JFKTV: Segment Four

 

Praetorian Guard- The Secret Service

In the literature dealing with the actions and inactions of the Secret Service, the man most cited as suspicious is shift commander Emory Roberts, the man leading the team of agents in the car directly behind the Presidential limousine. In video footage from Love Field he is shown telling agent Henry Rybka to stand down from his perch on the running board behind Kennedy. Rybka dutifully but frustratingly complies and is summarily ordered to remain at Love Field. This interaction might suggest that some of the Secret Service were not in on the hoax as it unfolded, but it is just as likely that this apparent “innocent” named Rybka was the decoy to lay the blame on the President when postmortem legends were dispersed that JFK had ordered the Secret Service not to get so close as to block the view of the crowd.

It doesn’t really matter what the details are of who knew what and when as the Secret Service’s participation in the production likely entailed a recorded run through drill that was integrated into the filmed sequences of the motorcade. Roberts, with Roy Kellerman and William Greer, the two agents in the car with the Presidential party, and Clint Hill, the agent who made the mad dash to the limo to guide Jackie back to her seat, certainly knew what was required of them during the drill and would participate only on a need to know basis. What transpired in front of the scattered few actors posing as witnesses in the kill zone was the real performance but it followed to a T the rehearsals in the days prior to the event.

What James Rowley, the head of the Secret Service, briefed these agents on before and after the live event would include the standard appeal to loyalty that always carried with it an implied threat. It was certain that anything more than a reminder of their oaths so sworn was not needed by these veteran soldiers of the long con known as The Kennedy Assassination.

The urban legends of Robert’s complicity, supplemented by tales of a previous night’s debauch by some of the attendant agents only further confused the Grassy Knoll Society members trying to implicate the President’s immediate security. A revolt of the Praetorian Guard was the meme that has never really taken flight thanks largely to the ever compliant media who pushed the CIA bred conspiracy/not a conspiracy face-off to keep the spotlight off the possibility of Secret Service complicity. And it should be said that the most vulnerable individuals would be the Secret Service agents right at ground zero of the hoax. The nebulous CIA made a much better media suspect because it isn’t at all clear whom one would pursue within the agency. Whom amongst the CIA do the researchers target? Allan Dulles had been fired. That’s a great alibi. But the Secret Service agents are named individuals.

Keeping the heat off of them would be paramount.

LBJ: Cutout

Cui Bono? Who benefits? The question is inevitably asked when power changes hands. In recent years the Latin phrase has been uttered rhetorically by researchers who vigorously promote the idiotic theory that Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s successor, was the real architect behind the assassination. For many years prior, LBJ was looked on as just a tool of the Pentagon, giving credence to the idea that the assassination was indeed a military coup d’état.

Johnson was ordered to go all in in Vietnam and the ghouls in the Pentagon and their private sector contractors made millions off the spoils of war.

In recent years, however, the Pentagon has been amputated from most theories, leaving the vulgar Texan as the chief manipulator of the deadly events of November 22. The change is easy to understand as the prestige of the military has superseded the civilian government by waging their phony war on terror and overwhelming the debate with the vigorous propaganda used to sell this phantom war. The idea that the military would be so dishonorable as to kill their commander in chief is no longer one of the most popular conspiracy tropes, despite the lingering presence of Oliver Stone.

LBJ’s back story has also been suitably enhanced with a chronology of skullduggery that includes a personal hit man named Mac Wallace tying up several loose ends for Johnson, including an order to kill Johnson’s own sister, Josepha. This fetid smoke screen of psychopathology has also excused the Pentagon for the lion’s share of blame for the escalated disaster of Vietnam, laying it instead at the feet of the bloodthirsty and racist LBJ and his administration. Despite the utter impossibility of him having the clout to kill his predecessor, this myth is the crowning blow to his reputation, a reputation that has been sacrificed in order to perpetuate the hoax.

As for Texas Governor John Connelly and his wounds, this element was added to have a survivor of the shooting be living testimony to the assassination’s flesh and blood reality.

Jackie said very little about the details of the gunfire and its effects, and no one was going to be so insensitive as to approach the eternally grieving widow (the grief of which was heavily cited to deliberately keep critical thinking in short supply in the days and weeks that followed) so it was left to Connelly’s wife, Nellie, to speak for her. And Nellie, like her husband, remained on point to the bitter end.

Five days after the assassination Texas Governor John Connelly gave his first interview. For a man in his mid-forties who was shot in the back, he moves his head and neck without the slightest wince of discomfort or stiffness. His performance ends in a soliloquy preaching tolerance with a cadence eerily reminiscent of a typical Kennedy speech.

