An Interview With Joseph McBride

Transcription

1 An Interview With Joseph McBride by Dan Akira Nashimura

2 San Francisco State University professor Joseph McBride has published seventeen books, mostly about film. Growing up an Irish Catholic, young Joe aspired to be a priest or (after discovering girls) a lawyer/politician. Those plans ended abruptly when President Kennedy, the man he and his family had campaigned for, was shot and killed. His arduous research has culminated in the publication of Into The Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit. President Kennedy s death set me firmly on my course to be a professional writer rather than a politician. True to his Irish roots, McBride shows innate storytelling abilities as he describes his grief, anger and eventual resolve to set the record straight about that terrifying weekend in November Like a bespectacled Phillip Marlowe, McBride follows the trails of clues wherever they lead, pouring through documents, interviewing relatives, law enforcement officials, and eyewitnesses and ultimately butting up against Washington insiders like Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush family juggernaut and the editors of the supposedly liberal publications, The Nation, The New York Times and The Washington Post. While maintaining the principles he was raised with, he s become a political gadfly, willing to take on all sides. Our interview took place as Tea Party Republicans had managed to do something even the murder of a president couldn t accomplish a partial shutdown of the government. 116 NOIR CITY I FALL 2013 I filmnoirfoundation.org

3 Noir City: Joe, we greatly appreciate your taking the time to discuss your new book. First question: Are the premiums on your life insurance paid up? JosephMcBride: Thanks for your concern, Dan. Numerous witnesses to the assassination and related events have been killed, as well as various players in the actual plot, but relatively few reporters (Jim Koethe and Bill Hunter are among the people on the pioneer JFK assassination researcher Penn Jones s mysterious deaths list). That s not to say this kind of thing does not still happen in America from time to time (the violent death of Michael Hastings is certainly suspicious), but when you investigate the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of Officer Tippit, you have to plough along and not succumb to fear or intimidation. The weapon most often used to attack researchers in our society is ridiculing them as conspiracy theorists or worse; you have to ignore that and become proud of such labels. On a related note, my father, Raymond E. McBride, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal, asked President Kennedy in May 1962, Do you ever worry about being assassinated? Kennedy replied that he couldn t think about being assassinated, because it would be hard for him to do his job if he did. He should have worried about it more and there is evidence he was aware of increasing danger, even speaking about it on the morning of his death but he was fatalistic and had to do his job. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in his autobiography, A man who won t die for something is not fit to live. NC: You ve been studying the JFK assassination since it happened. Twenty years after that, you began your active investigation. In , you conducted a number of interviews in and around Dallas, uncovering some previously unreported aspects of the case regarding Officer J. D. Tippit s murder. Why have you waited another twenty years to publish your findings? JM: I have been following the case from a few minutes after Kennedy was shot. I ran from my high school to a radio in a nearby drugstore to listen to the breaking news reports. The first reports I heard from about 12:40 onward said the shots came My early awareness of how the story was being altered, without explanation, helped me realize by the end of that day that Oswald was innocent. from the front, from the railroad bridge or from the grassy knoll. By 1 p.m., the reports started saying all the shots came from behind, from a building called the Texas School Book Depository. My early awareness of how the story was being altered, without explanation, helped me realize by the end of that day that Oswald was innocent. That and my belief in his statements of innocence on live television. I followed the case sporadically until the late 1970s, when I began reading about it seriously. I launched my own investigation in From then until Into the Nightmare was published this June, I read about it and studied it every day (as I continue to do). I had several period of on-site research in Washington and Dallas in the eighties and nineties. Why did it take so long to complete the book? Part of the reason was that I had other jobs to do to earn a living (including writing other books), but this subject was always my avocation. And so much was coming out in the way of documents (millions of pages of previously classified U.S. government documents were released in the 1990s as a result of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act), and other independent researchers were making valuable contributions in various areas of this highly complex case. government documents were released in the 1990s as a result of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act), and other independent researchers were making valuable contributions in various areas of this highly complex case. It took me this long to fully understand as much of the case as I do and to be able to assemble and make clear all my findings. The actual writing of the book took nine years. I spent two years writing one chapter and rewrote it four times before breaking it into two chapters. It was the hardest book to write that I ve ever tackled, and I am pleased that I was able to finally complete my long labor of love. NC: In the back cover photo, you look like either a young missionary or a junior spook with the CIA. What was your approach in contacting people years after the fact? Were you provided introductions by other researchers or did you have to make cold calls? You appear to have established a good rapport with your subjects. Was it tough trying to find common ground? filmnoirefoundation.org I FALL 2013 I NOIR CITY 117

