JFK Assassination-era Dallas and JD Tippit, plus George HW Bush and the CIA Our Hidden History Interviews

Author Joseph McBride — September 19th, 2018

OHH:Thank you very much for agreeing to talk today.

Joseph McBride: Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

J.D. Tippit and Assassination-era Dallas

OHH: Thank you. One of the things I really admired about your book was the way that you filled in the details not just of the assassination, and the murder of J.D. Tippit, which you did so well there, but also the way that you painted the details of Tippit's life, and about life in Dallas at that time, so I'm really hoping that we can focus some on these things, because I think it's important to understand not just why these things happened in Dallas, but maybe why it was ... Dallas was the particular place where this kind of thing could have happened. You had a quote ...

Joseph McBride: Yeah, I think it's important that the setting was Dallas. It could have been another city. There was evidence that there was a plot to kill Kennedy in Chicago on November 2, 1963. It was foiled, and some evidence of possible plots in Tampa and Miami a few days before the assassination, but it took place in Dallas. Dallas was a very right wing city, by and large, and had a very corrupt police department, and DA's office, so that was a perfect setting for covering up the crime, and any involvement of the police department as well in the crime.

OHH: Right. Right, and an interesting thing that you wrote about in the book was district attorney Craig Watkins who ... I forget the date that he was elected, but he was the first African American district attorney of Dallas, and part of what he did was uncover a lot of the people that district attorney Henry Wade, who obviously is famous for all of the interviews that we see of him basically calling Oswald guilty, so tell us a little bit about what Craig Watkins, of what kind of district attorney Henry Wade was.

[Henry Wade's] office had railroaded many innocent people, and sent them to be executed or put away in prison for a long time, and Watkins came in... and he freed about 300 people who had been in prison.

Joseph McBride: Yeah. Watkins was the DA from 2007 to 2015, unfortunately no longer in that office. He's a lawyer, but he was ... He set out to try to exonerate people who had been falsely convicted under Henry Wade's jurisdiction. Wade was a longtime DA. He was DA during the Kennedy assassination. I had a really interesting interview with him, quite revealing, actually, and he's also famous for the Roe v. Wade abortion case. He was the Wade in that case, who was the opponent of the woman who was trying to get an abortion. He was a former FBI agent, and a very interesting man, but very corrupt. His office had railroaded many innocent people, and sent them to be executed or put away in prison for a long time, and Watkins came in. One strange thing Wade did was he preserved DNA evidence on a lot of his cases, and that enabled Watkins to reexamine cases, and he freed about 300 people who had been in prison. It's a horrible miscarriage of justice, but he was correcting a lot of flaws, and it was great.

In the Kennedy case, Wade was, as you say, he gave a infamous press conference on the Sunday night after Oswald was killed, a televised press conference. You can watch it on YouTube, where he was laying out the case against Oswald, but he seemed unsure of a lot of the details, and confused, if you want to look at it that way, about some of the evidence, or as Oswald called it "the so-called evidence". He told his brother, "Don't believe this so-called evidence." I've found that so much of the, what is put forth as evidence in the case is just false, or misleading, and you have to reexamine everything very critically. You can't take anything at face value in this case, which is a good thing for researchers in a way, because it forces you to not take things because of some authority figure tells you to believe this or that. You have to really research every detail, every fact. And so a lot of what Wade said was way off the mark, and what I found out basically, I interviewed him and Jim Leavelle, who was the detective, who was the lead detective in the Tippit murder, took place the same day as the assassination within about 39 minutes after Kennedy was killed, Tippit was killed.

The two of them in their interviews basically admitted to me that a lot of the case against Oswald was very thin, and they wouldn't quite come out and say they had no case, but that was the strong implication of what, a lot of what Leavelle told me. He was trying to cover some things up, and he was an interesting man. He's still alive. He's in his nineties, but he would reveal certain things, so I had the feeling he was trying to tell the truth about certain subjects, but I have to question him carefully. Basically what he said was he was told by Wade in his office that Friday that they didn't really have a case on Oswald for killing Kennedy, so we better get him on killing Tippit.

The Tippit case, one reason I studied it for decades in my book Into the Nightmare was I thought it was a under-investigated part of the case. The Warren commission hardly looked into it, and the house law committee did some investigation, but not enough. Very little was written about it over the years, and so I thought, well, here's an interesting, revealing facet to the case. David Belin, who was one of the Warren Commission attorneys, said it was the Rosetta Stone for understanding the assassination, and I think it is although in a different sense of what he meant. He meant that it shows that Oswald did it, but there's an illogic to a lot of the presentation because one of the arguments is, "Well, he shot a policeman. He was fleeing, must have been guilty of killing the president", and that doesn't logically make sense, because you could kill a policeman and not have killed the president. There are many reasons why, if he did kill the policeman - which I don't think he did - one doesn't prove the other, and but that was kind of the emotional logic that they were selling to the public, that why else would he kill this policeman? He was fleeing from the assassination. He was panicking. He was trying to get away, and he shot this innocent policeman, et cetera. The public pretty much bought that for a while.

But they really didn't have much for the case at all on him for the Tippit murder, and I asked Leavelle, I said, "Well, what did you have? Why did you think it was a better case?" He said, "Well, we had witnesses," and they had some witnesses, but one of the strange things about the case is the witnesses really disagree very sharply on the Tippet murder. It's like the Japanese classic film Rashomon, where people are giving different views of the same incident, and it took me a long time to try to sort these out, and it's very complex, but there were some witnesses who said Oswald did it, and then there were witnesses who said two men were involved, and they would not identify Oswald. They identified people who had different appearance, like a short, stocky man with curly hair, instead of Oswald was a lean young man. He was not stocky, and he was balding, so anyway, there was wild discrepancies, descriptions of the suspect, or suspects.

To me, the bottom line in the case is that the ballistics evidence does not convict Oswald. In fact, it exonerates him. And you can't have a murder case without ballistics evidence unless the person confesses, which Oswald did not confess to either crime.

A lot of the physical evidence just doesn't hold up. To me, the bottom line in the case is that the ballistics evidence does not convict Oswald. In fact, it exonerates him. And you can't have a murder case without ballistics evidence unless the person confesses, which Oswald did not confess to either crime. He denied both crimes. The ballistics evidence, the bullets and the shells don't link up to Oswald's alleged gun that he allegedly had. Even that is disputed, and there was an FBI witness who was an honest man, who said he couldn't link the shells and the bullets to the gun. That's the whole case, really, basically.

And one of the key ... the key witness the Warren commission relied on was a woman named Helen Markham, who was a waitress who was on her way to work, and she claims she saw the shooting. She was hysterical at the scene, and then they took her to a lineup, and she was actually passing out with panic, and she had to be given smelling salts and things, and Jim Leavelle was kind of taking care of her, trying to get her to identify Oswald, and she wasn't really telling them what they wanted to know.

