JCC Half a century later there (still) was a conspiracy in the JFK assassination

Yeah, I have seen that film before and it is really surreal. It may have been 50 years ago, but it is really hard to believe a President can get gunned down like that.

 

Yes, sent Jackie a letter if I recall.


Well the ceremony was shortened due to the horrible weather. Flyover and symphony musicians cancelled.
Norah Jones sang but I'm still not sure if she was there or recorded because you couldn't get closer without a ticket.
I didn't buy one because I knew I'd have to leave to pick up my daughter from her half day at school.
The best speech was when they simply read from the one JFK was going to give that day.
A little too much self-serving, "Look what a great job we did bouncing back as a city" talk. Effing tacky if you ask me.

I know it's odd to say you had a lovely day at an event like this but I really did.
Got interviewed, answered a lot of questions (even-handedly I swear) for my impromptu tour group.
Gave a lot of out of towners tips on relevant sites to see.

After my Aussie interview I met a different group of people from Australia. They came all the way over for this, the dad's as into it as I am. We all had a great discussion and I gave him the still sealed pack of commemorative pictures from 1963 I had bought at an antique store last weekend. They were genuinely touched and forced me to take their money.

Later I came back with my daughter and we ate where we could watch the action. It was a crazy scene in there I can tell you. I talked to some wonderfully eccentric people (happens every year), then my daughter and I sat with a dad and son who had flown in from Little Rock at 2:00 am for this. His son is like 8 and obsessed with the assassination.
At one point he talked about wishing he had a time machine so he could stop it and said, "It's just not fair" and it was seriously moving.

 

Yeah, that was awful.

 

Manchester mentions Hoover briefly in Death of a President. In one of his notes at the bottom of a page in DOAP, Manchester notes that the Military District of Washington's state of readiness at the time of Kennedy's death was due to Hoover's illness.

 

It even worse the that , JFK's grandmother outlived him by a year.

 

It's especially bad that Jackie Kennedy mentally fell apart afterwards.

 

Okay, now for the photo essay and how I missed getting in trouble by less than a minute...

Again, I cannot overly stress how cold it was downtown. The wind was relentless.

Security looked like something out if The Dark Knight. Streets shut down, barricades everywhere, metal detectors and police (including undercover) everywhere

People with tickets waiting to get past Checkpoint Charlie...


Production crews getting ready...



So they've blocked off so much real estate that you really can't even see the plaza.
Of course I'm already there so I walk to what you can access. Inside the JFK memorial...


They are not playing around today...

I walk all the way around to the other side, where JFK's fateful leg of the drive began.

I'm seriously numb now from looking for ways to get closer.
I stop into a hotel lobby to thaw out. It's a really old building and I decide to explore.
There's a tiny little staircase and I start the cling to see if I can find a window with a view of the proceedings.

Top floor. Hmm, the stairs seem to continue up...
I'm in a room that hasn't changed much since the assassination.


Oh look, the fire exit to the roof seems to be ajar...


Probably because there's a cop out there watching over things. Only one way to find out.
I might be the only civilian to get a view like this today...


Looking down on about 12 police cars...


Time to go, I've pushed my luck more than enough after a second walk on the roof to take video.
Not 1 minute after I go back down to the highest guest floor do I get passed by two cops going to the roof.

The view and especially the uniqueness of it was worth it.

 

happy anniversary

 

Kiki-Gonn

Have you read "Crossfire" by Jim Marrs? Really good book, which I own.

 

Yes, so many years ago I don't want to venture a judgement off the top of my head but I remember it being a very thorough tour of the main conspiracy angles.

(Looks at all those spelling errors in my last post. My hands were completely numb and this thread has caused me to type a mile a minute)

 

Other books I own are:

 

RL has kept me quite busy with birthday celebrations, eluding the DPD, getting ready for Thanksgiving, etc.

Man,
It would take a trip to the garage to remember all the books I've read on this. Off the top of my head...

The Warren Commission report (the best 900 page fantasy book ever written)
Case Closed, the most successful lone gunman book ever
Another lone gunman book that argued for the Cuba conspiracy angle.
The one by the Dallas doctor
Oswald Talked
Norman Mailer's Oswald book
Crossfire
Robert Groden's main book
One that focused on Ruby
Who Really Killed JFK

That's all I can think of at the moment.

 

Okay, we're close the end of our tale so let's see it through.


Let's catch up with LHO after the shooting.
1st though, let's look at the sniper's nest.
There was a plate of chicken and a soda left there that IMO gets overlooked.
As the WC noted, this indicates someone sat there for an extended stay to make sure they didn't miss the motorcade's passing.

I agree, I just don't think it was LHO.

Fingerprints on the plate or glass? Negative. (Bonus: Fingerprints found on the rifle by the Dallas police? Negative.)

Anyway, the infamous 90 seconds between the last shot and Oswald being seen standing around on the 2nd floor by a cop and his boss...

Curveball! I'm not going to claim that he couldn't go from one corner of the building to the opposite lengthwise, hide his rifle, go down 4 flights of stairs, through a door and compose himself before being seen.

I am going to say that scenario makes no bloody sense. Why race down the building if you're not going to leave?
A careful reading of officer Baker's account shows LHO was in the lunch room and walking towards the rear (e.g. dead end).
Your rifle is up there, once they find it you're a marked man. Why risk being seen racing down the stairs seconds after the last shot only to then calmly walk into the lunchroom?

