Dealey Plaza vendor sues city of Dallas after police sweep

06:38 AM CDT on Monday, July 12, 2010
By DAVID FLICK / The Dallas Morning News
dflick@dallasnews.com
dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/071210dnmetjfksuit.1d941e9.html

Alone among the newspaper vendors and self-appointed guides in Dealey Plaza who for years regaled tourists with conspiracy theories, Robert Groden suddenly has the grassy knoll to himself.

And he has his suspicions about the forces at work.

“A security guard from the Sixth Floor Museum told me they were behind it,” Groden said of the recent police crackdown. In addition, “Everybody knows they want us out of here because of the Super Bowl.”

After his arrest June 13 for selling merchandise without authorization in a city park, Groden sued the city of Dallas in federal court, charging that he is being denied his constitutional right to freedom of speech. A hearing is set for Aug. 25.

Until then, the city has agreed to allow him to continue to sell his newspapers and DVDs from a folding table in an obscure corner of the plaza. His competitors, who sometimes outnumbered the tourists, were gone last week. Security patrols, sponsored by the private group Downtown Dallas, had a higher-than-usual presence.

Deputy Chief Vince Goldbeck said the crackdown was in response to complaints that visitors to Dealey Plaza – where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963 – were sometimes harassed and intimidated by the vendors.

He acknowledged that some of the complaints have come from officials of the Sixth Floor Museum and Downtown Dallas, but said most were from individual visitors and organized tours.

“We were responding to quality-of-life issues that have generated complaints for quite some time,” Goldbeck said. “It’s been going on for several months, but lately it’s become more intense.”

An official at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza declined to comment on the museum’s role on the crackdown, noting that it was in litigation.

But she took issue with Groden’s contention that officials there were motivated by fear that competition from the vendors would take tourist money away from the Sixth Floor’s new museum store and cafe.

“I’m surprised he would say that,” said Nicola Longford, museum executive director. “We run our own business, and we only care what the Sixth Floor is doing.”

As for the charge that the sweep was a way to clean up a major tourist site before next year’s Super Bowl in North Texas, Chris Bowers, a city attorney, was blunt.

“This has nothing to do with the Super Bowl,” he said.

The vendors’ statesman

Many of the Dealey Plaza vendors frequent the site for only days or weeks before moving on. Some are homeless people trying to gain a few dollars. In that subculture, Groden has something like statesman status.

Groden, 64, moved to Dallas from New York in 1995. He has been a familiar figure in Dealey Plaza ever since.

Groden maintains the taped “X” along the extension of Elm Street, which marks, more or less, where Kennedy was shot.

Working in a film processing company in New York, Groden copied Abraham Zapruder’s famed home movie of the JFK assassination and aired it on Geraldo Rivera’s late-night television show in 1975. Groden later served as a consultant to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and to Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, in which he also played a doctor at Parkland Memorial Hospital.

He was a paid witness for the defense in the O.J. Simpson civil trial, testifying that a photo showing Simpson wearing Bruno Magli shoes was faked. His expertise and testimony were battered in cross-examination by a plaintiff’s attorney, who demonstrated that Simpson appeared in the shoes in more than a score of other photos.

Some good, some bad

For his part, Groden acknowledges that there have been problems on the plaza.

“Some of the people are a bit pushy, some have gotten in the face of visitors,” he said. “No one is more against them than I am.”

He contends that the city has ticketed him 80 times for selling his newspapers over the years. But he said they agreed to tolerate his presence in the plaza after he threatened an earlier suit seven years ago. Bowers denied any such agreement existed.

Beyond official circles, visitors to Dealey Plaza interviewed one day last week expressed disagreement about the vendors.

“I thought it was interesting,” said Matt Tanner of Kansas City, Mo., of Groden’s newspaper JFK: The Case for Conspiracy.

“I didn’t like seeing the autopsy photos. But it was different from what you’d see up there . It was another opinion.”

On the other hand, John Sekul of Biloxi, Miss., said he found the presence of newspaper vendors offensive.

“This is a national monument, they shouldn’t have vendors here,” he said.

“When I walked through the plaza and remembered that day, I had tears in my eyes. This is sacred ground.”

Comments:
CitySlicker
5:22 PM on July 12, 2010

Is the city interfering with Groden’s right to express himself, or just trying to protect tourists from another form of aggressive panhandling? Has he REALLY been ticketed 80 times? Why is he not in jail? The city is too soft with this clown.