She gave a time for the shooting which by itself would exonerate Oswald. That's another one of the basic facts about the shooting, that Oswald was seen at his rooming house about nine-tenths of a mile away, at about 1:03 or 1:04, and the Warren Commission said the shooting took place around ... They gave I think 1:15 was the time they gave, but other witnesses said it was closer to 1:10, or 1:08, or 1:09. Oswald couldn't have made it from his rooming house by walking. If he had been there at 1:03 to 1:04, and then gotten there in time at 1:08 or 1:09 to shoot the policeman, and nobody saw him running or anything. The only way he could have gotten there that fast was being driven, and nobody has any evidence that he was driven to the scene. Also there was a witness at the theater where he was captured a while later. Butch Burrows, who was a concessionaire at the theater, who said that Oswald came in shortly after 1:00, and sat down, bought some popcorn, and was watching the movies, and so he wasn't even there, according to this witness.

Prosecutors in Dallas have said for years, "Any prosecutor can convict a guilty man: it takes a great prosecutor to convict an innocent man."

There are all kinds of anomalies in the case. It's a very, very mixed up case, and the other thing I would say, and there's so much you could say about it, but they basically stopped investigating the Tippit murder within two days. Once Oswald was shot, they basically dropped the investigation. They claim they continued looking into it, but they really didn't, and it's kind of shocking when you think that a policeman is shot, and his fellow officers don't even bother trying to solve the crime. They pinned it on this innocent guy, and in The Thin Blue Line, the Errol Morris documentary which is very retelent of the Tippit case, although it's about the shooting of another Dallas policeman years later, but it's quite similar in a lot of ways, and some of the same people are even involved, and Henry Wade let Errol Morris into his files, and that's how he proved that the guy that they convicted didn't do it, and then he was freed. In that case, one person in the film says the attitude in the Dallas DA's office was, "it takes a good prosecutor to convict a guilty man, but it takes a great prosecutor to convince an innocent man", which is really appalling.

This is the attitude that they actually, that it's great to get somebody who didn't do it, but how could you feel satisfied if you're a policeman, and your fellow officer is killed, and you didn't get the right guy? It just shows you how corrupt and slipshod, and amoral the whole scene was there.

OHH: Right, and that's an excellent film, and people should watch it, because it does show them ... It does show the police we  relying on people who obviously have their own motives for giving evidence. It's just a really fascinating look at ... That was also under Henry Wade, right?

Joseph McBride: Yeah. Wade ... Errol Morris was down there ... I know him. He's an old friend of mine, and he was investigating another subject who was a psychologist, who routinely testified for the police or the prosecution that somebody was a psychopath who would be dangerous to society, and they should put him away, and send him to get executed, et cetera. This guy was called "Dr. Death" . He was so evil, actually, but while he was investigating this, he started finding out in Wade's files about other cases. He came upon the Randall Adams case. Randall Adams was the guy they convicted for the killing of Officer Wood, Robert Wood, and as Errol says, everybody on death row, or in ... By that time, Adams was not on death row. His death conviction had been changed to life in prison, but he said it's very common for prisoners to say they didn't do it, so he didn't take it too seriously, but the more he looked into it, he realized that it didn't add up. Basically in the film, he, through his own investigation, finds the real killer, and gets them to more or less confess on camera, actually on a tape recorder.

It's quite remarkable, and that film freed Adams after he had been in prison for a long time. It's a great example of how they operated in the Dallas DA's office, and it's a similar looking case. You have a policeman out in a kind of isolated area, he gets shot, and you have these witnesses who make up stories, and the witnesses are a very corrupt bunch of people. Some of them did it for the money, et cetera, and made up stories. Just shows you the laxity that went on in the Dallas law enforcement circles in those days.

OHH: One of the stranger figures that you talk about was assistant ... I think he was an assistant district attorney. Bill Alexander.

Joseph McBride: Bill Alexander.

OHH: Right, and he specifically was ... He claimed to have actually lied to the FBI right during the investigation about important things, but to go into him, he was a member of the Minutemen, a far right organization. This'll kind of bring us into the Dallas police connection with the far-right...

Bill Alexander was a really flamboyant and kind of deranged character, who was one of the deputy DAs, and Wade sort of enjoyed having him around. He realized he was a loose cannon. He had to fire him eventually, because advocated hanging Chief Justice Earl Warren...

Joseph McBride: Yeah. He was a very ... Bill Alexander was a really flamboyant and kind of deranged character, who was one of the deputy DAs, and Wade sort of enjoyed having him around. He realized he was a loose cannon. He had to fire him eventually, because advocated hanging Chief Justice Earl Warren, actually. He was that kind of a far-right extremist, and he was involved in the investigation of the Tippit case, the Kennedy assassination, and the Ruby case, and I did get an interview with him on the phone, and he was fairly forthcoming, but then he, for some reason, wouldn't talk to me anymore, but he's given other interviews. He openly expressed contempt for President Kennedy, and he said something like, "he came down here, he got his ass wiped down here", like, "who cares?" A lot of the Dallas police were rabidly anti-Kennedy and racist, and even Klan members, Ku Klux Klan members.

I interviewed one retired detective who was a detective at the time, who was a friend of Tippit named Morris Brumley and while we were talking, he showed me his Ku Klux Klan membership card.

I interviewed one retired detective who was a detective at the time, who was a friend of Tippit named Morris Brumley and while we were talking, he showed me his Ku Klux Klan membership card. He pulled it out of his wallet and showed it to me. I had my tape recorder right there, and he was boasting about being a member of the Klan. He claims he had infiltrated the Klan for the Dallas police, and I later told that to another researcher and Dallas, and he kind of laughed. He said, "Well, infiltrated the Klan. About three-fourths of the Klan were Dallas policemen." Then he talked about acts of violence that they committed against Black people, and I tried ... When you do an interview and somebody says something shocking, you try to just listen, and encourage the person to keep talking, and I finally just kind of had to say something. I said, "Did you ever ... When you were infiltrating them, did you ever try to arrest any of them for these crimes, or report them?" He clammed up, unfortunately, at that point. That was kind of the atmosphere there, and so Alexander was connected with a lot of ... there were a lot of right wing people who were connected.

General Edwin Walker was a famous right wing extremist who lived in Dallas, and he was friendly with Alexander. A lot of them hung out at this place called Austin's Barbecue, which was near ... It was across the street from the police substation where Tippit was based. And Tippit worked there as ... he moonlighted in a couple places to make extra money, and one of them was Austin's Barbecue. He was working in this hotbed of right wing extremists, and he had ample opportunities to be known to them, to be recruited into the plot. What I found out about Tippit, and a lot of people from the very beginning wondered, was Tippit somehow involved in the conspiracy, or what was he doing there? He was out of his district. Questions were raised from the very beginning, but they were kind of stifled in the media. The media really didn't pursue that much, but some people speculated he was out to capture or kill Oswald, and I found out that's what he was doing.

I interviewed Tippit's father, Edgar Lee Tippit, who had really never been interviewed except by the FBI, and he was very outgoing, friendly guy. He told me that Mrs. Tippit, J.D.'s wife or widow, Marie told him that soon after the assassination and the murder of her husband, another policeman came to visit her to tell her what had happened that day. He said that, "J.D. and I were sent off to get Oswald, to pursue him," and it's not clear whether they were supposed to capture him or kill him, but I think there was evidence that the police would have killed Oswald if they had the chance in the theater, so it's likely that these guys might have killed Oswald if they had encountered him, and this policeman told Mrs. Tippit that, he said, "I got into a traffic accident on the way, and I didn't make it in time, and J.D. made it. He got killed," and he felt guilty about that. It was quite a revelation. And it jived with a lot of other evidence about Tippit's strange movements Cliff. The other policeman I realized was William Mentzel, who was the policeman who was actually assigned to that district, and Mentzel ... I also found out there was an auto accident up, about two blocks away, right around that same time.

