Oct 21st 2013

And Just Where Were You November 22, 1963?

by Gerald Nachman

Gerald Nachman has had six books published, two of them humor collections from columns in the New York Daily News, San Francisco Chronicle and various magazines. For 14 years was a critic and columnist at The Chronicle.

Following on the heels of a new book by Jesse Ventura that maintains Lee Harvey Oswald was not John Kennedy’s lone assassin, plus a movie just out about the event, entitled “Parkland,” several books are about to be released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s murder. Here are just a few:

   -- In “Zap!,” author Lionel H. Grist presents a detailed case that the real Kennedy assassin was Abraham Zapruder, who took the famous home movie of the Kennedy motorcade in Dallas on that fateful November day 50 years ago. Zapruder, claims Grist, masked his villainous deed by shooting the film as he took careful aim at the president. “He became an ‘innocent bystander,’ and was never questioned by police or FBI as to why he wanted to film the motorcade and, more critically, how a crucial frame was blocked by a stop sign. Zapruder had an ideal opportunity to shoot the President and used the movie as a decoy to throw authorities off the trail,” writes Grist in his compelling narrative that throws disturbing new light on the tragic event.

   -- In “DOA? – Yeah, Right,” assistant Dallas coroner Hubert H. Phlem is named as the likely Kennedy assassin, according to investigative reporter Clarence Dinglatt of the Peru, Indiana, Citizen Examiner. “Phlem was in the hospital room when the president was brought in and later pronounced dead on arrival – but was he?,” asks Dingblatt, who makes a convincing case that the president’s life could have been spared had Phlemm not smothered him with a hospital gown – accidentally, he claims. Phlem, a rightwing Republican, had a longstanding grudge against Kennedy, dating back to JFK’s vote for a 1960 farm parity bill that Phlem violently opposed – nobody at the time had any idea just how violently.

Especially engrossing is Phlem’s chapter on the Warren Report, in which he displays evidence that Chief Justice Earl Warren may have had a hand in Kennedy’s assassination and shrewdly used the Report to divert attention. Phlem reveals, for the first time, that Warren had once met Clay Shaw in an elevator just two years earlier. “Coincidence?” asks the author. “I think not. Shaw was known to be afraid of elevators.”       

   -- “Secret Disservice,” a new book about JFK’s murder, assassination buff Mildred Wallaby insists that Rufus Youngblood, the Secret Service agent assigned to the presidential limousine, was in fact the man responsible for Kennedy’s death. Wallaby, now 97, has devoted her life to fingering the real assassin, and has decided that the only  person who could have done it was Youngblood. “Rufus was in a perfect position to shoot the president and then cover his tracks by leaping into the limo and shielding Mrs. Kennedy. “It’s obvious Youngblood was the man who could have carried out the crime. He had the opportunity, the weapon and the motive – an intense dislike of motorcades.”

   -- “Mother of All Murders” tells the true story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s supposedly loopy mother, Marguerite, whom author Arnold Trolly maintains was the real assassin, not her son, who was merely an unwitting accomplice: “Lee had no idea his mother planned to kill the president when he gave her an Italian rifle for Christmas.” After Mrs. Oswald hatched the assassination scheme, she got her son a job at the book depository, made sure his fingerprints were on the murder weapon, and then instructed him to duck into a movie theater to mislead the police, where he was later nabbed. Mrs. Oswald was never questioned in connection with the actual shooting and ingeniously hid her crime by pretending to be an eccentric old lady when in fact she was a master criminal who may also have been implicated in the attempt on President Truman’s life in Blair House.  

     -- In “All the President’s Women,” former FBI agent Horace C. Dulwitch lays out a detailed and distinct possibility that the likely leader of the JFK assassination was none other than Mrs. Kennedy, who was fed up with her husband’s philandering and masterminded a complex plot to get rid of him. Dulwitch says Jackie persuaded Kennedy to make the trip to Dallas and purposely had him turn towards her to talk, creating a better target for the gunman when the fateful bullet found him. The rifleman on the grassy knoll, claims the author, was presidential speech writer Ted Sorenson, with whom Mrs. Kennedy was having an affair, as Dulwitch adds in a footnote. He writes that Mrs. Kennedy decided to kill her husband to get even for his fling with Angie Dickinson.

     -- “The Monroe Doctrine,” a new book by presidential historian Gordon W. Crackers, a distinguished conspiracy theorist and author of “Honest Abe, My Foot!,” solves two deaths at once when the author reveals that Marilyn Monroe had a hand in Kennedy’s assassination, aided by Yves Montand, with whom she was also having an affair as well as one-night stands with Ted Kennedy, Sargent Shriver and Pierre Salinger.

    “Clearly there was something fishy going on,” writes Crackers. “It took time to unravel it all but after 48 years I think I know beyond a shadow of a doubt how Kennedy was killed, and it’s not pretty. I’ll spare you the grim details, but suffice to say that Marilyn was not the innocent child-like sex goddesss she’s been painted.” Crackers goes on, “That was just a cover for her true motive, which was to get Kennedy to leave Jackie and marry her in his second term. When he balked, she pleaded with Montand, who found a French hit man to pull the trigger.” Crackers adds, “It may sound crazy, but the facts do not lie.”