4 JM: I did it the old-fashioned way, going to Dallas and making phone calls to ask for interviews. I found some in the phone book and had to track down others with help from other researchers and so forth. You learn in doing investigative reporting and books that one interviewee can help lead to others; it s a question you always ask people. Of course, it was not easy finding some witnesses: many have died, vanished, or moved away some out of fear. I was remarkably fortunate to find some highly important interview subjects, such as J. D. Tippit s father, Edgar Lee Tippit, who had never been interviewed before, and J. D. s mistress Johnnie Maxie Witherspoon, who had rarely been interviewed. Both gave me remarkably insightful interviews. Two of my most revealing interviews were with Detective James Leavelle, the lead detective in the Tippit case, and Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade. I questioned both of them closely about the case and its many flaws and elicited admissions from them about how weak the case was against Oswald for both shootings and why they concentrated on trying to nail him for the Tippit killing. Oswald was never even arraigned for the murder of President Kennedy, only for the murder of Officer Tippit, although he was charged with both crimes. NC: W. Penn Jones, Jr., who became your mentor, reminded me of the newspaper editor in Billy Wilder s Ace in Hole (1951). Small town papers seemed to be the only ones asking the tough questions back then. JM: Penn is one of my heroes. There are heroes in this case, but they are the little people, the witnesses who bravely came forward and the independent-minded reporters and researchers who dug into the case despite all odds and endured much ridicule and other abuse. Penn edited the Midlothian Mirror, in a small town outside Dallas, and was a relentless and fearless reporter in the old-fashioned shoe-leather tradition. Even before the assassination, his office was firebombed. He started researching the case the day Kennedy was killed but said, I didn t believe it was a conspiracy till Sunday mornin. That s how naive I was. But he was unstoppable for many years until Alzheimer s brought him down by the early 1990s. I met him in Dealey Plaza on my first visit there on the twentieth anniversary of the assassination in 1983, when he was leading his annual memorial service on the grassy knoll, and we had an instant rapport. He reminded me of my friend Samuel Fuller, the great writer-director, another old newspaperman with a gruff exterior and a warm heart, and a passion for the truth. I visited Penn frequently on my visits to Dallas. He advised me, as he did others, to Pick one aspect of the case, one that hasn t been studied enough, and research the hell out of it. NC: You interviewed James R. Leavelle, the policeman in the Stetson handcuffed to Oswald when he was shot by Jack Ruby. Leavelle told you they d been treating the JFK assassination like a South Dallas nigger killin. My God, it was the President of United States! A judge in the Jack Ruby trial told Leavelle basically the same thing about Oswald s murder. What was going through your mind when you heard that? JM: I was stunned. Leavelle did preface that comment with As the old saying goes back then. But he said it with a little smile, as if he were genuinely amused by the remark. Evidently it was a common view among the Dallas police. Many of them, according to Penn Jones and others, were Ku Joseph McBride in Dealey Plaza on the 20th Anniversary of the assassination in NOIR CITY I FALL 2013 I filmnoirfoundation.org