Mentzel was the officer who was sent to the scene of the accident, and he cleared the accident I think in four minutes, which is bizarre, because if a policeman is sent to an auto accident, you can't clear it in four minutes. You have to take down license numbers, and talk to witnesses, and find out what happened to the car. It just doesn't make any sense, so I wonder if Mentzel actually had the accident that he was reported to have covered.

[Tippit and Mentzel] were out to get Oswald specifically, and that proves that they were in on a conspiracy, because officially Oswald was not known to the Dallas police until he was arrested in the theater, which took place about 1:52 p.m.

Anyway, so that's what they were doing. They were out to get Oswald specifically, and that proves that they were in on a conspiracy, because officially Oswald was not known to the Dallas police until he was arrested in the theater, which took place about 1:52 p.m. Even then, they didn't know his identity because he had two different forms of ID on him, and he wouldn't tell him who he was, so they didn't prove who they thought he was until they took him downtown, to the police station, like at 2:10, and so when Tippit and Mentzel were set after Oswald shortly after the assassination, which took place at 12:30, that's very suspicious because they were told to be looking for a guy who was not officially known to the police.

The police knew who Oswald was. They were surveilling him, and they knew of his presence in town, et cetera, and a lot came out about that. It all ties together, that Tippit was involved in some kind of illicit activity there trying to get Oswald. He drove into a trap, and he was shot, and it gets kind of murky there because I don't claim to know everything about it. I studied this for 31 years, but it's still ... There are elements that are still mysterious. It's a cold case. It's hard to get the truth about a cold case, but it seems that there was another police car on the scene, and there are witnesses who said there was a car in the alley. Tippit pulled up right in front of an alley between two houses, and allegedly confronted somebody, and there was a police car there, and a witness said that somebody came from the police car direction, and shot Tippit in the head after he was shot by this other guy. He was on the ground and somebody shot him in the head to make sure he was dead, and looked at him, and then went back toward the alley. Then this other man ran off in another direction, and that's one person's ... well, there are a couple people who talk about the police car, but there are a number of people who talk about two people involved. 

I think that there was some kind of a setup there that they wanted to lure Tippit into a trap and kill him, and why they did that, you'd have to speculate that to some extent. It might have been as simple as they needed an excuse to draw all kinds of officers into that area, and nothing draws officers into an area more than the shooting of a policeman, because that's the worst thing that they can deal with. I actually asked Jim Leavelle, I said, "On the police radio, I noticed that there are actually kind of fairly blasé when they talk about the president being shot," and he said, "That's true," and you could say, okay, they're being kind of professional, but it seems kind of strange. Then when they said, "There's an officer shot," suddenly there's all kinds of excitement, and the police radio people, more voices coming in more quickly, and people seem agitated, and alarmed, and something like 30 police cars, 30 or 40 police cars went to that area.

I said to Leavelle, I said, "Do you think there was more concern there?" He kind of chuckled, and he said, "There's an old saying that ... " I said, "What did they think of the Kennedy assassination compared to the Tippit killing?" He said, "First of all, a policeman shooting means more to the police department," which is remarkable, considering the President of the United States has just been shot, but then he said there's an old saying, "Kennedy's shooting wasn't no more than a soft Dallas n-word shooting". He didn't say n-word. He used the actual word, which is pretty shocking, and he thought this was kind of amusing. This shows the depth of racism there, and also the hatred and contempt for Kennedy, so they got all these officers descended on the scene, and Oswald was in the theater, and it was very convenient to have all these officers there to arrest the suspect. They might well have killed him in the theater, but he had the presence of mind to shout, "I'm not resisting arrest. I'm not resisting arrest, and I protest this police brutality," et cetera.

There were some civilian witnesses in the theater, people who were patrons, and they took their names, and then that list has never been introduced into evidence, unfortunately. There was a scuffle, and he got arrested, but there was also an arrest in the balcony, according to the police records, and so two people were arrested, and somebody was taken out the back. There was a whole theory about, there were two Oswalds, which sounded far-fetched to me when I first heard this theory, but it actually ... I believe it now because there's a book by John Armstrong called Harvey and Lee that is overwhelmingly proving that case, that there were two people with that identity, which is not abnormal in spycraft. Oswald was a spy, and there was another person sharing the identity, and it was confusing intentionally. That's one reason they do that, so people can be seen at the same place, at different places at the same time, et cetera. The two of them apparently converged in the theater, and both were arrested, and the other guy was arrested and let go, apparently, in the back.

That's one reason why Tippit might have been killed, but he may have been involved in more depth in the plot to kill Kennedy, too, and I explore that possibility, although it's inconclusive. So there's a lot going on there with Tippit, and his movements before the assassination, and at the time, right after the assassination.

OHH: You draw a picture of him as kind of in the center of all of these groups, partially because of Austin's Barbecue, and his other job as well, which I found ... I never, I have always heard that oh, he worked at this Stevens Theater, and I just always heard it mentioned just kind of offhandedly, but you have a lot of information there, first of all. Go ahead. Please. Yes. Very interesting.

Joseph McBride: Yeah. That was a place where some organized crime activity was going on, including prostitution, and possibly some drug trafficking, and during the war in ...

OHH: And anti-Castro Cuban activity, right?

Joseph McBride: Mm?

OHH: Anti-Castro Cuban activity, and ...

The man who ran the theater [where Tippit worked] was involved with the Voice of America, which is a State Department operation, which is anti-Castro propaganda operation...

Joseph McBride: Yeah. The anti-Castro Cubans were, there, and the man who ran the theater was involved with the Voice of America, which is a State Department operation, which is anti-Castro propaganda operation, and there were these anti-Castro Cubans in Oak Cliff, which is the suburb where the shooting took place. There was a safe house apparently, and a number of them were around, and there was possibly some drug running and gun running involved.

During the Warren commission hearings, Chief Curry, the police chief, was asked by Allen Dulles, former head of the CIA, he said there was a rumor that Tippit was involved in drug trafficking. "Have you heard that?" Curry said, "No, I didn't ... Never heard anything about that." But it was interesting he brought that up, and it's just one of those strange loose ends. What's that about?

OHH: Yeah.

Joseph McBride: Tippit was involved in a number of milieus that were unsavory, and a lot of it converged in the Austin's Barbecue nexus, and for example, the guy who owned Austin's Barbecue, Austin Cook, was involved in business with Ralph Paul, who was a mob figure who had bankrolled Jack Ruby, and was his sort of silent partner in his nightclubs. So t here is a Jack Ruby connection there, too, and there ... It's kind of a small world. All these people kind of converge in that area there.

OHH: Yeah. No, it's amazing the connections that you found that draw together the organized crime, the anti-Castro Cubans, these far right groups, and really Tippit is sitting right in the middle of it, or whatever, or whatever he knew. I also found it interesting that you said he had worked at the theater for six or seven years. Was that correct?

