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Post by TRK on Oct 12, 2009 17:17:46 GMT -5
Did anybody catch the first part of this two-part premier on History Channel last night? (They're showing part two tonight, and rerunning part one Wednesday night.) I've seen all the JFK assassination documentaries--some umpteen times, but this one was interesting. It's basically constructed from raw footage, much of which I'd never seen before, with little or no voice-over narration, although there are captions to give you the chronology and timeline. For instance, you can see Dan Rather in Fort Worth the morning of 11-22-63, hours before the assassination, start to do a news bit, then signal a cut and start over. There's also home movie and official footage of the locales and events. The program has an incredible sense of immediacy. It's jarring, for example, to watch detailed footage of Kennedy giving a talk at a breakfast in Fort Worth hours before his murder, knowing what's to come. Those were scary, melancholy days if you lived through them, and this documentary reinforces anew just how seriously out of whack things were in November '63. If you didn't live through the event, it will give you an up-close, vivid idea of what it was like back then.
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Post by Allen Wiener on Oct 12, 2009 17:28:34 GMT -5
I'll have to catch this, Tom; I thought it was just going to be another conspiracy buff turn on. I think History Channel is also repeating "Beyond Conspiracy," hosted by the late Peter Jennings. I thought that was the best summation of the evidence and the most plausible conclusion about the murder, although conspiracy advocates will never accept anything other than a massive conspiracy.
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Post by TRK on Oct 12, 2009 18:21:53 GMT -5
Allen, this documentary has more of a feel of watching a lot of raw footage, leaving it to the viewer to piece things together rather than being spoon-fed a storyline. It's rather impressionistic: like the footage of JFK landing at Love field, and somebody holding up a sign saying something like "Help JFK crush democracy" along with signs welcoming the first couple to Dallas. It reinforces that the great divide in America isn't such a recent thing afterall.
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Post by Paul Sylvain on Oct 13, 2009 6:36:58 GMT -5
I've wanted to catch this, but have been dealing with some out-of-state guests since last Thursday. I'll have to catch a later rerun, I guess.
For those of us around at the time, we can recite exactly what we were doing at the moment we learned of the shootings. In my case, I was in Junior High School and had just gotten to my last-period study hall when a staffer from the office made the rounds telling us all to go back to our home rooms. There already was a buzz in the halls about Kennedy being shot, but we didn't know for certain until we got to our home rooms and the teacher told us with absolute certainty that JFK had been shot in Dallas. Beyond that -- whether he was dead or alive -- she didn't know. We were told we were being released early!
By time I walked home, and turned on the TV, the first announcement that Kennedy had been declared dead was being aired "live." Thus began the first (to my knowledge) 24/7 non-stop, continuous coverage of a news event in television history. It began with the shooting Friday and ran through and including the funeral on Monday.
The only other event that froze a period of time in the minds of people worldwide was 9/11, although for me the list includes one other event -- the murder of John Lennon.
Paul
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Post by Wade Dillon on Oct 13, 2009 7:49:16 GMT -5
When the assassination of JFK comes up in the house, my father Allen always says that the day he was murdered was the day that America lost its innocence.
I first saw the Zapruder (sp?) film when I was 10 or 11 and was ultimately shocked and saddened. A horrific image. But one that helped open my eyes to the tragic ways of the world and the people in it.
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Post by TRK on Oct 13, 2009 8:04:06 GMT -5
America lost its innocence many centuries before that, Wade, but I understand your father's feelings.
I watched part of the second part of the documentary last night and thought it wasn't as effective as the first part. It was more about how the JFK, MLK, and RFK assassinations affected the nation.
Interesting reminiscences, Paul. Those were pretty bleak days: even scarier for this then-ten-year-old than the Cuban Missile Crisis a year earlier. During that crisis, we all knew the world could suddenly go up in smoke, but we didn't know until later how close to the abyss we really were.