5 Klux Klan members. I was stunned when I was interviewing retired Dallas Police Detective Morris Brumley, who had been a boyhood friend of Tippit, and Brumley pulled out his KKK regional membership card (signed by the Grand Dragon in 1959). Brumley claimed he had infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan for the Dallas Police Department from 1957 through But when I asked about his activities with the Klan, he said, Oh, hell, I went out some places you went out and whipped the niggers, you know, castrate em if you catch one with a white woman, you know, stuff like that. When you hear shocking comments such as that, as an investigative reporter you don t object but keep the person talking to find out as much as you can for the record. If you express your outrage, they would stop talking. I was able to get many people to say things you might not expect and that helped reveal the mindset of Dallas in 1963 and other significant insights into the case. The Parallax View, 1974 I was able to get many people to say things you might not expect and that helped reveal the mindset of Dallas in 1963 NC: In The Parallax View (1974), witnesses to an assassination are being killed off one by one. Reporter George Frady (Warren Beatty) discovers the Parallax Corporation, a school for assassins. They administer a test, a video of still images that traces the evolution of a killer. It s an extremely disturbing film-within-a-film. In your research, you found the Rorschach blot test administered to J. D. Tippit by the Dallas police shortly after he was hired. Like the Warren Beatty character, Tippit was found to be antisocial and, of course, kept his job. JM: That s an intriguing parallel. The Rorschach test concluded, This man appears to be wholly devoid of any imaginative faculties. His grip on reality is below the average. Errors of judgment may be expected. And the examiner wrote that Tippit was within the limits of the average in his thinking that corresponds with that of the community at large, which tells us something about Dallas and its police department. I found abundant evidence that Tippit, until his death, was suffering from what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from his experiences in World War II. One manifestation was that he had trouble looking people in the eye he would look down at his feet or look away. This can be a fatal flaw for a policeman. Tippit s father told me that during the background investigation for Tippit s hiring, a minister who knew them told the Dallas Police Department, He s a good boy but he s no policeman. That should have caused concern as well. Tippit s friend Morris Brumley told me, I don t think he met people real well. He was real quiet. He wouldn t say shit if he had a mouthful. Tippit s father told me that after the war, J. D. was nervous, I would call him. There were many who came back wild. The war ruined a lot of people s nerves. It took several years before J. D. settled down. He had it pretty rough as a paratrooper, jumping out of planes. His nerves was shot for a few years. He was clearly a man with filmnoirefoundation.org I FALL 2013 I NOIR CITY 119

6 serious psychological issues. He had killed a man with another officer in the line of duty and on another occasion was attacked by a disturbed man with an ice pick, causing him to limp for the rest of his life. While he left few traces of his political views, Tippit moved in the circles of the extreme right in Dallas and could have been recruited for the plot by some of those contacts. His father told me that J. D. had uncanny shooting ability. NC: As a boy in 1962, I was greatly disappointed that The Manchurian Candidate wasn t the traditional war movie I was hoping for. I think I fell asleep. I can now appreciate the satire and marvel at its unintended prophecy. Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) has an evil mother played by Angela Lansbury. What about her real-life counterpart, Ruth Paine, Oswald s local CIA handler? Did you try to track her down? JM: That first adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate is a great film, and the novel by Richard Condon is the book I ve read most often (seven times, compared with six for David Halberstam s The Best and the Brightest). Condon s novel is astonishing and somehow seems almost totally new every time I read it. Ruth Paine, Oswald s local CIA handler and her husband....why after her home in Irving, where she lived with Marina Oswald, was thoroughly searched for two days by the Dallas police and sheriff s departments, she kept turning up key pieces of evidence supposedly incriminating Lee Oswald. Officer J. D. Tippit I did not interview Ruth Paine for my book, because I wasn t investigating Oswald s background primarily. Other researchers have done so in great depth, most notably John Armstrong in his book Harvey & Lee, which finally convinced me that the theory 120 NOIR CITY I FALL 2013 I filmnoirfoundation.org