Joseph McBride: I don't know the exact amount of time. I'd have to check into that, but he worked at another theater, too, and there were rumors about him knowing Ruby, and knowing Oswald. Those were never proven, but it wouldn't be surprising if he had some involvement with Ruby. Certainly had some connections there, but Tippit was kind of an ordinary, undistinguished policeman who never got promoted in 11 years, and he was not considered a very good policeman. He was a war veteran who had had some serious PTSD, and one problem he had was that he couldn't look people in the eye. He had this kind of nervous condition where he would look away from people, which is potential fatal for a policeman, and people worried about that. That could help account for how he got shot. If you're not looking at somebody, they could shoot you more easily.

And he also ... He had two homes, which is kind of unusual. He made only about $400 a month in the police department, but he had two homes, and he had these extra jobs, supposedly to help pay for these homes. He also had a mistress on the side. He was considered sort of a ladies' man. All this was kind of hushed up at the time because it didn't look good to try to make him into a hero, and I interviewed his mistress Johnnie Maxie Witherspoon, who gave me a very candid interview about their relationship, and she said they had broken up soon before the assassination. There were rumors that she was pregnant with his child, and she did get pregnant soon before the assassination, and she had a child in the spring of '64, but she denied to me that it was Tippit's child. And she had an ex-husband who was jealous, who she had broken up with, and he was stalking them. There's a theory that some people have that the ex-husband actually shot Tippit, and it had nothing to do with the assassination, and I think I disproved that. I tried to investigate that as much as I could. It seems unlikely. She didn't think it was the case, and she said she wasn't there. Some people thought he was in Oak Cliff to see her, and she said that she didn't see him that day, she was home.

She was a little vague on where she was, but that was one of the things that's interesting when you interview somebody, and they're not forthcoming in some areas. I couldn't pin her down on where she actually was at the time of the shooting, which ... There may be more going on there.

But I don't think her husband did it, and probably because there's a lot of evidence Tippit was rushing around Oak Cliff looking for somebody. He was waiting at the viaduct nearby. It's right near Oswald's rooming house. There's a viaduct that goes to downtown. You can see the downtown area if you sit there at this viaduct. There was a gas station, and it's a five minute drive across the viaduct to downtown area. Tippit was sitting in his police car. He was seen by various witnesses, and waiting for somebody, possibly a bus or a cab with Oswald, and it didn't come by, so he took off on a high rated speed about 12:45, and was racing around and he radioed in his whereabouts a couple times. Shortly after 1:00, he stopped a car a few blocks from where he was shot, and pulled this guy over, and looked in the back seat of the car, and then he didn't see anybody, and he ran back to his car and took off. It was mysterious behavior.

Then he ran into a record store [Top Ten Records] on Jefferson Boulevard, which is again, near the shooting place. He ran in there, and he commandeered a telephone, and that place is still there. You can still see the telephone, and he made a phone call just a few minutes before he was shot, and there was no answer, or nobody said anything. The witnesses said he just stood there and listened or whatever, and then took off again. He was looking for somebody, or he was getting, and/or he was getting directions, so that doesn't quite match the idea that a jealous husband just happened to shoot him.

OHH: That would be a hell of a coincidence, that's for sure.

Joseph McBride: Yeah, and the husband was allegedly on his way to work in a different part of town at the time.

OHH: And not to be outdone with all those connections, he was also ... the Tippits were also close friends with the Mathers. Am I right on that, and he was... Mr. Mather... I forget his first name, worked for Collins Radio.

Joseph McBride: Yeah. That's a whole interesting side of the case was, we don't know the whole story there, and I'm sure it's ... A lot more needs to be known. Collins Radio was a heavily defense industry connected radio company that supplied the radios, for example, for Air Force Two, and radio equipment for the Army in Vietnam, and all kinds of high level, top secret things like that. There was a man named Carl Mather who worked for them. They had a plant near Dallas, and he was a friend of the Tippits. He had lived nearby, I guess it could be explained by the fact that they were neighbors, but it's kind of an odd connection for kind of obscure policemen to be connected with this guy. It was sort of a high level security clearance kind of person with that kind of government operation going on. Anyway, Mather was ... his car was seen soon after the Tippit shooting in Oak Cliff, and a witness said he saw Oswald in the car, which doesn't make a lot of sense because Oswald was at the theater, but the witness who had been a former law enforcement person took down the license number, and it was traced to Carl Mather.

The car took off, and a reporter who later became mayor of Dallas [Wes Wise] investigated this. Some credible people investigated this, and Mather ... Mather's car was around Old Cliff at that time. What was he doing there? The Mathers arrived at the Tippit home soon after the shooting to comfort Mrs. Tippit, and this is all very strange connections.

Years later when the House Select Committee tried to interview Mather, he said he would give an interview, but he insisted on immunity from prosecution, which is peculiar, and they actually gave it to him.

Years later when the House Select Committee tried to interview Mather, he said he would give an interview, but he insisted on immunity from prosecution, which is peculiar, and they actually gave it to him. You can see the letter, and yet we don't know what he said to them because of those records have never appeared. Something very strange was going on with Mather. Some people have speculated maybe they were operating communications for the plot, to help coordinate all these people's activities at the time, or we really don't know the whole story there.

OHH:  There's a few other things to talk about, but just in regards to Tippit, in your final conclusion, what did you feel kind of ... I know you may have to speculate, but what did you feel finally was his role in everything?

Joseph McBride: One area that I investigated but it's inconclusive is there was the grassy knoll of ... There were probably two shooters on the grassy knoll, and the shooter in the Texas School Book Suppository, and probably somebody in the Dal-Tex Building. It was triangulated fire, and I think there was a shooter behind the wooden fence, and there was a shooter behind the concrete retaining wall on the grassy knoll, and witnesses, and photographs show that there was a man in a policeman's uniform behind the retaining wall, which is right near looking down on where the car passed, where Kennedy was being driven. So apparently a Dallas policeman fired a shot - or somebody dressed as a Dallas policeman - and there are seven photographs that show this figure, and so you have to wonder, who is this? And I began wondering, could this be J.D. Tippit? Could this be the reason why he was eliminated, because it is strange that 39 minutes later, miles away, this policeman gets killed for no really apparent reason. It is remarkable.

Somebody said sarcastically the Dallas Police did great work by capturing the assassin within an hour. Actually, it was ... Let's see, 1:52, so it was like an hour and 22 minutes after the Kennedy assassination, but Tippit was killed 39 minutes after Kennedy, so if Tippit was involved in the shooting of Kennedy, it would have been very convenient to have all three of them within an hour or so - Kennedy, Tippit, and Oswald - and they would have wrapped up the whole case, and looked like heroes, but it didn't really work out because Oswald was allowed to live. Then they had to have him killed in the police station, which was a real messy thing to do.

But I couldn't prove that Tippit was the grassy knoll shooter. One reason is his wife gave an alibi that he was home for lunch, and her story kept changing, though, over the years. She told many versions of it that don't quite jibe, and I couldn't get an interview with her. I tried to, and she didn't reply. Then after the book was published, she appeared in public at the sixth floor in museum in Dallas with her surviving children, two children. I flew to Dallas to try to get an interview with her, and I went up to her after the event, and she seemed very friendly. I introduced myself, told her I had written this book, and she seemed very nice. I said, "Could I interview you? I'm here in town briefly. Could I see you tomorrow?" She said, "Yeah, I would be happy to do that." This policeman came over who was her minder, kind of, and I had been told that she has always been surrounded by Dallas police, keep a close eye on her, and protect her, et cetera, or whatever they ... protect her and control her, and this guy came over and said, "Who are you? I'm in charge of her schedule." I gave him my card, he gave me his card, and he said, "Well, we'll work it out, and we'll get back to you," and of course he never got back to me.

