Kennedy Assassination Research Articles

Speculations on A Nation at Risk: Illusions and Realities

MAGICIANS present illusions. Commissioned reports and the writers who produce them sometimes do the same. Controversy continues to surround the findings of the Warren Commission on the Kennedy assassination long after it was completed. And the same has been true of A Nation at Risk, ever since its publication in 1983. The two most controversial issues have been the report's role in the development and establishment of a new and permanent federal influence in national education policy making and the degree to which the report's recommendations set the direction for subsequent national education reform actions. Overall,the controversies feed into the perception that, at least since its publication, American education has been in a perpetual state of rolling crisis and reform. Are such claims real or illusionary? THE REPORT TRADITION The history of education shows the ebb and flow of ideas, grassroots movements, and special interests, often manifested through published reports issued by units of government, by established state or national organizations, and, more recently, by think tanks and nonprofit centers that unabashedly advocate for a variety of causes. These reports circulate information; summarize important views; describe contemporary situations, conditions, and practices; or advocate positions on educational matters. Some are familiar, such as the widely disseminated 19th-century annual reports issued by Horace Mann as secretary to the Massachusetts Board of Education, which influenced thinking about the purposes, organization, funding, and curriculum of schools. Individual colleges have issued reports--Yale in 1828, Harvard in 1845 and 1945. Other wellknown wellknown reports articulated college entrance requirements for secondary school students in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Issued under the auspices of the National Education Association, the most famous of these were the reports of the Committee of 10 in 1898 and the of the Committee on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, the famous Cardinal Principles, in 1918. A central theme in the history of making is the improvement of curriculum--what students are to learn--viewed, according to particular constituencies, as preparation for college, knowledge for work,and sometimes both. It is also interesting that the written structure of the reports has generally followed a familiar progression: a statement or charge to the committee, organization, or persons assigned the task; an introduction and rationale citing the reasons for commissioning the report; the proper, consisting of the findings and recommendations; and the appendices, providing the minutes of hearings, commissioned studies, commentaries, data, and other documents that form the evidence for the recommendations. Taken as a whole, the report as narrative constitutes a knowledge base of record that is useful for scrutinizing its potential importance and appraising its eventual influence. Embedded in that body of knowledge is the ever-present curriculum imperative--attending to issues about what schools should teach--a matter as fundamental to education reports and reforms today as in the past. THE POLITICS OF THE REPORT Like any report, A Nation at Risk must be understood in the context of its creation. A central consideration is the role of the federal government in educational matters. As I'm sure readers are aware, there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that explicitly creates a federal role in education. The U.S. government's role and authority have evolved through interpretation of various clauses in the Constitution. For example, there was no central federal administrative presence until the formal establishment of the United States Office of Education in the 19th century, and it was not until the Carter Administration that a U.S. Department of Education was authorized. The establishment of the department was a flash point, and A Nation at Risk played an important role in the politics swirling around the department and its survival. …

Terrorism and global security

For most Americans, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, are a watershed event, a turning point in how Americans think about their place in the world. Before 9/11, the United States suffered the occasional attack on its citizens abroad, but the homeland remained secure, and public safety focused on ordinary dangers such as crime, fire, flood, and influenza. After 9/11, new fears intruded on daily life, and Americans were now forced to face a clever enemy who could seemingly attack at any time, at any place. Just as earlier generations remember where they were when they learned of John F. Kennedy's assassination or the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, 9/11 marks the moment American adolescents became aware of international events as well as the broader outlines of global security issues. The subsequent war on terrorism also dramatically changed the terms of a possible career in the military. Accurate and balanced, Terrorism and Global Security provides key information on the definition, causes, and goals of terrorism; the history of terrorism; the perpetrators and their backgrounds; counterterrorism; and the issues of balancing security and liberty. Separate case studies focus on the United States as well as the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Peru, and Colombia, examining how each has been affected by terrorism and comparing and contrasting the measures taken in response.

A Prosecutor Takes On the JFK Assassination

It is all but impossible to avoid hyperbole and cliches when writing about assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. The shooting in Dealey Plaza really was the crime of century and those who lived through four days of non-stop television coverage really do remember in extraordinary detail exactly what they were doing and feeling. Millions of Americans, and countless people around world, regard JFK assassination as a personal and historical turning point-which ultimately elevated slain forty-six-year-old president, as Vincent Bugliosi observes, a mythical, larger-than-life figure whose hold on nation's [and world's] imagination resonates to this very day (p. xi). I was a graduate student in history on that unforgettable day, but I could never have imagined that fourteen years later I would become historian at Kennedy Library in Boston. And, like it or not, I would have to repeatedly confront increasingly bitter controversy about who was responsible for JFK assassination. interest of full disclosure, I want readers to understand that, like countless others, I was for a time drawn to siren songs of some theories. However, I am now absolutely convinced, beyond a reasonable doubt, that evidence put forward by Mr. Bugliosi is incontrovertible: Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed President Kennedy. Reclaiming History is not really a at all in conventional sense-it is more like a comprehensive reference work-an encyclopedia of Kennedy assassination and its aftermath.1 In defense of its length, Bugliosi explains, conspiracy theorists have transformed Kennedy's murder into most complex murder case ever. ... The scope and breadth of issues flowing from Kennedy assassination are so enormous that typically authors write entire books on just one aspect of case alone, such as organized crime, or CIA, or Castro, or Jack Ruby, or Oswald's guilt or innocence. He acknowledges that his book keep[s] piling one argument upon another to prove his point but notes that the Warren Commission also made its point, and well,