Cuban ex-intelligence chief recalls JFK assassination

By Martin Roberts
Reuters
Monday, July 12, 2010; 7:32 AM

GIJON, Spain (Reuters) – Like many, Fabian Escalante remembers what he was doing when he heard U.S. President John F. Kennedy had been shot: he was trying to stop the Central Intelligence Agency from toppling the Cuban government with the help of anti-Castro exiles.

Years later, when he had risen to head Cuba’s Department of State Security, he was well placed to consider whether those same exiles may have had a hand in the November 22, 1963 slaying of the dashing young president in Dallas.

Escalante does not claim to know who killed JFK, but says that Cuban exiles recruited by the CIA had planned to kill Kennedy twice in November 1963, because they felt the U.S. president had done too little to topple the government on the Caribbean island.

“They had the capability, the means and the intent,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of the Semana Negra crime writing festival in Gijon, northern Spain.

“How was this meant to turn out? To assassinate Kennedy, launch a furious campaign against Cuba, blaming it for the assassination, which they did, then kill Fidel Castro a few days later, on December 12, and invade Cuba.”

Escalante worked with members of the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations investigating the JFK killing when they travelled to Cuba in 1978 to collect data on the activities of Cuban exiles.

In his retirement, he has published many of his findings in book form, along with research he has conducted since he set up the Centre for Security Studies in 1993.

LIFE INSURANCE

Escalante says one anti-Castro exile and former CIA operative who may hold clues to the JFK assassination is Luis Posada Carriles, who lives in Miami and is wanted in Cuba on charges of masterminding the 1976 bombing of a Cubana Airlines jet which killed 73 people.

Posada Carriles is also accused of involvement in a 1997 wave of hotel bombings, which were aimed at destabilizing Cuba and scaring away tourists, but Escalante doubts the U.S. government will deport him to Cuba to face trial.

“He has a life insurance policy, which is what he knows about the Kennedy plot,” Escalante said.

“He and (fellow exile) Orlando Bosch were in the thick of the Kennedy plot. Remember, both he and Posada were part of this terrorist mechanism set up in New Orleans, which is where the plot was hatched to assassinate Kennedy.”

POISON MILK SHAKE

Now 69, Escalante was just 18 when a revolution led by Fidel Castro took power in 1959. In the next few years, he and other young novices built up a counter-intelligence service from scratch.

He was invited to participate in the Spanish crime-writing festival because organizers say fiction falls short of a world Escalante has uncovered, in which the CIA plotted to make Castro’s beard fall off or poison Cubans with infected coins.

Escalante belonged to the Q Section in 1961, which had 50 case officers to thwart the efforts of the so-called JMWAVE CIA base in Florida assigned to conduct sabotage operations in Cuba with a $100 million budget and 4,000 agents.

In his book “Executive Action,” Escalante lists 634 conspiracies to kill Castro between 1959 and 2000, including 168 plots which may have succeeded.

He says the closest the Cuban leader came to death was when a CIA agent working at Havana’s former Hilton hotel tried to poison a chocolate milk shake Castro ordered

However, a capsule containing botulin stuck to the side of the freezer compartment in the bar and broke when the agent tried to prise it loose.

Escalante says the Q Section often intercepted false documents sent by the CIA to their agents in Cuba, which were as good as genuine ones, so he used one for himself.

“Security measures for documents in those days were very lax. There was just ordinary paper, a photo, stamp and plastic cover. So that was how I began to drive, with a CIA license.”

(Reporting by Martin Roberts, editing by Paul Casciato)

Dallas police crack down on Dealey Plaza vendors who peddle maps, conspiracy theories
11:43 PM CDT on Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Dallas News
By REBECCA LOPEZ / WFAA-TV

No visit to Dealey Plaza is complete without a run-in with vendors selling maps, newspapers and conspiracy theories.

That may soon change as Dallas police crack down on the street peddlers, who can be ticketed and arrested if they lack the proper permits.

“When a visitor is coming to … Dallas, and the first thing they are being cussed at or spit on or harassed, that’s not the image we want portrayed,” Deputy Police Chief Vince Golbeck said.

Michael Brownlow talks about conspiracy theories and gives tours at the downtown plaza alongside the spot where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Even Brownlow acknowledges that sometimes the vendors get out of hand.

“They walk up and say, ‘Would you like a tour?’ and you say no and they continue on and continue on and they actually intimidate people, and some people are scared,” he said.

But Brownlow says not all vendors are like that. He says some, like him, simply want to spread the word about different theories on the assassination.

He said he believes that police are heavy-handed when dealing with vendors, and he watched a good friend arrested last weekend.