I talked to Tippit's son Curtis, who was a very friendly, nice fellow. We were having an interesting talk, and the same policeman came over, and literally yanked Curtis by the arm and pulled him away from me. It was bizarre.

She was willing to give an interview, and she didn't because of this guy, and then so I went over, and I talked to Tippit's son Curtis, who was a very friendly, nice fellow. We were having an interesting talk, and the same policeman came over, and literally yanked Curtis by the arm and pulled him away from me. It was bizarre.

I was hoping to try to quiz Mrs. Tippit further in that lunch, because her stories kept changing, and the times kept changing. There was a woman across the street who, a neighbor who was quoted in another book on Tippit as verifying that Tippit came home. If he was home for lunch, he wouldn't have been the shooter downtown, because there was no way he could have done both. It's a considerable distance. So this woman said, "Yeah, I saw him leaving home, and et cetera, et cetera". So interviewed her, and I broke down her story. It really, her story doesn't hold up at all. She really ... I think she was confused, and I think she was mixing up seeing him on a different day, with that day. Her story, a lot of elements of her story don't make any sense at all, so it's still kind of an open question to me, whether Tippit really was home for lunch, or whether his wife was giving him a convenient alibi.

I think the available evidence shows that he was part of the operation. Soon after the shooting, they wanted to eliminate Oswald, so they sent Tippit and William Mentzel after him, hoping they could get into a gun fight with him, or shoot him down on some pretext, which wouldn't be hard for policemen to make up, as we know. Happens all the time in Dallas and other places. Then they would look like heroes, gunning down the so-called assassin, and they could easily frame Oswald, as they tried to do.

But a lot of the framing fell apart because the public, when they started looking into the case, independent researchers started studying it, and by 1966, people were seriously doubting the official version. The first day I was a high school student, I ran to a radio, and I heard he was shot, and I listened to the news reports, and from about 12:40 onward, they were saying Kennedy was shot from the front. They said the shots were fired from a hill in front of him, or from the railroad bridge, and it wasn't until about 1:00 they started saying the shots came from behind, and I registered the fact that this is peculiar. Now they've changed the direction of the shots, and if they had had some explanation of it, maybe I would have believed it, but I think an alarm bell went off in my head. I was already a newspaper reporter as a kid, and my parents were reporters, so I kind of knew how ... What questions to ask, so I was suspicious, and when I saw Oswald on television denying he had done anything, I believed him.

From the first day, I was skeptical, but then like a lot of people, I was convinced by The Warren Report. I thought, this seems thorough, et cetera, and I really didn't think about it too much for the next couple years until books started coming out, like Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment, and Sylvia Meagher's great book, Accessories After the Fact, and I didn't read these books at the time, but I knew about them from press reports, and things. I started reexamining the case. By the end of '66, I wrote a letter to a local newspaper in Wisconsin, saying I didn't believe The Warren Report anymore. I was back to being skeptical.

Then I started doing the research, reading the books. It wasn't until the seventies when I really started reading about it in earnest. I think Watergate helped open my mind, because it was so obviously conspiracy, and it revealed the dark underbelly of our society, and how things really happen, and criminal activities on the highest level. And a lot of the same players are involved, so I began studying it, and in '82, I began my own investigation in earnest, and over the years, I would do all I could to ... I was reading books on it constantly, and reading documents, going to the National Archives. In those days, we didn't have the internet, so you had to go to the National Archives, and xerox the documents and things. Then I'd go to Dallas and interview people, and did a lot of research over the years. I was doing other things, other books and work at the same time, but it's a long process, but it took a while for me to become a skeptic again, because The Warren Report fooled a lot of people.

OHH: Right. Certainly had the look of something that was put together right, with the hand of a lot of high-powered people behind it, but it's actually interesting that you ... these early critics, the people who were kind of brave enough to put their books out ...

Joseph McBride: Yeah, I think the only heroes in the case of the independent researchers, especially the earlier ones, and the witnesses who have come forward. A lot of very brave witnesses have come forward and said, "No, it didn't happen the way they said it happened," and some of them got killed, and some were threatened, et cetera. I greatly admire those early researchers, and those, to me, it was inspiring, and I dedicated my book to those two groups of people. Those are the ones who ... The government didn't investigate the crime. That was really shocking to me as a citizen, and I wanted to be a lawyer, and become a politician, and I was so appalled that the government would ... The President of the United States gets shot in public, on a public street, and they don't solve the crime, they didn't want to solve the crime, and blame it on an innocent man. I was really shocked, and that changed my whole life, because I didn't want to be ... I lost faith in our governmental system, so I became a writer instead. It's been the independent researchers, and I'm happy to be one of them, who carried the ball on this case all these years, because the mainstream media have been lying to us about this from day one, with a few exceptions. And the government has never done a proper job of investigating it.

Mark Lane and Emile de Antonio's film Rush to Judgment

OHH: No, I agree. I think it's kind of a real expression of democracy and civic action. Let's talk about one of the early researchers, and obviously you're a film historian. The Mark Lane, Emile de Antonio film Rush to Judgment, can we talk a little bit about that, just ...

Joseph McBride: Yeah.

OHH: Do you know any of the history of it? How was it released? Who got to see it? Did it mean anything? As a film, was it groundbreaking in any way, visually or anything like that?

Joseph McBride: Yeah. I knew both of them. I interviewed de Antonio once on television. I got to know him in Hollywood a little bit. He was a great guy, a tremendous documentarian, made a lot of groundbreaking documentaries, and very radical filmmaker. and Mark Lane, I admired as ... His book Rush to Judgment is very well argued. He was a lawyer and politician who took it upon himself to investigate the case. He wrote one of the first articles skeptical of the case, and he represented Oswald's mother because he felt Oswald wasn't getting represented before the Warren commission at all, and he wanted to have some kind of ... have his voice heard, and Lane testified before the Warren commission, tried to give evidence. He was the only person who publicly testified, because everybody else testified behind closed doors, and their testimony was released later. Lane was vilified by the government, and pursued by the FBI, and all kinds of... maligned by people. His book holds up well. A lot has been learned since then, but it's a good breakdown of the flaws in the case.

Sylvia Meagher's book I think is the best book on the assassination still, Accessories After the Fact. I'd recommend people read that. She was, again, an independent researcher. She worked for the United Nations, but in her spare time, she would study the 26 volumes of supporting evidence supposedly of the Warren report. She took it upon herself, for example, to index these volumes, because nobody ... They didn't provide an index to begin with, so she published that, and then she wrote this brilliant book, very lucid prose, dissecting all the so-called evidence, and showing how fraudulent and fake it all was. It reads really well, and again, we've learned so much since then. We keep learning things because different researchers make discoveries, and documents come out. Because of Oliver Stone's film, JFK, millions of pages of documents have been released since then.

There's still government documents that are withheld, as people probably know, that they were supposed to have been released last fall. President Trump said he would release everything. He had the ultimate ... There was a law passed, the JFK Records Act, that all the documents had to be released by the fall of 2017 unless the President issued an order otherwise, based on some ... The agencies could object to certain documents being released on certain grounds, such as national security, which is always a convenient excuse. And Trump, at the last minute, capitulated to the CIA and other agencies, and withheld some documents. 