Letter to the Editor

Occasionally during the course of the human learning experience we are faced with an anomaly. An aberration of sorts, which try as we might, defies appropriate classification. The recent paper by Spiegelman et al.--Chemical and forensic analysis of JFK assassination bullet lots: Is a second shooter possible?--is one such aberration. It is riddled with both misconceptions and errors of fact. Purporting to cast doubt on the NAA (neutron activation analysis) work conducted by Dr. Vincent Guinn in the investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, it fails miserably. The paper offers two central conclusions, one which is demonstrably false, and the other which is specious. The authors opine; ``If the assassination fragments are derived from three or more separate bullets, then a second assassin is likely, as the additional bullet would not be attributable to the main suspect, Mr. Oswald.'' This statement relating to the likelihood of a second assassin based on the premise of three or more separate bullets is demonstrably false. The available evidence indicates that Oswald fired three shots, one of which is believed to have missed. However, on the off chance that all three shots hit (even though there is absolutely no other supporting forensic evidence for such a notion) those three shots alone in no way would indicate then that ``a second assassin is likely.'' The authors' erroneous conclusion was achieved because they have either been misled (which I personally believe is the case) or they simply aren't familiar with the evidence.

Bordersploitation: Hollywood Border Crossers and Buddy Cops

Bordersploitation:Hollywood Border Crossers and Buddy Cops Camilla Fojas (bio) Hollywood 1980s films are so distinctive that we can identify them immediately, partly for their aesthetic but mostly for their mood, for the reassuring tone of family-centered stories with clear moral lessons. These kinds of films provided reassuring dramas in the midst of cultural unrest and political uncertainty. The 1980s were an era of major transformations: increased immigration and transit across the border, the rise of globalization, military defense build-up, the waning of the Cold War, and the US-backed wars in Central America. It was a time troubled by the recent past of the Vietnam War, Watergate, assassinations of public figures, and the revolution in social attitudes wrought by the civil rights era, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, and by the health care crises related to HIV/AIDS and Medicare/Medicaid. Hollywood border films are symptoms of this cultural morass; they stage immigrant disruptions to national identity in story lines drawn from a cinematic repertoire of "American" good guys: vigilantes, cowboys, and buddy cops. The bad guys are the male border crossers who infiltrate the national body as carriers of cultural, economic, and political ills. These Hollywood narratives provide or suggest solutions that double as fantasmatic resolutions and templates for public policy. Several border films work together to form a coherent cultural response to crises of the 1980s: Borderline (1980) with Charles Bronson, The Border (1982) with Jack Nicholson, and Flashpoint (1984) with Kris Kristofferson. These films have fast-paced buddy-cop plots full of chases and intrigue, desire for the forbidden immigrant (but no contact), plenty of double-crossing and risky business, and reminders of traumatic events of US history, particularly Vietnam. In Borderline, Charles Bronson's character is a veteran cop who goes off on his own path of justice for an attractive young Mexican woman whose child was killed while crossing the border. In the process, he discovers that his partner's murderer is a Vietnam veteran who has created a big business with corporate [End Page 80] sponsorship of running undocumented immigrants across the border, using the skills he learned in Vietnam to evade the border guards. This plot is revisited in The Border where Charlie, a border agent with a heart of gold, makes it his personal mission to help an attractive young Mexican woman reunite with her child who was seized by corrupt border officials. Charlie falls in with the corrupt border guards who aid the coyotes, immigrant smugglers, in return for extra cash, but eventually exposes this corruption. British director Tony Richardson, perhaps because of his vantage point outside of the US and Hollywood, offers a rather scathing critique of the emptiness of American consumerism and pop culture; nonetheless, the story relapses into the messianic nationalism inherited from the Western. Flashpoint unfolds in a more complicated series of events that invokes two unincorporated traumas of US history: the assassination of JFK and the Vietnam War. The story is about two maverick Texas border guards and best friends—Logan, a Vietnam veteran and Green Beret hero, and Wyatt, a young idealistic rookie—who find a large amount of cash along with the remains of a man buried in the desert, evidence which turns out to be related to the assassination of JFK—a fact that federal agents will do anything to suppress. These films work and play well together because they all flirt with a liberal critique of government, but remain faithful to the conservative conventions of the Hollywood border genre. They traffic in nostalgia for the era prior to the consolidation of the liberal policies of globalization, for the good old days of the early Westerns populated by wrangling and free-wheeling cowboys, morally upright law enforcers, and virtuous women—best iconized by blonde ingénue Grace Kelly in High Noon (1952). The border film provides symbolically rich material for managing the contradictions and uncertainties of this transitional moment in history. Beyond the Border Principle Since Touch of Evil (1958), the Hollywood border is represented as a lawless place ruled by a dark mythology, and home to every illicit sexual activity and industry, from sex-trade to drug-trade. The...

