General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsLee Oswald was absolutely without question a lone assassin.
But you absolutely without question cannot see our absolute proof.
Trust us. You are un-American if you don't.
(We will ruin you--or worse--if you resist.)
NOTHING TO SEE HERE!!
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
guillaumeb
(42,641 posts)I heard that proof of the multiple shooter theory was contained in some of the files in Benghazi, and that the raid was actually directed by the Clinton Foundation to destroy the evidence because then 17 year old Bill Clinton and George Soros were linked to the plot.
WARNING: The above sentence is an attempt at humor and is not to be taken seriously, nor should it be picked up and used by Alex Jones in a future newscast.
Cirque du So-What
(25,989 posts)If Alex Jones sees your post, he'll say it's irrefutable documentation.
CatMor
(6,212 posts)
underpants
(182,906 posts)
gopiscrap
(23,765 posts)guillaumeb
(42,641 posts)gopiscrap
(23,765 posts)but he had spies behind the grassy knoll
librechik
(30,676 posts)Anyone who questions the official story, even skilled forensics experts and respected historians with advanced degrees, must be ridiculed. It's the law.
And not just the JFK assassination either.
Heh--you really got me there, g
Not Ruth
(3,613 posts)Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)If it had come out that the CIA/FBI suspected a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy...not just "a conspiracy", but a Soviet or Cuban government conspiracy, that involved an avowedly Communist failed defector...there's a pretty good chance, considering the nuclear tensions of the time, that we wouldn't be here now. So yeah, there was a pretty good reason not to release something that said that, 50 years ago.
Not Ruth
(3,613 posts)jberryhill
(62,444 posts)...using channels, methods, and contacts which may still be relevant.
AntiFascist
(12,792 posts)so that we would go to war. Many felt that we could win a war with minimal casualties. Not everyone believed in MAD.
still_one
(92,422 posts)the Soviets. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. For those not familiar with who Lemay was, he was who George Wallace choose as his running mate when he made an attempted run for President. Both extremely dangerous people.
Another extremely right wing general, Walker, who was in Texas at the time of the Kennedy assassination, also had an attempted assassination, which had links to Oswald.
It was an extremely dangerous time back then, and there were individuals who wanted any excuse for WWIII.
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)bathroommonkey76
(3,827 posts)taken with a grain of salt.
There is nothing further on the Oswald case except that he is dead."
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover dictated that line in a memo he issued on Nov. 24, 1963, the day Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald as the gunman was being transported to the Dallas County Jail after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The memo is one of at least 52 records never previously made public that were included in the release Thursday of about 2,800 unredacted government documents related to Kennedy's murder in Dallas two days earlier. President Donald Trump approved withholding an undisclosed number of other documents pending a 180-day national security review.
Scholars and other experts have repeatedly said it's unlikely that there's anything groundbreaking in the documents. But as journalists and historians pored through the enormous database of material Thursday night and Friday morning, some interesting nuggets were turning up, among them Hoover's Nov. 24 memo.
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/jfk-assassination-files/jfk-files-j-edgar-hoover-said-public-must-believe-lee-n814881
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)LanternWaste
(37,748 posts)"But J. Edgar Hoover is not the primary source..."
There is no one primary source. There are in fact, many primary sources.
bathroommonkey76
(3,827 posts)Of course there are those who will never believe that our government would lie to us about the assassination of a sitting POTUS. These people are true patriots. lol
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)But that has nothing to do with the evidence that all shots fired came from the sixth floor of the book depository, that LHO arrived at work that morning with a long package he claimed were curtain rods, that LHO did not join his co-workers in watching the motorcade, that LHO immediately left, shot a cop and tried to hide in a movie theater.
J. Edgar Hoover may have chosen to lie about all sorts of things, but can you explain how he got all of those other people to lie?
bathroommonkey76
(3,827 posts)Did LHO run out of the school book depository to get the fatal frontal shot? Sorry, but our gov't lied to us about this entire case. The cover-up started in Dallas the day of the shooting.
Why would Sam Holland lie about a shot coming from the grassy knoll area? He had no reason to lie. The same could be said about multiple other witnesses who were threatened or intimidated by the SS/CIA.
I do believe LHO was part of this conspiracy- Like millions of other people in the US I don't believe he was the "lone gunman".
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)At the moment of impact, JFK's head moves slightly forward before his body goes into uncontrolled spasm. He was not shot from the front.
If you believe he was shot from the front, then please provide a trajectory that (a) does not go through the windshield, and (b) produces the same effect of ejecta spewing from the front of his head.
Your argument seems to be that he was shot diagonally from the side, not the front (since that's where the grassy knoll was situated at that moment). Given the relative location of the grassy knoll, and the fact that Jackie is leaning in with her arm around JFK, could you explain where this bullet went?
bathroommonkey76
(3,827 posts)All of them came up with a lie to fool those investigators at the scene and on the Warren Commission, right? Sorry, I'll take their word over your keyboard warrior word.
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)That's why the film is more reliable.
