JFKTV- Segment Two

Previously on JFKTV: Out of site of the crowds as they pulled away from Love field and prior to the motorcade approaching the first crowds lining the streets, the switch was made and actors took over as President, First Lady, Governor Connelly and his wife, Nellie. An identical limousine with the actors on board positioned itself within the motorcade, likely around a corner, briefly out of view of the press bus and trailing vehicles. The genuine President and his party vanished, surrounded by other vehicles guiding the limo down a cordoned off street devoid of witnesses. As the motorcade wound its way through the streets of downtown Dallas, cameras rolled. Along with the professional news cameras, many amateur cameras captured parts of the procession. The evidence of an actual motorcade riding through town was established.

Home Movies, All Kinds…

As the Presidential limousine approached Dealey Plaza, a Dallas dressmaker named Abraham Zapruder took his position on a short wall to film the President passing by. Zapruder would initially be held up as an innocent bystander but later it would be revealed that he was the former business partner of Jean de Mohrenschildt, wife of George de Mohrenschildt, CIA handler for Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas.

In the film footage, the limousine makes a slow and difficult left turn onto Elm Street as Zapruder starts burning film. He pans right with his 8-millimeter camera, holding the limousine barely in frame as the bullets whiz by. He gets the money shot of JFK’s brains being blown out while the President, already wounded in the throat by the looks of things, is cheek by jowl with his wife who appears startled and confused.

The film continues as Jackie climbs up on the back hood for reasons to this day no one knows why; she is met by Secret Service agent Clint Hill who has run forward from the trailing Secret Service car and grabs onto the handrails of the limousine. Mrs. Kennedy scoots back into the limo as the President lies unconscious across the back bench seat and the limousine speeds away under the triple underpass and on towards nearby Parkland hospital. I

Opposite Zapruder on the grass infield of Dealey Plaza stands Orville Nix. He films the scene from farther away and with less detail. Clint Hill again leaps to the running board of the Presidential limo and off they go. The film is relevant to the scam production only in so far as to corroborate the more important Zapruder film and support its veracity, as two films showing the same thing must be showing a real event. Logic.

Many researchers have poured over every frame of the Zapruder film. A sizable number of these researchers have concluded that the film is a forgery. Numerous anomalies appear in the film, from mismatched shadows to the height of some of the scattered bystanders appearing to be over seven feet tall.

Suspected of utilizing traveling mattes to reposition the limo and change its speed to contradict eyewitnesses who claimed the limo came to a brief stop, the film also reveals odd reactions of several bystanders, some of whom move faster than humanly possible or seem oblivious to the presence of the limo and its occupants.

One aspect of the film that has received no comment is that if there were multiple shooters, including one forward and to the President’s right, situated behind the picket fence atop the grassy knoll, and presumably author of the fatal head shot, did the plotters feel that Mrs. Kennedy was acceptable collateral damage should any of the shooters, especially the one behind the fence, miss and hit the First Lady?

At the time of the event, Jacqueline Kennedy was arguably the most famous, glamorous and sympathetic woman in the world. The trip to Dallas was her first public appearance in America since the death of her infant child several months earlier. The tour through Texas had reinforced her star power and the affection the country had for her, if not for her husband’s polices. What impact would her wounding or disfigurement or death have on the populace, especially women?

Consider: The President is the titular head of the armed forces. The office is assumed to come with war making powers. He is in some sense a man of violence, even if only vicariously. Receiving regular death threats and being in mortal danger to the point of having a legion of armed guards around him at all times gives the violence aimed at him a certain contextual logic; but a First Lady?

She’s the homemaker, the child bearer, the teacher, in short, the civilization that the war-mongering husband fights to protect. The deliberate manipulation of the public with this mythic sham sacrifice of the king does not include the death of the queen. She is the element the sacrifice is made to. Her fertility is the survival mechanism that the king’s death assures. The proximity of Jackie to Jack’s exploding head is another clue that this whole farrago is as phony as the President’s power. And it settles the debate as to whether the Zapruder film is in any way, shape or form depicting spontaneous reality. It most certainly is not.

