Eight years ago today you started your research on the assassination of John Kennedy, right?
That's right, it's been eight years,Gloria. A lot of things come to mind. You know, I read the paper yesterday about the celebrations and various religious services and dedication services commemorating John Kennedy, and I got up and I looked at my study, my library and I looked around the walls and the books and closets and the documents and it was a time of contemplation, like, what is this all about? You know, to work on something for so long with so much dedication, for eight years now. I brought in the name of the people who also began their work that same day and none of us knew each other . It may be of interest to people who are listening, because on November 24, 1963 when Jack Ruby walked in and shot Lee Harvey Oswald I became very concerned and called my family on the telephone and I said, "What do you think is happening to America?" Did Ruby do this to silence Oswald? Was there a conspiracy? Who is controlling the country? Will the evidence show that Oswald did it alone.? I was very concerned about the police department. And that same day there were other persons, I;'ll mention their names: Maggie Fields in Beverly Hills, California, Penn Jones,in Midlothian, Texas, Mark Lane in New York, David Lifton in Los Angeles, Sylvia Maegher, Raymond Marcus in LA, Shirley Martin in Oklahoma, Leo Sauvage in New York, Joachim Joesten in Germany, Hal Grove in El Cerrito, California, Harold Weisberg in Maryland, and Mae Brussell. in West Los Angeles began to save articles on the assassination and became curious about what happened. And they refer to us in the literature as "the buffs"_ nthe assassination buffs"ñ"the original buffs". There is an article in Ramparts that I helped write on the John Kennedy murder. It was done, oh, many years ago, around 1966. And that insert there was by Penn Jones on the deaths that had occurred to people involved with the assassination or close to the assassination scene. David Welsh came over to my house He worked with Ramparts and I helped him write the article and I kept my name out of the article. He listed the other buffs, but at that time I wanted privacy. At least for a few years, and did not want to be in the public eye because I was very curious about Lee Harvey Oswald, the person.. And all the other people working on the assassination were concerned with ballistics, the bullet trajectory, the autopsy, the shooting of Officer Tippit.
And my interest was in Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Who they knew where they met, and associated and what contacts they had. Where they set up to be killed, to act as a decoy? I was interested as a human being in how you use ordinary citizens from your community to effect changes in history. I spent many years charting the course of, and documenting the banks they went to, the associations they had in common. Jack Ruby did not know Oswald, but they was a link, of common people that worked together, and I want to show, as I mentioed, some of those links. And through the years these assassination buffs got to know each other. We correspond.
It started, I think, when Mark Lane began to tour a few areas like Berkeley and he spoke at the Beverly Hills High School. And Maggie Field heard about him. He had been to Dallas and she contacted him to speak; so I met him, and I knew Maggie. I met her through this work. Then we got the address of other people and began long distance telephone calls and exchanging letters. Some of them have published booksñsome are still coming Tim Jones has four books out, Maggie Fields has a book that documented it that has never been published and Sylvia Meagher did Accessories ~fter the Fact and Index to the Warren Report, Dave Lifton has a book that will be out soon, that he spent seven years working on. Jo Joesten has written seven books on the subject. Harold Weisberg has written four books, and he has a new one called Frame Up on James Earl Ray. Leo Sauvage did one book, and Raymond Marcus has done many articles. Shirley Martin has never written a book, but she continues to feed information to other researchers. And we all got to know each other. And we stayed with the subject.
I have a poem that I saved that I would like to read. It's appropriate for this anniversary, Gloria. It's called "Appropriate for the Whole Situationn, written by Carl Sandburg. And it was written to Archibald McLeish after the last was because he gave up the work on his Massachusetts farm to help work for freedom against the Nazis. And this is the way the poem reads:
Thomas Jefferson had red hair and a violin And he loved life and people and music And books and writing and quiet thoughts. He was a lover of peace, decency, good order Summer corn ripening for the bins of winter Cows in green pastures, colts sucking at mares Apple trees waiting to laugh with Pippins. Jefferson loved peace like a good farmer.