In a coming 2014 sequel to “The Monroe Doctrine,” Crackers reveals that Jack Ruby did not shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on TV, seemingly before millions of viewers, but that the murder was staged by the CBS reporter on the scene, Texas-born Dan Rather, as an attention-grabbing stunt. Crackers claims that Ruby, who allegedly died in jail, was played by actor Ed Begley, who managed to escape. Oswald, now 74, faked his death and remains under house arrest in San Antonio for several unpaid moving violations.

Click here for Gerald Nachman's own web site.




Browse articles by author

More Essays

Mar 8th 2024
EXTRACT: "This study suggests that around 10% of people diagnosed with dementia may instead have underlying silent liver disease with HE causing or contributing to the symptoms – an important diagnosis to make as HE is treatable."
Jan 28th 2024
EXTRACT: "Health disparity is a powerful weapon in the savage class warfare otherwise known as neoliberalism. (In 2020, the RAND Corporation did a study of the transfer of wealth over the last several decades from the working-class and the middle-class to the top one percent. Their estimate is a staggering $47 trillion – that is how much the “upward redistribution of income” cost American workers between 1975 and 2018.) Neoliberalism is a brutal form of labor suppression, which uses health as a means of maintaining and reproducing a condition in which wealth is constantly being redistributed upwards, and the middle-class is kept in a constant state of fear of sinking into the ranks of the poor. Medical expenses are the leading cause of bankruptcies in America – and that’s according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. The ballooning costs of healthcare serve to maintain a system marked by morally unacceptable health inequity and injustice."
Jan 28th 2024
EXTRACT. "But living longer has also come at a price. We’re now seeing higher rates of chronic and degenerative diseases – with heart disease consistently topping the list. So while we’re fascinated by what may help us live longer, maybe we should be more interested in being healthier for longer. Improving our “healthy life expectancy” remains a global challenge. Interestingly, certain locations around the world have been discovered where there are a high proportion of centenarians who display remarkable physical and mental health. The AKEA study of Sardinia, Italy, as example, identified a “blue zone” (named because it was marked with blue pen),....."
Jan 4th 2024
EXTRACT: ""Tresors en Noir et Blanc" presents 180 prints from the collection of the Musee des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, also known as the Petit Palais.  The basis of the museum's print collection is 20,000 engravings amassed by a 19th-century collector, Eugene Dutuit, " ----- "This wonderful exhibition, the tip of a great iceberg, serves to emphasize how unfortunate it is that the tens of thousands of prints owned by the Petit Palais are almost never seen by more than a handful of scholars who visit them by appointment.  Nor is the Petit Palais the only offender in this regard,....."
Jan 4th 2024
EXTRACTS: "And that is the clue to Manet’s work. He paints painting, regardless of his subject: he paints the medium itself, it as if he is constantly reminding us that this is a painting," ..........."This is a new conception of painterly truth at play here, a new fidelity to truth. Manet is the Kant of painting because he initiates a similar kind of “Copernican revolution” – we do not see the world as it is but as we are. " -------- " Among the most remarkable but unfamiliar of Manet’s work on display are those depicting the bloody aftermath of the Paris Commune of 1871.There is no question regarding Manet’s condemnation of the Versailles government’s actions following the defeat of the Commune, when some 25,000 Parisians were gunned down, including women and children."
Dec 27th 2023
EXTRACT: "Think of our brain like a map. When we’re young, we explore all corners of this map, sending out connections in every direction to make sense of our environment. Before long, we figure out basic truths – such as how to secure food, or where we live – and the neurological paths that make up these connections strengthen. Over time, a network emerges that reflects our unique experiences. Regions we re-visit often will develop established paths, whereas under-used connections will fade away. ---- Conditions such as addiction, chronic depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are characterised by processes such as repetitive negative thinking or rumination, where patients focus on negative thoughts in a counterproductive way. Unfortunately, these strengthen brain connections that perpetuate the unfavourable mental state."
Dec 14th 2023
EXTRACT: "While no one was looking, France has become a melting pot of European peoples. Its neighbors have traditionally been welcomed, and France progressively turned them into French boys and girls in the next generation."
Dec 4th 2023
EXTRACTS: "Being rich is essentially about having more stuff in general, including bigger houses." "..... if SUVs had not become widely adopted largely as a status symbol for the global middle classes, emissions from transport would have fallen by 30% over the past ten years. For the largest class of SUVs, six of the ten areas of the UK registering the most sales were affluent London boroughs like Kensington and Chelsea."
Nov 11th 2023
EXTRACT: "By using these “biomarkers”, researchers have discovered that when a person’s biological age surpasses their chronological age, it often signifies accelerated cell ageing and a higher susceptibility to age-related diseases." ----- "Imagine two 60-year-olds enrolled in our study. One had a biological age of 65, the other 60. The one with the more accelerated biological age had a 20% higher risk of dementia and a 40% higher risk of stroke."
Nov 6th 2023
EXTRACT: "We are working on a completely new approach to 'machine intelligence'. Instead of using ..... software, we have developed .... hardware that operates much more efficiently."
Nov 6th 2023
EXTRACTS: "When people think of foods related to type 2 diabetes, they often think of sugar (even though the evidence for that is still not clear). Now, a new study from the US points the finger at salt." ...... ".... this type of study, called an observational study, cannot prove that one thing causes another, only that one thing is related to another. (There could be other factors at play.) So it is not appropriate to say removing the saltshaker 'can help prevent'." ..... "Normal salt intake in countries like the UK is about 8g or two teaspoons a day. But about three-quarters of this comes from processed foods. Most of the rest is added during cooking with very little added at the table."
Oct 26th 2023