Negotiating with the Enemy: U.S.-China Talks During the Cold War, 1949–1972 (review)

Reviewed by: Negotiating with the Enemy: U.S.-China Talks During the Cold War, 1949–1972 Charles W. Hayford (bio) Yafeng Xia . Negotiating with the Enemy: U.S.-China Talks During the Cold War, 1949–1972. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. xv, 328 pp. 4 maps, chronology. Hardcover $45.00, ISBN 978-0-253-34758-9. A respected diplomatic historian declared that if "diplomacy" is "the process of negotiation and dialogue by which states in a system conduct their relations," then "it can be said that the United States had no meaningful diplomacy with Communist adversaries through long stretches of the Cold War."1 Xia Yafeng disagrees. This deeply researched and clearly organized monograph argues that communication between the governments of the United States and the People's Republic was continual, though perhaps "negotiation" might be a slight exaggeration and often "dialogue" was only the exchange of rebarbative monologues. Xia tells a story of intrigue, subterfuge, frustration, courage, and massive hypocrisy. But he shows "how the two sides eventually came to grips with mutual differences and slowly but surely learned to engage each other productively" (p. 4). Xia analyzes the structural shifts in balance of power as perceived on either side but insists that diplomacy—that is, the process of personal negotiation—in the end made a difference. He optimistically concludes that "self-learning and mutual learning" led to the diplomatic coup in 1972. Disaster was, indeed, avoided, but success still seems, in the famous words of Wellington after his victory at Waterloo, "a damn close run thing." Before coming to the United States for doctoral training, Xia was a diplomat in the Chinese Foreign Service, serving in Washington from 1995 to 1998. Being an insider, although of junior rank, gave him access to gossip, extensive interviews, and, even more important, a certain feel for how the flow of events inside China's "diplomatic establishment" interacted with international politics and domestic issues. Xia made knowledgeable use of recently opened archives in China (others are still closed), copious memoirs, semi-official biographies, compilations of documents, and scholarly studies in Chinese and English. The first question is how the friends in the anti-Japanese war became enemies in the Cold War. While Xia does not buy the argument that there was a "lost chance" for continued friendly relations, he is also careful to show that there was no inevitability that hostility would reach the level that it did. New China would "lean to one side," said Zhou Enlai, but suggested that American policy would determine just how far the lean would go. The State Department hoped to split the new regime into pro- and anti-Soviet factions. Zhou refused the bait, as the American position was based on a condescending and much resented assumption that China was a weak and supplicant nation. [End Page 435] The disastrous Korean armistice talks were followed by the creation of a "special channel" through the embassies in Poland, which lasted through the 1960s. Several chapters detail the period of mutual hostility and self-sabotage in which neither side acted in its own rational self-interest. Nonetheless, as the relative power of the two nations began to shift, mid-level diplomats on either side began to develop a cohesive set of insights and skills. Each side was forced to think clearly and to distinguish what it wanted, what it needed, and what it would settle for. This was often a matter of fanmian jiaocai, "learning from negative example," bringing to mind the American State Department apothegm "Good judgment is usually the result of experience. And experience is frequently the result of bad judgment." By the mid 1960s, the stage was set and the curtains parted on a new act. The story moves briskly without losing sight of the structural analysis of the international situation. Xia's Chinese sources provide fresh force and nuance to the familiar story. He reasserts that in the early 1960s Kennedy and Johnson were working toward a normalization that was delayed first by Kennedy's assassination, then by Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War, and finally by the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. One can observe that perhaps it was just as...