And yet for eight years he fought in the war, writing with his own hand the war announcement named the Declaration of Independence
And there was his friend and comrade Ben Franklin,the printer, bookman, and diplomat. And all Franklin asked was that they leave him alone So he could do his work as a lover of peace and work. And Franklin too fought a war for eight years. And the same Franklin said two nations Would be better to throw dice than to go to war. He went in with the fighters for Freedom and For eight years he threw all he had into his books, Print shop and found electricity, research and science And he applied these but he had to wait Until he joined himself for eight long years of war For Freedom and independence.
Now of course these two odd fellows Stand as only two among many. The list runs long of these fellows. Lovers of peace, decency, good order Who throw in with their all they've got For the abstraction of Freedom and independence. Strictly, they were gentlemen,not hunting trouble. Strictly they wanted quiet and the good life and freedom. And they would rather have the horses of instruction Than those eight years they gave To the tigers of wrath.
The records runs, they were both dreamers. At the same time, They refused imitations of the Real Thing. And at the same time, They stood up and talked back. And at the same time, They met the speech of steel and cunning With their own relentless steel and cunning.
Now, because it's eight years since the assassination, this is an appropriate poem. I read this poem out at Monterey Peninsula College and one of the students asked me, "Do you compare yourself to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.?" And I reminded him that in the third verse of the poem it says those two men were only two among many. And of course I compare myself with them, because I have things that I would like to do, like watch the apples ripen on the tree, and I would like to be sewing dresses and cutting fabric, you know, the hobbies that I have, Gloria, and I would like to be baking bread for Thanksgiving. I have a conflict here, and I have to do my research and use cake mixes, because I want to make my own. Do I have the time? Do I do my research? Am I to buy my holiday presents? Every year I say itñam I going to buy or am I going to make the things I want to make? I have the talent, I have the interest. I want to put these things together, and I want to do my own cooking and creating and I don't like to buy packaged things. And then the research pulls me back. All year, it pulls me back to the things I really want to do that are important in my life, and I have to put them aside, a lot of them.
I try to reach a compromise, but a lot of times I can't. I have put aside many, many things for eight years because you have to speak with steel. You have to answer steel with steel. And you have to refuse imitations of the real thing. Everybody is taking an imitation of the real thing, and they are giving it all kinds of names, like "credibility gap" or "national security" or "top secretn. And I could bring to you, the listeners, over the air, all the articles I showed to Gloria this morning when I came in here. The news this week of actual repression of laws, of harm that has happened since the assassination. Because people accept the phony for the real. That wasn't a real election in 1964. It was not a real election in 1968. Any more than the election of Thieu was an election in VietNam. If you accept that, you accept the paper this morning of what Muskie was saying, or what Hubert Humphrey was saying. They're just puppets .they're puppets of a system that are propped up Or if you think McCloskey is a liberal, you don't read his voting record. How he really votes on every issue, because you like these pat, comfortable answers.
This has been one of the big problems. Jules Feiffer had a cartoon in Sunday's paper, where two gentlemen are talking to each other. And one man is standing with his hands behind his back. with ropes And he says, "my hands are tied, right?". And he says, "my feet are shackled, right? n nAnd my eyes are blindfolded, right?" ~And my movements are..." and he starts to mumble. And the other man looks at him, and says, "When do you break free?" And the man who is tied and shackled says "What do you mean, break free?: I like it.~ And that's about where people are today in the community and in the nation at large. They don't mind the position they are in, and it's difficult to shake them to the fact of what happened in Dallas in 1 963.
And I will read part, as much as time allows in the second half, of the new issue of "Computer and Automationn, which came this week to my home. The November 1971 issue. And the statement above the article is on the assassination of President Kennedy. It's the pattern of coup d'etat in public deception. And it begins with this quotation: of the author Edmund Berkeley. "We must begin to recognize history as it is happening to us. We can no longer toy with illusion. Our war adventures in Asia are not related to national security in any rational sense. A coup d'etat took place in the United States on November 22, 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated."