 

In 1904, Emile Bernard visited Paul Cezanne in Aix.  He wrote of a conversation at dinner:

Sep 11th 2023
EXTRACT: "Many people have dipped their toe into the lazy gardener’s life through “no mow May” – a national campaign to encourage people not to mow their lawns until the end of May. But you could opt to extend this practice until much later in the summer for even greater benefits. Allowing your grass to grow longer, and interspersing it with pollen-rich flowers, can benefit many insects – especially bees. Research finds that reducing mowing in urban and suburban environments has a positive effect on the amount and diversity of insects. Your untamed lawn won’t only benefit insects. It will also encourage more birds, such as goldfinches, to use your garden to feed on the seeds of common wildflower species such as dandelions."
Aug 30th 2023
EXTRACT: "Eliot remarked that Shakespeare's greatness not only grew as the writer aged, but that his development became more apparent to the reader as he himself aged: 'No reader of Shakespeare... can fail to recognize, increasingly as he himself grows up, the gradual ripening of Shakespeare's mind.' "
Aug 25th 2023
EXTRACTS: "I moved here 15 years ago from London because it was so safe. Bordeaux was then known as La Belle au Bois Dormant (The Sleeping Beauty). It's the wine capital of France and the site of beautiful 18th century architecture arrayed along the Garonne river." ---- "What’s new is that today lawlessness is spreading into the more comfortable neighborhoods. The favorite technique is to defraud elderly retirees by dressing up as policemen, waterworks inspectors or gas meter readers. False badges including a photo ID are easy to fabricate on a computer printer. Once inside, they scoop up most anything shiny as they tip-toe through the house."
Aug 20th 2023
EXTRACT: "The 1953 coup d'etat in Iran ushered in a period of exploitation and oppression that has continued – despite a subsequent revolution that led to huge changes – for 70 years. Each year on August 19, the anniversary of the coup, millions of Iranians ask themselves what would have happened if the US and UK had not conspired all those years ago to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected leader."
Aug 18th 2023
EXTRACT: "Edmundo Bacci: Energy and Light, curated by Chiara Bertola, and currently on view at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, is the first retrospective of the artist in several decades. Bacci was a native of Venice, a city with a long and illustrious history of painting, going back to Giorgione and Titian, Veronese and Tiepolo. As a painter, he was thoroughly immersed in this great past – as an artist he was determined to transform and remake that tradition in the face of modernity and its vicissitudes, what he called “the expressive crisis of our time.” That he has slipped into obscurity affords us, at the very least, an opportunity to see Bacci’s work essentially for the first time, without the burden of over-determined interpretations or categories."
Aug 12th 2023
EXTRACT: "Is Oppenheimer a movie for our time, reminding us of the tensions, dangers and conflicts of the old Cold War while a new one threatens to break out? The film certainly chimes with today’s big power conflicts (the US and China), renewed concern about nuclear weapons (Russia’s threats over Ukraine), and current ideological tensions between democratic and autocratic systems. But the Cold War did not just rest on the threat of the bomb. Behind the scientists and generals were many other players, among them the economists, who clashed just as vigorously in their views about how to run postwar economies."
Aug 5th 2023
EXTRACT: "I have a modest claim to make: we need Bruno today more than ever. This is because he represents an intellectual antidote to the prevailing ideology of today which tells us that we are doomed to finitude, which comes down politically to the assertion that there is no alternative to the reign of global capitalism. Of course, Bruno did not know about capitalism, globalization or neoliberalism. What he did know however is that humanity is infinite. That we are limited only by our own narrowness of vision."
Jul 26th 2023
EXTRACT: "We studied 55,000 people’s dietary data and linked what they ate or drank to five key measures: greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, water pollution and biodiversity loss. Our results are now published in Nature Food. We found that vegans have just 30% of the dietary environmental impact of high-meat eaters. The dietary data came from a major study into cancer and nutrition that has been tracking the same people (about 57,000 in total across the UK) for more than two decades."