An Interview With Joseph McBride by Dan Akira Nashimura

15 Pages·2014·4.62 MB·English

An Interview With Joseph McBride
by Dan Akira Nashimura
S

an Francisco State University professor Joseph McBride has pub-
lished seventeen books, mostly about film. Growing up an Irish Cath-
olic, young Joe aspired to be a priest or (after discovering girls) a law-
yer/politician. Those plans ended abruptly when President Kennedy,
the man he and his family had campaigned for, was shot and killed.
His arduous research has culminated in the publica- eyewitnesses—and ultimately butting up against
tion of Into The Nightmare: My Search for the Killers Washington insiders like Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush
of John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit. President family juggernaut and the editors of the supposedly
Kennedy’s death “set me firmly on my course to be “liberal” publications, The Nation, The New York
a professional writer rather than a politician.” True Times and The Washington Post.
to his Irish roots, McBride shows innate storytelling
abilities as he describes his grief, anger and eventual While maintaining the principles he was raised with,
resolve to set the record straight about that terrify- he’s become a political gadfly, willing to take on all
ing weekend in November 1963. Like a bespectacled sides. Our interview took place as Tea Party Republi-
Phillip Marlowe, McBride follows the trails of clues cans had managed to do something even the murder of
wherever they lead, pouring through documents, in- a president couldn’t accomplish—a partial shutdown
terviewing relatives, law enforcement officials, and of the government.
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Noir City: Joe, we greatly ap- from the front, from the railroad
preciate your taking the time to bridge or from the grassy knoll.
discuss your new book. First By 1 p.m., the reports
question: Are the premiums on started saying all the shots
your life insurance paid up? came from behind, from a
building called the Texas
JosephMcBride: Thanks for School Book Depository.
your concern, Dan. Numerous My early awareness of how
witnesses to the assassination the story was being altered,
and related events have been without explanation, helped
killed, as well as various play- me realize by the end of that
ers in the actual plot, but rela- day that Oswald was inno-
tively few reporters (Jim Ko- cent. That and my belief in his
ethe and Bill Hunter are among statements of innocence on
the people on the pioneer JFK live television. I followed the
assassination researcher Penn case sporadically until the late
Jones’s “mysterious deaths” 1970s, when I began reading
list). That’s not to say this about it seriously. I launched
kind of thing does not still my own investigation in 1982.
happen in America from time From then until Into the Night-
to time (the violent death of mare was published this June,
Michael Hastings is certainly I read about it and studied it
suspicious), but when you in- every day (as I continue to do).
vestigate the assassination of I had several period of on-site
President Kennedy and the murder of Officer Tippit, you have research in Washington and Dallas in the eighties and nine-
to plough along and not succumb to fear or intimidation. The ties. Why did it take so long to complete the book? Part of
weapon most often used to attack researchers in our society is the reason was that I had other jobs to do to earn a living
ridiculing them as “conspiracy theorists” or worse; you have to (including writing other books), but this subject was always my
ignore that and become proud of such labels. avocation. And so much was coming out in the way of docu-
ments (millions of pages of previously classified U.S. govern-
ment documents were released in the 1990s as a result of the
On a related note, my father, Raymond E. McBride, a reporter for
President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection
the Milwaukee Journal, asked President Kennedy in May 1962,
Act), and other independent researchers were making valu-
“Do you ever worry about being assassinated?” Kennedy replied
able contributions in various areas of this highly complex case.
that he couldn’t think about being assassinated, because it would
government documents were released in the 1990s as a result of
be hard for him to do his job if he did. He should have worried
the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection
about it more—and there is evidence he was aware of increasing
danger, even speaking about it on Act), and other independent re-
the morning of his death—but he “My early awareness of how the searchers were making valuable
was fatalistic and had to do his job. contributions in various areas of
story was being altered, without
As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., this highly complex case.