Barn Burning Barn Building: Lessons of Lone Star Politics that Can Improve Our Country's Future (review)

362Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJanuary Barn BurningBarn Building: Lessons ofLoneStarPolitics that Can Improve Our Country 's Future. By Ben Barnes with Lisa Dickey. (Albany, Texas: Bright Sky Press, 2006. Pp. 256. Illustrations, bibliography, index. ISBN 1931721718. $24.95.) The English essayist Cyril Connolly once wrote—bitterly—"whom die gods wish to destroy, they first call promising." Few political careers have begun as promisingly as diat of Ben Barnes, who became Speaker of die Texas House of Representatives at age twenty-six and was elected lieutenant governor at age thirty. Yet by 1972, at age thirty-four, Barnes finished out of the running in a divisive Democratic gubernatorial primary dominated by the Sharpstown scandal and calls for reform. While Barnes was never implicated in that scandal, after twelve years in office he was widely viewed as a symbol of the tainted Democratic Party establishment in Austin. In his own words, after 1972, "my career in elective politics was over." Barn Burning Barn Building is an engaging memoir of Barnes's tumultuous years in elective office—1961 to 1973. The tide is loosely derived from a political maxim attributed to Sam Rayburn—any mule can kick down a barn, but it takes a real carpenter to build one. The author, who cites Rayburn as an early influence, observed or participated in a remarkable series of events of state and national significance, including the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, die chaotic ig68 Democratic Convention, and the "assisted" enrollment ofyoung George W. Bush in the Texas Air National Guard during the peak of die Vietnam draft. While these episodes make for fascinating reading, die book's mostvaluable contributions are the detailed recountings of Barnes's close working relationships with Texas giants Lyndon Johnson, John Connally, and BarbaraJordan, and of his adversarial relationship with Richard Nixon, as well as his dealings with the Nixon-eraJustice Department and many lesser lights ofTexas politics. The audior tells his story in a frank, opinionated, and anecdotal style. Only one chapter is footnoted, and Barnes relies sparingly on secondary sources—one exception being a 1969 front-page story in die Wall StreetJournal that deemed him "Heir Apparent" to dieJohnson legacy, and anodier being a transcribed White House tape showing Nixon's determination to block diat succession. Given Barnes's central role in die Texas politics of his era, diis anecdotal format serves die audior and reader well. Barnes says litde about some controversial episodes of his career, including his business ventures after 1973. Nor does he dwell on his personal life outside of politics. He briefly discusses the remunerative, subsidized investments that kept him solvent while living on a legislator's meager pay, noting that this was common practice in that freewheeling, pre-reform era. Barnes's memoirs essentially end with his 1972 primary defeat, but he closes with two briefchapters lamenting the destructive, overly partisan state of contemporary politics and recommending measures to foster moderation, integrity, and fairness in Austin and Washington. Barnes, who has remained a loyal Democrat, clearly understands this subject matter, and many of his observations on die perceived excesses of recent one-party rule (written in 2005) have been borne out by die political upheavals of 2006. Barn Burningshould provide useful raw material for serious historians ofTexas politics in tiieJohnson-Connally era, but it does not really resolve a central question 2??8Book Reviews363 about die controversial audior's own role in history: will Ben Barnes be remembered primarily as the promising young phenomenon who became a protégé ofJohnson and Connally, or will he be recognized as a force in his own right in the events and transformations he chronicles? That answer will await a work ofgreater depth and broader perspective. AustinJames E. Cousar Mestizo inAmerica: Generations ofMexicanEthnicity in tL·Suburban Southwest. ByThomas Macias. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006. Pp. 194. Tables, graphs, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 0816525048. $45.00, cloth. ISBN 0816525056. $19.95, paper.) Mestizo in America examines die social integration ofthe U.S. Mexican community from 1965 to the present. While its sources are both qualitative and quantitative , its richest source for quantitative data is the Current Population Survey (CPS) from igg4 to 2002. In addition, the author interviewed more...

Scientist as detective: Luis Alvarez and the pyramid burial chambers, the JFK assassination, and the end of the dinosaurs

Luis Alvarez (1911–1988) was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century. His investigations of three mysteries, all of them outside his normal areas of research, show what remarkable things a far-ranging imagination working with an immense store of knowledge can accomplish.

Max Holland, The Kennedy Assassination Tapes: The White House Conversations of Lyndon B. Johnson Regarding the Assassination, the Warren Commission, and the Aftermath. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 453 pp. $26.95

April 01 2007 Max Holland, The Kennedy Assassination Tapes: The White House Conversations of Lyndon B. Johnson Regarding the Assassination, the Warren Commission, and the Aftermath. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 453 pp. $26.95 Gerald Posner Gerald Posner Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Gerald Posner Online Issn: 1531-3298 Print Issn: 1520-3972 © 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2007 Journal of Cold War Studies (2007) 9 (2): 154–156. https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws.2007.9.2.154 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Gerald Posner; Max Holland, The Kennedy Assassination Tapes: The White House Conversations of Lyndon B. Johnson Regarding the Assassination, the Warren Commission, and the Aftermath. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 453 pp. $26.95. Journal of Cold War Studies 2007; 9 (2): 154–156. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws.2007.9.2.154 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsJournal of Cold War Studies Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws that Changed America (review)

