Burgess Meredith has much to answer for.
As Bismarck said 25 years earlier:
One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.
In political cartoons, an umbrella was associated with Neville Chamberlain, notorious for his appeasement of Adolf Hitler. JFK’s dad, as Ambassador to England, had similarly favored a soft approach to the Nazis. It led to Joe Kennedy leaving the role, and ended any hopes he had of escalating himself to the presidency.
So this guy was trying to call JFK’s dad a chickenshit.
What really surprises me is the Babushka Lady. She was never identified.
Do we know for certain this wasn’t Woody Harrelson’s dad?
What are the chances that the Secret Service would allow the President to be driven at a walking pace in an open car? I mean really, that’s just unbelievable.
It was a different time. Our understanding of security for public officials changed substantially that day.
And look at this photo of JFK campaigning in West Virginia in 1960, which i posted in Moriarty’s thread. Sure, he didn’t have the nomination yet, so no Secret Service protection, but a boy holding a realistic toy gun is right behind him. It was a different time.
I’ve long said that Ford was an unrecognized political genius. He manipulated affairs from Eisenhower through Nixon to get himself the only person to occupy the Presidency without being publicly elected to executive office and then was smart enough to bail out and dump the energy crisis and economic mess on Carter. His legacy is untarnished!
It was Sean Connery in disguise. He can be heard in the Dictabelt recording speaking Russian with a distinct Scottish burr.
Stranger
Why not? And people use umbrellas to ward off the Hot Sun also. So, yeah, people would carry them. and yeah, he used it to heckle JFK. so?
How many Secret Service agents did they think were along the parade route?
Why? Many people along the route, many had cameras, and some people dont like publicity.
Oh, I’m not saying it’s outrageous or remarkable. I’ve often imagined it was somebody who didn’t speak English (admittedly, the word Babushka has colored my thinking), and so would have been very intimidated by the press.
But so much effort has gone into uncovering all of the evidence related to the case, I’m just surprised one person remained anonymous.
She’s wearing a light headscarf (and there are pictures of her without even that) and an overcoat - neither of which would lead to the word association of a russian word meaning “old lady” (бабушка) unless some guy - a former Marine who had tried to renounce his US citizenship (the State Dept. worked slow back then and/or they ignored him) and did indeed defect to the USSR (the KGB wisely placed him pretty far away in Riga, Latvia, then part of the USSR or whatever that Baltic area was called) and then returned - with a Russian wife - to return to the USA no проблема (problema).
Anyways, the babushka thing is only because of Oswald’s definite Russian connections. It is of course very curious that she has not been identified.
I’ve listened to the first three episodes of this podcast. It seems clear that Rob Reiner has never looked into any sources that have debunked things, like the “magic bullet” or the belief that the kill shot came from the front. He talks about all these things like he is delivering information never heard before.
Apparently, by the end of the series, he is going to prove that there were at least 4 shooters. It should be interesting? If you can’t trust Meathead, who can you?
I assume this was tounge-in-cheek, but there are folks who think that LBJ had him killed. How the F does that work? He schedules a meeting with the CIA and tells a GS-15 that come from Langley that he wasn’t the President killed? “Oh sorry, that’s not my division, let me get someone from the assassination bureau over next Tuesday.” Seriously, how does LBJ get other Americans who work for the government in a group and convince them to kill a sitting President? And as others have mentioned, let me know how that’s kept a secret for 60 years.
Thank you for taking this one, so I didn’t have to. This describes exactly the feeling I got from the interview that spawned the OP, the sense that he thought no-one had ever thought of or looked into these things before. If he is sincerely that stupid, then I have lost respect for his intellect. If he is doing it as a way to make money, then I have lost respect for his integrity.
Rob Reiner was part of The Arizona Speaker Series. He was a good speaker, funny and very interesting (no conspiracy mongering at all).
Anyway, one thing he did say was that he is so identified with that character that, if he were to win the Nobel Prize, the headlines would read “MEATHEAD WINS NOBEL PRIZE”
“Meathead solves JFK killing. No one ever noticed these facts before!”
I once heard an on air interview, in the late 80’s, with Tim Curry. He was in Lansing in a roadshow production of “42nd Street” He said that no matter what movie/play/ show or whatever he was in, the first thing folks want to talk about is Rocky Horror.
While I’ve generally liked Reiner from the few times I’ve heard him speak, I suspect it’s his ego vice his intellect that would lead him down this path of finding solutions that have somehow escaped the notice of experts.
The fourth episode dropped this mourning.
They interview a person who claims to have known Oswald when they were in the Marines together. He says that Oswald told him he was recruited by the CIA to be a double agent in the USSR.
I thought the first rule of Secret Agent Club was you don’t talk about Secret Agent Club. Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald agent 000.
Also interviewed is a doctor who thinks Oswald may have been in the MK-Ultra program.
The episodes are only about 35 minutes long and they give no context as to why we should believe any of the information given, beyond just that this guy said it’s true.
Unfortunately, anybody not familiar with any of the JFK conspiracy theories will probably find this podcast compelling and believable, as it is slick and well produced.
If I had a kitten for every guy I’ve worked or went to school with who claimed to be a former Super Recon Sniper, or a member of the Secret Squirrel Assassin Society, or was a Special Action Commando in Thailand, or used to work in the Defense Intelligence Agency Red Hat Crypto-Kill Squad, I’d have a fuckton of cats.
On the other hand, Oswald is such an utter fuckup, it is almost paradoxically credible that he was engaged by the CIA to spy on the Soviet Union. So…there’s that, I guess.
Stranger
ISWYDT.
I told people while I was in college that I was, too. I made a convincing case. Someone might have actually believed me.
I sure hope there is no one out there that still believes. I could be part of someone’s conspiracy theory! Oh no!
This is the most compelling evidence yet for a CIA conspiracy.