wrote in his autobiography, “A man
explanation, helped me realize
who won’t die for something is not It took me this long to fully under-
fit to live.” by the end of that day that stand as much of the case as I do
and to be able to assemble and make
NC: You’ve been studying the JFK Oswald was innocent.” clear all my findings. The actual
assassination since it happened. writing of the book took nine years. I
Twenty years after that, you began spent two years writing one chapter
your active investigation. In 1993-1994, you conducted a number —and rewrote it four times—before breaking it into two chapters.
of interviews in and around Dallas, uncovering some previously It was the hardest book to write that I’ve ever tackled, and I am
unreported aspects of the case regarding Officer J. D. Tippit’s pleased that I was able to finally complete my long labor of love.
murder. Why have you waited another twenty years to publish
your findings? NC: In the back cover photo, you look like either a young mis-
sionary or a junior spook with the CIA. What was your approach
JM: I have been following the case from a few minutes after in contacting people years after the fact? Were you provided in-
Kennedy was shot. I ran from my high school to a radio in a troductions by other researchers or did you have to make cold
nearby drugstore to listen to the breaking news reports. The first calls? You appear to have established a good rapport with your
reports I heard from about 12:40 onward said the shots came subjects. Was it tough trying to find common ground?
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JM: I did it the old-fashioned way, going to Dallas and making phone
calls to ask for interviews. I found some in the phone book and had to
track down others with help from other researchers and so forth. You learn
in doing investigative reporting and books that one interviewee can help
lead to others; it’s a question you always ask people. Of course, it was
not easy finding some witnesses: many have died, vanished, or moved
away—some out of fear.

I was remarkably fortunate to find some highly important interview sub-
jects, such as J. D. Tippit’s father, Edgar Lee Tippit, who had never been
interviewed before, and J. D.’s mistress Johnnie Maxie Witherspoon, who
had rarely been interviewed. Both gave me remarkably insightful inter-
views. Two of my most revealing interviews were with Detective James
Leavelle, the lead detective in the Tippit case, and Dallas County District
Attorney Henry Wade. I questioned both of them closely about the case
and its many flaws and elicited admissions from them about how weak the
case was against Oswald for both shootings and why they concentrated on
trying to nail him for the Tippit killing. Oswald was never even arraigned
for the murder of President Kennedy, only for the murder of Officer Tippit,
although he was charged with both crimes.
NC: W. Penn Jones, Jr., who became your mentor, reminded me of the
newspaper editor in Billy Wilder’s Ace in Hole (1951). Small town papers
seemed to be the only ones asking the tough questions back then.
JM: Penn is one of my heroes. There are heroes in this case, but they
are the “little people,” the witnesses who bravely came forward and the
independent-minded reporters and researchers who dug into the case de-
spite all odds and endured much ridicule and other abuse. Penn edited the
Midlothian Mirror, in a small town outside Dallas, and was a relentless
and fearless reporter in the old-fashioned shoe-leather tradition. Even be-
fore the assassination, his office was firebombed.
He started researching the case the day Kennedy was killed but said, “I
didn’t believe it was a conspiracy ’till Sunday mornin’. That’s how naive
I was.” But he was unstoppable for many years until Alzheimer’s brought
him down by the early 1990s. I met him in Dealey Plaza on my first
visit there on the twentieth anniversary of the assassination in 1983, when
he was leading his annual memorial service on the grassy knoll, and we
had an instant rapport. He reminded me of my friend Samuel Fuller, the
great writer-director, another old newspaperman with a gruff exterior and
a warm heart, and a passion for the truth. I visited Penn frequently on my
visits to Dallas. He advised me, as he did others, to “Pick one aspect of
the case, one that hasn’t been studied enough, and research the hell out
of it.”
NC: You interviewed James R. Leavelle, the policeman in the Stetson
handcuffed to Oswald when he was shot by Jack Ruby. Leavelle told you
they’d been treating the JFK assassination like “a South Dallas nigger
killin’.” My God, it was the President of United States! A judge in the Jack
Ruby trial told Leavelle basically the same thing about Oswald’s murder.
What was going through your mind when you heard that?
