JOHN WARNOCK HINCKLEY (b. 1955), attempted
> assassin
>
> I released this information in my October 5, 2001
> issue of REALITY CHECK, "News Stories That Are Somehow Not
> Worth Pursuing." This story remains not worth pursuing in
> the eyes of the media. No one picked it up. I did not
> think anyone would.
>
> If you think that the media have learned their
> collective lesson, you are naive. The same suppression
> goes on. Consider 9-11. Consider United Airlines Flight
> 93 over western Pennsylvania. The media ignore the
> obvious: debris was scattered up to eight miles away from
> the crash site. Are we to believe that this debris
> bounced? No, we are to believe the story of the brave
> victims who crashed the plane. We are not to inquire about
> that scattered debris. We are to forget about it. No
> establishment reporter asks the obvious: Was the plane shot
> down high above the landscape? Were it not for the Web,
> these facts would be lost.
>
> http://www.flight93crash.com
>
> http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30682
>
>
> CONCLUSION
>
> It is a grand illusion to believe that what we do
> today can immunize ourselves from the fallout from the
> seemingly random events of life. We can buy gold, we can
> live in gated communities, but the hard realities of life
> penetrate the high walls of our long-term plans.
>
> Uncertainty is a fact of life. This is why we should
> rejoice that there are entrepreneurs out there who put
> their capital on the line to assist future consumers in
> their quest to reduce uncertainty. Someone must deal with
> uncertainty. Capitalism's great gift to mankind is that it
> allows specialists to do this merely for the opportunity to
> reap a profit by opening their wallets to the possibility
> of losses. This is a cheap price for services rendered.
>
> -------------
>
> -- Been to the Daily Reckoning Marketplace Yet? --
>
> If not, you ought to see what you've been missing.
>
> Want to read more from our regular contributors? This
> is the place to find it.
>
> We've collected some of the best financial advice and
> commentary available anywhere and presented it to you
> all in one place. Take a look:
>
> http://www.dailyreckoning.com/marketplace.cfm
>
> -------------
>
> To subscribe to Reality Check go to:
>
> http://www.dailyreckoning.com/sub/GetReality.cfm
>
> -------------
>
> If you enjoy Reality Check and would like to read more
> of Gary's writing please visit his website:
>
> http://www.freebooks.com
>
> -------------
>
> If you'd like to suggest Reality Check to a friend,
> please forward this letter to them or point them to:
>
> http://www.dailyreckoning.com/sub/GetReality.cfm
>
> -------------
>
> E-mail Address Change? Just go to Subscriber Services:
>
> http://www.dailyreckoning.com/RC/services.cfm
>
> and give us your new address.
>
> *******
> Please note: We sent this e-mail to:
> Frank Purcell <mentor@arisbe.net>
> because you or someone using your e-mail address subscribed to this
> service.
>
> *******
> To manage your e-mail subscription, use our web interface at:
> http://www.agoramail.net/Home.cfm?List=RC-Only
> Or to end your e-mail subscription, send a blank e-mail to:
> RC-Only_unsub@agoramail.net
> To cancel or for any other subscription issues, write us at:
> Order Processing Center
> Attn: Customer Service
> P.O. Box 925
> Frederick, MD 21705
=====
Looking for an opportunity? http://arisbe.estarnetwork.com/.