7 that there were two people using Oswald s identity is correct. I did go hear Ruth Paine give a talk in September 2013 to the Sonoma Valley Historical Society in northern California. She is eighty-one and still lucid and disciplined in her telling of what in spycraft would be called Oswald s legend. The questions at the event had to be written and were screened; I put in three but only one was asked. I wanted to know why after her home in Irving, where she lived with Marina Oswald, was thoroughly searched for two days by the Dallas police and sheriff s departments, she kept turning up key pieces of evidence supposedly incriminating Lee Oswald. That question seemed to rattle her a bit, and she launched into a long account focusing partly on the Russianlanguage letter supposedly by Oswald that was used, speciously, to link him to the attempt to murder General Edwin Walker. Some intriguing nuances emerged during her talk, mostly between the lines; C-SPAN was there videotaping the event, so you and your readers can see it eventually. I wish they had asked her my my other questions, including one about her and her sister s involvement with the CIA. NC: Frank Sinatra s other assassination movie, Suddenly (1954), would be forgettable without the ironic Kennedy/Sinatra connection. If I recall the plot correctly, the Sinatra character and his cronies don t have a political ax to grind it s just business. Is a contract hit man scenario feasible with the JFK assassination? The shooting itself, aided intentionally or not by the Secret Service, was perfectly executed but the cover-up was botched from the beginning. JM: After the Dealey Plaza hit succeeded, it seems that the plot was starting to unravel, necessitating some improvisation; the scapegoat, Oswald, was captured alive and needed to be silenced. The cover-up has worked well in some ways, especially by snowing and/or intimidating the mainstream media into compliance, to this day. But the public is smarter than the General Edwin Walker filmnoirefoundation.org I FALL 2013 I NOIR CITY 121

8 media; seventy to eighty percent of the American public has never believed the official story. A contract hit against President Kennedy is likely, at least in the case of some of the three or four gunmen, although we can t be sure of their identities. Various people have been suggested as possible killers, and I explore the possibility that Tippit may have been Badge Man, the man in a Dallas policeman s uniform who was photographed firing from behind the concrete retaining wall on the grassy knoll. NC: In the mid-to-late 1960s, Time and Life would occasionally dole out stories pertaining to the assassination. You describe how the Zapruder film, the home movie shot by clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder, was released piecemeal and without attribution until later. Another series in Life magazine that I recall dealt with the Oswalds. Marina Oswald was portrayed as a young innocent, a sweet Russian girl who got in with the wrong crowd. She s elsewhere been exposed as a Mata Hari-like femme fatale with Soviet intelligence connections. Was she a Russian spy who got turned by the CIA? The cover-up has worked well in some ways, especially by snowing and/or intimidating the mainstream media into compliance, to this day. But the public is smarter than the media; seventy to eighty percent of the American public has never believed the official story. the Secret Service and threatened with deportation. She has told so many conflicting and false stories over the years that her more recent statements about Lee being innocent don t hold any more weight than her earlier statements to the contrary. NC: In Goodbye World (2013) a character with government experience understands the meaning behind the President s coded message when he appears on television after a Y2K meltdown. When a beat-up looking Oswald was brought before the television cameras, he professed innocence and asked for legal assistance. As a sixteen year old, you saw the pathos of the moment and sympathized with his situation. Has anyone to your knowledge analyzed Oswald s words for a message he may have been trying to communicate to his CIA and FBI handlers? Was he trying to maintain deep cover? Or, do you think he realized the game, whatever it was, was up? JM: Apparently he was waiting for legal representation or for other help. We don t know for sure what he was saying under interrogation, because a complete and reliable record apparently was not kept. We have learned that on Saturday, November 23rd, Oswald made two mysterious phone calls from the Dallas jail. One was to an unknown party, and then he tried to place a call to a former U.S. Army Counterintelligence agent living in North Carolina, John David Hurt, but that the police wouldn t put the call through. That attempt to reach out to a man who may have been a contact in a cutout system may have helped seal Oswald s fate. NC: If he were a fall guy, the self-confessed patsy, what could he have thought his mission in Dallas was? JM: I believe Oswald was infiltrating the plot against Kennedy for the FBI and did not realize he was being set up by the CIA and others to be the fall guy. JM: Dallas FBI Special Agent James P. Hosty, Jr., who was monitoring the Oswalds before the assassination, writes in his 1996 memoir, Assignment: Oswald, that he suspected both Marina and Lee of being KGB sleeper agents. Marina s uncle, with whom she lived in Minsk, was a lieutenant colonel in the MVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, an agency with secret police authority, and she may have been used in KGB honeytrap intelligence operations to ensnare American defectors (including another one, Robert Webster, before Oswald). She may have been turned even before the assassination to work for American intelligence, along with Ruth Paine. Marina certainly did everything she could after the assassination to cooperate with the American authorities to help frame her husband. She was under duress, literally held prisoner by 122 NOIR CITY I FALL 2013 I filmnoirfoundation.org

