President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas (November 22, 1963)

Springfield, Missouri
Sunday, November 18, 2012

In the years since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, numerous theories have surfaced about who shot the president and why. In this program, authors David Wrone, Gerald McKnight, David Kaiser and Max Holland dispute each others findings about what really happened in Dallas in 1963.

See the video version at http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/dallas/JFK-50th-assassination-memorial-will-be-at-Dealey-Plaza-180055291.html

Dallas County News
JFK 50th assassination memorial will be at Dealey Plaza

by BRAD WATSON

WFAA – Channel 8 News, Dallas

Posted on November 19, 2012 at 7:07 PM

DALLAS — A year from now, Dallas will be in the world spotlight for the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

On Tuesday, Mayor Mike Rawlings will announce details of how the city will remember the tragedy, and Monday News 8 confirmed through a city spokesman that the city will take over a permit for an event at Dealey Plaza.

John Mattes of Grapevine brought his sister who’s visiting from California to Dealey Plaza Monday, and they quickly offered where they think the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death should be held in Dallas.

“It should be here,” Debbie Mattes said, “because you get to see where history happened.”

“People need to come to the spot to remember it,” John Mattes added. “If it’s somewhere else, then it’s not as profound.”

And the City of Dallas agrees. A spokesman told News 8 that the Sixth Floor Museum, which held a permit for events at Dealey Plaza next November, will give it up Tuesday so the JFK 50th Committee can take it over.

Mayor Rawlings appointed the citizens committee to plan a memorial that’ll be held Nov. 22, 2013 at 12:30 p.m. — 50 years to the moment of the first shot.

However, some committee members say they discussed a City Hall Plaza ceremony instead, since there’s great sensitivity on what tone and image the city should set for the event that will attract worldwide media coverage.

These committee members say that concern extended to how to deal with the conspiracy vendors constantly at Dealey, but the city says the 50th event will be open to the public.

If not, longtime vendor Robert Groden said he’ll be ready to fight.

“If the city wants to keep, the Sixth Floor wants to keep researchers and people who challenge the official fiction out of the plaza, we’ll file a lawsuit against the city and the Sixth Floor,” he said.

JFK 50th Committee members say some of the early concerns are crowd control, security, and media logistics. The city said Dealey Plaza will be shut down 48 hours prior to the event, which could cause traffic issues, too. Those are all among topics the mayor may discuss Tuesday.

E-mail bwatson@wfaa.com

Published in Star-Telegram on June 20, 2012

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dfw/obituary.aspx?n=jack-d-white&pid=158121627&fhid=4250#fbLoggedOut

Jack D. White (1927 – 2012)