A recreation of a fiction sold as fact. As with religious figures, the historicity of JFK himself will one day be questioned. This is the mind bender’s longest type of con, staging a false reality to seed the false history that follows and that can be demolished at any time, collapsing the fictional paradigm that holds a people together.

As for the other movies taken in immediate proximity to the kill zone, they show almost nothing of interest save the Mark Bell film which ever so briefly captures what appears to be Abraham Zapruder walking away at a calm and even pace, his secretary, Marilyn Sitzman trailing and looking back at the viewer with a certain amount of suspicion.

The rest, including the clips taken earlier on the motorcade route of the actors portraying the Presidential party, serve only to reinforce the assumption that the four dignitaries in the Presidential limo are in fact who they are alleged to be, including footage surfacing only in the late nineties, a strip of color super 8 that shows both Jack and Jackie indisputably in the limo. Where it had been for thirty-five or so years is a mystery but it looks pristine as to have been developed only a day earlier than its public release. CGI is not just for digitized 70mm 3D IMAX.

Forty plus years later pristine footage of the limousine and its occupants surfaced. This is a standard ploy in such hoaxes completely reliant on photographic evidence to sell the fiction. The grainy originals give way to vibrant new releases to update the lies.

Along with the motion pictures, several still cameras were employed to capture the event. The two most important of these stills are the Altgens number 6 and Moorman Polaroid.

AP photographer James “Ike” Altgens photo number 6

Polaroid photo by Mary Moorman

The photo taken by AP press photographer James “Ike” Altgens, a twenty-five year veteran of the newspaper racket, labeled number 6 of the 9 he had on that film roll, depicts the Presidential limo and trailing Secret Service car heading straight towards the camera. Flanking motorcycle cops to the left and slightly behind the limo also figure prominently in the composition. Of special significance is that the main entrance and steps of the Texas School Book Depository can be seen clearly in the background. Unfortunately, the high contrast of the noonday light and shadows largely obscures the President and party in darkness.

The use of the Zapruder film to coordinate the timing of the photo suggests that at the point of shutter compression, the President had apparently been shot in the neck from a rifle facing the front of the limo and that he is clutching his throat. Another point of interest in the photo includes a man standing in the Depository doorway who bears a resemblance to Oswald and has been routinely identified as Billy Lovelady, another Depository employee.

The Dal Tex building in the very back of the photo scene shows a dark open window on the second floor, often times thought to be a candidate for a second shooter perch. But despite its voluminous and tantalizing detail, the photo doesn’t really show much in the way of useful information. It is a noisy belly flop into the guessed at, but of no concrete value as far as drawing useful conclusions.

The Moorman black and white Polaroid on the other hand has been an object of veneration for many researchers whose claims for the content of the photo borders on divine revelation. From the apparent depression on the top of the President’s head to the silhouette of various characters in the background thought to be shooters and/or spotters, the Moorman Polaroid has the implicit power of a medieval icon depicting the death of Christ.

Monikers such as Badge Man and Black Dog Man have been assigned to blobs and specks in the background up behind the picket fence atop the grassy knoll and extending to the edge of the pergola just to the right of Abe Zapruder. Alas, as much or more as a man can study the various shapes, no certainty as to who or what they are can be definitively ascertained.

And when you compare the Moorman Polaroid with the Orville Nix film, a total lack of coordination is apparent in attempting to align these confections to conform to one another. Against the Nix anomalies, the Moorman appears the more accurate and aligned with the apparent contours of Dealey Plaza.

And that it’s a Polaroid is one reason the Moorman pic has so long passed as genuine. The events in Dealey Plaza were captured with technology the average citizen was familiar with. To use any recording equipment that would render the assassination in some format beyond the public’s comprehension would be alienating and would dampen the emotional impact of the images.