Reviewed by: Judgment Days Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws that Changed America Jack Bass (bio) Judgment Days Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws that Changed America By Nick KotzHoughton Mifflin, 2006522 pp. Cloth $26.00 In contrast to the current emptiness of "compassionate conservatism," Nick Kotz has written an important book about a president from Texas and a preacher from Georgia who both understood civil rights for black Americans as a moral issue that the American people needed to confront with action. Judgment Days captures the soaring hopes and successes of the 1960s, when, in the wake of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, the vision and moral leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. and the collective Civil Rights Movement joined together with the masterful political leadership and skill of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. It forces a new look at LBJ as a man of moral courage who deeply understood and confronted the crippling effects of three centuries of racial discrimination and who suffered from the failure of his effort to succeed in his war on poverty. It also captures the heartbreaking conflicts and devastating impact of the expanding war in Vietnam, including the ultimate breach between King and Johnson over the war's morality as well as its commandeering of the resources that both recognized were needed to correct what Johnson would characterize as "the conditions that breed despair and violence" at home. He learned too late the fatal flaw in his belief that the country could afford guns and butter, a failure that fed bitter public divisiveness. Kotz has roots through his mother's family to the New Deal tradition of LBJ's Texas hill country, and he uses both the tools of journalists and historians to produce a fresh and vivid account of the combined role of Johnson and King in unlocking the legal barriers to equality. (At a time when Congress cuts back on food stamps and medical care for the poor as a means of financing tax cuts for the wealthy, this book provides clues to what another wave of reform would require.) Kotz may be viewed as a reporter interviewing sources or as an oral historian collecting revealing personal narratives; either way, his roughly 150 interviews of [End Page 110] men and women on the front lines of conflict and change add depth to our understanding of this traumatic era. The story of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's vendetta against King isn't new, but Kotz tells it with greater depth and nuance than ever before. He gained access to thousands of pages of previously closed FBI documents and interviewed contemporary top officials of the Bureau. We learn how one top Hoover aide finds out that the Ford Foundation is about to award $4 million to King's financially strapped Southern Christian Leadership Conference, calls a former FBI agent working for Ford Motor Company, and the grant is cut to $250,000. (The firewall separating the company and the foundation apparently came later.) The full story of Hoover's determination to destroy King is sordid. His top associates delivered to a receptive White House detailed reports filled with dubious counterintelligence and distorted interpretations of Communist influence over King, details of sexual exploits, and advance knowledge of his tactical moves. The approval for the initial wiretaps came from Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and Johnson devoured it all. Johnson emerges as a flawed giant, King as a brave and shrewd moral leader who becomes more radical as he's overcome by events and, finally, an assassin's bullet. Readers will learn how two lives, both well documented, intersect from the time LBJ moves into the White House until MLK is murdered in Memphis. We see in vivid detail Johnson cajoling, persuading, bribing with political favors, and using powerful moral arguments to move Congress to pass the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and then exploiting the climate of remorse after King's death to gain passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act and outlaw housing and jury discrimination. Missing from this story is Johnson's failure, as a lame...

Father Oscar Huber, the Kennedy Assassination, and the News Leak Controversy: A Research Note

Notes and DocumentsFather Oscar Huber, the Kennedy Assassination, and the News Leak Controversy: A Research Note Patrick Huber (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Father Oscar Huber pointing to the entry in the Holy Trinity Catholic Church's Sick Call Register where he recorded the details of his administration of Last Rites to President John F. Kennedy at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Under the column of "Remarks," which he usually left blank, the Vincentian priest had written: "Assassinated in Downtown Dallas." Courtesy of the DeAndreis-Rosati Memorial Archives, DePaul University, Special Collections and Archives Department, Chicago, Illinois. [End Page 380] On November 22, 1963, the Very Rev. Oscar L. Huber, C. M. administered the conditional last rites of the Roman Catholic Church to the mortally wounded Pres. John F. Kennedy. The Vincentian priest's religious service that day in Dallas, Texas, unexpectedly thrust him into the national spotlight, as the New York Times, the Dallas Morning News, and several other metropolitan newspapers interviewed him about his last moments with the slain president. But the modest, soft-spoken priest found neither glory nor honor in his service that day, because Time magazine correspondent Hugh Sidey and several other members of the national news media reported that he was responsible for leaking the news of the president's death several minutes before the official White House announcement. What began as Father Huber's proverbial "fifteen minutes of fame" mutated and then stretched into a decade of attention and speculation. The purpose of this research note is to examine the evidence concerning exactly what Father Huber said and did not say about the death of President Kennedy on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. In retrospect, the matter may seem minor, but it was of vital importance to Father Huber. Moreover, it provides yet another example of the chaos and confusion that reigned in Dallas on that fateful day. [End Page 381] Until the day of the assassination, Father Huber had never seen a U.S. president in person. And so, shortly after noon on Friday, November 22, 1963, the seventy-year-old priest walked the three blocks from Holy Trinity Catholic Church where he served as pastor to watch President Kennedy's motorcade pass along the parade route. Only five-feet-five-inches tall, Father Huber had to stand on tiptoe to see over the heads of the other spectators who crowded the sidewalk in front of him along Lemmon Avenue. And, for a brief moment, the priest caught a glimpse of the president. Father Huber thought that President Kennedy noticed his Roman collar and waved to him. After the motorcade was out of sight, Father Huber returned to the parish rectory, eager to share his story of seeing the president with his colleagues. "It was," he later recalled, "a thrilling moment for me."1 By 12:36 P.M., however, everything had changed. Father Huber was eating lunch when Father James N. Thompson, his assistant pastor, burst into the room and gasped, "The president's been shot." A television bulletin soon confirmed that President Kennedy had been wounded and was being transported to nearby Parkland Memorial Hospital, which was located within the Holy Trinity Parish. Because the two priests regularly attended to the spiritual needs of the patients there, Fathers Huber and Thompson raced to the hospital without waiting to be summoned. Shortly after they departed, a Parkland administrator telephoned the rectory at Jacqueline Kennedy's request, asking for a priest to minister to her husband. Someone told him that two priests were already en route to the hospital.2 Swarms of automobiles and curious onlookers had already begun to jam the area surrounding Parkland, so it took the two priests nearly fifteen minutes to reach the emergency room entrance. While Father Thompson parked the car, Dallas police officers escorted Father Huber through the crowd of nearly two hundred bystanders and into the hospital. The scene inside was utter pandemonium. Earlier, at 12:35 P.M., just five minutes after three shots were fired at Dealey Plaza, the Lincoln Continental limousine carrying the fatally stricken President Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally, who was also unconscious and...