Jack D. White, 85, passed away Monday, June 18, 2012. Funeral: 3:30 p.m. Thursday in Mount Olivet Chapel. Interment: Mount Olivet Cemetery. Visitation: 2:30 p.m. Thursday at Mount Olivet Funeral Home. Memorials: Those desiring to honor Jack’s memory may contribute to a TCU Journalism Department scholarship fund or a charity of choice . Jack was born Jan. 17, 1927, in San Angelo, moving to Fort Worth with his parents, John Nathan White and Billie Lorena Dumas White, shortly after his birth. Graduating from Carter-Riverside High School in 1944, he worked briefly for the Fort Worth Press covering high school sports under the legendary sports editor H.H. “Pop” Boone. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War II and while serving attended Stanford University in the ROTC program. Discharged in 1946, Jack entered Texas Christian University, graduating in 1949 with a B.A. in journalism and began an advertising career as copywriter and art director at Yates Advertising Agency. In 1954, he joined Witherspoon and Ridings Public Relations Agency, which later became Witherspoon and Associates, as the firm’s first art director. During his 27 years with the agency he rose to vice president, executive art director, personnel manager and part owner. He specialized in design and photography. Although he had photographed the city since the 1950s, he began collecting Fort Worth photographs seriously in 1972 when Witherspoon was planning the 100th anniversary for one of its clients and he was in charge of acquiring copies of historical prints of Fort Worth. After the event he took care to preserve all the exhibit materials and during the next 20 years he reproduced other client’s historical photographs and took hundreds of pictures to add to the collection. Jack retired from Witherspoon in 1981 and formed his own company, Jack White Enterprises, specializing in free-lance art and photography. In 1984, taking two partners, the firm’s name changed to VJS Companies. In 1991, he again became a sole proprietor. Because of his interest in Fort Worth history, he spearheaded a group of local historians and launched an internet website, which he named “The Way We Were,” to display and research old photos of the city. Another of Jack’s interest has been the study of the John F. Kennedy assassination, serving as a photographic consultant to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Assassinations during its hearings, as well a consultant on the JFK film. He produced two videotapes on his photographic studies of the assassination and developed a slide lecture, while contributing his research to books and professional journals. Jack’s collection of JFK assassination books and materials and his old Fort Worth photographs have been donated to UTA Library’s Special Collections where they are accessible to those interested. Jack married the former Sue Benningfield in 1969 and in 1977 they were instrumental in reactivating their neighborhood home owners association. He served as president for several years. He painted many works of art which hang in private collections and adorn the walls of his modern home, as well as a large painting of the Fort Worth skyline on display at the Fort Worth Public Library. He was an avid TCU alumnus and until last year had not missed a home football or basketball game since 1946. He enjoyed yard work and raising tomatoes, which he happily supplied his friends. Survivors: Wife, Sue; cousins, Pat O’Neal of Fort Worth, Laura O’Neal Tauzel of Arlington, Larry O’Neal of Fort Worth, Nancy Robbins of Denton and Shirley Hurley of Haltom City; and a host of wonderful friends.

COMMENT

It’s hilarious that 82-year-old Hugh Aynesworth is back for another feeble attempt to sway minds — 90 percent of whom do not believe in the government’s version of a lone gunman firing three shots from a 6th floor window, polls show — by digging up old Warren Report misinformation that most Americans didn’t accept in 1964, just as most of us don’t now.

The cinematic renegade talks about Obama, FDR, his new Showtime series and the myth of American exceptionalism

By Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com

Saturday, Nov 17, 2012 03:00 PM EST

http://www.salon.com/2012/11/17/oliver_stone_america_is_an_%E2%80%9Coutlaw_nation%E2%80%9D/?source=newsletter

American film director, screenwriter and producer Oliver Stone poses for a portrait, on Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2012 in New York. (Photo by Carlo Allegri/Invision/AP) (Credit: Carlo Allegri)

Across a four-decade career in the movie business that has encompassed three Academy Awards, 18 narrative films and several documentaries as a director, and innumerable side projects as a writer and producer, Oliver Stone has been obsessed with one topic: America. Indeed, during what you might call Stone’s classic Hollywood period, from “Salvador” in 1986 to “Nixon” in 1995 – and I don’t exclude such apparent detours as “The Doors” and “Natural Born Killers” – his central subject has been all the ways the United States has driven itself crazy, on both the foreign and domestic fronts, in the years since his own Eisenhower-era childhood.

Given that background, it’s almost surprising that it’s taken Stone this long to tackle a straightforward nonfiction project like his Showtime miniseries “The Untold History of the United States,” which tries to counter the jingoistic mythmaking and obligatory “American exceptionalism” of most public discourse about 20th-century history. That phrase refers to a creed that still holds sway (or so polls suggest) among a large proportion of the U.S. population, although it hasn’t been taken seriously by historians for many years: The idea that America has a special and even sacred role to play in world history, and cannot be compared to other nations driven by the grubby realities of politics and economics.

For left-wingers like Stone and American University history professor Peter Kuznick, who collaborated on this miniseries and the accompanying book, the rhetoric of American exceptionalism is used as a mask to conceal the nexus of money and power – corporate expansion and military empire-building – that really defined America’s rise to global hegemony. While the TV series begins with a scattershot history of World War II, the development of the A-bomb and the transition to the Cold War, Stone and Kuznick’s whopping companion volume from Gallery Books goes much deeper into the past in search of the roots of America’s contemporary dilemmas.

That was partly, Stone told me during our recent conversation in New York, because he had to keep the Showtime series to 10 episodes. It was also because the target audience for the TV show is meant to include high school students, and he didn’t want to drive them away with a potentially confusing exploration of the explosive class politics, rapid economic expansion and abrupt turn toward imperialism that transformed America late in the 19th century. Stone and Kuznick were partly reacting to testing data suggesting that American high school students have a poorer grasp of history than of any other subject; the vast majority, for example, could not identify the social issue addressed by the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.

The call slip showing Oswald tried to place a collect call to John Hurt of Raleigh

It was 11:30 on a foggy night in Raleigh on Saturday, Nov. 23, 1963. The previous afternoon, President John F. Kennedy had been shot on the streets of Dallas. Just a block from the North Carolina State Capitol, at 201 Hillsborough St., Apartment No. 1 was about to be thrust into one of the most profound mysteries behind the assassination. And it would be a generation before its meaning would be understood.

That night, nearly 1,200 miles away at the Dallas Municipal Building, Alveeta A. Treon arrived for her shift at the telephone switchboard. Treon would relieve her co-worker, Louise Swinney, who had been given orders by their supervisor to assist two men in listening to a call that would come through their switchboard. Treon assumed the men were Secret Service. She suspected that Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin being held in the downstairs jail, would be making another call. He had already phoned his Russian wife, Marina, and an ACLU lawyer in New York. This call, however, was different.

Oswald rang the switchboard at a quarter till 12, Raleigh time. Swinney took the call and scribbled Oswald’s information as the two men listened in.

“I was dumbfounded at what happened next,” Treon later told a former Senate investigator. “Swinney told [Oswald], ‘I’m sorry, the number doesn’t answer.’ Swinney then unplugged and disconnected Oswald without ever really trying to put the call through.”

Afterward, Swinney tore the sheet from her note pad and threw it into the trash. She left, her shift having ended.

Treon retrieved the wadded piece of paper from the trash and copied the information onto a standard long-distance telephone call slip to save as a souvenir. The slip reveals that Oswald had given Treon the name “John Hurt of Raleigh, N.C.”

After the release of the Warren Report, the U.S. government’s official version of the assassination, in 1964, a CBS poll found that more than 40 percent of Americans surveyed said there was more to the assassination than the U.S. government had revealed. In 1976, a Gallup Poll found that 81 percent believed in a conspiracy. A recent CBS survey found that 90 percent of Americans reject the Warren Commission’s conclusions.

In the nearly 50 years since President Kennedy’s assassination, hundreds of respected researchers have dedicated decades of their lives in their search for the truth, not just about the assassination but for what they describe as America’s hidden history: How the “official version” of events is promoted by the U.S. government and perpetuated by a cooperative, if not complicit media.

Although many are professional investigators, photo analysts, pathologists, journalists, historians or lawyers, most approach the assassination not as a vocation but as an avocation. An engineer conducted crucial studies of the president’s autopsies. A flight attendant performed respected research into Oswald’s ties to military intelligence. A high school teacher uncovered important information about the Texas connection. And key facts about JFK’s Vietnam withdrawal directive was revealed by a Southern California real estate agent.

Grover Proctor, a Raleigh native, is among the researchers. A university dean and statistical analyst, he now lives in Cary and has become widely recognized as a meticulous and respected researcher. Every major discussion of the assassination that includes facts about Oswald’s call cites his work. His website was awarded the JFK Site Award in 1997. (Yes, there are enough websites on the assassination to justify awards.)

In fact, because of Proctor, Oswald’s attempt to reach out to John Hurt has become known as the Raleigh Call.

Nine years after the assassination, Proctor, then a graduate student at Wayne State University in Michigan, was transfixed as the Watergate scandal unfolded on television.

“Every evening, several of my friends and I would sit glued to the news, fascinated by the unfolding constitutional drama,” Proctor said. “Late-night discussions inevitably gravitated to the conspiracy being brought to light by the televised hearings—and to the wider subject of political conspiracies in general.”

A friend of Proctor handed him a paperback copy of A Heritage of Stone, a book by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison that concluded that the Kennedy assassination was plotted and executed by the CIA.

“Until then, I had never given the assassination a second thought,” Proctor recalled. “I reasoned, ‘They know who did it, right? What’s the big deal?’ But both Watergate and this book told me to ask, ‘Could there have been a conspiracy in Dallas?’

“Already disturbed by the high crimes and misdemeanors of a fallen president as a result of the Watergate scandal, I was shaken to the core. Watergate had already convinced me that the government could lie to its own people. This book forced me to ask the question whether sometimes it also kills them.”

It was through the work of independent researcher Michael Canfield that a copy of the Raleigh Call slip first became public. He secured a copy of the slip, which became available as the result of a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by a civil rights activist, while conducting research for the 1975 book Coup d’Etat in America. The book, co-authored with Alan Weberman, was the first major work to deal with the Raleigh Call, and the slip was reprinted in the appendix.

On the slip were two numbers attributed to a “John Hurt”: one for a John W. Hurt, one for a John D. Hurt. Canfield called both numbers. John W. Hurt turned up nothing of interest. However, when Canfield spoke to John D. Hurt, he sat stunned, silent when Hurt revealed, “I was in the counterintelligence corps in the Army during World War II.”

That Oswald called a former military intelligence officer from jail—only to be assassinated by Jack Ruby a little more than 12 hours later—was notable and, to that point, publicly undisclosed.

Proctor became aware of Oswald’s attempted call while riding on a train from Hartford to New York in 1980. Proctor was engrossed in Anthony Summers’ book about the assassination, Conspiracy, when he came across a short paragraph about Oswald’s call from jail: “The note preserved by Mrs. Treon reportedly shows that Oswald booked a call to Area Code 919.”

Proctor says: “I remember being pulled up short after reading that, thinking, ‘Something about that sounds familiar.’ It took a few seconds, but then I realized the area code 919 was Raleigh, my hometown.”

Proctor later dialed the first number on the phone slip and, to his surprise, John D. Hurt answered and confirmed the revelations in Canfield’s book.

In the way in which researchers have built upon one another’s work to add to the wealth of information about the assassination, Proctor took the Raleigh Call a step further: Suspecting that Oswald had intelligence connections, he interviewed a former CIA agent.

Victor Marchetti was a 14-year veteran of the CIA who had served as executive assistant to then-Deputy Director Richard Helms. Marchetti had also written extensively about the Raleigh Call in The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, the first book on the assassination censored by the U.S. government.

In an interview with Proctor, Marchetti stated that in calling Hurt, Oswald was clearly following standard procedure for a CIA asset under duress. This includes contacting his case officer through a “cut-out,” an intermediary with no direct involvement in an operation—John Hurt.

“[Oswald] was probably calling his cut-out. He was calling somebody who could put him in touch with his case officer,” Marchetti told Proctor. “He couldn’t go beyond that person. There’s no way he could. He just had to depend on this person to say, ‘OK, I’ll deliver the message.’ Now, if the cut-out has already been alerted to cut him off and ignore him, then …”

Here is an excerpt from Proctor’s interview with Marchetti:

Proctor: OK, if someone was an agent, and he was involved in something, and nobody believes he is an agent … He is arrested, and trying to communicate, let’s say, and he is one of you guys. What is the procedure?

Marchetti: I’d kill him.

Proctor: If I was an agent for the [Central Intelligence] Agency, and I was involved in something involving the law domestically and the FBI, would I have a contact to call?

Marchetti: Yes.

Proctor: A verification contact?

Marchetti: Yes, you would.

Proctor: Would I be dead?

Marchetti: It would depend on the situation. If you get into bad trouble, we’re not going to verify you. No how, no way.

Proctor: But there is a call mechanism set up.

Marchetti: Yes.

Proctor: So it is conceivable that Lee Harvey Oswald was ….

Marchetti: That’s what he was doing. He was trying to call in and say, “Tell them I’m all right.”

Proctor: Was that his death warrant?

Marchetti: You betcha.

Whether the switchboard operator connected Oswald’s call is irrelevant, especially since there appeared to be government agents monitoring the activity. His intentions were enough. As Marchetti told Proctor: “This time [Oswald] went over the dam, whether he knew it or not, or whether they set him up or not. He was over the dam. At this point it was executive action.” Assassination.

Proctor says he remembers thinking, as he had Marchetti on the phone: “I have really stepped over into a place where I have NO referent at all. I had no background for the necessarily dirty world of spycraft. I suppose now, 30-plus years later, I have just about the same reaction.”

Raleigh wasn’t Oswald’s only connection to North Carolina. Although the U.S. government has contended that Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, he had been spotted at the Illusionary Warfare Training base in Nags Head, which instructed young idealists to be fake defectors to the Soviet Union.

Marchetti wrote that the program created “young men who were made to appear disenchanted, poor, American youths who had become turned off and wanted to see what communism was all about.”

The existence of the Nags Head base was confirmed in the 2004 testimony of former CIA pilot William “Tosh” Plumlee:

“When I later learned [in November 1963] that Oswald had been arrested as the lone assassin, I remembered having met him on a number of previous occasions which were connected with intelligence training matters, first at Illusionary Warfare Training in Nags Head, North Carolina, then in Honolulu at radar installation and at Oahu’s Wheeler Air Force Base, then in Dallas at an Oak Cliff safe house on North Beckley Street run by Alpha 66′s Hernandez group, who had worked out of Miami prior to the assassination.”

Oswald’s intelligence connections were further verified in a 1975 congressional investigation.

In September of that year, U.S. Rep. Richard Schweiker was appointed to chair the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Schweiker had the credentials for the job: He had served on the Church Committee, which revealed gross misconduct of the CIA, FBI and the military in their surveillance of U.S. citizens.

The Select Committee was tasked to investigate intelligence agencies with respect to the JFK assassination. Afterward, Schweiker revealed: “We do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there are the fingerprints of intelligence.”

A year later, Congress launched another investigation, this one by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), also charged with probing the assassinations of JFK and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Surell Brady was on the committee’s staff and investigated the Raleigh Call. Brady wrote an exhaustive 28-page report outlining Canfield and Weberman’s findings. Although the report clearly states that Oswald attempted to call a former military intelligence officer with whom he had no identifiable ties, that detail was omitted from the HSCA Final Report.

The trend of ignoring provocative evidence in government investigations continued.

The Raleigh Call remains one of the most disturbing, unexplained and ignored aspects of the JFK assassination. In an interview Proctor conducted with HSCA Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey, he reaffirmed what has become the last official word on Oswald’s attempted call. “I consider it unanswered,” Blakey said, “and I consider the direction in which it went substantiated and disturbing, but ultimately inconclusive. The bottom line is, it’s an unanswerable mystery.”

As we enter the 50th year after the assassination, expect an onslaught of books, television programs and movies pertaining to the assassination. Virtually every network will produce a show purporting to have the definitive word on the JFK assassination. Judging from previous efforts, they will likely support the conclusions of the Warren Commission and not those of the government’s more recent investigations. And odds are good that researchers who have uncovered key documents will be, at best, dismissed.

You can find the enormous body of work at Andy Winiarczyk’s Last Hurrah Bookshop in Williamsport, Pa., the world’s definitive book store devoted to the JFK assassination. The three-story converted house reveals the massive scale of independent research: more than 2,000 titles. Of those, only a small minority reflect the Warren Report.

The rest document the indefatigable work of independent researchers such as Proctor, whose findings have added up into a coherent and compelling counter-narrative. “In many cases, researchers fight the institutions for years—FOIA request after FOIA request—trying to get one document pertaining to one tiny piece of evidence,” said Andy, as he’s known among his fellow researchers. “When they finally get that piece of information, they piece it together with their previous research or with the research of others, and then write a book. And while that one book might be incomplete, taken in toto with the work of the research community, the truth behind the assassination becomes quite clear.”

Despite the 2,000 titles at the Last Hurrah, most of the national attention given to books about the assassination has focused on just two works that defend the government’s official version: MSNBC contributor Gerald Posner’s best-seller Case Closed, published in 1993, and 2007′s Reclaiming History by former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi.

Posner’s Case Closed was released in time for the 30th anniversary of the assassination. “It caught this incredible wave,” Andy says. “It appeared on the desks of all the major media who would say, ‘We don’t have to read anymore, we don’t have to trouble ourselves, here’s someone who’s sorted it all out.’”

But Posner’s research was selective. Although he reviewed the 26 volumes of the Warren Report, Andy says, “he found what he wished to find. But he didn’t go really much beyond that.”

Nonetheless, Posner made the press rounds: 60 Minutes, network specials, the Sunday morning political roundtables and even the morning shows. Posner appeared on the Today Show in the now infamous segment “Truth or Conspiracy.“ Host Katie Couric proclaimed that the three to four years Posner spent on the case amounted to “tons and tons of research.”

While Case Closed was a best-seller, Bugliosi’s 1,648-page defense of the Warren Report hovered at No. 800 in the Amazon rankings. Yet even at that length, the book ignores the staggering 6 million documents that have been released under the JFK Records Act, as well as the mountains of independent research.

The book’s dismal sales didn’t dissuade media outlets from booking its author. A staunch supporter of the Warren Report, Bugliosi appeared on The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, C-Span and 20/20 to herald his confirmation of the government’s version of events—and in doing so, marginalizing the work and evidence that counters that view.

“The dismissal and ostracizing of the pro-conspiracy group—including independent researchers, members of Congress and congressional investigators—continues [to this day],” Proctor says.

The media’s role in perpetuating the official government version is significant—and very effective. And for good reason: Reporters and editors have helped the government itself.

Among the revelations of the Church Committee hearings was CIA Document #1035-960. This document, dated Jan. 4, 1967, and marked “PSYCH” for Psychological Warfare, directs CIA agents to counter critics of the Warren Report by using “liaison and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors)” and “to employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics.”

Those cozy relationships were revealed in 1977, when Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein—who had earned fame from his groundbreaking Watergate coverage—wrote extensively on information released by the Church Committee. His article detailing revelations of the committee hearings, The CIA and the Media, appeared in the Oct. 20, 1977, issue of Rolling Stone. The article exposed details of Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s effort to control the media.

Through documentary evidence, Bernstein revealed a list of high-profile media organizations that willingly cooperated with the CIA: These include ABC, NBC, the Associated Press, Reuters, Newsweek, The Miami Herald and even The Saturday Evening Post. “But the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, has been with The New York Times, CBS, and Time Inc.,” Bernstein wrote. Quoting an unnamed CIA agent, Bernstein added, “One reporter is worth 20 agents.”

Yet some of the most strident voices against the idea of conspiracy have recanted, Proctor said. Case in point: Robert MacNeil of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, who recently stated in a filmed interview for the documentary Beyond JFK: “We’ve seen revealed one conspiracy after another. Anybody would have to be a fool, nowadays, to dismiss conspiracies. And perhaps we lived in a fool’s paradise before the Kennedy assassination.”

Even New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, a former defender of the Oswald-as-lone-nut theory, reconsidered his position. “I think there’s enough evidence now that there’s certainly doubts about that,” wrote Wicker, a North Carolina native.

There are many psychological theories that people innately need to believe in conspiracies. However, Walt Brown, author of numerous books on the JFK assassination and a college history professor, offers a counter view: “Imagine the police come to your house to tell you that, God forbid, your daughter has been killed. Once you get it together, you ask, ‘What happened?’ Well, the cop tells you, we’re not sure. It’s either a psycho that got loose from the asylum or a bunch of Hell’s Angels that killed her.

“In this scenario, the guy from the asylum was just one of those fluke things that happens: an accident. At least it wasn’t systemic, institutional and organized. Well, Lee Oswald is the accident and conspiracy is systemic. As a father, I’m going to pray for the accident.”

John Judge, co-founder and director of the Coalition on Political Assassinations, put it best: “The political paralysis in America is based on the fact that we are allowed to believe anything but to know nothing, [author] Martin Schotz said so perceptively in History Will Not Absolve Us,” Judge said. “And if you cannot know, you cannot act.” That’s precisely why, Judge believes, the word of independent researchers is so important.

Will we ever know the truth? We may already. “Who is to say that, somewhere in that morass of opinion and deception, the real answer hasn’t already been revealed?” Proctor says. “The government and the press—by abrogating their responsibilities—have deprived us of the normal and official venues for discerning the truth.”

It’s important to know the truth about the Kennedy assassination not only to correct the historical record but to reveal the motivations for obscuring it in the first place. The knowledge should prompt us to be circumspect about what we “know,” and to question other official versions of contemporary events.

“Why is it important?” Proctor asks. “For the same reason it was important to Galileo to correct the prevailing official position that the sun revolved around the earth. Those who have devoted their lives, resources and intellect to trying to uncover the truth about the Kennedy assassination have decided that, twice now, the U.S. government has been less than candid about its conclusions on who killed the President of the United States. At the level of American politics and freedom itself, can there be a more worthy cause?”

Randolph Benson is an award-winning, Durham-based filmmaker. His films have garnered the Gold Medal in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Student Academy Awards and a Kodak Excellence in Filmmaking Award at the Cannes Film Festival, among others. His work has been featured on the Bravo Network, the Independent Film Channel and UNC-TV as well as several international channels.

His current project, The Searchers, is a portrait of researchers of the Kennedy assassination. The film is slated for a spring release.

A graduate of Wake Forest University and the North Carolina School of the Arts, Benson has taught at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University for more than 10 years. Contact him at rbenson@thesearchersfilm.com

Dallas County News

DALLAS — Work is now under way to restore Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas.

The work is starting on the plaza’s south side, with the north side next, as the city prepares for the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy next year.

As restoration work begins, there are are also plans finalizing a big dedication for next week’s 49th anniversary in Oak Cliff, where Dallas police Officer J.D. Tippit died was slain by Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

From a distance, Dealey Plaza hasn’t changed much over the decades. But construction fences up Monday on the plaza’s south side showed that changes for the better are coming.

“It just means being very honored to work here,” said Juan Sales, superintendent of the project by Phoenix 1 Restoration of Dallas. “I did that area right over there as well, so it is a great honor to be doing some stuff like this.”

A closer look shows how weather and neglect really changed the plaza, with paint peeling off the south pergola. Workers will remove the previous coats and repaint.

This second phase of restoration will cost $1.4 million, an amount covered by city and private funds.

While that work begins, just a few finishing touches remain a few miles away in Oak Cliff for the dedication of a Texas Historical Commission marker next Tuesday at 10th and Patton Streets, where Officer Tippit died.

The marker, spearheaded by the Old Oak Cliff Conservation League, will be on a corner of the new Adamson High School campus through an arrangement with the Dallas ISD.

“Another family lost somebody that day, and he was lost protecting his country and his city and Oak Cliff,” said OOCCL’s Michael Amonett. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Back at Dealey Plaza, the north pergola will be fenced off in mid-December for about a month, likely disappointing thousands of holiday tourists who won’t get all possible views of the plaza.

But the goal is to get all the work finished by the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. “You’ve got to be a perfectionist to do this kind of work,” Salas said. “Everybody is looking at it, all the time… everybody is looking at it.”

All of the restoration should be done by April, 2013.

Couple who witnessed JFK assassination recall infamous day the shots rang out

On Nov. 22, 1963, they were just a struggling young couple eager to let their two children steal a glimpse of President John F. Kennedy.

But history reserved a special seat for Bill and Gayle Newman: They were the closest civilian eyewitnesses to the assassination of JFK in downtown Dallas.

About 15 minutes after the president was shot, the Newmans were interviewed live on TV. Their 15 minutes of fame, however, has endured for 49 years, permanently etched in the annals of history.

Both 71 now, the Sachse couple still vividly recall excruciating details of that fateful day, especially the gunshots that rang around the world.

They shared their recollections again Friday at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, where they’ve interacted with many audiences in recent years.

“I was terrified because of my children,” Gayle Newman said in an interview a day before the “Meet the Museum” presentation.

“I had never been around gunfire, so it was quite a shock to see someone shot in the head. … And it was the president of the United States.”

The Newmans actually drove to Love Field that morning to watch the Kennedys disembark from Air Force One. They then rushed to downtown to see the motorcade wind its way past the old Texas School Book Depository.

They were on the north side of Dealey Plaza less than five minutes when the gunfire — which both said sounded like “firecrackers” at first — burst through the air as the president’s motorcade drew closer.

“When the third shot rang out … I turned to Gayle and said, ‘That’s it. Get down,’” Bill Newman told the audience of about 250 people.

They dropped to the ground and shielded their two boys — Clayton, 2, and Bill, 4 — a frightening moment captured in a compelling photograph that still stirs public passion.

“The picture of us covering the kids on the ground — I suspect that’s why there’s so much interest in our story,” Gayle Newman said before the event. “Some people have embellished their story. We try to keep it straight and pure.”

They don’t delve into the conspiracy theories.

“Two questions always come up,” Bill Newman said in an interview. “Do you think it’s a conspiracy? If I’m talking to school kids, I say, ‘If by conspiracy you mean there could have been more than one person involved, yes, it’s possible. But I don’t know.’

“The other question is, ‘Mr. Newman, do you think our government had anything to do with it?’ I say it’s possible some individual could have been involved, but I don’t think any government agency had anything to do with it.”

Program moderator Stephen Fagin, the museum’s associate curator and oral historian, grew up near the Newmans when they lived in Mesquite. His relationship with them sparked a lifelong curiosity about the JFK assassination.

Fagin homed in on how some researchers and authors selectively interpret the Newmans’ descriptions of what they heard. The third shot that the Newmans said came from “behind” them, he pointed out, has been used “as evidence that you heard a shot from the grassy knoll.”

And that’s simply not the case, said Bill Newman.

“It was the visual impact [of the fatal shot] that made me think the shot came down over our head,” he said. “In all honesty, I have no idea where the shot came from.”

When an audience member asked if they thought Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or was part of a conspiracy, the Newmans leaned on 49 years of hindsight.

“I think you could take either position,” Bill Newman said. “I tend to think there was only one shooter, but I really don’t know.”

Gayle Newman said she initially thought “it would be hard for one person to plan this and carry it out.”

But if someone else was involved, she figured, they’d eventually “blab it out.” Since no one ever did, she said, “I think there was just the one shooter.”

The Newmans have settled into their place in history, even if they’re still coming to grips with what it all means.

“People ask, ‘How has it affected you?’ And that’s almost impossible to answer,” said Bill Newman, a former Mesquite City Council member and retired electrician.

The Newmans have been interviewed countless times. They’ve received letters from people seeking their autographs or pleading for a signed copy of the famous picture taken of them the day JFK was slain.

Filmmakers have flown them to places as far away as England to work on JFK-related projects.

“Early on, the first two to four years, we were bombarded when people could find us,” said Bill Newman. “Then it started dying off.”

But when the 25th anniversary approached, he said, “it picked back up and it hasn’t let up since.”

The couple celebrated their 54th wedding anniversary earlier this month. They spend most of their time on their 1.7-acre homestead in Sachse. Both of their sons, now in their 50s, are married with kids.

“The youngest didn’t recall much” about the assassination, Bill Newman said before the presentation.

The older son, however, remembers seeing the fatally wounded president.

“A day or so later,” Newman said, “he asked his mother, ‘Mama, did you see that blood? Why did they shoot that man?’”