“I feel like his civil rights were violated and his constitutional rights,” he said.

Dallas police say the vendors can give papers away or sell them on public sidewalks, but once they enter Dealey Plaza, which is considered a park, they are committing a crime.

“It is giving another perspective of that important piece of history,” Golbeck said, “and that is fine if they are doing so on public property.”

Do you remember where you were? He does: With JFK

By Bill Bartel
The Virginian-Pilot
News Virginia Beach
June 17, 2010
hamptonroads.com/2010/06/do-you-remember-where-you-were-he-does-jfk#rfq

(VIRGINIA BEACH) Winston Lawson remembers the shots as clearly as if it was yesterday.

“I heard bang… bang-bang,” he said, slapping his knee for emphasis.

Lawson was riding in the front seat of an unmarked Dallas police car traveling just in front of a dark blue Lincoln convertible carrying President John F. Kennedy, first lady

Jacqueline Kennedy and the governor of Texas and his wife. It was 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 22, 1963. An assassin’s bullets mortally wounded President Kennedy and severely injured Gov. John Connally.

It was a national tragedy so shocking that many Americans can remember exactly where they were when they heard of Kennedy’s death. For Lawson, it was more personal. He was the Secret Service agent who had planned security for the Dallas trip.

Lawson, now 81 and living in Virginia Beach, is going back to Dallas this week for a reunion with Secret Service colleagues.

An Army intelligence specialist, he joined the Secret Service in 1959, working in its Syracuse, N.Y., office until being transferred to Washington in March 1961, two months after Kennedy was sworn in as president.

As part of a 34-man White House detail that handled security, he often worked long hours, accompanying JFK on his many weekends at the family’s compound in Cape Cod and other trips.

By the fall of 1963, Lawson was experienced at planning presidential security, having organized trips both in the United States and abroad. He handled security for JFK’s 1963 trip to Germany where the president told citizens of West Berlin – then surrounded by Communist-controlled East Germany – that “all free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ “

On Nov. 4, Lawson was told that he would be responsible for the Dallas stopover during Kennedy’s trip to Texas. Kennedy wanted to boost his political standing in the state, home of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.

The Dallas visit was to include a slow-moving 45-minute motorcade through suburbia and part of downtown, followed by a luncheon speech and a four-minute trip back to the airport.

Ten days before Kennedy arrived, Lawson and other agents were in Dallas arranging security and evaluating potential hazards.

Early on Nov. 22, the Dallas weather was drizzly, and as agents awaited the president’s plane, they considered placing a clear plastic cover, or bubble, over the limousine. A

Kennedy aide told the Secret Service to leave it off – the White House staff wanted as many people as possible to see the president without obstruction.

As the motorcade eased its way through Dallas, crowds lined the route. Lawson, with another agent and the Dallas police chief and sheriff, were a few car lengths ahead of the presidential limousine.

He kept looking back at the limo and the crowd, then glancing ahead to overpasses, railroads and other hazards, trading advice with the police chief as they went.

The job of scanning buildings fell to agents in a car behind the limo and to local law enforcement officers.

Agent Roy Kellerman, riding in the front seat of Kennedy’s car, later said he looked at the Texas School Book Depository Building but saw nothing suspicious. Lawson was commenting to his colleague that it was a long trip when he heard the three bangs. He knew immediately what they were.

“The president was hit. Go to the hospital,” a voice on his radio ordered.

They raced to Parkland Memorial Hospital just ahead of the limousine. Lawson retrieved a gurney, and after Connally was removed from the car, he helped other agents take out Kennedy. Mrs. Kennedy had been cradling her husband on her lap.

The president’s skin was gray, and he didn’t move as they placed him on the gurney. Lawson saw a huge hole in the back of the president’s head. “He didn’t look like he was going to make it,” Lawson said.

As the president was wheeled into the emergency room, Lawson followed. The agent stood at the president’s head as emergency personnel tried to save him. But the damage was so severe, they didn’t work for long.

At 1 p.m., the president was declared dead.

As the world outside the ER exploded with the news and, within two hours, the capture of Lee Harvey Oswald, Lawson stayed with Kennedy.

He and other agents transported the president’s body back to the airport and loaded the casket onto Air Force One for the return to Washington. On board was the new president, Lyndon Johnson, and Mrs. Kennedy.

Lawson returned home the next day to his family in Falls Church. The day after, he watched on live TV as Oswald was shot to death outside the Dallas jail by Jack Ruby.

And the day after that, he stood guard down a slope from Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery, part of the detail that provided security for the burial.