Would you care to explain how a shot coming in diagonally and down from the grassy knoll did not go into Jackie's arm?
I gather you brought up the Zapruder film, but have now decided you do not want to discuss what it shows, and have instead decided to make a personal insult.
bathroommonkey76
(3,827 posts)There are lots of keyboard warriors who take pride in their online behavior.
You would rather ignore eyewitness accounts and go along with Arlen Spector and the good ole' boys on the Warren Commission.
I believe there were 51 eyewitnesses who said there was smoke and a shot(s) that came from the grassy knoll area- Do you call that being "all over the map"? Let's just discount everything they say since it doesn't fit into the government's narrative.
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)"I believe there were 51 eyewitnesses who said there was smoke and a shot(s) that came from the grassy knoll"
No, there weren't. You are free to believe what you want. There are many witnesses who report shots coming from various directions, and various numbers of shots. This is largely a function of the acoustics of Dealey Plaza.
The witnesses closest to the depository building gave the most consistent accounts (i.e. accounts that agreed with each other) as to the number of shots, which one would expect:
And I guess I should be sorry to agree with JFK's own two brothers. I imagine that you believe they were in on it too.
bathroommonkey76
(3,827 posts)Witnesses to Shots from the Grassy Knoll:
Victoria Adams
Danny Garcia Arce
Virgie Baker (née Rackley)
Jane Berry
Charles Brehm
Ochus Campbell
Faye Chism
John Chism
Harold Elkins
Ronald Fischer
Buell Wesley Frazier
Dorothy Garner
Jean Hill
S. M. Holland
Ed Johnson
Dolores Kounas
Paul Landis
Billy Lovelady
Austin Miller
A.J. Millican
Luke Mooney
Thomas Murphy
Jean Newman
William Newman
Kenneth O’Donnell and David Powers
Roberta Parker
Frank Reilly
Arnold Rowland
Edgar Smith
Joe Marshall Smith
Forrest Sorrels
James Tague
Roy Truly
Harry Weatherford
Seymour Weitzman
Otis Williams
Mary Woodward
Abraham Zapruder
Eugene Boone (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.19, p.508)
E.V. Brown (Warren Commission Document 205, pp.39f)
James Crawford (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.6, p.173)
Avery Davis (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.22, p.642)
Emmett Hudson (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.19, p.481; cf. Warren Commission Document 5, p.30)
Clemon Johnson (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.22, p.836)
Joe Molina (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.6, p.371)
Samuel Paternostro (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.24, p.536)
Nolan Potter (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.22, p.834)
Jesse Price (Warren Commission Document 5, p.65)
Madie Reese (Warren Commission Document 5, p.59)
William Shelley (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.6, p.329)
James Simmons (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.22, p.833)
Garland Slack (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.26, p.364)
Steven Wilson (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.22, p.685)
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)And if you look at all of the eyewitness accounts, the distribution of them is as follows:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6kYzhJGqq2M/TIr37cPl30I/AAAAAAAAFTo/5Pl0nzQd0rE/s400/Shot+Locations.jpg
53.8% of witnesses heard shots from the depository.
33.7% of witnesses heard shots from the grassy knoll.
4.8% heard shots from two directions.
7.7% other
This event happened in an urban area with a lot of sources of echo. There is no question that, depending on the location of the witness, they are going to hear bangs from various directions.
If you are going to talk about "evidence", you have to talk about all of it. Yes, some witnesses heard shots from directions other than the depository. That's not an unusual result. But you conveniently ignore what the majority said they heard, and have no explanation for it.
Oh, and by the way, can you explain why you are relying on the Warren Commission records?
dflprincess
(28,082 posts)and they both told Tip O'Neil that they thought the shots came from the knoll. (O'Neill recounted this in his book "Man of the House".) He asked them why their official testimony matched the official story and they both said they let the FBI wear them down and finally decided they'd just agree to that to make it easier on the family.
If the FBI could wear down two of the men closest to JFK it's amazing any witness was able to stick to their original testimony.
underpants
(182,906 posts)I'm just saying.
Boomerproud
(7,968 posts)is called a CT by the MSM. Lee Harvey Oswald is not the "accused" or "alleged" assassin, he's now simply called the lone gunman who killed JFK-case closed.
Oneironaut
(5,525 posts)open mind. On the other hand, I don’t like how both sides of the argument are absolutely sure they are correct. It’s ok to have an opinion, but always be ready for new evidence!
librechik
(30,676 posts)and professional researchers are trained to evaluate their own theories with enormous caution.
of course the bits and pieces of evidence we do have are a source of much confusion and propaganda. Still, we need the information for an informed populace.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)
stopbush
(24,396 posts)Read Bugliosi, then get back to us.
BTW - it’s sad to see people hanging onto these threadbare hopes that some document is going to surface that PROVES Oswald didn’t act alone. Let’s face it, there will never be enough “evidence” for the CT crowd when all the evidence that comes out supports the original conclusions of the Warren Commission. Apparently, batting 0-for-53-years isn’t enough inspiration to hang up the silly CT ghosts.