Now that came eight years after I began my research, Gloria, and when people talk about never having fascism in this country or never being overthrown, they have already been overthrown, and they're not aware of it. And this can be documented. How the law's come down, and they're not aware of it. I was invited to the High School this week to speak to one of the classes, a group of seniors, on revolutionary change. And I went to the class and we had a one hour discussion, which barely gets into the subject of how the government was overthrown. And what ways you get it back again. You have to have a revolution to get it back. Either intellectual or a spiritual, or a practical or a bloody revolution. To get the country and the economy and the duty of this nation back in some national course of sanity.
And then I was sure the teacher was somewhat in a state of shock, you know, his mouth was open, and he just couldn't believe what I was saying, and he was teaching these young people revolutionary change. And I said the reason the people are dropping out of high school, or finding what they are learning in the classroom not meaningful.is that the teachers can't tell them what has happened to them, and therefore they can't instruct them on how to survive or explain the news of the day. The teachers themselves will not face the facts that the country was overthrown. So how can they teach a class on American History that is meaningful to the people that are going out in today's society?
And the whole basis of this country is freedom, and how could they explain to the kids that there was a coup d'etat?
That's right, whole basis is free speech, and a free choice of candidates and places to meet and congregate and express your opinions. But you're photographed at every meeting that you go to; there are recordings of your voice, you're put into a data system, the the threat of losing a job or getting a security clearance hangs over youñyour economic independenceñyou are intimidated down the line, and you feel it. And then what do you do with that kind of intimidation?
You see, the system was set up after the political assassination of John F. Kennedy to bring in more repression, and then in 1968 after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, national security and wire tapping and surveillance increased even more. So that in order to effect a change you have to speak about a revolution now, and that's a long way off because people don't yet know that they've been had. They will disagree with everything I say, but they haven't examined the documents. And that's a very pathetic situation to be in.
Now I have a few opinions or notes on things that have happened in the past eight years that affected me, working on this work all this time. And the first thing that I had to learn was not to be bitter,that I had to adjust my time vision of things to how they were and be tolerant that other people had not yet caught up with what I was seeing. That even though they didn't do the data and work and they would say, "I don't have the time that you have; I don't have the leisure", they still don't want to know what I did with that leisure to find out my statements. I have backed up everything with documents, even from the words of the Commission themselves, or the Chief of Police in Dallas. But they don't want that. They still want to go back to another world. So that even if I documented, the excuse "I don't have the time to do your work" is a lie, because they really should say, "I don't have the interest to know." And I have to be very tolerant of people because I can see events that occur and not be afraid to look at them right as they are, like a diagnosis of a disease. And other people are going to have to wait many years to find out what happened,to them, and I have to not be bitter with them. That doesn't mean I have to accept them or respect their opinion, but I have to not be bitter with them, and just say "This the material is here, and this is the way you handle your life, and I feel sorry for you.". "Don't take my time, but I feel sorry for you. If you want to come, I'll show you. But I feel sorry for you.
And another thing I learned that was really a disappointment was that the intellectual class or the liberals, does not care to know at all. He is not intelligent. And this turns you off to formal education. And it teaches you how Nazi Germany came about. The educated class do not care to know either. You can see why people who effected a change and the assassination would keep the truth from coming out. But there is no ground swell of professors of history to my house yet, and I've been on the air for twenty weeks. There's no intellectual curiosity. of members of the Democratic party or the Republican party or the lawyers in the community or Fulton Freeman, who worked with John Kennedy, who is the head of the Monterey Instituteñthese intellectual places of learning are headed by people who do not want you to usurp their position by saying that they have some responsibility for making the world any different than they just want to do it. They want their position, and they will turn off this station, or they will hang on to one thing you say, and say ~that's not true, therefore nothing else is true."
So, there are walking liberals around here that are work and have campaign lunches for people, they're going to listen to various people come through here, and I'm telling you that the people that they're going to dine and place at certain table arrangements and meet at the airport are puppets. They may as well be Gepetto carrying Pinnochio on a string. They're all just a bunch of Gepettos. And they're carrying these monkeys, these candidates, around. And if you show them truth, they don't want it. They want to be Gepettos, and they want to carry the little strings of their candidates, and they want to play their little roles and they want to treat their candidates like their own children, in their own image.
They want it the way it was, and it hasn't been that way for many, many years.l guess they won't accept it.