So you have to wonder, one thing I say if somebody believes the Warren report, how come after ... what is it now, 50, how many years is it? 55 years since Kennedy was shot, what's the national security excuse for keeping parts of it secretive if a lone nut killed the President? It makes no sense whatsoever. It's crazy. And so we should have all these documents, but the CIA is protecting certain operations, and a lot of people are digging into it, but we'll probably never get all the documents.

A lot of things have been destroyed over the years. Documents have been destroyed, evidence has been destroyed. People have been killed. A lot of people have died, so it's an imperfect case in terms of having evidence, but you do your best to fill in the gaps. There may be some things we'll never know, but Penn Jones, who is another of my heroes, who is a Old Texas newspaper man, who had a small town paper outside of Dallas, and he was on the case from the first weekend, although he said, "I didn't realize it was a conspiracy until Sunday, so that's now naïve I was." He turned up a lot of leads, and all kinds of information. He was the fearless guy who's kind of a mentor of mine, and I asked him once, people often say, do you think the case will ever be solved? You hear all the time, and he said, "Well, I think ... I and a few friends of mine solved the case basically back in the sixties." I did a YouTube on the media in the assassination. It was called Political Truths. It's in a series called 50 Reasons for 50 Years. You can watch it on YouTube.

I end with that, and I end with a clip from Rush to Judgment with Penn Jones, so they made this very low budget film, Rush to Judgment, based on the Lane book, and Lane is the interviewer in the film who goes around Dallas interviewing witnesses that they could get to talk. It's very, deliberately very simple, black and white, unadorned film. It has a lot of credibility for that reason. It's not a fancy, gussied-up production. They got some great interviews with witnesses who contradict the Warren report, and some of them are very powerful. S.M. Holland, who was a railroad man, who was on the bridge looking down, who said he saw smoke coming from a shot from the grassy knoll, for example. He's a totally credible witness.

And Acquilla Clemmons, who's an African American woman, who was a domestic who worked nearby, near the Tippit shooting, and ran outside when shots were fired, and she saw two men involved going in different directions. She was very brave, and gave this interview. She said that she had been threatened by the Dallas Police not to talk or something might happen to her, and she unfortunately was never seen again after this interview. She just disappeared off the face of the earth, and it's kind of horrifying to think of what happened to her, might have happened to her. She gave a few other interviews, but she was threatened, and de Antonio said in an interview that there was more tension around the Tippit shooting area than in Dealey Plaza. When they went to Dealey Plaza, it was relatively relaxed, and they got people to talk, but when they went to the Tippit area and tried to talk to people, everybody was extremely tense, and some people wouldn't talk, and some people were told by the police, "Don't talk to them," et cetera. He found that very interesting, as I do, too.

OHH: How did Mark Lane use it? Did he just kind of show it at colleges, or how was it released?

Joseph McBride: He gave a lot of lectures. This was before the internet, again, and mainstream media wouldn't cover his activities much, so he would go around and give lectures. He'd rent a hall, and he would give lectures in New York and other places, and he would go to colleges. The film didn't come out till '67, so they had been ... His book had been out for, since '66, and so yeah. He showed the film at colleges, and it was shown a lot. It was kind of a guerrilla production. De Antonio's films were not widely distributed in the conventional way. I saw it in a couple theaters, offbeat movie theaters would show it occasionally, or college campuses, you could rent these films. There were a lot of left wing films that came out in that era about ... antiwar films, and things like that, that were shown, and de Antonio's work, he dealt with the Vietnam and other subjects. The film got around, but you had to be kind of resourceful to be a researcher in those days.

Like to see ... The Zapruder film was not available officially, but there was a bootleg copy of it around, and I got one in... it was the eighties when I got mine, and then I had it converted to videotape, and studied it. Penn Jones had a copy, and he would sell copies. He actually took Dan Rather's erroneous description of the Zapruder film, which says that Kennedy's head went violently forward, when in fact, the film shows his head going violently backward, because he was shot from the front. He put Dan Rather's voice over the film, and he sold copies of that, and I was ... many people saw that. It was shown widely on college campuses, et cetera, so there was this kind of underground movement of researchers. There still is, to some extent, people have conferences, and they have internet forums, and people give speeches, and they do things like a podcast. Podcasts are a great way to get people talking about it, and get the word out, so there is a lot of people that are very interested in the case.

One thing I find that's encouraging, I find a lot of young people are very open-minded about it. People my age ... I was 16 when Kennedy was shot. For a long time, I had trouble getting people to talk to me about it. They wouldn't listen. They would get very tense. They would resort to name-calling, and they just couldn't deal with the subject, but the younger people I don't think have a problem. They just find it interesting, and revealing, and they're more skeptical about government than most of us who were back in the day, and a lot of my friends, and family, and people are still ... they just believe what the government tells them. They don't want to hear anything else, but you used to get vilified a lot if you challenged people. You don't quite get as much vilification as you used to. At a certain point, I realized you just have to live with that, and not worry about that, and just ... that's their problem not my problem, but when I talk to students, for example, they're very open minded about it, and they want to see the Zapruder film, and they want to see Rush to Judgment. They want to see JFK, and read books about it, and it's encouraging. Yeah.

George H.W. Bush and the CIA

OHH: That's great. I don't want to ... I know your time's valuable. I don't want to take too much of it, but if you have time, you want to talk about the George Bush stuff?

Joseph McBride: Yeah. Sure, that's one of my research activities over the years. In the course of my Kennedy research, I was going through microfilm of a 1977, '78 releases on microfilm of FBI documents under the Freedom of Information Act. They released 100,000 pages of documents in those years, and apparently hardly anybody looked at them. I was at a library, and I was ... In my spare time, I would be looking at these documents, and I found in ... When was this, '85, the memo from J. Edgar Hoover, November 29, 1963, summarizing how he had given a briefing to ... The FBI had given a briefing to Mr. George Bush of the CIA, and to a couple of other people about the activities of the anti-Castro Cubans. They were trying to find out if the anti-Castro Cubans were going to do anything in reaction to the assassination. That was the ostensible purpose of this, and I kind of thought, hmm. George Bush, CIA. I didn't realize he was with the CIA that early, but I hadn't really studied his career that much. I was aware of him because he was Vice President at the time.

Then when he became ... When he started running for President in '88, I thought, oh, I better look into this. I went back into these files, and I started looking there, and I started finding more documents that mentioned him. I found documents that talk about the strange incident that the afternoon of the assassination, at 1:45, he called the FBI office in Houston, where he lived. He was in Tyler, Texas, which is east of Dallas. He was running for the U.S. Senate, and he was calling the FBI to turn in one of the head of the Houston Young Republicans, whose name then was James Parrott. He said Parrott had been threatening to kill the President when he came to Texas, and they should look into Parrott, and he gave phone number, and all that. He identified himself with his address and everything, and it immediately raises the question is, well, if this guy had been threatening to kill the President, why didn't he tell the Secret Service before Kennedy came to Dallas, like any good citizen should do.