9 Head of Mexico City CIA where Oswald was purported to have visited. Marina Oswald Incredible photo taken just as Jack Ruby moves in to gun down Lee Harvey Oswald. Lee Harvey Oswald being escorted by Dallas police. filmnoirefoundation.org I FALL 2013 I NOIR CITY 123

10 President and Mrs. Kennedy and Texas Governor and Mrs Connolly in the motorcade only moments before the assassination. The Dallas police knew who he was. I learned that Officer Tippit and another policeman were secretly sent in pursuit of Oswald shortly after the assassination and before he was officially regarded as a suspect, which is proof of a conspiracy to scapegoat him, if not to kill him. It s known that he had delivered a message to the FBI shortly before the assassination, which was destroyed after he was killed. The Dallas Morning News reported in its edition published the morning he was killed that Oswald was interviewed by the FBI on November 16th. Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, a former FBI agent, told me that Oswald had spoken with the FBI s Hosty within a day or two [before the assassination], I don t know exactly. We don t know what Oswald was telling them, but he was involved with anti-castro Cubans and other rightwing elements, most likely as an infiltrator, and may well have been trying to help stop the plot. An FBI informant named I believe Oswald was infiltrating the plot against Kennedy for the FBI and did not realize he was being set up by the CIA and others to be the fall guy. Lee helped stop a plot against Kennedy in Chicago when he was to visit there on November 2, 1963, a trip that was called off at the last minute because the Secret Service and Chicago police couldn t find all the conspirators. This incident was hushed up until Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden eventually managed to reveal it. NC: Jacqueline Kennedy was quoted as saying of her blood-stained clothing, I want them to see what they have done to Jack. It s curious she would use they. It may have been a figure of speech referring to the haters she knew were out there. Still, she was there in the limousine, heard and felt the shots, probably knew instinctively the bullets were coming from more than one direction. Was she interviewed by the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee on Assassinations? JM: I think her comment, made to several people that day, and her conspicuous re- 124 NOIR CITY I FALL 2013 I filmnoirfoundation.org

11 President and First lady arrive in Texas, November Right: Vice-President Lyndon Johnson being sworn in, on the plane, as President. fusal to change her clothes, indicated knowledge of a crossfire. Mrs. Kennedy was interviewed by the Warren Commission, rather gingerly and sketchily, but not by the HSCA. The commission didn t ask her probing questions. Comments she made about her husband s wound were censored from the Warren volumes and only later revealed. It s known that she and Robert Kennedy soon realized that this was a rightwing plot. They had an emissary tell that to the Soviets shortly after the assassination, while assuring them they didn t believe the USSR had anything to do with it. The Kennedy family, for complicated reasons, has largely kept silent publicly about the case. NC: Do you believe Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade s story that it was Jackie Kennedy who demanded that her husband s body be brought back to Washington, thereby canceling the legally mandated autopsy about to be performed at Parkland Memorial? JM: There s no genuine evidence that Mrs. Kennedy was the filmnoirefoundation.org I FALL 2013 I NOIR CITY 125