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)They're either utterly ignorant of the facts in the case, or they're an utter moron. There really isn't any middle ground there. The case against Oswald is simple and airtight; there was motive (he was heard, before witnesses, saying he wanted to kill Kennedy after he failed to obtain a visa to go to Cuba); means (Oswald's mail-order Carcano), and opportunity (Oswald got a job at the Texas School Book Depository after Ruth Paine told him they were hiring; Kennedy's parade route was changed to one that went past the Book Depository at almost the last moment, on the 18th). His rifle, with three spent shell casings (matching the number of shots heard by 80% of the witnesses in Dealey Plaza), was found on the sixth floor, in a makeshift sniper's nest constructed from book cartons; his fingerprints were on the rifle, and on the cartons, and employees on the fifth floor not only heard the shots coming from above but heard the sound of spent shells hitting the floor (and one of the employees got plaster dust in his hair after the report of Oswald's rifle knocked it loose). Eyewitnesses saw a man with a rifle in that window and provided a good enough description of Oswald that Officer JD Tippit stopped him; Oswald shot Tippit, hurried away after reloading his revolver (and dropping the spent cartridges on the ground), and ducked into the Texas Theater without buying a ticket. Then when the police went in, he tried to shoot another cop, only to have his weapon misfire. His words when they took him? "Well, I guess it's all over now."
chimpymustgo
(12,774 posts)Please read something other than the Warren Commission Report, Vincent Bugliosi or Gerald Posner.
Russ Baker’s, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years. (Remember Bush Sr didn't remember where he was on November 22?)
https://whowhatwhy.org/2013/10/02/bush-and-the-jfk-hit-part-3-where-was-poppy-november-22-1963/
-edit-
George H. W. Bush may be one of the few Americans of his generation who cannot recall exactly where he was when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
At times he has said that he was “somewhere in Texas.” Bush was indeed “somewhere” in Texas. And he had every reason to remember. At the time Bush was the thirty-nine-year-old chairman of the Harris County (Houston) Republican Party and an outspoken critic of the president. He was also actively campaigning for a seat in the U.S. Senate at exactly the time Kennedy was assassinated right in Bush’s own state. The story behind Bush’s apparent evasiveness is complicated. Yet it is crucial to an understanding not just of the Bush family, but also of a tragic chapter in the nation’s history.
Who Wanted Kennedy Dead?
The two and a half years leading up to November 22, 1963, had been tumultuous ones. The Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, designed to dislodge Fidel Castro and his Cuban revolution from its headquarters ninety miles off the Florida Keys, was an embarrassing foreign policy failure. Certainly in terms of lives lost and men captured, it was also a human disaster. But within the ruling American elite it was seen primarily as a jolt to the old boys’ network – a humiliating debacle, and a rebuke of the supposedly infallible CIA. For John Kennedy it also presented an opportunity. He had been impressed with the CIA at first, and depended on its counterinsurgency against Communists and nationalists in the third world. But the Bay of Pigs disaster gave him pause. Whatever Kennedy’s own role in the invasion fiasco, it had been planned on Dwight Eisenhower’s watch. Kennedy had been asked to green-light it shortly after taking office, and in retrospect he felt the agency had deceived him in several key respects.
The most critical involved Cubans’ true feelings toward Castro. The CIA had predicted that the island population would rise up to support the invaders. When this did not happen, the agency, Air Force, Army, and Navy all put pressure on the young president to authorize the open use of U.S. armed forces. In effect they wanted to turn a supposed effort of armed Cuban “exiles” to reclaim their homeland into a full-fledged U.S. invasion. But Kennedy would not go along. The success of the operation had been predicated on something – a popular uprising – that hadn’t happened, and Kennedy concluded it would be foolish to get in deeper.
Following the disaster, CIA director Allen Dulles mounted a counteroffensive against criticism of the agency. Dulles denied that the plan had been dependent on a popular insurrection. Just weeks after the calamity, he offered this account on Meet the Press: “I wouldn’t say we expected a popular uprising. We were expecting something else to happen in Cuba . . . something that didn’t materialize.” For his part Kennedy was furious at Dulles for this self-serving explanation. He also was deeply frustrated about the CIA’s poor intelligence and suspected that the CIA had sought to force him into an invasion from the very beginning.
bayThe president told his advisers he wanted “to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Within weeks of the invasion disaster, Washington was speculating on Dulles’s departure. By autumn, he was gone, along with his lieutenants Charles Cabell and Richard Bissell. But in the end, it was not the CIA but rather John F. Kennedy who was destroyed.
The assassination of JFK has fathered a thousand theories, and nearly as many books and studies. Through it all, no consensus has emerged. Most “respectable” academics, journalists, and news organizations don’t want to get near the matter, lest they be labeled conspiracy nuts. Most Americans harbor an overwhelming psychic resistance to what retired UC Berkeley professor and author Peter Dale Scott has called the “deep politics” surrounding the assassination. Few of us care to contemplate the awful prospect that the forces we depend upon for security and order could themselves be subverted.