Why wait until after it happened, and so that was peculiar, and I found other documents pertaining to Parrott, and Parrott was a far right guy, young guy, but he was involved with a bunch of right wing extremists in both Houston and Dallas. I started investigating this, and so I did an article for the Nation magazine in the summer of '88, when Bush was ... Before he got the nomination for President, and I started researching his life, because when you find out he was with the CIA in the early sixties, it sheds a whole new light on his career, because the official story was he didn't become involved with the CIA until Gerald Ford named him the director in '75. In his hearing, confirmation hearing, he was asked, "Do you have any intelligence background?" He said, "No," so he lied under oath, which should have disqualified him. Also, as people even at the time said, how come they're picking this guy with no intelligence background to be the head of the CIA? That doesn't really make a lot of sense. You wouldn't do that.

The more I found out, I started calling people, and doing a lot of research, and found out that he had been with the CIA for years, as kind of a covert operative. Not a full-time agent, but a kind of an asset. He was a businessman. He was running an oil company that had a lot of suspicious connections all over the Caribbean, which was the big hotspot at the time, and even the Middle East and other countries, and they had oil drilling apparatus in various ocean locales. These kind of oil derricks were places where weapons were often stored, when people were trying to use them against Castro, for example. I found out that Bush was involved in the Bay of Pigs operation, as part of the CIA, and then I found indications that his background in the CIA might have extended way back further into his years at Yale in the late forties, which makes sense. Yale is a hotbed of recruitment for the CIA, and always has been.

He was in the Navy during World War II. He was a flyer, but he may have had Navy intelligence connections. His father, Prescott Bush, who was a senator from Connecticut, was an Army intelligence guy, so it runs in the family. There's this whole alternate history of the Bush family that started to emerge in my research, but it was very hard to nail all this stuff down, because I was getting all this information, and finding out about all kinds of nefarious activities that Bush had been involved in. I was one guy trying to get all this information with very little resources, and I couldn't nail down everything I was told, and then later on, a lot of this came out. As far as ... I wrote this piece, and it caused quite a stir, and I was on C-SPAN, for example, and got a lot of attention, and it was covered in the Associated Press, and The New York Times, and a lot of newspapers. The CIA, I called them, and I called Bush's office trying to get a response, and they wouldn't comment. The CIA's basic stance on these kinds of questions is always, we don't confirm or deny that somebody's an agent.

Then after I got a lot of attention for about 10 days, they came out with a story that it wasn't George H.W. Bush. It was a guy named George W. Bush, who was also working for the CIA at the time, but they didn't know where he was now, which was kind of odd that they couldn't find a guy. I found the guy pretty quickly, the Defense Intelligence Agency actually tipped us off how to find him, which was kind of unusual. They just ... They called The Nation and said, "Hey, you want to find this guy?" Somebody there didn't like George Bush, and so I interviewed this other man, and he said he was a low level maps reader basically for the CIA, and a desk clerk, very young guy at the time, and he said, "I didn't get that briefing, the high level briefing about the anti-Castro Cubans." I ran a second piece about that, but the media ran with Bush's denial, and the CIA's denial, and then they ignored my followup story, basically. That's the way the media work in our country, that they'll believe the official denials, and they won't believe the story from The Nation, the second story.

I was trying to get him on the phone, and his wife finally came on the phone and said the FBI had just been there, and warned them not to talk to me.

That story kind of died off, and I was hoping other people would run with it, but they didn't, and I did a third story for the Nation on Parrott, the man I was talking about in Houston. When I went to Houston, tried to interview him, and I couldn't ... I was trying to get him on the phone, and his wife finally came on the phone and said the FBI had just been there, and warned them not to talk to me. I said, "The FBI?" She said, "Well, either the FBI or people like the FBI showed up at the house and said, 'Don't talk to this guy McBride.'" Which is very interesting, and Parrott ... I couldn't get to Parrott, but I did a piece about it because I had a lot of FBI documents. It was very well-documented, and I found out that the FBI did a six month investigation of Parrott and his friends, right wing friends, after the assassination as part of their investigation of the assassination. That document was withdrawn from the National Archives right after Bush became Vice President, which was suspicious.

I managed to get ahold of some related documents that gave some indication of how violent some of these guys were, and then other documents began disappearing, like the 10K reports from the Zapata Oil Company that Bush ran. Corporations have to file these reports with the government periodically about what they're doing, and I went to the Securities Exchange Commission, and those had been withdrawn shortly after Bush became Vice President, too, so there was a coverup going on. I turned in this article to The Nation before the election, and they wouldn't run it, even though it was very well-documented. I avoided speculation. I just laid out the facts, and they just wouldn't run it. The editor, Victor Navasky, said, "Stay away from the Kennedy assassination. It's a quagmire," and so they killed the story. I moved on to other things, and years later, I incorporated in my book Into the Nightmare, and continue doing Bush research, but finally, some people, other book writers, started digging into the Bush family.

There are a lot of bad books about the Bush family that just repeat the official BS, but there are some books that do some actual research, including Russ Baker's book, Family of Secrets, which I'd recommend, and his book starts with me finding that document at the San Bernardino University Library in the microfilm, and that's the trigger for his book. He found out some things that I didn't know. For example, it came out in '94 that George H.W. Bush was in Dallas the day of the assassination. He was in Tyler, and then he flew ... He called the FBI and said "I flying to Dallas, and going to stay at the Sheraton Hotel overnight". The Sheraton was where the Secret Service and other agents had their communications for the President's trip to Dallas, including the White House communications, and so here's Bush flying to Dallas.

But what Russ found out was Bush had been there the night before, the 21st. I've failed to do a simple thing. I didn't look at the newspaper for the day before, and there was a little item that Bush was giving a speech to an oil group on November 21, so here he is in Dallas on the 21st, and then he's there on the 22nd, and Richard Nixon was there on the 22nd, and Kennedy and Johnson, so you had four US Presidents in Dallas on the 22nd of November, and what was Bush doing there... Russ goes into further details about what he might have been involved in, and it seems like he was some kind of operative in the plot against Kennedy.

OHH: Explain the ... Parrott was somebody who was working in Bush's office, when Bush was the ...

Joseph McBride: Yeah, Bush was-

OHH: Working at the GOP chairman in Houston, I think.

Joseph McBride: He was the chairman of the Harris County GOP. Harris County is Houston, and he turned in the head of the Young Republicans. That's a fairly important position, and why did he turn this guy in, and one of the strange things was in the '92 campaign, when Bush was running against Bill Clinton, it came up that Parrott was still working for Bush as a volunteer in '92. Why would you work for a guy who had turned you in to the FBI as an assassination conspirator? There's something fishy, and even though I never got the Parrott, a friend of mine got to Parrott and he hasn't given much in the way of interviews, so there's not much known about him except that he was a right wing extremist. Different theories were proposed by people I interviewed and I wrote about some of them. One was that Bush was just wasting the FBI's time by sending them off on a wild goose change of somebody who wasn't involved in anything. But Kennedy was in Houston the day before, and I found evidence that the police were extremely worried that somebody would shoot Kennedy in Houston.

Why didn't he do anything before the assassination?

And Jack Ruby was there the day before, and so it's conceivable that Parrott and some of his friends might have been involved in some kind of a plot. We don't really know the whole story of Parrott, and why Bush would turn him in, and why they would still be friendly, and I tried really hard to find out all I could. I found out some other odd things about him and some of his friends, but again, it was kind of inconclusive research, but something very strange, why he would do this. He was fingering somebody for some reason, and maybe it was the way of getting himself off the hook. Why didn't he do anything before the assassination?