12 one who insisted on taking her husband s body from Parkland. Kennedy aides and Secret Service agents used that as an excuse to break the law by refusing the Dallas County medical examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, the right to conduct the autopsy. He did the impeccable autopsies on Tippit and Oswald, and if he had been allowed to do the autopsy on Kennedy, the plot would have been blown. So it was literally a matter of life or death for those parties to steal the coffin, which I believe may have been empty. Guns were drawn against Dr. Rose and Dallas policemen The body may have been spirited out a tunnel from Parkland. This is one of the most disturbing incidents in the case, and it made a great impression on me when I first learned about it in William Manchester s 1967 book The Death of a President, November 20- November 25, When I interviewed Henry Wade, he took responsibility for letting the coffin be removed from Dallas. But he expressed misgivings, admitting that Dr. Rose could have done a better job. And that [military] autopsy was probably the poorest autopsy I ever saw. I probably made a lot of mistakes. NC: We ve talked about the doubling that occurs in Vertigo (1958), an Alfred Hitchcock trademark. Unlikely as it seems, there were three men named Tippit or Tippett on the Dallas Police Department in That made it convenient for witnesses to backtrack on testimony. You also mention the speculation about multiple Oswalds. Strangely, J. D. Tippit possessed some of the qualities incorrectly attributed to Oswald by the Warren Commission, one being that he was an expert marks man. Another point rarely discussed that you relate in the book is the planned attempt on the President s life not long before Dallas. Could you tell us about the patsy in that scenario? JM: Investigative journalist Edwin Black wrote an outstanding 1975 article on the plot against Kennedy in Chicago on November 2, 1963, the day South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated. The Chicago plot was foiled by the Chicago police, the Secret Service, and the FBI, although they didn t catch all the hit men, and the plot was hushed up. Kennedy s trip to Chicago was canceled at the last minute. The apparent patsy was Thomas Arthur Vallee, a Chicago mirror image of what Oswald was said to be: a thirty-year-old ex-marine who had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic by military doctors, and later had trained anti-castro Cubans to assassinate Castro. Vallee had a job in a warehouse overlooking Kennedy s motorcade route and was arrested that morning after being found with weapons and ammunition. There also were plots against Kennedy that November 18 in Tampa and Miami, Florida. There also were plots against Kennedy that November 18 in Tampa and Miami, Florida. Despite all this, the Secret Service protection for Kennedy in Dallas was far more lax than usual. Despite all this, the Secret Service protection for Kennedy in Dallas was far more lax than usual. NC: In a previous Noir City interview, you spoke at length about Orson Welles. You ve written that he planned a movie to be called either Assassin or The Safe House, from a screenplay by Donald Freed [Executive Action (1973)]. The story was about Sirhan Sirhan and the Bobby Kennedy killing. That film never got made, but you quote Oliver Stone s remarkable comment that Welles should have directed JFK. Do you recall Welles saying anything about either Kennedy assassination? JM: Not to me. But I ve read Welles s fine screenplay Assassin, his rewrite of Freed s script on the subject. It deals Sirhan being brainwashed in a safe house by an intelligence programmer who would havebeen played by Welles himself. Welles shows Sirhan being set up as the patsy in a plot run by the FBI and carried out by a paramilitary group. This script is based on documented evidence. Sirhan did not shoot Robert Kennedy. The autopsy by Dr. Thomas Noguchi showed that the fatal shot to the head was fired from behind, from less than one inch on an upward trajectory. Sirhan was always in front of Kennedy, firing from a standing position, and at least three feet away. His shots wounded other people. There were more shots fired than Sirhan s gun held. The likely suspect for Kennedy s actual killer is security guard Thane Eugene Cesar, a right winger who was following immediately behind Kennedy. This is another assassination, like those of JFK and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which used a patsy. Scapegoats are often used to conceal the true nature of such plots and blame them on supposed lone nuts in order to distract the public from the actual political implications. NC: Not to minimize its importance, but pushing through civil rights legislation seems to have given LBJ effective liberal cover, at least for a time. Isn t that right? JM: Johnson was a tragic figure. I believe he was involved in the plotting of the assassination, though the evidence brought forth to date is largely circumstantial. He was certainly the one who made the cover-up possible, since he had the power to control the military autopsy, the FBI investigation through his close friend J. Edgar Hoover, and through the Warren Commission, whose actual title was the President s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. And Johnson secretly gave the order on November 24, 1963, to 126 NOIR CITY I FALL 2013 I filmnoirfoundation.org

13 widen the Vietnam War. Kennedy had been in the process of trying to wind it down and withdraw. Johnson was in serious danger of not only being dropped from the 1964 ticket but also of going to jail because of corruption investigations taking place at the time of the assassination, including a hearing taking place at that exact moment in Washington. Johnson s telephone conversations reveal that as early as the spring of 1964, he knew widening the war would be futile but that he felt powerless to stop it. Those in the military-industrial complex who put him in power (he was owned and operated by Brown & Root, the Houston construction company that became part of Halliburton in 1962) forced him to wage the war for their profit. The war then killed the Great Society and shadowed Johnson s accomplishments in civil rights and other areas. Johnson s senior advisers, The Wise Men, ordered him in March 1968 not to run for re-election following the Tet Offensive. Johnson told Henry Brandon of the Sunday Times of London in a conversation later that year: The only difference between Kennedy s assassination and mine is that mine was a live one, which makes it all a little more torturing. NC: Liberal icon Bill Moyers was one of Johnson s boys. You repeat the shocking charge, something you won t hear on the next PBS pledge drive, that Moyers helped determine the route of the motorcade to pass through Dealey Plaza and had the bubbletop removed from the presidential limousine. I m wondering how a mere vice-presidential aidecould have had that much power? Wouldn t that be the Secret Service s call? JM: Moyers, who was deputy director of the Peace Corps at the time, had worked closely with Johnson and flew from Austin to Love Field to join him immediately after the assassination; he went on to work in the Johnson administration until 1967 as his de facto chief of staff and as press secretary. Moyers was an advance man on Kennedy s trip to Texas and was involved in Aide to President Kennedy, Kenneth O Donnell. the decision to hold Kennedy s speech in the Trade Mart, which caused the motorcade to go through Dealey Plaza. But he was not the prime instigator of that decision. Kennedy aide Kenneth O Donnell, whose actions were highly suspicious, seems to have been the main decider, along with Texas Governor Connally and the Secret Service. Moyers also was on a committee that helped publicize the trip; he insisted that the motorcade route be published, which was natural enough since his job was partly to ensure maximum attendance on the motorcade route, but which wouldn t be done today for security reasons. Moyers also was the recipient of the infamous memo from Deputy Attorney General filmnoirefoundation.org I FALL 2013 I NOIR CITY 127