JM: I was stunned. Leavelle did preface that comment with “As the old
saying goes back then.” But he said it with a little smile, as if he were gen-
uinely amused by the remark. Evidently it was a common view among the Joseph McBride in Dealey Plaza on the 20th
Dallas police. Many of them, according to Penn Jones and others, were Ku Anniversary of the assassination in 1983
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Klux Klan members. I was stunned when I was interviewing retired Dallas
Police Detective Morris Brumley, who had been a boyhood friend of Tip-
pit, and Brumley pulled out his KKK regional membership card (signed
by the Grand Dragon in 1959). Brumley claimed he had “infiltrated the
Ku Klux Klan for the Dallas Police Department” from 1957 through 1959.
But when I asked about his activities with the Klan, he said, “Oh, hell, I
went out some places—you went out and whipped the niggers, you know,
castrate ’em if you catch one with a white woman, you know, stuff like
that.” When you hear shocking comments such as that, as an investigative
reporter you don’t object but keep the person talking to find out as much
as you can for the record. If you express your outrage, they would stop
talking. I was able to get many people to say things you might not expect
and that helped reveal the mindset of Dallas in 1963 and other significant
insights into the case.
“I was able to get many
people to say things you
might not expect
and that helped reveal
The Parallax View, 1974
the mindset of
Dallas in 1963”
NC: In The Parallax View (1974), witnesses to an assassination are being
killed off one by one. Reporter George Frady (Warren Beatty) discovers
the Parallax Corporation, a school for assassins. They administer a test,
a video of still images that traces the evolution of a killer. It’s an extremely
disturbing film-within-a-film. In your research, you found the Rorschach
blot test administered to J. D. Tippit by the Dallas police shortly after he
was hired. Like the Warren Beatty character, Tippit was found to be anti-
social and, of course, kept his job.
JM: That’s an intriguing parallel. The Rorschach test concluded, “This
man appears to be wholly devoid of any imaginative faculties. …His
grip on reality is below the average. Errors of judgment may be expect-
ed.” And the examiner wrote that Tippit was “within the limits of the
average in his thinking that corresponds with that of the community at
large,” which tells us something about Dallas and its police department.

I found abundant evidence that Tippit, until his death, was suffering from
what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from his experiences in
World War II. One manifestation was that he had trouble looking people in
the eye—he would look down at his feet or look away. This can be a fatal
flaw for a policeman. Tippit’s father told me that during the background
investigation for Tippit’s hiring, a minister who knew them told the Dallas
Police Department, “He’s a good boy but he’s no policeman.” That should
have caused concern as well. Tippit’s friend Morris Brumley told me, “I
don’t think he met people real well. He was real quiet. He wouldn’t say
shit if he had a mouthful.” Tippit’s father told me that after the war, J. D.
“was nervous, I would call him. There were many who came back wild.
The war ruined a lot of people’s nerves. It took several years before J.
D. settled down. He had it pretty rough as a paratrooper, jumping out of
planes. His nerves was shot for a few years.” He was clearly a man with
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serious psychological issues. He had
killed a man with another officer in the
line of duty and on another occasion
was attacked by a disturbed man with
an ice pick, causing him to limp for the
rest of his life. While he left few traces
of his political views, Tippit moved in
the circles of the extreme right in Dal-
las and could have been recruited for
the plot by some of those contacts. His
father told me that J. D. had uncanny
shooting ability.
NC: As a boy in 1962, I was greatly
disappointed that The Manchurian
Candidate wasn’t the traditional war
movie I was hoping for. I think I fell
asleep. I can now appreciate the satire
and marvel at its unintended prophecy.
Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) has
an evil mother played by Angela Lans-
bury. What about her real-life counter-
part, Ruth Paine, Oswald’s local CIA
handler? Did you try to track her down? Ruth Paine, Oswald’s local CIA
handler and her husband.