When the Kennedy assassination is mentioned, the inquiry tends to focus on the almost impossible task of determining who fired how many shots and from where. This obsession with the gun or guns bypasses the more basic – and therefore more dangerous questions: Who wanted Kennedy dead, and why? And what did they hope to gain?
Earl Warren to LBJ: “I’ll just do whatever you say.”
The years since the first assassination investigation was hastily concluded in September 1964 have not been kind to the Warren Commission. Subsequent inquiries have found the commission’s process, and the resulting report, horrendously flawed. And there are lingering questions about the very origins of the commission. First, all the members were appointed by Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, who was – stark as this may sound – a chief beneficiary of the assassination, having immediately replaced the dead president to become the thirty-sixth president of the United States.
The commission’s chairman was the presiding chief justice of the Supreme Court. Earl Warren was the perfect choice because he was seen by the public as an honest, incorruptible man of substance. Warren’s involvement gave the commission a certain credibility and convinced major newspapers like the New York Times to continue supporting the commission report over the years.
Warren resisted LBJ’s call to service, but finally acquiesced, leading the panel to the conclusions it reached. To get Warren to say yes, Johnson had warned the justice that Oswald might be tied, through an alleged Mexico City visit, to the Soviets and Cubans. He implied that this could lead to nuclear war if level heads did not prevail.
As Johnson explained in a taped telephone conversation with Senator Richard Russell, himself reluctant to join the panel:
Warren told me he wouldn’t do it under any circumstances . . . He came down here and told me no – twice. And I just pulled out what [FBI director] Hoover told me about a little incident in Mexico City . . . And he started crying and he said, “I won’t turn you down. I’ll just do whatever you say.”
And that got Warren— and the public trust he brought— on board.
Allen Dulles, the member who asked the most questions, would have been himself considered a prime suspect by any standard police methodology. Moreover, he was expert not only in assassinations but also in deception and camouflage.
Dulles’s animus toward Kennedy was never overt, but it was incontrovertible. In ousting him, Kennedy was showing the door to a man who had spent his entire adult life in spy work. Behind the pipe-smoking, professorial mien, Allen Dulles was a ruthless, calculating man with blood on his hands. Certainly, the veteran master spy, director since 1953, could not have expected to stay on under Kennedy indefinitely. But to be forced out after what seemed to him a glorious decade of covert operations (including successful coups in Guatemala and Iran) – and on account of what he considered Kennedy’s failure of nerve regarding the Bay of Pigs invasion – must have been galling. Dulles was, according to his subordinate E. Howard Hunt, a “remarkable man whose long career of government service had been destroyed unjustly by men who were laboring unceasingly to preserve their own public images.”
pic3
“I have never forgiven them.”
Among those infuriated with the Kennedys was none other than Dulles’s good friend Senator Prescott Bush. In 1961, when Dulles brought his successor, John McCone, to a dinner at Prescott’s home, the senator recalled that he “tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was sick at heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedy’s [sic] that brot [sic] about the [Bay of Pigs] fiasco.”
He expressed this anger in a condolence letter to Allen Dulles’s widow in 1969, discovered among Dulles’s papers at Princeton University. Prescott’s next line is particularly memorable: “I have never forgiven them.” The expression of such lingering resentment, six years after JFK’s death, was doubly chilling because it came just months after a second Kennedy, Robert, had been gunned down under mysterious circumstances, once again by a seemingly unstable lone gunman.
Clearing the Way for Poppy
In the spring of 1962, about six months after Dulles’s departure from the Kennedy administration, both Prescott Bush and his son Poppy made some considerable and rather abrupt changes to their lives. Prescott Bush, having already begun his reelection campaign and opened his headquarters, surprised virtually everyone by reversing himself and announcing that he would not seek a new term after all. The reason he gave was that he was tired and physically not well enough to endure another six years. This decision struck people as curious, in part because Prescott so dearly loved his life in Washington, and in part because he would turn out to be physically robust for a number of years afterward, and would even express his deep regret at having chosen to leave the Senate. Whatever took him away from Washington seems to have been pressing.
Just as Prescott was leaving the political arena, his son was entering it at high speed. Poppy, who until then had been barely involved with local Houston politics, suddenly became consumed with them. Conventional accounts treat Bush’s new interest as simply the next step in the life of an ambitious man, but for the Bush family, there was an almost inexplicable urgency. At a Washington political gathering, Prescott pulled aside the Harris County (Houston) GOP chairman, James Bertron, and demanded that Bertron find a place in his organization for Poppy. “Senator,” replied Bertron, “I’m trying. We’re all trying.”
This pressure quickly paid off. In the fall of 1962, Poppy was named finance co-chair of the Harris County Republican Party, a position which likely entailed visiting wealthy oilmen and asking them for money. Just a few months later, in early 1963, James Bertron abruptly announced his intention to retire and move to Florida, and Poppy announced his intention to succeed him. A party activist who had expressed his desire for the position suddenly abandoned his candidacy, and Bush won the position by acclamation. Now he had a plausible reason not only to be visiting with wealthy oilmen, but also to be building an operational team, ostensibly for political purposes.