In the weeks that followed, he wrote detailed memos and spent hours testifying before the Warren Commission. He also returned to work.

He continued to do presidential advance work, handling security arrangements for President Johnson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey and, in the Nixon administration, Vice President Spiro Agnew.

The personal support he received from other agents helped him deal with the aftermath of the assassination, he said. “Just their attitude and the way they talked to me.”

He grimaces when asked how much credence he gives conspiracy theories that the Kennedy assassination involved multiple shooters.

“None,” he said. “There’s no shots from in front, kitty corner or from the side or anything like that.”

He has rethought his work in Dallas many times.

“The biggest ‘what ifs’ were, ‘What if the rain hadn’t stopped and the bubble had been on the car?’ ” he said. “Because everybody thought it was bulletproof, maybe he wouldn’t have tried it.”

Although the bubble wasn’t bulletproof, it might have distorted the shooter’s view or the metal frame might have deflected a shot, he said.

After the assassination and investigation, significant changes were made to the Secret Service. The Warren Commission said the agency was understaffed and did not have adequate sources of information and assistance from other law enforcement agencies in reviewing threats against the president.

The number of agents has grown vastly. In 1963, the 34 agents were assigned to guard the president 24 hours a day, with several hundred others on staff. Today, there are thousands.

On Friday, Lawson will travel with his wife back to the Book Depository building – now a museum – where he and a handful of other agents will tell their stories. The event will be taped as part of a Discovery Channel show to air in November. At the same time, a book,

“The Kennedy Detail,” will be released that tells the story of the agents assigned to JFK.

It’s an important and strenuous trip for him. He has been living at Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital since February 2008 after suffering a stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body.

Lawson said he’s made peace with what happened in Dallas. In the end, he ascribes to a feeling, shared by many agents and the Warren Commission, that there’s no way to completely protect someone.

“I thought about it, but I was pretty confident that I had done everything I could do,” he said.

Jeff Parris, who worked with Lawson in later years, said he is an iconic figure within the Secret Service. His actions in Dallas and afterward are studied at their training academy, Parris said.

“Even though it was a bad situation, he did the job the way it was supposed to be done.”

FBI files show Edward Kennedy’s life was constantly threatened

By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 15, 2010;

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy lived with constant threats on his life after the assassinations of his brothers and was monitored by the FBI for his possible ties to communist radicals in Latin America, according to a trove of FBI files on the late senator released Monday.

The more than 2,200 pages, disclosed in response to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by news organizations, cover the FBI’s relationship with the Massachusetts Democrat from 1961 to 1985. Kennedy died of cancer in August.

The bulk of the material covers FBI investigations of threats of violence and extortion against Kennedy and other public figures, including Kennedy’s political rival President

Ronald Reagan. One anonymous letter sent in October 1968 threatened “assassination for Kennedy number three within twenty four hours . . . all Kennedy residents are in danger on that day.”

Sirhan Sirhan, who fatally shot Kennedy’s brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968, even offered $1 million to a fellow inmate in California to kill Edward Kennedy, according to the files, which say the prisoner declined.

Ted Kennedy was acutely aware of such threats but rarely spoke of them publicly.

Then-Sen. Walter Mondale recounted that Kennedy’s own fears bubbled powerfully to the surface on an infamous plane trip in April 1969, less than a year after Robert Kennedy’s death. Operating on little sleep and not much food, the senator suddenly burst out loud enough for the whole plane to hear: “They killed Jack and they killed Bobby, and now they’re trying to kill me. . . . They’re trying to kill me!”

Kennedy waited 12 years after Robert was assassinated before running for president, largely because of his family’s concerns about such threats, according to a longtime aide,

Robert Shrum. “You took precautions,” said Shrum, Kennedy’s speechwriter during his 1980 presidential campaign. “We had a doctor with us everywhere we went. We had ambulances in most places. The memory was there. But you just lived with it.”

Concerned about the threats, Shrum and other Kennedy aides asked President Jimmy Carter, Kennedy’s rival for the Democratic nomination, for Secret Service protection two months before Kennedy officially announced his candidacy. Carter granted the request.

Longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover is a regular presence in the documents, which touch on some of the controversies involving Kennedy and his family — and Hoover’s own troubled legacy of spying on Americans. The FBI closely monitored Kennedy’s fact-finding trip to Mexico, Central America and South America in 1961, and one document shows that Hoover received a file from an FBI employee in Mexico City that said the senator “is interested in meeting with ‘leftists’ to talk with them and determine why they think as they do.”