The official timeline even has him hanging out for a couple of more minutes after being seen by the cop and his boss. I guess it was a really awesome lunch room.

As far as the distance/time, make your own judgement...
Building (one corner to the exact opposite)...


The sixth floor...

 

This has been a really great and interesting thread. You took some really cool pictures too.

 

A somewhat cautionary and decently-researched application of witness recollection and accuracy principles to the JFK assassination.

Most of this is pretty kosher from the point of view of someone who's dealt with these concepts in practice, i.e. in criminal trials.

About the only hole you could put in the statements made here is the proposition that the Warren Commission was determined to paper over holes in the prevailing Oswald theory of the time and the proposition that at least in some cases the FBI pushed people to say things they didn't necessarily agree with. That makes it a little tricky to rely on Warren Commission evidence as accurate for a comparison of the person's account down the line.

One point somewhat omitted, or perhaps only implicit in the article, is that if confronted with an impossibility by someone else it is possible for someone to alter their own memories so they are consistent with the other person's point of view. The theme of FBI investigators saying to witnesses things like "It couldn't have happened that way" is a recurrent theme in the JFK literature, both from civilians right through to Presidential aides (Powers and O'Connell). Fifty years down the line, the most accurate pictures you're ever going to get of what happened back then will come out of the forensic and photographic data first -- and as the Zapruder footage demonstrates, even that will not get you entirely there.

 

I feel like a public radio host working a telethon, gotta dig deep to get to the end.

So, we're at Dealey Plaza seconds after the final shot.
I'm going to do a smattering of accounts that go against the LG theory plus a Jack Ruby stripper bonus!

I'm doing just a few because each should properly get a write up of the pros and cons on credibility and I'm not doing that. This is why books on this event are such endless tomes or focused on just one aspect.

DPD officer who, in his WC testimony maintained he ran up the grassy knoll immediately and ran into a Secret Service agent. There was NO Secret Servive in Dealey Plaza right after the assassination. IF he's correct, then someone was impersonating Secret Service. Extra- woman spectator directing him to the picket fence where she thought the shot(s) came from.

Mr. SMITH. I started up toward this Book Depository after I heard the shots, and I didn't know where the shots came from. I had no idea, because it was such a ricochet.
Mr. LIEBELER. An echo effect?
Mr. SMITH. Yes, sir.; and this woman came up to me and she was just in hysterics. She told me, "They are shooting the President from the bushes." So I immediately proceeded up here."
"Mr. SMITH. Yes, sir; I checked all the cars. I looked into all the cars and checked around the bushes. Of course, I wasn't alone. There was some deputy sheriff with me, and I believe one Secret Service man when I got there.
I got to make this statement, too. I felt awfully silly, but after the shot and this woman, I pulled my pistol from my holster, and I thought, this is silly, I don't know who I am looking for, and I put it back. Just as I did, he showed me that he was a Secret Service agent.
Mr. LIEBELER. Did you accost this man?
Mr. SMITH. Well, he saw me coming with my pistol and right away he showed me who he was.
Mr. LIEBELER. Do you remember who it was?
Mr. SMITH. No, sir; I don't--because then we started checking the cars. In fact, I was checking the bushes, and I went through the cars, and I started over here in this particular section."

Ed Hoffman. A deaf mute who always maintained he saw two men with a rifle in the railroad yard. His story was inconsistent and you can read that innocently or not but we can say for a fact that...
1. He voluntarily went to the FBI with his story.
2. Never recanted it


Decorated Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig on the supposed 2nd rifle. Craig is a very interesting and controversial figure so we'll get to him later. An appetizer...


Willis family father (on video so I don't have to worry about misquotes)...
On testifying, "All they wanted to know was 3 shots that probably came from the depository building. That's about all they wanted... I am very dead certain that at least one shot, including the one that took the president's skull off, had to come from the right front and I'll stand by that 'til my death, over my mother's grave."

Jada, dancer at Ruby's club. The interesting bit here is that she mentions the only Kennedy comment she can recall from Ruby is his not liking Bobby Kennedy. That's cause everyone in the MOB despised Bobby.

 

I never knew about that. Very interesting.

 

I have solved the mystery. Watch the killer's confession.

 

As long as we're on this track, we must see the closest witnesses to the headshot, the Newman family.

These are the people I saw speak at the Sixth Floor Museum...


Original interview if you like great archival footage. Sorry about the idiot who ran music over it but I wanted a nice short version (trying to keep videos very brief and that's tough without editing myself)...

 

Fine, bit more...

Woman says she saw two men in window with gun...


Sam Holland, standing on the overpass.
1. His description matches Governor Connally's exactly on the bullet hitting him in the back being different than the previous which hit JFK. Refresher- the surviving shooting victim's testimony directly contradicts the magic bullet theory.
2. Like others, he immediately went to the grassy knoll.

 

Won't all of the records in regards to this be open to the public in 10 years or so?

 

People insist on conspiracy theories because they can't handle the fact that the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the western world, was brought down by someone as insignificant as a single nutjob with a mail order rifle.

 

4 years, actually. The JFK Records Act was passed in late October 1992, and set the timeframe for the release of the remaining docs at 25 years after passage of the Act, so the remaining records will be released after October 26, 2017.

However, I wouldn't count on the autopsy photos and X-Rays ever being released to the general public.

Mrs. Kennedy's tape recorded session with William Manchester while the latter was writing Death of a President can't be unsealed until 2067.

 

I'll be first in line!