JM: That first adaptation of The
Manchurian Candidate is a great
“...why after her home in
film, and the novel by Richard
Condon is the book I’ve read most Irving, where she lived
often (seven times, compared with
six for David Halberstam’s The Best with Marina Oswald,
and the Brightest). Condon’s novel
was thoroughly
is astonishing and somehow seems
almost totally new every time I searched for two days by
read it.
the Dallas police and
sheriff’s departments,
she kept turning up key
pieces of evidence
supposedly
incriminating
Lee Oswald.”
I did not interview Ruth Paine for my book, because
I wasn’t investigating Oswald’s background primar-
ily. Other researchers have done so in great depth,
most notably John Armstrong in his book Harvey
Officer J. D. Tippit
& Lee, which finally convinced me that the theory
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that there were two people using Oswald’s identity is correct.
I did go hear Ruth Paine give a talk in September 2013 to the
Sonoma Valley Historical Society in northern California. She is
eighty-one and still lucid and disciplined in her telling of what in
spycraft would be called Oswald’s “legend.” The questions at the
event had to be written and were screened; I put in three but only
one was asked. I wanted to know why after her home in Irving,
where she lived with Marina Oswald, was thoroughly searched
for two days by the Dallas police and sheriff’s departments, she
kept turning up key pieces of evidence supposedly incriminat-
ing Lee Oswald. That question seemed to rattle her a bit, and
she launched into a long account focusing partly on the Russian-
language letter supposedly by Oswald that was used, specious-
ly, to link him to the attempt to murder General Edwin Walker.
Some intriguing nuances emerged during her talk, mostly be-
tween the lines; C-SPAN was there videotaping the event, so you
and your readers can see it eventually. I wish they had asked her
my my other questions, including one about her and her sister’s
involvement with the CIA.
NC: Frank Sinatra’s other assassination movie, Suddenly (1954),
would be forgettable without the ironic Kennedy/Sinatra connec-
tion. If I recall the plot correctly, the Sinatra character and his
cronies don’t have a political ax to grind—it’s just business. Is a
contract hit man scenario feasible with the JFK assassination?
The shooting itself, aided intentionally or not by the Secret Ser-
vice, was perfectly executed but the cover-up was botched from the
beginning.
JM: After the Dealey Plaza hit succeeded, it seems that the
plot was starting to unravel, necessitating some improvisa-
tion; the scapegoat, Oswald, was captured alive and needed to
be silenced. The cover-up has worked well in some ways, es- General
Edwin Walker
pecially by snowing and/or intimidating the mainstream media
into compliance, to this day. But the public is smarter than the
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media; seventy to eighty percent of the American public has the Secret Service and threatened with deportation. She has told
never believed the official story. A contract hit against President so many conflicting and false stories over the years that her
Kennedy is likely, at least in the case of some of the three or four more recent statements about Lee being innocent don’t hold
gunmen, although we can’t be sure of their identities. Various any more weight than her earlier statements to the contrary.
people have been suggested as possible killers, and I explore
the possibility that Tippit may have been “Badge Man,” the man NC: In Goodbye World (2013) a character with government
in a Dallas policeman’s uniform who was photographed firing experience understands the meaning behind the President’s
from behind the concrete retaining wall on the grassy knoll. coded message when he appears on television after a Y2K
meltdown. When a beat-up looking Oswald was brought before
NC: In the mid-to-late 1960s, Time and Life would the television cameras, he professed innocence and asked for
occasionally dole out stories pertaining to the legal assistance. As a sixteen year old, you saw the pathos of
assassination. You describe how the Zapruder film, the home the moment and sympathized with his situation. Has anyone to
movie shot by clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder, was your knowledge analyzed Oswald’s words for a message he may
released piecemeal and without attribution until later. Another have been trying to communicate to his CIA and FBI handlers?
series in Life magazine that I recall dealt with the Oswalds. Ma- Was he trying to maintain deep cover? Or, do you think he real-
rina Oswald was portrayed as a young innocent, a sweet Russian ized the game, whatever it was, was up?