Oiling the Rest of the Way for Poppy
That summer of 1963, right in the middle of his move out of the oil business into politics, Poppy Bush embarked on a busy itinerary of foreign business travel for Zapata Offshore. The trip seemed ambitious, especially when one considers the realistic opportunities for a firm with just a few rigs.
Upon his return, Poppy’s new lust for political power hit warp speed: now he had decided to seek a U.S. Senate seat. In less than a year he had gone from uninvolved to finance co-chair to county chairman to U.S. Senate hopeful. As a businessman engaged in offshore drilling, Poppy Bush had little reason to be traveling extensively throughout Texas. As Harris County chairman, Poppy had Houston as his bailiwick. But as a Senate candidate, he had every reason to be seen all over the Lone Star State.
Bush’s political work, like his oil work, may have been cover for intelligence activity. But there were political objectives as well, ones that conflicted with those of John Kennedy. In deciding to run for U.S. Senate, Poppy was playing a key role in the Republican effort to unyoke the conservative south from the Democratic wagon it had pulled to victory in 1960. Jack and Bobby Kennedy, meanwhile were busy strategizing exactly how to prevent that –and this was going to be a crucial battle, given JFK’s wafer-thin victory in the previous election. Two states in particular would be battlegrounds: Florida and Texas. In theory, a candidate like Poppy Bush, with his family connections to Wall Street, could be a strong fund-raiser and perhaps contribute to a substantially increased Republican turnout in 1964, even if Bush himself was not elected. To head off this larger threat, it was clear to Kennedy’s political advisers that Jack would have to campaign in Texas, along with Florida. Kennedy was interested in revoking the oil depletion allowance, a decision that would have meant steep losses for Texas oilmen, and he continued voicing his support for civil rights, always a contentious issue in the South.
As a candidate for statewide office, Poppy Bush was on the go in the fall of 1963, moving around Texas and spending time in Dallas, where he opened a headquarters.
Poppy and Barbara, November 3, 1964
Poppy and Barbara, November 3, 1964
Another Memory Lapse
Jack Kennedy’s death in Dallas on November 22, 1963, was one of the most tragically memorable moments in the lives of those who lived through it. So Poppy Bush’s inability or unwillingness to say where he was on that day is extremely odd, to say the least.
His haziness became an issue a quarter century after the assassination – when there emerged yet another good reason for Bush to have recalled that day vividly. On Thursday, August 25, 1988, about six weeks after the Nation published Joseph McBride’s piece on “George Bush of the CIA” – and just a week after George H. W. Bush accepted the Republican presidential nomination – a short article appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, with the intriguing headline: “Documents: Bush Blew Whistle on Rival in JFK Slaying.” The article began like this:A man who identified himself as George H. W. Bush phoned the FBI in Houston a few hours after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas to report that a right-wing Young Republican had “been talking of killing the president,” FBI documents show.
The FBI, the article goes on to say, promptly followed up on Bush’s tip and interviewed the Young Republican, a man by the name of James Milton Parrott. Parrott claimed he had never threatened Kennedy, and his mother declared that he had been at home with her in Houston all day.
The author of this story, the Examiner’s Miguel Acoca, had been unable to reach Parrott but noted that the FBI report on Bush’s call listed the address of the tipster as 5525 Briar, Houston, Texas – the address of the man who was now, in 1988, vice president of the United States.
Like Bush, Acoca, a Panamanian, had graduated from Yale. He spent the early 1960’s in the Miami area working for Life magazine, where dinners at his Coconut Grove apartment were typically populated by Cuban émigrés and CIA officers managing the war against Castro. While still in Miami, Acoca became interested in the group running the CIA’s JM/WAVE Cuban operations station in the area, and developed a growing obsession with assassinations in general, and JFK’s in particular.
Acoca had placed a call to Bush’s office once he discovered that the vice president had been the tipster back on November 22, 1963. His call brought a familiar response:
Bush’s press office at first said the vice president hadn’t made the call and challenged the authenticity of the FBI reports. Then, several days later, an aide said Bush “does not recall” making the call.
Acoca’s story about Bush didn’t get much attention, running on page A-II of the Examiner. The media reaction was similar to that which greeted journalist Joseph McBride’s earlier revelations: next to nothing. A few newspapers picked up the Examiner piece off the Hearst wire, but not a single paper bothered to assign reporters to follow up.
Thus, neither of two vexing questions – whether George Bush had been a CIA operative in 1963, and whether he had called the FBI on November 22 with purported information related to the JFK assassination – became issues for Bush in 1988 as he sailed into the White House.
By the fall of 1992, though, things were growing uncomfortable for President Bush. Arkansas governor Bill Clinton’s challenge was gaining momentum, the economy was in the doldrums, and now an initiative from Congress and the public posed a new dilemma for Poppy. Oliver Stone’s JFK, released in December 1991, had aroused public interest and helped prod Congress to unanimously pass the President John F. Kennedy’s Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. It required each federal agency to collect and forward all records about the JFK assassination to the National Archives, which would then make them available to the American people.