Questioning how an image could be so well rendered beyond the average consumer’s understanding would trigger one’s critical faculties and distract from the emotional firestorm the images were designed to stoke. In the intervening years, as film and video technology have improved, and the consumer version of said technology has been in wide spread use, this decommissioned technology, the Polaroid camera (though in the vanguard back in1963) has allowed the Moorman Polaroid to be given a pass as a quaint reminder of a technology gone by. It’s like a last of its kind artifact and its frail condition makes it hard to question what it shows, though what it shows isn’t possible to describe.

Moorman’s background above and Nix’s below. Both can’t be correct. The Nix appears to have had the background blacked out suggesting a need to hide something or someone(s) perchance hot footing it out of Dodge. (See Simon Shack’s thread at September Clues Forum for the source comparison.)

As well, consider how difficult it would have been to get a focused shot with an amateur camera best suited to photographing stationary objects and not a moving vehicle. The limo had to have been stationary if this was an actual on site photo. Best guess is that this photo was taken during a rehearsal days or weeks ahead of the public pantomime on 11/22/63. Only a car at rest would allow for Moorman’s focused image.

And, to add authenticity and damning significance to the images, claims of immediate confiscation by authorities were made by the witnesses who took photographs or movies. Though subsequent claims were made that some cameras were returned with the developed films, some were not. In time, critics of the Warren Report would ask out loud just what did the confiscated images show and why were they not available for public scrutiny?

The truth is, access to the “evidence” for this event was and is controlled by the perpetrators, the same associations that control the media and controlled the scene before, during and after the “assassination”. To withhold or leak apparently damaging evidence to the official story accomplishes two things: First, it divides the public. Some believe their government, right or wrong. Some do not and would settle for the truth instead. Either way, the opposing sides are warring with each other and not joining forces to oppose the perpetrators of this ongoing false reality. Second, and more to the point, both sides assume that President Kennedy was actually shot dead. All the doctored or wholly fabricated images in the world can be debated but if no one questions whether the killing actually took place then the scam is a success.

Reel Life

Life magazine was a propaganda tool, nothing more. CD Jackson, Life’s publisher, was a spook from way back. Psychological warfare was his métier. Securing the rights to the Zapruder film was a fait accompli for Life. In fact, it’s very likely that Life was given the task of designing Zapruder’s character and his part in the show. The legend of negotiating the price for the film rights was inserted to reinforce the legitimacy of the film’s contents. Clearly such an august publication as Life magazine would not fork over so much money for a forgery. In fact, the entire concept of fake pictures, films, witnesses and deaths was not possible to conceive of in that era. In the same way a serf in the muck and mire of the Dark Ages could not conceive of something as common today as air travel, so too the average American media consumer of the early sixties could never have conceived of their government acting as a facade for creators of a completely false reality. Almost no one today in the early twenty first century can wrap his or her addled brain around the concept.

In keeping with the task of controlling both sides, once the Zapruder film began to circulate in the late sixties in the wake of the Jim Garrison led investigation into Clay Shaw’s alleged participation in the assassination, doubts started circulating as to the legitimacy of the film. There were clearly missing frames. There was a massive edit near the beginning. And there was no certainty as to the chain of possession. Another subdivision of the Warren Commission doubters was created. Those who supported the film because it appeared to show JFK getting hit from the front battled the detractors who insisted the CIA had intervened in the film’s processing and therefore likely tampered with it. Either way, the debate centered on how JFK was killed, from the front or not, not whether he was actually killed or not.

Meanwhile, crisis actors dotted the Plaza and the most photogenic young women in the immediate vicinity of the kill zone stepped forward to recite their lines.