Breach off Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why

President Lyndon B. Johnson hastily created the Warren Commission to respond to the fears of an international conspiracy, subsume a possible investigation by the Texas attorney general, and answer the political questions that were prompted by John F. Kennedy's assassination. Gerald D. McKnight joins those who have argued that the members of the commission, in the words of his subtitle, “failed the nation.” The Warren Commission, he argues, was a cover-up. McKnight notes that even before the commission met, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi), J. Edgar Hoover, was certain that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only gunman, and he convinced both President Johnson and the commission members that they needed to look no further. To McKnight, Hoover was the major culprit behind the failure of the commission. Hoover kept information from the commission and ensured that its chief counsel was a man he could work with, rather than Chairman Earl Warren's first choice. He gained even more influence over the commission through internal commission information provided by commission member and future president, Gerald R. Ford.

The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings

For 150 years, the story of the Kennedy family has been inextricably linked to their heritage as Irish-Catholic immigrants-from Patrick Kennedy's 1848 arrival in Brahmin Boston from Country Wexford Ireland, to Joseph Kennedy's Vatican ties and Jackie's thoughts on faith and sorrow, to Kennedy-confidante Father McSorley's religious counsel following the assassination of JFK. Through groundbreaking interviews with Senator Edward Kennedy and other Kennedy family and friends, acclaimed journalist Thomas Maier casts the Kennedy saga in an entirely new light, showing how their Irish catholic heritage influenced their public and private decisions. Released to coincide with a documentary adapted from the book, this edition features a new preface, in which Maier explores the dynamics of the three brothers, Ted Kennedy's legacy, and the 2008 presidential elections that have been touched in so many ways by the Kennedy family.

Proper Assessment of the JFK Assassination Bullet Lead Evidence from Metallurgical and Statistical Perspectives

The bullet evidence in the JFK assassination investigation was reexamined from metallurgical and statistical standpoints. The questioned specimens are comprised of soft lead, possibly from full-metal-jacketed Mannlicher-Carcano (MC), 6.5-mm ammunition. During lead refining, contaminant elements are removed to specified levels for a desired alloy or composition. Microsegregation of trace and minor elements during lead casting and processing can account for the experimental variabilities measured in various evidentiary and comparison samples by laboratory analysts. Thus, elevated concentrations of antimony and copper at crystallographic grain boundaries, the widely varying sizes of grains in MC bullet lead, and the 5-60 mg bullet samples analyzed for assassination intelligence effectively resulted in operational sampling error for the analyses. This deficiency was not considered in the original data interpretation and resulted in an invalid conclusion in favor of the single-bullet theory of the assassination. Alternate statistical calculations, based on the historic analytical data, incorporating weighted averaging and propagation of experimental uncertainties also considerably weaken support for the single-bullet theory. In effect, this assessment of the material composition of the lead specimens from the assassination concludes that the extant evidence is consistent with any number between two and five rounds fired in Dealey Plaza during the shooting.