The 1988 Acoca article that caused so little stir had been based on a brief FBI summary of Bush’s tip about Parrott. But there was a longer, more detailed memo in the archives, waiting to be unearthed and released.
President George H. W. Bush now found himself in the awkward position of potentially outing himself. Should he veto the politically popular JFK Act just days before voters would go to the polls to choose between him and his surging challenger, Bill Clinton? Bush, with little enthusiasm, signed the bill – though, in a move that his son George W. Bush would use without restraint, Poppy issued a “signing statement” that essentially attached conditions, asserting unilateral executive authority to withhold records on the basis of several concerns, including national security. Still, Poppy couldn’t claim national security about everything, certainly not about documents that some already knew to exist, especially documents that had his own name on them.
Whether he knew it or not, with his signature, Poppy was moving the more detailed “Parrott memo” toward the light of day. In fact, government records show that the complete FBI memo from December 22, 1963, laying out the particulars of Bush’s call to the agency was finally declassified in 1993, along with thousands of other papers – by the Clinton administration.
Wrong Tip at the Wrong Time
That memo, reporting the call that had come in on the day of the assassination to Special Agent Graham W. Kitchel of the Houston FBI bureau, contained some important new identifying information and other details:
[DATE: November 22, 1963]
At 1:45 p.m. Mr. GEORGE H.W. BUSH, President of the Zapata Off-shore Drilling Company, Houston, Texas, residence 5525 Briar, Houston, telephonically furnished the following information to writer by long distance telephone call from Tyler, Texas.
BUSH stated that he wanted to be kept confidential but wanted to furnish hearsay that he recalled hearing in recent weeks, the day and source unknown. He stated that one JAMES PARROTT has been talking of killing the president when he comes to Houston.
BUSH stated that PARROTT is possibly a student at the University of Houston and is active in political matters in this area. He stated that he felt MRS FAWLEY, telephone number SU 2-5239, or ARLENE SMITH, telephone number JA 9-9194 of the Harris County Republican Headquarters would be able to furnish additional information regarding the identity of PARROTT.
BUSH stated that he was proceeding to Dallas, Texas, would remain in the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel and return to his residence on 11-23-63. His office telephone Number is CA 2-0395.
The memo contained several intriguing details, but no news organization picked up on them. Indeed, no one paid any heed to the whereabouts of Poppy Bush at the time of the JFK assassination – except Barbara Bush. In 1994, three decades after Poppy began not remembering where he was on November 22, 1963, it was suddenly Barbara who remembered.
Next: Part 4. Barbara’s Hair-Raising Day
For Part 1, please go here; Part 2, here; Part 3, here; Part 4, here; Part 5, here;Part 6, here; Part 7, here; Part 8, here; Part 9, here; Part 10, here.
-edit-
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)Would you care to explain where the bullet which went through JFK's throat went?
chimpymustgo
(12,774 posts)Single Bullet Theory
Much of the early critiques of the Warren Report focused on the implausibility of the "single bullet theory", wherein the Commission attempted to explain how Oswald had killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally with just three shots. In particular, the Zapruder film showed Connally reacting to being hit too soon after Kennedy for Oswald to have operated the bolt-action Carcano and fired again. Were the two men hit by different bullets fired from two different rifles?
The solution created by Commission counsel Arlen Specter was to posit that both men had been hit by a single shot which entered JFK's upper back, exited his throat, and then struck Connally, breaking a rib and shattering his wrist, and finally coming to rest in his thigh. The "magic bullet" deemed to have done all this was found somewhat mysteriously on a stretcher near an elevator in Parkland Hospital, about an hour after the victims had been brought there.
Some of the problems with the Single Bullet Theory (SBT) which have been pointed out by critics include:
Timing. The Zapruder film shows Kennedy clearly wounded as much as a second before Connally, and the Commission's idea of a "delayed reaction" by Connally is implausible. Connally himself was certain he had been struck by a separate bullet.
Trajectory. The Parkland doctors believed the neck wound to be an entrance, not an exit. Further, the location of Kennedy's back wound - as measured by the shirt and jacket holes, medical witnesses, autopsy photos, and other evidence - is too low for a shot fired from the 6th floor of the TSBD to have exited the neck wound where it did. The Warren Commission misrepresented the back wound location in drawings.
"Pristine" Bullet. Commission Exhibit 399, the bullet found on the stretcher, is virtually undamaged and had no blood or tissue on it. Its appearance is consistent with having been fired through the rifle into water or cotton, recovered, and then planted. Also, there is a serious question as to whether the minimal amount of lead missing from the base of CE-399 can account for the fragments left behind in JFK and Connally.
Recent discoveries in the FBI records have even raised the question of whether the bullet found on the stretcher is actually CE 399.