The document added that “the Kennedy party” was meeting with a university official in Mexico “on whom this office and bureau has information indicating communist sympathies.”

In a statement accompanying the document release, the FBI said that “given the Bureau’s long interest in the influence of Central American revolutionaries and communists on American radicals, the Bureau took an interest in Kennedy’s travels.” During the trip, the documents show, the FBI recovered a notebook kept by Kennedy documenting his travels that was accidentally left on his airplane.

The files include 77 pages on the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne when Kennedy drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island off Martha’s Vineyard in 1969. The pages are nearly all newspaper articles, but one internal FBI document informed Hoover of the accident and says the police chief in Edgartown, Mass., “confidentially” advised that Kennedy was the driver.

“Stated fact Senator Kennedy was driver is not being revealed to anyone,” the document said.

FBI file shows Ted Kennedy was death threat magnet
Jun 15, 1:08 AM EDT
By ANDREW MIGA and GLEN JOHNSON
Associated Press Writers

WASHINGTON (AP) — For decades after gunmen shot down his brothers, Sen. Edward Kennedy lived under constant assassination threats of his own, sometimes chillingly specific, as he became a target for extremist rage, previously private FBI documents disclosed Monday.

Five years after President John F. Kennedy was killed and shortly after Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot, one letter warned that the third brother was next: “Ted Kennedy number three to be assassinated on Oct. 25, 1968. The Kennedy residence must be well protected on that date.”

Nearly two decades later, in 1985, the threats continued, this time including the Republican president as well as the liberal Democratic senator: “Brass tacks, I’m gonna kill Kennedy and (President Ronald) Reagan, and I really mean it.”

Releasing 2,352 pages from Kennedy’s FBI file, many of them concerning threats over the years, the agency said on its website: “These threats originated from multiple sources, including individuals, anonymous persons and members of radical groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, ‘Minutemen’ organizations and the National Socialist White People’s Party.”

Some of the threats prompted investigations, some resulted in warnings to Kennedy or local law enforcement authorities. There is no indication any attempts were carried out.

In 1977, the FBI even looked into allegations that Sirhan Sirhan – the man who assassinated Robert Kennedy – had attempted to hire a fellow prisoner to kill Edward Kennedy. The prisoner, who was housed next to Sirhan for 18 months, told the FBI he was offered $1 million and a car but declined.

President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Robert Kennedy died on

June 6, 1968, a day after he was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Their deaths cast a long shadow on the youngest brother’s life, and prompted fears he, too, would be targeted by an assassin’s bullet. Indeed, Kennedy wrote in his memoir “True Compass” that after his brothers were killed he was easily startled by loud sounds and would hit the deck whenever a car backfired.

He died last year at 77 after fighting brain cancer. Kennedy’s widow, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, declined comment on the document release through a spokesman.

Most of the documents released Monday are about death threats and extortion attempts against the Massachusetts Democrat.

The release had been highly anticipated by historians, scholars and others interested in the life and long public career of one of America’s most prominent and powerful politicians. The Associated Press and other media organizations requested the documents through Freedom of Information Act requests.

There is relatively little on a major controversy, Kennedy’s car accident on Chappaquiddick Island off the coast of Massachusetts that killed Mary Jo Kopechne, a young woman who had been a worker in Robert Kennedy’s campaign.

The files do show that the FBI was told almost immediately of the accident and Kennedy’s involvement, but authorities kept his identity quiet at the start. The Boston FBI office relayed word to Washington headquarters at 2:45 p.m. EDT on

July 19, 1969, after being notified by Police Chief Dominick Arena in Edgartown, Mass. The advisory said that Kennedy – the vehicle’s driver – was uninjured. It also said, “Stated fact Senator Kennedy was driver is not being revealed to anyone.”

Kopechne drowned after Kennedy drove the car in which she was riding off a bridge into a pond. He swam to safety, leaving Kopechne in the car. Kopechne, 28, was found dead in the submerged car’s back seat 10 hours later. Kennedy, then 37, pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and got a suspended sentence and probation.

In his memoir, Kennedy wrote that his actions on Chappaquiddick were inexcusable. He said he was afraid, “made terrible decisions” and had to live with the guilt the rest of his life.

Kopechne’s death also caught the attention of the Nixon administration and one of the eventual Watergate conspirators.

One file shows FBI Deputy Director C.D. DeLoach reporting an Oct. 17, 1969, call from John Dean, then assistant to the deputy attorney general.

