This is something for people who are well seasoned and still cooking. Every one of us knows exactly where we were on November 22, 1963 when we heard the news. I was in eighth grade and had been misbehaving. I was sent across the hall to sit with the seventh graders to eat my lunch. Others were going room to room spreading the horrible news, and Susan Hennessy brought it to us. There was stunned silence, then tears and sobbing.
Everyone, that is, except George H.W. Bush, who says he does not remember where he was when he heard. (He was in Dallas. Later that day he would phone the FBI from Tyler, Texas to implicate a young student named James Parrot in the crime. But hell, who remembers picayune stuff like that!)
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Bush was a member of the CIA at that time, this fact confirmed by a memo from J Edgar Hoover. His odd behavior, the phone call to the FBI, is unexplained. Speculation is that he did it to place himself somewhere else on that day other than Dallas. But documentation also exists of his presence in Dallas. Did he have a role in the assassination? Possibly, though he was quite young. He did run Zapata Corporation, a shell company and front for the CIA that was using oil drilling platforms in the Gulf to stage terrorist attacks inside Cuba.
So there’s that.
Should a member of the CIA, a highly secret organization engaged in intelligence gathering and covert warfare, be allowed to be POTUS? It appears to me that because they are by definition engaged in illegal activity, that a member cannot uphold the oath of office.
Piece of Mindful 
I was in 2nd grade. I went to our neighbor’s house for lunch (I only lived a block from the school and always ate at home), where my mom was watching tv with her friend. When the tv screen went from the soap opera (“As the World Turns” — how apropos…) to the silent “CBS NEWS Bulletin” screen for 6 or 7 seconds, our neighbor said “the president’s been shot!” , then the voice came on saying exactly that. It was eerie…
skip to the 9:50 point of the viddie to see the interruption.
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Here’e another. JFK was in Billings and Great Falls a couple months before he was assassinated. The clip below is a good example of “perception management” that was going on even then. I got to see the prez during his motorcade and speech at Memorial Stadium. My dad being such a good military man actually got to meet and shake the prez’s hand after he got off his plane at Gore Field.
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I’m surprised it’s in color. Was it shown on TV?
I have somewhere a National Geographic from the 1950’s that has a story about Montana – it’s all Indian head dresses too. Those were unsophisticated times.
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First time I’ve ever seen it. Looks to be one of those film propaganda pieces the Prez’s men do for show. Looks like someone digitized it off of 16mm. Doubt that it was intended for TV, more likely shown on screen at campaign events before the big speech.
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Interesting tidbits on GHWB. If there is that much, it would seem there would be more.
I consider him one of the better presidents; one of the most honest, anyway, as far as these things go. He prosecuted the first gulf war in a decent fashion; cleaned up the S&L crisis in a decent way; was way more fiscally sound than anyone since the Kennedy administration. He did lie big time to the Iraqi opposition groups, but they turned out to be less than expected, so maybe he knew something we didn’t.
That he only had one term is probably a testament to his integrity.
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You obviously have not exposed yourself to the evidence regarding the conduct of the First Gulf War. It was an experiment of sorts – to quarantine the journalists and feed them shit while the military was out there decimating a country, including its civilian infrastructure, after which Bush would crow “We whipped the Vietnam Syndrome!” (Grenada appears to have been the first test of this model. On a more advanced psychological level, embedding of journalists in military units in the Second Gulf War was a PSYOP as well, very successful as the journalists became sympathetic agents of the soldiers, and hence the war effort.)
Like everything else, you have got to get out more! You’re a mirror reflection of American propaganda.
[There is much, much more on HW, by the way, but if you are not one to explore beyond culturally imposed boundaries, how will you ever encounter it? But you might try WhoWhatWhy and Russ Baker.]
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I don’t disagree with you here. I’m just saying HW was better in the context of what gets put forward as political leadership.
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