Defenders of the SBT point out that alternative shooting scenarios require bullets which were never found in bodies or recovered in the limousine, and that the HSCA's Neutron Activitation Analysis (NAA) confirmed the theory.
https://www.history-matters.com/essays/frameup/EvenMoreMagical/EvenMoreMagical.htm
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)That part is a simple lie:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6kYzhJGqq2M/TBmXZcDgvtI/AAAAAAAAEOA/BZUKLEOSaTo/s1600/CE399+%282%29.jpg
The "delayed reaction" is also bullshit. Connally's recollection of a traumatic event was off. They clearly flinch at the same time:
Could you please explain how someone fired a shot into Connally's back which did not pass through JFK? Were they in a helicopter?
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)thanks for proving my point, there! Nothing "magic" about that bullet; it did what you'd expect of a FMJ rifle round, shot from that position at that angle and trajectory. Fun fact: Connally wasn't sitting directly in front of Kennedy; he was to the left and below him. And he wasn't facing directly forward, he was turned to one side. There are photographs that show this. Based on the relative positions of Kennedy and Connally? That bullet didn't do anything magical at all.
lame54
(35,326 posts)EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)“If you put six million dead Jews on one side of a scale and on the other side put the Nazi regime-the greatest gang of criminals ever to seize control of a modern state-you have a rough balance: greatest crime, greatest criminals.
“But if you put the murdered President of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the President’s death with meaning. He would have died for something. A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely.”
ElementaryPenguin
(7,800 posts)The magic bullet theory alone proves Oswald couldn't have been the killer. (and his nitrate test proved he hadn't fired a gun) The head wound was an exit wound, etc. Listen to the Nixon Watergate tapes, where President Nixon mentions that the Warren Commission Report was the biggest hoax ever pulled on the American people. In 1977, an FBI employee testified to Congress that Oswald had been an FBI informant - his number was 179 - and he was paid $150 a month. An accountant employed by the CIA also testified in that same Congressional inquiry that Oswald was also on the CIA payroll. He didn't finish high school, but his Russian was so fluent and his accent was so accurate that his eventual wife believed he was a native Russian when they met - because he was trained by U.S. Intelligence when he was in the military. Oswald's own mother believed he was CIA, because he traveled everywhere and had no money to do so - and was never held up even after denouncing his US citizenship and announcing he was giving secrets to the Soviets. Check out what E. Howard Hunt said on his death bed about how it was really done. By the 70's a vast majority of the public was on to the deception of the bogus Oswald as the lone assassin story - yet today, mainstream media is trying to rewrite history and make the original Warren Commission story the accepted one. You can find on youtube, all of the networks announcing the rifle as a different make (which Roger Craig said that it was) - and reversing their story the next day. Even more problematic - it was the pristine bullet that supposedly fell out of Gov. Connolly and onto his stretcher - that's what tied Oswald to the crime - yet AFTER the bullet had been found and the Dallas police are holding it up for display, Connolly's surgeon gives a press conference where he announces that they had deliberately left that bullet in Connolly, because it was not life-threatening. So that clearly wasn't the bullet (which the surgeon later said it couldn't possibly have been) - or the story has even another bullet to account for - when there are already too many bullets to jive with the Zapruder film.
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)"Magic bullet theory"? REALLY? Thanks for proving my point! That has been analysed; Connally was on a jump seat, about six inches inboard and below Kennedy, not directly in front; Kennedy was leaning forward at the time of the shot, Connally was twisted around in his seat. This is on film, there are photographs, they were able to reconstruct the positions of Kennedy and Connally relative to one another and relative to a trajectory from the sixth-floor book depository window. The conclusion: A shot fired from that location and striking Kennedy where he was hit would follow the path the so-called "magic bullet" did in fact follow. Here is the testimony of a NASA scientist to the House Select Committee on the subject.
And a paraffin test is not an accurate indicator of whether someone has recently fired a weapon (fun fact: the FBI test-fired Oswald's own rifle. Three shots. The shooter then had a paraffin test; casts taken of cheek and both hands, and...the test was negative for gunshot residue.)
ElementaryPenguin
(7,800 posts)It may cause you to rethink a few things.
Here's the footage of Gov. Connolly's surgeon Dr. Robert Shaw explaining that the bullet was left in his leg - at the time that bullet is being presented to the world as the proof that Oswald was the killer. That pristine bullet being shown to the world - the whole basis for the government's case against Oswald (coined by staff lawyer Arlen Specter as "the magic bullet"
hadn't fallen on any stretcher to be found - it was still in Connolly's leg.
Go to 4:52
And here Dr. Shaw discusses "the magic bullet."
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)the bullet fragment shows on the x-ray, not a complete bullet, see here:
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/wound3.txt
and also here: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/06/18/us/fbi-backs-plan-to-remove-connally-bullet-fragments.html
Hoyt
(54,770 posts)You can see how this is going to play out, yes?
Kaleva
(36,354 posts)chimpymustgo
(12,774 posts)nt
Kaleva
(36,354 posts)It wouldn't take one long to come up with an extensive list of folks who authored books and go on speaking engagements promoting their pet conspiracy theory.
IMO, there isn't much of a difference between a JFK CSer and a creationist. They operate on faith instead of reason and science and some are rather radical. The belief that there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK is faith based.
