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On a Bright, Sunny Day in Dallas
> 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.
>
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>
> 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.
>
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no subject
your journal was recommended to me by defcon9 and I must say it seems fascinating. With your permission, I'd like to add you.
Feel free.
no subject
I only skimmed the stuff after the bubble ordeal, but I read the rest of it. A lot of that seems really poorly written in more than one way-- for one, a lot of it (especially the bubble ordeal) is written in a very unclear manner. More importantly, the dramatic rhetoric is really the most convincing thing about it, which is not to say much.
The stuff about LHO especially struck me as very biased. First of all, its mention of criticism of the Warren Commission is really misleading, because it dismisses it as just some random whim of the public. Sure, the very improbability of the lone gunman theory-- most notably the "magic bullet" theory-- is something that turns most people off from the start. But the Warren Commission had some very shady--to say the least--ways of going about things, such as reversing pictures to prove their point about the single bullet. Its findings were well worthy of the intense scrutiny and criticism they have received.
Sure, the information about LHO was true-- but how does that lead to the lone gunman conclusion? This may just be part of the poor writing-- it may not have been trying to use that to convince anyone of the lone gunman theory--but I got the impression that this was supposed to be weighty evidence in support of the theory, which it is not in any way. There is so much information about LHO out there; it's really rather insane. There is even a theory that there were two men both posing as him (one of many very interesting conspiracy theories. One states that a man pumping an umbrella in Dealy Plaza that day was using a weapon that was available at the time, which shot darts capable of stunning someone, which would explain the President's abnormal lack of movement prior to the fatal shot, by some accounts).
In any event, anyone who begins to research the JFK assassination must immediately realize that every aspect of the situation is far too complicated to be explained away by the shoddy, shady work of the Warren Commission. There are far too many political motivations, important leads to pertinent characters-- hell, still, no one is sure exactly how many shots were fired. Some things people can be relatively sure about (for instance, the bullet that hit the curb, injuring a bystander) have been denied by the government (in this case, the FBI at least). It is obvious that a hell of a lot was going on at the time. Whether it was all related to the successful assassination attempt is cloudy at best.
It is highly likely that no one will ever know the whole of the explanation for the assassination of JFK, but it is clear to me that any simple answer cannot be correct.
Also, to put a more poignant note on the bubble story, apparently Jackie was very concerned about the motorcade, and begged JFK to allow them to use the bubble. She even tried to convince him by saying that her hair would get messed up.
Oh, and that stuff about Johnson is pretty damned biased. I mean, Johnson was certainly not perfect, but it is certain that Vietnam tarnished his reputation more than it deserved to be. Where his foreign policy was certainly problematic, his domestic policy was really very noble. You could also say that if JFK hadn't be assassinated, there would be no PBS (YES, NO SESAME STREET!). But because of the stigma attached to Vietnam and Johnson, no one says that, or recognizes him for his ambitious social policies. Vietnam was really tragic for more than its own reasons-- it also slowly choked out a lot of really excellent ideas that he otherwise would have had the force to put through.
Anyway, wow, dig some rant there. :-p
Interesting points.
If there was a conspiracy, could the conspirators count on the bubble not being on? Or was the shooter close enough that he was confident of a good hit through the plastic?
One of the interesting things I got from the Epstein book is the idea that LHO got JFK elected in the first place.
Not that that was his intention.