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Post by Paul Sylvain on Oct 13, 2009 8:22:48 GMT -5
Those were pretty bleak days: even scarier for this then-ten-year-old than the Cuban Missile Crisis a year earlier. During that crisis, we all knew the world could suddenly go up in smoke, but we didn't know until later how close to the abyss we really were. Yeah, the missile crisis was bad. I remember talking to a neighborhood priest some time after tensions eased. I was pretty young -- maybe 12 or 13 -- but I still remember the good Padre telling me that he and his fellow priests did a booming business (no pun intended) hearing confessions during the peak of the crisis! People they hadn't seen in church for years and maybe decades wanted absolution for their sins, in the event someone pushed the button. I also remember when the Berlin Wall went up, also during JFK's administration. Little could I have imagined that I would be stationed in the "Island City" with the Air Force for four years beginning in 1969. I do believe that, for many people, Wade, the events in Dallas in 1963 marked the end of innocence. It ecrtainly was the end of that whole fairy tale "Camelot" thing. And as we've since learned, life was not so perfect in Jack's house. I think the reason why Lennon's death struck me so deeply was because for many "kids" who came of age with the Beatles and all that followed, it showed that we are all mortal and not so bullet-proof or Teflon coated after all. I mean, we knew we weren't, but the dream really ended with his death. At least for me. Funny, but I was in New York City a week or so ago, and made it a point to visit the Dakota, where John was shot. Paul
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Post by Jim Boylston on Oct 13, 2009 9:56:40 GMT -5
I was living on Homestead Air Force Base near Miami during the missile crisis, so you can imagine the tension. My Dad came home from work in combat gear instead of his usual khakis, and the base was transformed overnight. Sandbags, concertina wire, and units from the other branches of the service were everywhere. It was a frightening time. Paul. I share your feelings about the death of John Lennon. The Beatles hit the American scene only about 3 months after the Kennedy assassination, and were seen by many as ray of light amid all the darkness. That light, too, went out on that dark December night. Things have never looked quite as bright or promising since. Jim
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Post by mustanggray on Oct 18, 2009 22:02:58 GMT -5
I'm not really a big conspiracy theorist but watching the coverage of the Kennedy assasination on 3 Shots... I couldn't help but wonder why anybody wouldn't think there was some sort of conspiracy?! I mean, c'mon, Oswald shoots Kennedy, Oswald is arrested, Ruby shoots Oswald and then has the look of and acts like someone who has been told "we'll take care of you if you do this, don't worry!"... it seems to have conspiracy written all over it!
It was a good program though(I only saw the second part)... better than the What Went Down I saw on Pearl Harbor, and if that one was any indication of what the Alamo episode is like I don't think I've missed anything! SMc
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Post by Allen Wiener on Oct 19, 2009 7:31:41 GMT -5
It was the CIA, the mob, Castro, the Feds (led by LBJ), and maybe the Russians who combined forces to organize JFK’s assassination (or each hatched it’s own plot, with all of them having operatives in Dealy Plaza shooting from all angles with one or more of them getting lucky. The smart money’s on Badge Man). Oswald and Ruby were dumb stooges, whacko enough to let themselves be set up by these conspirators and go to their rewards with their traps shut.
Then, the Federal Government, which could not keep a single secret throughout the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Watergate, the Clinton Sex scandal, Iran-Contra, their failures prior to 9/11, or their badly fumbled intelligence preceding the invasion of Iraq, managed to keep the lid on this one for the past 46 years.
Allen
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Post by majorevans08 on Oct 23, 2009 18:29:10 GMT -5
Whoever did it, it certainly gave Texas a bad reputation for years.
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Post by Allen Wiener on Oct 23, 2009 20:44:55 GMT -5
Unjustifiably. Lots of people hated Kennedy, just as Lincoln was roundly hated during his lifetime.
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Post by stuart on Nov 15, 2009 9:29:57 GMT -5
Just catching up on various threads...
By chance last weekend I watched what to me was the most interesting documentary on the Kennedy assasination I've ever seen - and one that planted it very firmly on Oswald. Don't remember the title but it was a simple 50 minute job, I think by National Geographic.
Anyway to cut a long story short, they used a frame by frame analysis of the Zapruder film to track the exact position of the presidential car second by second. Then they put actors in the car, assuming the exact positions of each individual at the critical moments.
Then they took a British Army sniper and got him to assess the various suggested "additional" firing positions for the fatal one.
The results were so clear that I'm astonished nobody ever tried this before. As a former sniper myself I can cheerfully testify that the most commonly heard phrase uttered by any sniper is "I can't see anything"; and so it turned out with the first alternate position. I don't recall the particulars but his conclusion was that anyone there wasn't going to get a clear shot; on the other hand the second position, by the railroad bridge provided a very clear view of the actor playing the president; trouble was it was (a) dead ahead, and (b) the round would have had to go through the windshield.