They will not accept it. And then you want to go "what is all the education process about?" Outside of the fact that it's to earn a living. What are you really learning, and what are your teachers really teaching the children? I am going to extend an invitation to members of the faculty of Carmel High and Monterey Peninsula College or Pacific Grove High, or other schools around here to come to my home over Christmas and any of the teachers who are listening, or students who want to come with their teachers, they can write to KLRB, and give me their name and address and I will reach them, and they can come to my home. Not to be brainwashed or to believe what I'm saying, but just to see how raw evidence or material is accumulated. They'll take the kids out to Smuckers in Salinas to see how jelly is made, and see strawberries put into jars, because that's very safe, you know, but if you say "I want to show you how your government was overthrown in 1963n, that's very dangerous, to put that thought into their heads, because then it requires work like Benjamin Franklin, did, or Thomas Jefferson, it requires giving up some of the goodies, or the luxury of a good night's sleep sometimes. to just work.
I also learned how uninformed people are. Because everyone plays the authority on different subjects. You go out to dinner parties Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night, and people pass off their knowledge as if they really read a paper. And once you study any particular subject really well, like I've done with political assassination for eight years, you begin to gauge people's awareness about political events if they bring that subject up to you, because they'll throw out things that are totally untrue. And if they do it on that subject, they'll do it on many, many other things. Instead of saying, :nl have no opinion" or "this is what Mark Lane saysn, "or what Mae Brussell says", they'll say, "No, that's not true. And so I feel that most people who come to me and tell me about world events and want to share an opinion about Mr. Rhenquist or Powell, who are now nominated for justices of the Supreme Court measure decisions that come up or opinions on things that are in the news, when they bring up a subject, I say, "oh, yes, I read about that this week." They didn't read any articles at all. I don't know how they get their opinions, but I sit there and read the paper and cut out articles and I'm willing to have a dialogue about it, and I find that most people are totally uninformed. They don't readñor they'll read the top of an article and never get to the bottom. And the bottom is the most interesting of all .
In fact, apropos, the John Kennedy anniversary of his death there was an article in the Chronicle this Sunday about the Texas Book Depository Building. This is a perfect example of my friends reading the first few paragraphs, and then when we get to the bottom of the article,they haven't read that, and the best is often at the very last and if a subject catches your interest, it is good to just sit and read it. all the way through. Many articles are of interest all the way through.. I suggest that you try that once if you want to be knowledgeable on a subject. now the article about the book depository was interesting.
This is the beginning of the article, " Eight years ago tomorrow, a sick, young, self-styled Marxist named Lee Harvey Oswald sneaked up to the sixth floor of a drab red brick building in Dallas There he waited until 11:30 a.m. when he fired three rifle shots that rang around the world and took the life of President John F. Kennedy. In the years since that awful moment there have been countless controversies about the assassination. Most of them have by now faded away. That is, all except one. " And, I'm going to end the quotation there to say, that, you see, they're hoping the discrepancies have faded away. I'm pulling articles of magazines that are coming out every day that bring issues in lawsuits, issues very much to light,that are in the news but they want you to think they have faded away.
Now they go on to tell you about the Texas Book Depository. This was the building that Oswald worked in for six weeks before the motorcade went in front of it.lt stands at the corner there where the car passed around the curb into the underpass. After the assassination the building was closed off. The top floor was closed off where Oswald was supposed to have been, and nobody can use that floor. At the time that the researchers wanted to reconstruct the crime of the trajectory of the bullet, they couldn't use that floor, and when NBC News made a 4 hour television series on reconstructing this murder in order to put down Jim Garrison's case, they went to the fifth floor to duplicate the shot that Oswald took, but the trajectory from the sixth floor is higher up and more straight down, which would change the course of the bullet, because it was to enter in his back five inches below the neck and exit uphill through the Adam's apple which is against the law of physics. But they've never been able to duplicate or try this shot either with Oswald's weapon or from the sixth floor and nobody has been allowed up there; that's been closed off.