Mary Moorman presented her Polaroid and vague recollections about the direction of the shots but leaned towards the Knoll. Her friend Jean Hill suggested the Knoll as the direction but couldn’t be certain, although she said smoke lingered in that area. Beverly Oliver, a party girl in Jack Ruby’s orbit, had a ring side seat as the Babushka Lady, so labeled by her appearance in the Zapruder film, and claimed she had filmed the kill shot but a man she took to be an FBI agent wanted to develop the film and he never returned it. And, as an added bonus, Oliver floated the story that she had witnessed Oswald and Ruby together well prior to the assassination.

Moorman, Hill and Oliver

A fusillade of testimony, with all the attendant confusion and contradictions, flew in all directions. A witness named Marie Muchmore, with the same birthday as Mary Moorman, helped provide a good matched set of names to give the apparent randomness a subtle sense of order. This play on the names is a counterintuitive thumbtack of coincidence that helps distinguish these two actors from the rest of the pack; Muchmore because she allegedly recorded the kill shot on film, and Moorman with her ubiquitous Polaroid; and these two items, along with the Nix and Zapruder films, plus the countlessly repeated testimony of a small band of witnesses, are the foundations upon which the indisputable evidence of the President’s murder rests. The fact that careful scrutiny of these items and review of the rather vague recollections of said witnesses, and the accusations that some of this vague testimony was changed by the FBI, charges which serve to deliberately exacerbate anomalies and contradictions within the official conclusions, occupies the attention of the controlled opposition and keeps consideration of the whole event being a hoax out of the paradigmatic corral within which all debate is contained.

A few other actors came forward to attest to the shooting. James Tague, a solid working stiff sort claimed a piece of concrete nicked his cheek, clearly from a stray bullet coming from the direction of the Depository, given Tague’s stated location. This missed shot seemed to create a great deal of trouble for the Warren Commission and is one of the deliberately placed charges that helped in the Commission’s prearranged demolition of their own conclusions.

Many years later, a man identifying himself as Gordon Arnold, who on November 22, 1963 was on leave from the Army, came forward to claim he had, from near the top of the knoll, filmed the motorcade when shots rang out right behind him. He dove to the ground until the shooting stopped. He claimed that men identifying themselves as police officers seized his camera and told him to leave immediately. Two days later, Arnold reported for duty in Alaska. His poor acting can be seen in the epic misdirection video from 1988 titled “The Men Who Killed Kennedy” where he recalls his tale of woe, complete with a cascade of tears.

Another witness, Lee Bowers, was up in a railway tower behind and to the right of the Knoll. His recollections included seeing men behind the picket fence and wafting smoke after the shooting stopped. Though Bowers’ testimony in front of the Commission adds details that make him sound plausible, his placement of men behind the fence was given a great boost with the story of his subsequent death in 1965. Bowers is one of the most prominent “witnesses” to end up on the “Mysterious Death List”, a collection of names that had one small thing or another to do with the assassination narrative and who then died in extremely suspicious circumstances.

(For further source details, see http://cluesforum.info/ and the JFK hoax threads within.)

Tague, Arnold, Bowers

This list of dead characters further functions to reinforce the certainty of the President’s murder; a tying up of loose ends after a crime is a familiar cinematic trope and as this assassination was made specifically for TV screens, those kinds of pre-sold concepts seemed perfectly logical to the public, even the skeptics, which knew only what they saw on television.

A most curious witness, Ed Hoffmann, “says” he was a witness to the shooting, though he was a deaf-mute. His story has expanded and shifted over the years and because of the difficulty in communicating his recollections, he’s largely a footnote, a “disputed” witness. His function had been to corroborate the most important details of the Bowers testimony regarding men behind the picket fence without actually being believed. He has remained off the Death List for this reason while Bowers remains critically “dead”.

Another group of front row center eyewitnesses were the Newman family, Bill and his wife and two toddler sons, two “new men”. This holy family was seen being photographed lying on the grass well to the left of the Knoll. Some of the photos show the newsmen photographing the family as the husband and wife lay in a prone position over their two boys.