“He stated that both the deputy attorney general and attorney general are anxious to discreetly find out if Mary Jo Kopechne (deceased) had visited Greece in August 1968,” DeLoach writes in his report. John Mitchell was attorney general at the time. Dean supplied Kopechne’s passport number. The subsequent report about the results of the check on any visit to Greece was blacked out.

Meanwhile, the FBI said Monday it has additional documents on threats to Kennedy, possibly thousands more pages, that it plans to make public once the agency finishes reviewing them.

Kennedy family members were given a chance to review and to raise objections to the documents before they were released Monday, the FBI said.

Dennis Argall, assistant section chief of the FBI’s record information dissemination section, declined to specify how much time the family was given. He would only say the family was given an “appropriate” time to review the documents.

The family has no legal power to keep information withheld. But the FBI does consider privacy concerns on a case-by-case basis, he said.

Johnson reported from Boston. Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Sam Hananel in Washington contributed to this report.

COPA’s annual Commemorative event on the 47th anniversary of JFK’s speech against the Cold War will be held at the Memorial Plaque, campus of American University (southeast end of football field), 4800 Nebraska Ave. NW, Washington, DC (entrance off New Mexico and Nebraska Aves.). Reading followed by luncheon meeting. Open to researchers and public, no cost.

On Eve of California Primary, Lessons From Robert Kennedy’s Assassination
Carl M. Cannon
Senior Washington Correspondent
Politics Daily.com
June 5, 2010
politicsdaily.com/2010/06/05/on-eve-of-california-primary-lessons-from-robert-kennedys-assa/

On Tuesday, California’s voters will go to the polls to choose their November standard-bearer for governor, an open Senate seat, and a host of other races. It’s a celebration of democracy, as all elections are, but for the past four decades June primaries in the Golden State have also been sad and sobering reminders of the harm that human beings do to each other in the name of politics and sectarianism.
This day, 42 years ago, Robert F. Kennedy was shot after winning the California presidential primary. He died the following day, June 6, 1968, just before 2 a.m. My job was to tell people about it.
Each year, usually around Christmas time, I write one column expounding on my love of newspapers. This year, perhaps because the California primaries are so compelling, I’m going to do it early. In 1968, I was a 14-year-old paperboy the same age as Homer McCauley, the sensitive World War II-era Western Union messenger of William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy. I had read that book — Saroyan, one of California’s greatest writers, was taught in school at the time — and had wondered how Homer McCauley had managed to climb on his bicycle and deliver death notices to the Gold Star mothers in the San Joaquin Valley without crying.
I was about to find out.
Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles, 1968As a student at Joaquin Miller Junior High School in Sacramento, I delivered the San Francisco Chronicle, which was the preferred newspaper of many politically aware Northern Californians. My route was big: 90 papers delivered seven days-a-week on a bicycle stripped down for speed and lightness: my daily trip was about five miles.
Any American even slightly older than I am will always remember the national tragedy and turmoil of 1968, and the passions surrounding that year’s presidential campaign.
On March 12, anti-war candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy gave President Johnson a scare in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire and LBJ subsequently announced he would not seek re-election. Four days later Robert Kennedy entered the race. A month after that, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, a debilitating blow that seemed to break McCarthy’s stride, if not his spirit. I know it sapped mine. By the time of the June primary in California, the Democratic presidential contest had come down to a grinding contest between Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. I had first been a Humphrey kid, out of loyalty to LBJ, then switched to McCarthy after meeting him at Sacramento Municipal airport. But 14-year-olds can be fickle. After Robert F. Kennedy ushered in June of 1968 with a campaign swing through Sacramento and the Central Valley, I switched affections again, to RFK. It was a short-lived love affair.
Like most Californians who had to get up early for school or work, I watched the election returns the night of June 4, saw that Bobby had won, and went to bed relatively early, as a paperboy will do when his alarm is set every morning at 5:45 a.m.
That morning, I didn’t sleep that late, however. At 4:30 in the morning, my mother came into my room, which was a first, and told me gently to get up and deliver the papers. I told her that they didn’t have to be delivered this early, and she replied that today, they did. I should know, she added, that Bobby Kennedy had been shot in Los Angeles. It had happened just after midnight, she said, meaning that the out-of-town editions of the San Francisco Chronicle were not going to have the news that people needed to know: namely, that less than five years after his brother the president had been assassinated, RFK had also been wounded, and was probably going to die.
“Where’s dad?” I asked. The answer was that my father, a newspaperman, was still at work.
“He stayed there all night,” my mother told me. “But he called with the latest bulletin. He told me to write this down for you.”
Fighting back tears, my mother handed her oldest son a three-by-five card with the grim news from L.A. I was to read the latest news about RFK to my customers as I delivered their paper.
“No one will be awake at this hour.” I protested.
“Yes, they will,” she replied softly. “And they’ll want to know what happened.”
She was right. At every other house, it seemed, in these pre-cable, pre-Internet days, a light was on, and through the windows I could see people at their kitchen tables, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, some with their face in their hands. At many houses, the resident — usually the woman of the house — came outside to meet their paperboy, who dutifully recited the information on his little card. Sometimes the women would start crying. Several of them hugged me in their grief.
My paper route usually took an hour. That morning, it took three. It’s far too melodramatic to say that the kid who delivered those papers began his rounds as a boy and finished them as a man, but I will say that when I was done delivering those papers, I had acquired an abiding interest in the presidency, and a searing appreciation for the power of the news. I still retain those dual passions, and over the years have also formed some judgments about the meaning of those horrifying events of 1968.
One of them is that the words we use in politics and the press matter.
In 1944, as Allied bombers razed German cities, George Orwell, who was then (among other things) a newspaper columnist, received a letter from a reader who was troubled by the indiscriminate nature of the lethal ordnance being rained on the German people by British and American pilots. Although he said he realized “the Hun (has) got to be beaten,” the writer expressed his misgivings over civilian casualties suffered in places like Dresden and Hamburg. Replied Orwell in his newspaper column: “It seems to me that you do less harm by dropping bombs on people than by calling them ‘Huns.’”
Perhaps that’s hyperbole, but Orwell’s point was that it’s the name-calling and demonization that make the bombing possible. It’s a lesson for our own times as well as the 1960s. It’s a lesson for any era, as the sacrifice of the Kennedy family attests. The anger and hatred expressed in our politics is troubling, and not only because it’s unpleasant. World history – our own history – has shown it can be dangerous. That’s one reason why Politics Daily, a newspaper for a digital age, has embraced the concept of the “civilogue,” a self-explanatory term coined by our colleague Jeffrey Weiss, who lives in Dallas, a city that came for a time to be associated with the murder of a president.
Yoda, the sage and diminutive Jedi master in the movie Star Wars , a cultural icon of the 1980s, put it this way: “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
Those words were not actually written by a cute little intergalactic creature, of course. They were written by George Lucas, who, like Homer McCauley grew up in the Central Valley and who was living in Los Angeles that fateful June of 1968 when hate and fear seemed to overwhelm the better angels of our natures.

When Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone was in Washington in fall 2007, scouting locations for a film about the My Lai massacre, he asked AU history professor Peter Kuznick to join him, his cinematographer, and his producer for dinner. As often happens when Kuznick and Stone get together, their conversation turned to analyzing key events in history. In the midst of an animated conversation, Stone suggested that the two of them do a documentary film together.

Kuznick was then spending his sabbatical year working on a book on how knowing that nuclear war could end all life on the planet had influenced public opinion and policy decisions since the start of the atomic bomb project in 1939. Still, he agreed that working on a documentary with Stone would be an intriguing possibility for the future. Kuznick should have known Stone better than that. They had been friends since 1996 when Stone made the first of many visits to Kuznick’s class which uses Stone’s films as a window into recent U.S. history, comparing Stone’s interpretations with those of scholars and participants in key events.

The class is so popular with AU students that one year Kuznick let 150 students enroll instead of the customary 80. The class has brought an outstanding roster of guest speakers to the AU campus, including Robert McNamara, Daniel Ellsberg, Bob Woodward, Paul Warnke, Seymour Hersh, John Dean, Ambassador Robert White, Senator Max Cleland, Vietnam vets Bobby Muller, Ron Kovic, and Wayne Smith as well as Pham Duy Thanh, who fought for North Vietnam, Cambodian child soldier and author Loung Ung, Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, JFK screenwriter Zach Sklar and leading JFK critic Max Holland, and many others.

By the time Stone returned to California a couple days later, his idea for a documentary had evolved into something far grander. Stone phoned Kuznick proposing that they collaborate on a 10- part documentary series exploring lesser known aspects of U.S. history – the parts that are generally left out of high school history texts and those so often presented in a sanitized version conforming to what Kuznick and Stone consider a triumphalist and very partial view of America’s past. Their series instead plans to focus on the development of a peculiarly American form of empire and the national security state that undergirds it. Kuznick explained, “We had initially intended to begin by debunking the mythology surrounding the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then, in the second episode, go back to the roots of empire in the late 19th century. We now plan to begin with World War II and work our way to the present in a more linear fashion.” They will likely include the earlier material as an 11th episode in the box sets that are released next year.