The Book Depository was open for business until about a year ago in April 1970, when a man from Nashville, Tennessee by the name of Audrey Mayhew, bought the building. He is known as a Kennedy buff. He researches the murder of John Kennedy. He paid $650,000 for the building and the city of Dallas was glad to have the building sold and they thought this would end the controversy and that he would tear it down, or do something with it. but now the citizens are worried about the building. because they had hoped that it would be torn down, and some thought maybe it would be a museum. It turns out that Audrey Mayhew has a different intention for the building. What he wants to do is put a collection of 20,000 items of Kennedy items, or items pertaining to the assassination that he has collected, into this building, and the Dallas people are very concerned that it would become a tourist trap. Now, they say, we have one memorial to John Kennedy, and they don't want it rubbed in that people are putting another memorial to him.right at the corner where he was shot..
Across from the book depository is a tourist trap which shows movies of the assassination and a shrilling voice which says," My God, they're going to kill us all." I've been in that place across the street, and it's not really a living memorial to John Kennedy, they sell bumper stickers that say, "America- Love it or Leave it." and all-American flags and ashtrays with pictures of Jacqueline on it, and it's hardly a fitting description of a memorial. It is a real tourist trap, right across the street from the Book Depository. but what Mr. Mayhew wants to do is use this building to house microfilms and books and newspapers about the assassination and provide facilities for what he calls,nA continuing study of what happened here that day."
In other words, Audrey Mayhew does not think the case is closed. If he would house his 22,000 items like my items in my home, my 28,000 pages of original research,just cross-filing the witness testimony in the Warren Report and my 300 books, you can imagine what he has. If you put copies of people's research and all the books on the subject, you'd begin to understand what happened in Dallas that day.
Now that is not pleasing the Dallas people, because they want to forget that anything happened. at that corner, in spite of the fact that 3-4000 people pass every single day and take pictures of the corner. One man wanted to buy Mr. Mayhew out so he offered him one million dollars for the bricks of the building, the bricks alone, and he's turned that down. A wax museum offered one million dollars. You know, money is no problem; you can buy Mr. Mayhew out if he can be had, because you want to tear down this living symbol of John Kennedy. And the Tragedy Museum offered him$100,000 just for the casings from the sixth floor window. Oswald was supposed to have poked his rifle out. But Mr. Mayhew said, "I want a continuing study of what happened here that day."
Now the people in Dallas are simply furious, and Senator Mike McCool wants funds to be brought up to the state legislature to buy the building back; he is having a fit, and he wants, he says it has tremendous historical value and it should belong to the people of Texas. And they want to tear down this building! It should be torn down. The state legislature in Texas is coming up with millions of dollars, trying to get a law to tear the building down. And they say, the one thing we have to do is to remove this entire building, or keep it for ourselves because the state of Texas can come up with money. to make a fitting memorial Now Mr. Mayhew isn't asking for money.He doesn't care about that. He wants it as a living memorial to the memory of what happened.so then the legislature came up with another suggestion. They suggested that they leave the front of the building up and tear down the whole back of it and just leave the front standing up. What they said is that it cannot be remodeled properly and it isn't in good condition. "What you have to do basically is gut this thing and keep the exterior as it is. My personal feeling is the site is an important national landmark." This is Raymond Nasher a Dallas developer and cultural leader. Well Mr. Mayhew has said, that he, "over his dead body," would he. Iet them do it. He says that he does not want them to take that from him. "They'll take it over my dead body. I will fight it with everything I have and I'll fight it to the Supreme Court." Well, when he gets to the Supreme Court he's going to have to fight Mr. Powell and Mr. Rhenquist!
So that's another subject. Mr. Powell is being supported by Leon Jaworski, we've mentioned this before, who represented the State of Texas for the Warren Commission, who's head of the American Bar Association and Mr. Powell has a quotation in a paper in U.S. News this week. defending the opinion of Epstein who worked defending Oswald's position in the Warren Commission wrote a book called Inquest and he refers to Epstein as an authority on the killing of Panthers instead of using material that computers automation has used, Mr. Powell is heavily associated with people. who would defend the Warren Report, so try and take this case to the Supreme Court.
You're listening to "Dialogue Assassination" with Mae Brussell. This is KLRB, Carmel.
Contact the Lighthouse Report.
Site created and maintained with assistance from David A. Mason.