Why the parents did not immediately bundle up their kids and run for cover is a mystery. They seemed to have been lying there, responding to the cameras as if in character as witnesses clearly identifiable rather than hysterical parents sprinting for cover. I don’t know how long it took the press bus, five cars back from the President, to offload photographers, but why the Newman’s waited for them can only mean they were supposed to.

The Newman “family” posing for the cameras amidst utter chaos. The odds that these people comprised an actual family are slim to none.

Several minutes later, the Newman family sat in front of television cameras at local ABC affiliate WFAA and told news director Jay Watson* their story in a couple of different ways.

Watson cozies up to Papa Newman, all of twenty-two years old, and carefully guides him through his story, suggesting the answers and having Newman affirm most of them. The performance is understated and, in a weak field, one of the more convincing line readings of the day. The mother is asked for her recollections, but after mis-remembering her lines, she is excused as being too upset. She returns later, and holding her youngest son who looks to be about 18 months old, projects her story in a more calm and coherent fashion, with more details added by the creepy interviewer, Watson.

The Newman’s take turns calmly telling their side of the story, complete with toddlers and a generous portion of gory details describing the President’s exploding head.

*Presumably the news director of a television station in Dallas at that time would be a well vetted spook as this theater piece was planned well in advance and information controls would be well entrenched.

Watson’s cool demeanor and casual way with a cigarette would suggest a well-rehearsed actor very much in on it. His emphasis on the image of the President’s bloody, wounded head again drives home the certainty that the murder took place. Why would a young father and husband like Newman, with wife and children in tow, lie about something like that?

This is another example of an emotional firewall being erected to retard critical thinking. The perpetrators thought nothing of utilizing small children in their deceptions knowing that the first viewers would be housewives, maids and nannies and that their emotional distress would insure the structural integrity of that firewall of emotions should their at work husbands take a moment and try to think things through.

Medical Drama- A Midday Soap Opera Staple

Like many professions of the day, the medical men who rose in rank were inevitably Free Masons. Dealey Plaza is the site of the first Masonic temple in Texas, erected in the mid-19th century. The doctors at Parkland hospital who testified to the press and public as well as the Warren Commission were, almost certainly to a man, poor widow’s sons, as Masons are styled. The scripts they read before the cameras detailed the prearranged wound profiles that they claimed to have observed on the President’s head, neck and back. The televised press conferences could have been staged at any time prior to the assassination so that all medical witnesses were consistent in their testimony. The actors playing pressmen were of the same class of Masons, as their professional ascent was also contingent upon membership and obedience.

Beyond the testimony of those doctors who did appear before cameras, the remaining elements of the live broadcasts involving the President and Governor Connelly were in whole nothing more than press releases written sometime in advance and likely authored by government intelligence assets within the motion picture industry.

Assistant press secretary Malcolm Kilduff breaks the news of the President’s death to the press.

It is at the point of the official announcement of the President’s death that the public portion of the narrative concludes. From this point forward, all the public will see and hear will come from the collaborating media, from trustworthies like Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntley to field reporters staging man on the street interviews with crisis actors in an attempt to sell the shocked public that they are not only not alone, but a stoic and resilient front should be maintained in honor of the President’s memory and especially with respect to the grieving First Lady. Shouts for action and a critical investigation would be inappropriate at this time. The immediate aftermath of the shooting as far as television and radio were concerned was to focus on emotions and personal feelings and not ask awkward questions, at least until responsible authorities could properly look into it. And provide their spin.

Seasoned white males, whose trustworthiness is unchallenged, recite the prefabricated narrative that will become cemented in the mass consciousness as actual history.

Actors on the street give their own pre-scripted spin, cuing the viewing public on how to process their emotions while subtly persuading the viewers to avoid engaging their critical faculties.

Next time: The not so hidden hand of Hollywood…

Other parts of this series:

Other parts of this series:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part eight
Part nine
Part ten