girl who got in with the wrong crowd. She’s elsewhere been ex-
posed as a Mata Hari-like femme fatale with Soviet intelligence JM: Apparently he was waiting for legal representation
connections. Was she a Russian spy who got turned by the CIA? or for other help. We don’t know for sure what he was say-
ing under interrogation, because a complete and reliable re-
cord apparently was not kept. We have learned that on Sat-
“The cover-up has worked
urday, November 23rd, Oswald made two mysterious phone
well in some ways, calls from the Dallas jail. One was to an unknown party, and
then he tried to place a call to a former U.S. Army Coun-
especially by snowing and/or terintelligence agent living in North Carolina, John David
Hurt, but that the police wouldn’t put the call through. That
intimidating the mainstream
attempt to reach out to a man who may have been a contact
media into compliance, in a “cutout” system may have helped seal Oswald’s fate.
to this day. NC: If he were a fall guy, the self-confessed “patsy,” what
could he have thought his mission in Dallas was?
But the public is smarter
JM: I believe Oswald was infiltrating the plot against Kennedy
than the media;
for the FBI and did not realize he was being set up by the CIA
seventy to eighty percent and others to be the fall guy.
of the American public
has never believed
the official story.”
JM: Dallas FBI Special Agent James P. Hosty, Jr., who was
monitoring the Oswalds before the assassination, writes in his
1996 memoir, Assignment: Oswald, that he suspected both
Marina and Lee of being KGB sleeper agents. Marina’s uncle,
with whom she lived in Minsk, was a lieutenant colonel in the
MVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, an agency with secret
police authority, and she may have been used in KGB “honey-
trap” intelligence operations to ensnare American “defectors”
(including another one, Robert Webster, before Oswald). She
may have been “turned” even before the assassination to work
for American intelligence, along with Ruth Paine.
Marina certainly did everything she could after the assassina-
tion to cooperate with the American authorities to help frame
her husband. She was under duress, literally held prisoner by
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Head of Mexico
City CIA where
Oswald was
purported to have
visited.
Marina Oswald
Incredible photo
taken just as Jack Ruby
moves in to gun down
Lee Harvey Oswald.
Lee Harvey Oswald being
escorted by Dallas police.
filmnoirefoundation.org I FALL 2013 I NOIR CITY 123
President and Mrs. Kennedy and Texas Governor and Mrs Connolly in the motorcade only moments before the assassination.
The Dallas police knew who he was. I “Lee” helped stop a plot against Kennedy in
learned that Officer Tippit and another Chicago when he was to visit there on No-
“I believe Oswald
policeman were secretly sent in pursuit vember 2, 1963, a trip that was called off at
of Oswald shortly after the assassination the last minute because the Secret Service
was infiltrating
and before he was officially regarded as and Chicago police couldn’t find all the
a suspect, which is proof of a conspiracy the plot against conspirators. This incident was hushed up
to scapegoat him, if not to kill him. It’s until Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden
known that he had delivered a message to Kennedy for the FBI eventually managed to reveal it.
the FBI shortly before the assassination,
and did not
which was destroyed after he was killed. NC: Jacqueline Kennedy was quoted as say-
ing of her blood-stained clothing, “I want
realize he was
The Dallas Morning News reported in its them to see what they have done to Jack.”
edition published the morning he was killed being set up It’s curious she would use “they.” It may
that Oswald was interviewed by the FBI on have been a figure of speech referring to the
by the CIA and
November 16th. Dallas District Attorney haters she knew were out there. Still, she
Henry Wade, a former FBI agent, told me was there in the limousine, heard and felt the
others to be the
that Oswald had spoken with the FBI’s Hosty shots, probably knew instinctively the bullets
“…within a day or two [before the assassi- fall guy.” were coming from more than one direction.
nation], I don’t know exactly.” We don’t Was she interviewed by the Warren Com-
know what Oswald was telling them, but he mission or the House Select Committee on
was involved with anti-Castro Cubans and Assassinations?
other rightwing elements, most likely as an
infiltrator, and may well have been trying to JM: I think her comment, made to several
help stop the plot. An FBI informant named people that day, and her conspicuous re-
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