"There may be some nuts around who might try something, but they won't be Republicans,"

Then I made an amazing discovery. One of the Houston papers, I actually looked at the Houston papers for that period. The day Kennedy was in Houston, the 21st, on the front page in one of the Houston papers, it says, "Harris County Chief, GOP Chief Urges Calm." It was a little interview with George H.W. Bush saying, "Everybody should be calm when Kennedy comes to Dallas, and be polite, and give him a nice welcome." Then he said, "There may be some nuts around who might try something, but they won't be Republicans," which is a very bizarre thing to say, and I told Mark Lane about that. He really was astounded, and I gave him a copy of that.

"There may be some nuts around, but there won't be Republicans." First of all, what does he mean, there may be some nuts around, and the police chief was very worried about stress, and he's saying there won't be Republicans? Barbara Bush wrote an autobiography which she says, among other things, that when Oswald was captured, they were really glad, well, he wasn't a Republican. He wasn't some right wing nut. He was alleged communist. As if that mattered. But so it makes you wonder what Bush was hinting at. Maybe he was really worried that Parrott and his friends were going to do something, and he was trying to deny ahead of time that they were Republicans. It's kind of a strange ...

OHH: Right. In light of what Bush ... It's telling that Bush would keep someone working for him that he also thought he had to turn into the FBI for wanting to shoot John F. Kennedy.

Joseph McBride: Yeah. If you have people working for you who were that crazy, you would be feeling kind of in jeopardy yourself for ... You'd want to disassociate yourself from them at least.

OHH: Yeah. Definitely. This was really great. It was great to get to kind of look at Dallas, and what was going on there, and then to hear about your work on George Bush. I haven't seen any interviews of you with that, so that was great, and to have a film historian talking about Rush to Judgment as well was fantastic. Is there anything else you want to add before we go?

Joseph McBride: Rush to Judgment ... I was going to say Into the Nightmare is a very long book. It's over 600 pages, and I go into a lot of detail about all these things that we're touching on, and I spent a lot of time on the Texas milieu, the right wing, extremist, anti-Kennedy milieu, and I do think that it's no accident that the crime happened in Texas, and in Dallas in particular. A lot of people like to deny that. They say, "Well, Oswald was ... " One time I went to Dallas, and I was trying to find his grave, and I went to some cemetery, and I said, "Where is it?" The guy helpfully told me where it was, but he said, "You know, he wasn't from Dallas. He was from Fort Worth." They like to deny that the climate of hatred, as people called it back then, had anything to do with a crime, but it did. The police were very corrupt, and the city government was corrupt. We found out in the recent document release that the mayor was CIA-connected, for example. There's a lot of detail in my book. It's quite rich and full of details, so I think people would find it fascinating if they're into the subject.

And I have revelations about Kennedy's death, and people who might have been part of the plot against him, and how the plot was created, and carried out, et cetera. It's about Kennedy as well as Tippit, and it's also a narrative of my own evolution into a skeptic, and I thought it would be good to write it as first-person account, starting with my hearing of the shooting, and then why I was skeptical, and then gradually evolve into a critic, and started to do my own research, and what I've found. It's quite a saga. I think people will find it interesting, and you can get it through Amazon. It's only sold through Amazon.

OHH: No. I absolutely agree. I think especially for young people who weren't alive at that time to get to watch ... It really did change the country, the period between Kennedy's assassination, and then as you mentioned, kind of the aftermath of Watergate, just the outlook of people was just so completely different to watch your progress through life is very interesting, I think, especially for younger people who didn't experience that. It'll be really fascinating, so I definitely recommend people read it.

"They like what they got, and they ain't never gonna give it back."

--Penn Jones

Joseph McBride: Thank you. I do think it was a military coup that took over our country, and Penn Jones in his later years had Alzheimer's, and I would see him. He would only basically say one thing, he just kept repeating one thing. He would say, "They like what they got, and they ain't never gonna give it back." He kept repeating that. It was sort of like a distillation of his entire life's wisdom into one line, and it was very interesting observation. They like what they got, and they ain't never gonna give it back. When people try to stop wars, and stop terrible things that happen, it never seems to work. There's always somebody pushing back, like in Woodward's new book Fear, about Trump, I take it with a big grain of salt, because Woodward is a dubious source. One thing he writes about it, he claims that Trump was trying to stop the war in Afghanistan, which is a lunatic war, and he was prevented from doing that by the military and other people around him, and just said, "You got to do it. You have to have this war," et cetera, and he gave in.

That's the way it works with Obama, came in with a lot of high ideals and aspirations, and wound up continuing the war in Afghanistan, and we're still involved in Iraq to some extent. Obama widened our involvement in other countries, and it's just ... The military runs the show, the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address, so it's important to understand what happened to our country when Kennedy was killed. It wasn't just some isolated event.

Film Recommendations

OHH: Yeah. I think we're still ... If anybody wonders why things just seem to get crazier and crazier, I think at least, at the very least, you can start in 1963. Could you give us maybe film recommendations that you think not necessarily about the assassination, but maybe about that time period that you think kind of will give people the best feel? I'm sure it's something like Dr. Strangelove, but are there any films?

Joseph McBride: Films. Yeah. Yeah, there's some wonderful movies made in that period. The Manchurian Candidate, I think, is a very eye-opening 1962 film, based on a wonderful novel by Richard Condon, which is kind of a bizarre fantasy, but it has a lot of elements of reality. It's hard to describe it. It's about a programmed assassin, and it came out right during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's a great movie. Dr. Strangelove, a great movie about nuclear war that is still extremely timely, relevant. The Parallax View is a good film made in the seventies. It's about a reporter who's trying to investigate a killing that's like the Robert Kennedy killing. It's fictionalized, but it's what they used to call "paranoid thrillers", although paranoia I always think is the wrong word, because it's just realistic. Winter Kills is a good film. Hard to find. It's kind of a black comedy about the Kennedy assassination, based on another Richard Condon novel. JFK, Oliver Stone's film, is really a basic one. If anybody hasn't seen that, they should really get that right away and look at that. It's a terrific film, especially the director's cut.

A lot of really good scenes were added, and Stone's Nixon is an excellent film, and there's a lot of subtext in that film about the Kennedy assassination, and Nixon's guilty knowledge of certain things about the Kennedy assassination, and it's a tragic, Shakespearean story, quite a grand drama, and very wonderfully done film. Some documentaries like Rush to Judgment, and so there are other ... 50 Reasons for 50 Years, you can find on YouTube, Len Osanic's YouTube series, 50 part series that he did for the fiftieth anniversary. It's a lot of good short films that various people did. I did two of them. I did one on the Tippit case and one on the media, and this is just some starters, but there are a lot of ... Those will get you into the groove of studying the case.

OHH: That's great. Thanks a lot.

Joseph McBride: Yeah.

OHH: Thanks again for talking, and I really appreciate it. I think it was really fascinating.

Joseph McBride: Yeah. Thank you very much. It was great talking to you, and thanks for all the good questions.

OHH: Great. Thanks. Take care. Bye.

Joseph McBride: Bye.