14 Nicholas Katzenbach on November 25 urging that a cover-up be put in place and that the public had to be convinced that Oswald was the lone gunman. Perhaps all this helps account for why Moyers has never written his memoirs, which would surely be an interesting book. happened to our country when President Kennedy was killed. It was the end of our experiment with democracy. NC: The War Powers Resolution of 1973 has tried to check presidential power since Kennedy s time. But, with Kennedy, they genuinely felt the need to kill him. The Tea Party just spent most of October 2013 holding the government hostage without firing a shot. Previously, Bill Clinton was subject to very effective character assassination. Unless you believe the theory that Monica Lewinsky was a Mossad agent, it was self-inflicted on Clinton s part, but you get my point about assassination by other means? JM: Garry Wills, in his 2010 book Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, argues that NC: You describe our current form of government as a limited police state. That s still better than the actual police state of the Bush/Cheney years, wouldn t you say? Bill Moyers was one of Johnson s boys.... Moyers helped determine the route of the motorcade to pass through Dealey Plaza and had the bubbletop removed from the presidential limousine. JM: I use the word limited before police state because we still have some of our freedoms, such as the freedom to criticize the government in the press and in books, although Obama and Bush/ Cheney have tried to stifle the media as part of their repressive measures. So we are not a fully totalitarian state at present. But we have lost many of our civil liberties since 9/11, and Obama, despite pretending to be a liberal, in some ways is even worse than Bush/Cheney. Obama claims the right as president to kill even American citizens, as he has actually done. His drone program is a targeted assassination program that is contrary to all of our supposed democratic principles. The Fourth Amendment basically does not exist anymore. I could go on and on about the crimes of Bush, Cheney, and Obama, but perhaps former President Jimmy Carter said it best in July 2013: America has no functioning democracy at this moment. He was referring largely to the illegal surveillance programs that now target us all. This was even before the Republicans tried to shut down the government. Everyone now realizes we have a dysfunctional government. All this is a result of the Coup of 1963, whether people understand that or not. Many people are in denial about what Journalist and PBS commentator, Bill Moyers, after JFK s death, he became Johnson s de facto Chief of Staff and Press Secretary. 128 NOIR CITY I FALL 2013 I filmnoirfoundation.org

15 the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the postwar imperial presidency by giving one man the power to wage war unilaterally and wipe out nations. The War Powers Resolution is a relatively weak attempt by Congress to rein in that presidential power. President Kennedy was trying to stop the war in Vietnam that he had helped launch; there is little doubt that he would have done all he could to resist pressures to widen the war and certainly would not have widened it to the extent Johnson did. But when asked early in his presidency what most surprised him about the job, Kennedy replied that it was how little power he actually had. Obama made a similar comment early in his presidency. The presdent in some ways does have great power, but he is subject to the tremendous influence and pressures of what Eisenhower in his farewell address warned about, the military-industrial complex. There are other ways to remove presidents, such as cooking up or revealing scandals, but Kennedy was a serious threat to the war machine that badly needed and wanted a large-scale war in Vietnam. Above: CIA Direstor, Allen Dulles, whom JFK forced to resign after the Bay of Pigs disaster. As member of the Warren Commission he pushed the lone gunman theory. Left: Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach who wrote the memo urging for a cover-up. NC: Unlike Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King held no office. By 1968, the most important civil rights legislation was already in effect. To militant blacks, King was politically irrelevant. Even radical whites found him too tame. Was his assassination vindictive rather than practical? Was it connected to either of the Kennedy assassinations? ing to Pepper, the Memphis police department was involved in the plot, with at least one of their men as part of the hit team, and U.S. military intelligence and Carlos Marcello s mob operation also participated. James Earl Ray was only a patsy, like Oswald. The similarities between the King assassination and those against the Kennedys are telling about the forces arrayed against all three men in that era of violent assaults on those trying to bring about social change and a more rational foreign policy. Professor McBride has done four Black Op Radio interviews and has written and narrated two shows for their YouTube series Fifty Reasons for Fifty Years (one upcoming). Into The Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit is published by Hightower Press, Berkeley and is available exclusively from Amazon.com. JM: Dr. King actually was considered a major threat to the establishment at the time of his death. He had come out against the Vietnam War a year before his death, despite the misgivings of some of his associates, and was determined to link the war to racial oppression. He was also turning his focus more and more to economic issues with his Poor People s Campaign, challenging the basic injustice in the distribution of wealth that still plagues us today. So he was someone who was feared and targeted for those reasons. The King family lawyer William F. Pepper s 2003/08 book An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King is authoritative in laying out the facts that can be ascertained about the actual plot that killed Dr. King. Accordfilmnoirefoundation.org I FALL 2013 I NOIR CITY 129