Night Moves (1975): America at Middle Age

Night Moves (1975):America at Middle Age Jonathan Kirshner Released to little fanfare thirty years ago—warmly received by the more serious critics but just past the moment when it might have enjoyed broad commercial success—Night Moves, still relatively obscure, stands as one of the achievements of the 1970s, a period now widely acknowledged as Hollywood's last golden age. While the peerless Chinatown—the Citizen Kane of the seventies film—reached back so seamlessly to the great classic studio films noir of the 1940s that in memory it has almost become one of them, Night Moves remains plainly neo-noir, unambiguously of the period, visually, stylistically, and politically. Finally available on DVD, Night Moves is a reminder of the extent to which great films depend on the unpredictable magic and serendipity of collaboration. Alan Sharp's tight, witty, and insightful script is brought to life by Gene Hackman and a pitch-perfect supporting ensemble, brilliantly orchestrated by director Arthur Penn and his team of period-pros including cinematographer Bruce Surtees and editor Dede Allen. Writer, star, and director bring their best stuff to the table, and it is hard to imagine the movie absent each of their contributions. Hackman plays Harry Moseby, an ex-Pro-Bowl football player who now gets by, more or less, running a one-man private-eye agency. By convention, he is hired to track down the wayward daughter of a disreputable guardian, and by convention the routine investigation must disturb and uncover darker and more dangerous secrets. Against genre, however, Harry not only has a wife but finds out (by accident) that she has taken a lover, one with a limp and a cane, no less, both mocking his masculinity and depriving him of the right to square things with a good sock to the jaw. This apparent sub-plot, of Harry's troubled marriage and the riveting domestic confrontations between husband and wife (in the kitchen, in the driveway, in the bedroom), is neither a distraction nor of secondary interest, for Night Moves is ultimately about the investigator, not the investigation. This raises the stakes considerably, because Harry Moseby is not just anybody; he is America. Stranded at the embarrassing age of forty, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, down a peg and directionless, with the hopes of the sixties long given way to the hollowness of the seventies, Harry is defined by disappointment and lost opportunity. A chess player, he passes the lonely hours of surveillance playing and reenacting classic matches on his portable set. One match he plays over and over again is from 1922: black had a mate and he did not see it. "Three little knight moves," Harry explains at one point. But he "played something else and lost. He must have regretted it every day of his life. I do, and I wasn't even born." Writer Sharp, a Scotsman, clearly saw the movie as a vehicle to puzzle through the American enigma (though his novelization betrays a more heavy-handed critique of both character and society) as he had done with his script for the revisionist western and Vietnam allegory Ulzana's Raid for Robert Aldrich. Gently probing national myths, Harry attributes his ability to resist the advances of young nymph Delly by conjuring the pure thoughts of Thanksgiving and George Washington's teeth. More pointedly, in response to a question about the Kennedy assassination, Moseby explains, "when the President got shot I was on my way to a football game in San Diego; when Bobby got shot I was sitting in a car waiting for a man to come out of a house with his girlfriend—a divorce case." Harry states the facts and does not dwell on the point, but a more concise summary of America's fall from grace is unlikely to be found. Certainly the sentiment did not escape the politically astute Arthur Penn, who had previously earned an Oscar nomination for directing the downbeat counter-culture classic Alice's Restaurant and also enjoyed a big hit with his revisionist western Little Big Man, a retelling of the conquest of the west from the perspective of the conquered. Penn plays with perspectives in Night...

Judgment days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the laws that changed America

Opposites in almost every way, mortally suspicious of each other at first, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., were thrust together in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination. Both men sensed a historic opportunity and began a delicate dance of accommodation that moved them, and the entire nation, toward the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Drawing on a wealth of newly available sources -- Johnson's taped telephone conversations, voluminous FBI wiretap logs, previously secret communications between the FBI and the president -- Nick Kotz gives us a dramatic narrative, rich in dialogue, that presents this momentous period with thrilling immediacy. Judgment Days offers needed perspective on a presidency too often linked solely to the tragedy of Vietnam. We watch Johnson applying the arm-twisting tactics that made him a legend in the Senate, and we follow King as he keeps the pressure on in the South through protest and passive resistance. King's pragmatism and strategic leadership and Johnson's deeply held commitment to a just society shaped the character of their alliance. Kotz traces the inexorable convergence of their paths to an intense joint effort that made civil rights a legislative reality at last, despite FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's vicious whispering campaign to destroy King. Judgment Days also reveals how this spirit of teamwork disintegrated. The two leaders parted bitterly over King's opposition to the Vietnam War. In this first full account of the working relationship between Johnson and King, Kotz offers a detailed, surprising account that significantly enriches our understanding of both men and their time.

Synchronization of the acoustic evidence in the assassination of President Kennedy

We have revisited the acoustic evidence in the Kennedy assassination--recordings of the two Dallas police radio channels upon which our original NRC report (Ramsey NF et al., Report of the Committee on Ballistic Acoustics. National Research Council (US). Washington: National Academy Press, 1982. Posted at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10264.html) was based--in response to the assertion by DB Thomas (Echo correlation analysis and the acoustic evidence in the Kennedy assassination revisited. Science and Justice 2001; 41: 21-32) that alleged gunshot sounds (on Channel 1), apparently recorded from a motorcycle officer's stuck-open microphone, occur at the exact time of the assassination (as established by emergency communications on Channel 2). We have critically reviewed these two publications, and have performed additional analyses. In particular we have used recorded 60 Hz hum and correlation methods to obtain accurate speed calibrations for recordings made on both channels, cepstral analysis to seek instances of repeated segments during playback of Channel 2 (which could result from groove jumping), and spectrographic and correlation methods to analyze instances of putative crosstalk used to synchronize the two channels. This paper identifies serious errors in the Thomas paper and corrects errors in the NRC report. We reaffirm the earlier conclusion of the NRC report that the alleged "shot" sounds were recorded approximately one minute after the assassination.

Paradigms of paranoia: the culture of conspiracy in contemporary American fiction

The recent popularity of The DaVinci Code and The Matrix trilogy exemplifies the fascination Americans have with conspiracy-driven subjects. Though scholars have suggested that in modern times the JFK assassination initiated an industry of conspiracy (i.e., Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Area 51, Iran-Contra Affair), Samuel Chase Coale reminds us in this book that conspiracy is founda-tional in American culture - from the apocalyptic Biblical narratives in early Calvinist households to the fear of Mormon, Catholic, Jewish, and immigrant populations in the 19th century. Coale argues that contemporary culture - a landscape characterized by doubt, ambigulty, fragmentation, information overload, and mistrust - has fostered a radical skepticism so pervasive that the tendency to envision or construct conspiracies often provides the best explanation for the chaos that surrounds us. Conspiracy as embodied in narrative form provides a fertile field for explorations of the anxiety lying at the heart of the postmodern experience. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Don DeLilio's Underworld, Toni Morrison's Jazz and Paradise, Joan Didlon's Democracy, Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, and Paul Auster's New York City Trilogy are some of the texts Coale examines for their representations of isolated individuals at the center of massive, anonymous master plots that lay beyond their control. These narratives remind us that our historical sense of national identity has often been based on the demonizing of others and that American fiction arose and still flourishes with apocalyptic visions - in the very marrow of its narrative bones.

Richard H. Popkin 1923-2005

Richard H. Popkin 1923-2005 Harry M. Bracken and Richard A. Watson Richard H. Popkin, founding editor of the journal of the History of Philosophy, died on April 14, 2005. He was 81 years old and had continued his research and writing to the last moment before he entered the hospital on march 21st with extreme respiratory difficulties. Popkin's The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (1960) revolutionized the study and understanding of early modern philosophy. Popkin entered the minds and world of thinkers from Erasmus to Descartes in a way few other scholars had done, and he showed how the development of philosophy and science was far from an easy series of steps from success to success. Instead, philosophers and scientists pursued a dozen lines from the scepticism of Sextus Empiricus through religious belief, atheism, numerology, astrology, alchemy, eschatology, magic, and millenarianism—a maelstrom of ideas out of which emerged the major figures and ideas of Modern philosophy and science. Dick once explained that actually he lived in the 17th century, and certainly he knew as many of those thinkers and their thoughts as did many people who actually lived at that time. Of course Popkin did not originate the notion of exploring the history of philosophy in the context of its times, but he made that approach central today. It led him not only through the Early Modern period, but also from medieval jewish philosophy to a critical analysis of the Kennedy assassination. Popkin received his PhD at Columbia University, and in his career he taught at the universities of Connecticut, Iowa, California (San Diego and Los Angeles), Washington University in St. Louis, and Harvey Mudd College. He served as the first editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and as president of JHP, Inc. For many years, and was active in its operation for over four decades, having attended the annual meeting of the Board of Directors a little over a month before he died. After retirement, he lived in close association with the Clark Library in Los Angeles. He was well known to scholars and librarians throughout the world. Whatever library he visited, he was likely to find some obscure or hidden document that would either clear up some mystery, or give rise to a new problem. His memory was extraordinary. During his final years when he was virtually blind, he would sift through his mind, send assistants off to look for something that had to be in this or that library and write papers in his head for later dictation. Besides his memory, indispensable throughout his lifetime he had Julie, his co-worker and wife of 60 years, without whom, the Popkin we knew could not have existed. These few paragraphs are meant to be neither an obituary nor an adequate memorial. We were Dick's first two PhDs, and we were barely five years his junior. He treated us from the beginning as colleagues and he became a lifelong friend. He changed our lives, as he did the lives of many other aspiring scholars. We miss him. Copyright © 2005 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.

Famous American crimes and trials

Famous American crimes and trials