In the intervening years, Jackie was of no help in clarifying what happened that day and why she’s depicted in the Zapruder and Nix films as climbing onto the back hood of the limo. She was given a wide berth by the press and spent the rest of her life famous for being famous. The paparazzi chased her around and her image always reverberated the echo of the assassination. Her very existence was all that was required of her to keep the hoax never far from the public’s mind.

Whether you like it or not, living on the grid will expose you to the manufactured reality that your corporate masters see fit to suffocate your senses with. Keeping the blinders on will only leave your subconscious vulnerable to further manipulation.

Corporate Propaganda

The corporate media that reported on the events of that day were relentless in displaying proper conduct for the public to emulate, insinuating how to react and how to cope. It is one thing to slay a leader, but if the perpetrators do not have immediate control of the public’s response, then they cannot guarantee their ruse will be successful.

The first step was to position the onsite reporters too far back in the motorcade to be able to witness the shooting. As mentioned earlier, the press bus was five cars back from the Presidential limousine and had yet to make the hairpin turn onto Elm Street.

Their sight line was blocked by the last vestige of the crowds lining the streets and the trees along the side of the reflecting pool on Houston Street. They were effectively neutralized and had no choice but to feed out of the White House/Pentagon press agency hands like every other news outlet in the country.

The first person on air in Dallas to report the details of the assassination was Jay Watson, as stated, news director of ABC affiliate WFFA in Dallas. WFFA was only two blocks from Dealey Plaza and Watson, who claimed to be at the scene, was able to corral both the Newman family and Abe Zapruder and bring them in front of the cameras.

In his interview, Zapruder indicates with his right hand where the President appeared to be shot, in the area of the right temple, near the parietal bone, which was also indicated in the autopsy report. This would be consistent with what the film named after him portrays, and given that its construction took place in advance, this Zapruder character could accurately describe what he says he saw through the lens and have his testimony jibe with what was in the prefabricated film.

As the film bearing his name would not be presented to the general public until 1975, Zapruder’s description and the few frame reproductions posted in Life Magazine were all anyone had to envision what was contained within those precious 24 seconds of brittle 8mm home movie film; a film likely constructed at the Jamieson Film Company in Dallas, the military contracted “Hollywood of Texas”.

Around the television dial, the network hubs and affiliates ran man on the street features to ostensibly take the temperature of the public. All of the extant footage of these street interviews looks staged. In Chicago, one station gathered several people around in a semicircle to voice their thoughts. The group seemed largely culled from a nearby church, a black Baptist one by the look and sound of it. The line readings of these crisis actors are stilted, almost robotic, the dialogue itself is of the most bathetic sort. In viewing this footage the notion that certain churches may well be intelligence stations and that their congregations are salted with assets seems plausible.

Line readings from the man on the street interviews all sounded rehearsed. Monotone deliveries from crisis actors ape the sense of stasis the viewing public experienced; Neuro-linguistic programming at its most insidious.

The function of these interviews was to further drive home the proper attitude and etiquette in processing the shocking news of the President’s demise. The reporters often guide the interviews into personal accounts of previous sightings of the President, whether it was a campaign stop or public function, as well as an appeal to the subject to inventory their feelings. The implication being that emotional responses are the appropriate ones, critical analysis is not.

In one such revolting and obviously staged interview, the execrable Frank Reynolds of ABC cuts short a young man who has wandered off point as he warns against the dangers of viewing this event through the divide of left versus right. It’s a specious argument but it is also steering the mood away from the manufactured pathos. Reynolds tries to get back on track with a black lady, but she is too measured and has to be subtly reminded that Jackie’s welfare is the most important concern for women and that that concern should be the topic discussed. Both Reynolds and the lady seem frustrated and he’s about to send the feed back to the mother ship in Chicago when a young girl is shoved into the picture. She appears to be about eleven years old and Reynolds immediately seizes her and sticks the microphone in her face, asking for her thoughts. Her response is as blatantly coached as the unfortunate kids in the Sandy Hook videos of nearly half a century later. The girl frustratingly admits she has nothing to say and Reynolds agrees that there is nothing to say and sends it back to the anchor’s desk. How anyone could watch this and not immediately spot it’s completely artificial nature is beyond comprehension, but such is the trust in the media that even today they can still largely exploit the gullible proles who sit in a catatonic daze and let the damage to their subconscious continue undeterred.

The odious Frank Reynolds sneers at the off screen wrangler of the kid actor who has just blown her lines. The girl smiles nervously, knowing she’s screwed the pooch. Reynolds would go on to fame as the original host of ABC’s long running Nightline, a late night innovative national news program originally designed to hype to hysteria the Iranian hostage hoax; a hoax that gave the final push to bring American militarism back to respectability in the minds of the gullible public, making perpetual war as routine foreign policy a fait accompli.

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