Edit: there's a reason why the JFK subject is normally restricted to the group where one can discuss ghosts and goblins.
Cold War Spook
(1,279 posts)two for example Grenada the reason is not to protect the American student, it was to stop the lengthening of the runways and the USS Liberty, this one I can but will not write about. Just remember, a paper a government puts will always be what it wants people to know.
chimpymustgo
(12,774 posts)Twin Towers.
And see how any discussion is just shut down???
Don't talk about it. Don't THINK about it. Don't believe your lying eyes. BELIEVE THE OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT VERSION. Or we will consider you a kook.
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)The weakened structural supports meant that the weight of the uppper floors led to a "pancake" collapse. In the absence of external forces directing that energy other than straight down, of course it collapsed "like a controlled demolition". It's simple physics.
librechik
(30,676 posts)take your Popular Mechanics bullying to the dungeon please.
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)librechik
(30,676 posts)I wish we could talk freely in the US but we can't, not even here. I miss the old DU.
WinkyDink
(51,311 posts)Commission concluded there was more than one shooter, right?
RIGHT?
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)A police motorcycle that, it later turned out, was at the Dallas Trade Mart and not in Dealey Plaza, and so the "evidence" was not evidence at all. That finding has been pretty conclusively debunked.
librechik
(30,676 posts)Thank you Sen. Church!
YoungDemCA
(5,714 posts)Why waste time on the proudly paranoid?
VOX
(22,976 posts)Did he meet with anybody, have some promise of compensation, or was he "programmed" in a Manchurian Candidate" sort of way?
We will never know.
chimpymustgo
(12,774 posts)The waters - and memories - are so muddied now.
America, we hardly knew ya.
USALiberal
(10,877 posts)
BannonsLiver
(16,470 posts)One too many verified contacts with foreign intelligence agents. Had been to Russia. I can accept the idea that he was the lone shooter, but the lone wolf stuff just doesn’t pass the smell test.
USALiberal
(10,877 posts)than the truth.
librechik
(30,676 posts)We all have our biases. The trick is to recognize it. People who are sure they know the truth are dangerous whatever the narrative.
As critical thinking teaches us, there is no truth but the WHOLE truth; and being mere humans we can never know that whole truth. So I try not to claim I know the answers or the truth. It's a foolish assertion on practically any subject.
I am just full of questions though. Annoying, isn't it?
USALiberal
(10,877 posts)librechik
(30,676 posts)I wouldn't call it fun, though. It's actually pretty sad.
USALiberal
(10,877 posts)librechik
(30,676 posts)clean up in aisle 13! Sorry, didn't mean to make you mad. Just having a conversation
USALiberal
(10,877 posts)librechik
(30,676 posts)a book, The Devil's Chessboard, by David Talbot. a biography of Allen Dulles. It is full of facts, a New York Times bestseller, and truly opened my eyes about what happened to us due to the corruption of our own government. A review:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/the-devils-chessboard-all_b_8959302.html
USALiberal
(10,877 posts)We've known the basic whodunit for several years now, or at least we now have a pretty good idea.
p.s. James Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable is also very detailed and it's been out since 2008.
mountain grammy
(26,656 posts)so all your BS's seem just a bit, well, unhinged? You have all the answers to all the questions?
librechik
(30,676 posts)Yep that was a broad brush! But we settled,,,
mountain grammy
(26,656 posts)I read it because I remember my mother's reaction at the mere mention of Allen Dulles. She pushed a lot of paperwork as a Marine during WWII and came away with a huge distrust and hatred of Dulles and the CIA. I never really understood what she was talking but as I read that book, many things she said haunted me.
She really lost it when Dulles was appointed to the Warren Commission.
librechik
(30,676 posts)I'm so glad you read it. I was going to come back into the thread and recommend it to you!
USALiberal
(10,877 posts)
MiltonBrown
(322 posts)of the official gov't version.
Lithos
(26,404 posts)It was the path getting there. A lot of side-tracks were investigated and while they were not associated, still were problematic and/or embarrassing.
LiberalFighter
(51,104 posts)George H.W. Bush.
Demtexan
(1,588 posts)How young would someone have to be to remember it.
No point not to release the information.
Dan
(3,580 posts)Very inaccurate rifle;
Bolt Action;
Moving target;
How many shots fired;
In how many seconds;
Couldn’t be repeated by military expert shooters;
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)the rifle was tested; three aimed shots on a 100-yard target in a 3.5 inch group in 5.6 seconds. It was fairly accurate, but not properly zeroed (about 2 inches high and 2.5 inches to the right of the point of aim). There's testimony before the Warren Commission on this point.
And the target was moving at a speed of about 12mph in almost a straight line away from Oswald. Which means very little correction required.
Me.
(35,454 posts)Yet again
struggle4progress
(118,356 posts)
ucrdem
(15,512 posts)The only material difference is that the Roman conspirators publicly admitted what they'd done in hopes the populace would see things their way. Well, they did for a bit, per Livy et al, but then Marc Antony gave that speech and that was the end of the conspirators:
