November 13, 2012

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  The Daily News

  1   Amazing what one day could do to refresh. 

  
  

  2   I thank my Vets every day for all they have gone through, but yesterday, I was stubbornly thanking them for taking all the pressures of the past six months off me. 

  3   Each Fall is a tough go, because I give a lot of essays and stuff. I also have to correct all that stuff. 

  
  

  4   It used to be pretty rough, but I always insist on teaching seasonally and allowing Madison Avenue to advertise my lessons. 

  
  

  5   I've mentioned this stuff before. 

  
  

  6   I use advertising to chime in with my lessons. 

  
  

  7   Usually by November I would already have taken advantage of Back-to-School Night (magazines), 911 (CBS film 911, which is awesome!), Halloween (Heidi Chronz and ghosts/legends), followed by a natural move to Greek mythology and a continuation of ghosts/myths/legends. I used to squeeze the JFK assassination in there, and always had a somewhat compelling series of lessons about the lone-gunman theory (government's story) v. the real story ("conspiracy theories," horrible term in this instance.) I use it to conduct a fiction/non-fiction unit. 

  
  

  8   I decided a week ago to go back in to the case. I assume that as we get closer to the date of JFK's assassination, that the news media will spark up a small bonfire, which it annually does, and at least warm up this cold case. 

  
  

  9   It may seem to be a story that is long past, but just a little over (or perhaps less than) a week ago Arlen Specter passed away. Specter, along with then Representative Gerald Ford, came up with the now famous "Magic Bullet Theory." 

  
  

  10  Both Ford and Specter were members of the official government investigative authority in the murder of Kennedy, the Warren Commission. 

  
  

  11  The Warren Committee was stacked with highly suspect individuals. It was their intention to make it look as though purported assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, a mousy-looking fellow, was a lone-nut whose personal life led him up to the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository window (aka the "sniper's nest") and wait for the President's motorcade to pass below. 

  
  

  12  Because of a tree blocking the motorcade, it was proven that given the speed of the motorcade as it emerged from the tree and given its moment of disappearance, Oswald would have had no more than six seconds to load and re-load an older Italian rifle with a lousy scope. The maximum amount of shots he could have gotten off in that window of time was three.
  

  
  

  13   Arguments went back and forth, but nearly everyone agreed that the maximum amount of shots one could get shooting that rifle was three, and that's without aiming. 

  
  

  14   Could the greatest marksman in the world possibly get three shots off AND three hits?

  
  

  15   Of course. For whatever reason, the Commission wanted to nail Oswald. They had to keep the amount of gunshots to three. One more would place a second gunman at the scene, indicating a far more sinister conclusion than the neat package of three, done by some poor schmuck down on his luck.

  
  

  16   The earliest reports had Kennedy getting hit by the first one, Texas governor John Connolly, who sat in front of Kennedy in the limousine with the second, and the one that blew Kennedy's head to smithereens the third. 

  
  

  17   Neat package. 

  
  

  18   Enter a citizen of Dallas named James Tague. Tague was an important witness, because Tague told reporters that one of the shots had hit the street and ricocheted to his mouth. 

  
  

  19   Tague's testimony at the time, taken by a Dallas police officer, threw a huge monkey wrench into the three-hit theory, because if one of the bullets missed, then the damage done to both Kennedy and Connolly's bodies by the second bullet had to do all sorts of strange turns and zig-zags. That bullet was purportedly found on a stretcher that was already on the second floor of Dallas' Parkland Hospital when Governor Connolly arrived on the second floor. 

  
  

  20   Walter Cronkite interviewed a hospital intern who reported in a NOVA series called Who Shot President Kennedy? that the bullet he found, the so-called Magic Bullet, was on a different stretcher, a stretcher that was already on the second floor of Parkland Hospital before Connolly arrived. If it was already there, then how did it jump over to Connolly's stretcher and fall out of the Governor's body? How did it emerge in pristine condition if it had smashed into bones?

  
  

  21  Yet Arlen Specter and Gerald Ford insisted over the years that their story was the case. Specter went on to be the guy who investigated whether the Government (by "government" I mean the people now in charge, not the "people") spied on our cell phone calls. Following some other cheesy investigation, he found that, and here I paraphrase, they do a little, but not much. 

  
  

  22  If all of this sounds a tad spurious, it is because I am writing it for the DN, which is often done between bouts of insomnia. I haven't time to pull all of the citations and all necessary facts to make this truly journalistic. I do include a bibliography for my students if they would like to look a lot of this stuff up. 

  
  

  23  I have done all the checking and cross-checking of sources. The testimony by the hospital worker who said that the bullet he found was on the other stretcher is on camera in the Cronkite NOVA episode, which aired in 1988, Season 16, Episode 8. It is entitled Who Shot President Kennedy?
  

  
  

  24  Somewhere over the years I lost my copy, and set out looking for a DVD of this episode so that I could use it in my new work this year. I just couldn't find a copy fast enough, and November was here before I knew it.

  
  

  25  When the witness was interviewed, the camera panned in on an empty gurney, but when Cronkite talked about the bullet that fell out of Governor Connolly, the camera zeroed in on a gurney with all sorts of equipment on it, which took the attention off what he was saying and blended the two bullets into one. 

  
  

  26   The effect was slight, but what was being said by the witness and what was being panned made a brain that might not be riveted to each word by this guy go blank. For years I never even paid attention to what that witness said. It would always get a little noisy in my class, and I assume that a lot of people who watched the NOVA show that evening had similar experiences: people talk during shows, they get up, they stretch, a lot of times when they are hearing the same old stuff. 

  
  

  27   I'm guessing you could get a copy of that episode on Amazon. 

  
  

  28   Yesterday I went to get one at Barnes and Noble <basketball buzzer> and then Rasputin's <basketball buzzer # two> and had no luck. I talked to the manager of Rasputin's and he helped me by saying, "Sometimes with that topic we put it in with UFO's and the Paranormal."

  
  

  29   I thought, "Swell." <sigh> That will teach me to have a ghost unit. It was like, "We park that sort of thing over here in the fiction area."

  
  

  30   I'll still get myself a copy. 

  
  

  31   The point is that both Specter and Ford went on to play key roles in American history. 

  
  

  32   Without the NOVA episode, I don't get the acoustic recording of the shots. I always enjoyed that special because of its awkward attempts to back the Warren Commission. A motorcycle cop in the motorcade testified in the 1975-8 House Select Committee on Assassinations that his microphone was on during the assassination. This went to a dictograph recording apparatus in the Dallas police station, and was recorded. The HSCA concluded that it could accept four shots caught on tape, that three were from the Book Depository, but that one was from the grassy knoll area. 

  
  

  33  The HSCA concluded "...on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy."

  34   The NOVA episode, which clearly backed the Warren Commission, took the acoustic evidence and lined it up with the famous Zapruder film. What they were trying to establish was how this stuff all lined up with the shots. They would later bring some guy out to debunk this. 

  
  

  35   What I did was record the acoustical shots on an audio tape for my students. The NOVA program shows it with the Zapruder film, and it sounds at first to the layman like around three shots. 

  
  

  36   When I listened without the distraction of the film, it became obvious at once that there were not only more than three shots, but a barrage of shots going on as the motorcade moved toward the Stemmons Freeway to Parkland Hospital. 

  
  

  37   I used to begin the unit with that recording. I would have each class tally how many heard three shots? Four shots? Five shots? All day long the answers that were over three were overwhelming, always at least 95%. Very few students heard three. 

  
  

  38   I would start the entire session as I have this year: by telling the students that, "We are going into a murder mystery. The murder has been caught on audio tape. As people joining me on this murder, I want you to tell me how many shots you hear on this audio recording." 

  
  

  39   It traditionally isn't until AFTER I play this that I reveal that it is the murder of JFK we are going to study. 

  
  

  40   Since I couldn't find the NOVA episode over this past weekend, I was without that. I did find an interesting documentary on You Tube entitled JFK: The Case For Conspiracy which I previewed yesterday. It worked. They even had the acoustic evidence, but this piece was written and directed by a photographer named Robert Groden, famous for analyzing pictures of the assassination. 

  
  

  41   This piece had filtered the shots so that there clearly were five. Too clearly. I never had the chance to check out the entire acoustical section of the documentary because You Tube muted it. In the morning it worked beautifully, but in the afternoon it was muted. 

  
  

  42   I searched high and low for something to jump-start this lesson, and came up empty. At Rasputin's I did find a curious DVD called The Kennedy Assassination: 24 Hours After, a 2003 documentary put out by the History channel. This instantly worried me, because the History channel has lost some credibility in recent years, especially with me. 

  
  

  43   I Googled it and it did have some interesting luminaries, Gore Vidal being one. I put it on my computer and had no sound. I took it out and put it on the DVD that is hooked into my large screen and it said something like, "Illegal to watch this."  I'll get the exact words hopefully tomorrow. I began to see a pattern. 

  
  

  44   As I was writing this last night, I gave the Nova thing one more shot, no pun intended. I hit gold. I found a You Tube video of the NOVA episode! 

  
  

  45   I put it on.

  
  

  46   No sound. After a few minutes, as I was writing this piece, a commercial suddenly blasted me out of the room. When the documentary came back on, it fell silent. 

  
  

  47   Hmmm. You go ahead and try this link:

  
  

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dsan2aVJhis

  48  I will too. 

  49  Ready? Go.

  50  Okay I realize that the link is not working. Cut and paste. Hmmm. They are sure making it difficult to study this case. Cut and paste. It is eerie. Have your sound up. 

  51  I got almost four minutes into it and it remained mute. I haven't heard the commercial blare at me. I did notice that people who commented could hear it, but it is still strange that this is the third JFK thing to lose sound. 

  52   Of course, I could just be an idiot and not know to restart my computer (already did earlier today). I certainly can't rely on this for acoustic evidence!

  53   The small bonfire that the news media stirs up each year may be almost out. 

  54   It is harder and harder to find good material on this. 

  55   Yet the evidence is to most people who have ever taken the slightest look at this case overwhelming that the killing of JFK was an overthrow. Anybody who could have testified is either dead or still scared. There are people in place who are in control of our media, of of our senators, our congressmen, of our judges, and of our children's thoughts. 

  56   I'm not an Occupy guy. I do understand where they are coming from. Most Americans have a slight sense of it, but for myself, we don't need to have huge protests. That just invites Marshall Law. We need arrests made. 

  57   Eisenhower was correct when he said, "The eyes of the world are upon you."

  58   It's late. It is into the one a.m. I awoke earlier than normal because I still need to put this lesson together by later today. 

  59   I also have to put together the story of the Trojan War for my freshmen. 

  60   Sophomores could do Julius Caesar later in the year, and I could come back to the assassination, especially  when we consider the early scenes in Caesar. 

  61  So there you have it. Grades are due Thursday. I got almost everything done in that regard and had a ball this morning on the trail of the assassins once again. 

  62  It has never been more relevant. 

  64  It's set. We're going in. I'm scared because I don't have all my materials in place, but I do have the very powerful On the Trail of the Assassins by Garrison, which I turned into non-fiction packets with excerpts and pictures. 

  65   I'll keep you posted. I gotta get some sleep. 

  66   Have a GREAT Tuesday.

  67   Peace. 

  ~H~

  

  www.xanga.com/bharrington

  
  

  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  • 9:39 am
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