Then they moved around to the infamous grassy knoll, and that was a peach of a shot; side on at about 30 metres range - I could have taken that one with iron sights without even thinking about it.
Trouble was, remember those other actors faithfully replication the positions and poses of the other passengers? If President Kennedy was shot from the grassy knoll the same round would also have taken out Mrs Kennedy at the same time.
Against all of that, shooting from the Texas Book Repository lined up perfectly with the forensic evidence.
There was more to it than that which I won't go into on a family site, but the evidence was pretty clear and, to me, utterly convincing.
I suppose conspiracy theorists can still argue to their hearts delight as to why Oswald did it and whether he was working alone or on behalf of some organisation or another, but there is no doubt from this very simple exercise that he was the sole shooter.
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Post by marklemon on Nov 15, 2009 18:45:08 GMT -5
While I used to lean more in the direction of the "second shooter" theory, especially from the grassy knoll, I am much less certain of that now. The acoustic evidence which led the House Committee on Assassinations to conclude that there were two shooters, and therefore a conspiracy, has been challenged, but not, I think, conclusively. The bullet fired from the knoll hitting Jackie is not a foregone conclusion, especially since her head had been moved to a point a little in front of, and to JFK's left, thereby moving her head from a direct line as seen from the knoll. Still, I am willing to dismiss the second shooter if the evidence clearly does the same...I'm just on the fence at this point (pun not intended). However, an issue that does not require a second shooter, is the fact that Oswald was a very active and motivated anarchist wanting to make a name for himself, with footholds in both camps, right and left. He had once tried to infiltrate a right-wing movement, and was heavily associated with leftist, Marxist political thought. We know as a fact, recently published in American Heritage magazine, (hardly a purveyor of nut-job theories) that Oswald, during his trip to Havana in, I think, the summer of 63, personally met with representatives of the Cuban Government, to whom he told his intention to kill Kennedy, and from whom received their complicit support. It is entirely possible that Oswald, having made a high profile name for himself in New Orleans as an instigator, was contacted by elements of the mob (ie: Carlos Marcellos' reps) and given support in his "mission" to kill JFK. Whether or not any Operation Mongoose (CIA) players helped out, is an open question. No, I think Oswald was definitely there on the 6th floor of the TSBD, with the Manlicher Carcano in his hands, firing shots...it's just the "rest of the story" that I'm not so sure about.
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Post by Paul Sylvain on Nov 15, 2009 22:35:22 GMT -5
Well, Stuart, I'm of a mind there were two shooters involved with the events in Dallas that weekend in 1963. Oswald ... and a few days later, Ruby. I don't think Ruby acted without some direction from elsewhere to take Oswald out. The bigger question is who and why would someone want Oswald silenced if there wasn't some kind of conspiracy involved in the killing of JFK.
That said, I used to believe there had to me multiple shooters on the Plaza on Nov. 22. But as more time has passed, and more research is conducted, I've come to accept the single shooter theory. Given the angles, slow-moving vehicles, and Oswald's apparent abilities as a marksman, it wouldn't have been a difficult shot from the sixth floor. Standing on the Plaza today, that tree has had another 46 years of growth, so it tends to obscure the view a bit. But that was not the case in '63.
I was in the depository last year on a Sunday morning when a museum worker had me and my wife step over to the window next to the sniper's nest. Below, Dallas police had blocked off the streets so an A&E film crew could shoot video of a Presidential limo and actors playing JFK, Jackie, the governor turning onto Houston and then making the hairpin turn in front of the building. It was pretty eerie seeing a view almost identical to Oswald's, just one window down. With the car rolling towards the building, the target hardly moves -- appears pretty stationary. Even after it passes te building heading towards the Grassy Knoll and underpass, it was so slow, and movement was minimal. You could line up on and stay on the target without much movement or lead time. Kennedy was pretty much a dead man, and clearly, Oswald was the shooter.
I do believe there were others involved, be they Communist/Cuban or the Mob, or perhaps both. But were there more than one shooter on the Plaza that day? I don't think so.
Paul
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