Showtime has announced that the series, “The Secret History of the United States,” will be aired in 2010. Kuznick warns that, despite the title, people who are looking for conspiracies will be disappointed: “This is solid history, based on cutting edge scholarship. The broad public, which has not been exposed to this kind of information and analysis, may be shocked by what we present, but it will come as less of a surprise to historians who have stayed on top of the latest research findings.”

Stone, a decorated Vietnam vet who dropped out of Yale to serve, has won numerous Academy Awards, including two for best director. Despite an illustrious Hollywood career that includes the films Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, JFK, Nixon, Salvador, Natural Born Killers, Wall Street, The Doors, and W, he sees this documentary series as his crowning achievement. He recently proclaimed, “this epic 10-hour series…is the deepest contribution I could ever make in film to my children and the next generation.” He added, “I can only hope a change in our thinking will result.” Kuznick feels the same way: “It will be a great opportunity to reach an audience of tens of millions – here and abroad – rather than the tens of thousands who might read something I write. Oliver and I have put a lot into this project. We want to change the way people understand American history in the hopes that we, as a nation, can learn from what we’ve done wrong and build upon what we’ve done right. Our story has its share of villains, but it also has its share of heroes. We want to correct the historical record, but we also want to inspire the next generation to dream the dreams and fight the fights that will enable this country to become a force for good in the world rather than the hyper-militarized defender of an unjust and inequitable status quo.”

Two of Kuznick’s students – Cindy Gueli, who received her PhD in 2006, and Eric Singer, who is currently writing a dissertation on civil defense in Baltimore – have assisted Kuznick and Stone in the research.

By Brian Englar
News-Post Staff

Gerald McKnight is a retired Hood College professor and JFK assassination expert. McKnight is working on his third book.

For retired Hood College history professor Gerald McKnight, much of the early part of his life conditioned him to question American policy and challenge the officially recognized versions of events.

Growing up in a rough Philadelphia neighborhood during the 1940s, many of his friends were avowed leftists, exposing him to a range of alternative political views.

Then came his service in the Korean War, where he was assigned the grim task of removing bodies from the battlefield after massive Chinese assaults.

“That was eye-opening for a 20-year-old,” McKnight said. “I think what it said to me in a sense was, ‘what is the history of this and how did we get involved with this?’ “

McKnight said these experiences helped steer him away from his plan to go into veterinary medicine and into the field of history. However, it was not until he arrived in Frederick in the mid-1970s as a part-time professor at Hood that he found what would be his life’s work: attempting to call into question the official story of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and other political figures of the 1960s.

While at Hood, he worked with Virginia Lewis, history department chairwoman at the time as well as a JFK enthusiast, and met Frederick resident and assassination researcher Paul Weisberg. He and Lewis decided to put together a class about the political assassinations of the 1960s, which McKnight continues to teach.

McKnight said the college provided a supportive environment where he could pursue his research without fear.

“It was encouraged,” McKnight said. “I wasn’t regarded as the village idiot or as someone who needed counseling.”

McKnight has since written two books, based largely on documents obtained by Weisberg and himself. “The Last Crusade: Martin Luther King Jr., the FBI and the Poor People’s Campaign” was published in 1998 and documents the bureau’s campaign of harassment against King and its efforts to thwart a planned march on Washington by impoverished Americans. He had to sue the Justice Department for the documents used in the book, receiving word his Freedom of Information Act requests would be granted the day before the case was set to go to trial.

“Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why” was published in 2005 and details many of the inner workings of the commission in an attempt to show its findings were based on a preordained conclusion reached by top officials almost immediately after the assassination.

He is working on a new book about the Kennedy assassination he said will highlight evidence drawn from recently obtained documents. He said its scope will be more expansive than “Breach of Trust,” dealing with many aspects of the case, including what he said is documented proof that the government used threats of deportation to get Marina Oswald to cooperate with its investigation, as well as evidence Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union may have been part of an Office of Naval Intelligence program to insert sleeper agents.

While McKnight hopes his work will make a difference in informing the nation’s understanding of the assassination, he thinks the upcoming 50th anniversary of the event is likely to spark a massive media campaign in support of the official story.

“I think there is a movement on to close off this issue once and for all,” McKnight said, “… to say that publishers and newspapers should treat this business of an alternative explanation for Dallas as some sort of mental disease that undermines the republic itself.”