Slippin’ out the back, Jack

At last count, Manhattan Contrarian’s five (and counting) posts on the JFK assassination have drawn 559 comments, though it the 80/20 rue applies, most have come from two or three sources.

My older brother told me, with awe, that Theodore Roosevelt had been shot while standing on a podium speaking, and still stood tall and finished his speech. With all due respect, Steve, that’s a crock. 1) If shot, or shot at, he would have hid behind the podium and there would have been a pile of bodies to shield him from further harm, and 2) he wasn’t shot (or shot at) anyway. That’s just presidential mythology, like San Juan Hill.

There’s a bit of popular mythology that says that in olden days presidents did not have tight security. They did, just like now. It’s not just presidents, but kings and queens, princes, dukes and archdukes. Security has been around longer than our country or colonies, and they know how to do it.

1. Avoid high buildings.
2. If high buildings cannot be avoided, place a guard or two or three atop each one.
3. No open windows are allowed, anywhere.
4. Keep track of aberrant personalities, make sure their whereabouts are known.
5. Avoid motorcades. (I’ve only been witness to one motorcade, Bill Clinton on North 27th Street in Billings, Montana. It went by really fast, so fast that Billings’ finest had to run like hell to keep up with it. It was quite a sight, a bouncing belly festival.)
6. If a motorcade is necessary, make sure all windows are black and all cars are alike.) (This would apply as well to horse-drawn carriages.)
7. Use motorcades and carriage-cades as distraction, never actually placing the person to be protected in them.
8. Divert, distract. Use body doubles. (That motorcade I watched probably did not have anyone named Bill Clinton in it. He would probably have taken a helicopter to the airport, at the very least, a separate limo.)
9. Do not press the flesh! Do not stand among spectators, do not walk through them on your way to a destination.
10. Do not stand in place.

I quote from Miles Mathis’ piece, Hidden Kings: Camelot Ruled from the Cave of Merlin:

Let me suggest to you that both sets of stories [Oswald and someone else] were created mainly as misdirection and disinformation. This is not to say that all alternate theorists are controlled by the government or by anyone else. It is only to suggest that alternate theories—in all forms but one—seem to be encouraged by the government and the powers that be. We have always assumed that alternate theories would be frowned upon or discouraged, and yet we have never seen much real effort at suppression. In fact, in most cases, the dissemination of alternate theories would seem to be abetted by the mainstream, not suppressed. You should ask yourself if the alternate theories and theorists might be selling the main lines of the desired story just as fully as the standard theory. For the powers that be, it may not matter whether you believe there was one shooter or many, or even whether you believe that the CIA or FBI was involved. The only thing that is critical is that you believe Kennedy was assassinated that day, and the alternate theories sell that fact with even more emphasis and gusto than the Warren Commission. As it turns out, the alternate theories make a much greater hero out of Kennedy than the standard theory, and it may be that this is a welcome side-effect to the real conspirators.

That in mind, I find that the Manhattan Contrarian is playing along with this game, as all five posts are about alternate theories, and never once is another theory, that he was not killed that day, given notice – not even to discard or ridicule it! I am therefore relegating him to distrusted on my blogroll, not to be ignored, not to be discarded, but instead taken with a grain of salt, a large one.

Another paragraph from Mathis, one of my favorites in the whole piece, a bit long, but worth my while, if not yours:

Those alternate theorists who point out how odd it is for the Secret Service to have been pulled off the back of the car and for the building windows to be open don’t mention that it is even odder for the route to be so completely uncontested. They imply, by omission, that it was normal in 1963 to have ladies with cameras stepping out into the street and men with movie cameras milling around on the grass and hundreds of day trippers rubbernecking in whatever fashion suited them, with absolutely no effort at crowd control; but it wasn’t. Compare the visits to Miami or Chicago weeks earlier and you will see that this protocol wasn’t normal at all, not in 1963 or 1863. Commonsense would tell you that you don’t allow strangers that close to the President under any circumstances. It has nothing to do with the 60’s “being a more innocent time” or any of that misdirection. Truman would not have been caught in that situation, or Wilson, or anyone else, much less a president like Kennedy, supposedly surrounded by a combination of enemies unparalleled in history.
People then try to blame his Secret Service, but Kennedy had eyes. Even if it is true that he could not have known about the open windows in the Book Depository until he got there, the other factors were clear to anyone who was awake. He didn’t need to be briefed or to rely on intelligence reports from good guys or bad guys. All he needed to do is look around. Whoever was riding in that motorcade could see that the public was lining the streets, that traffic was uncontrolled, that the car had no protection, and so on. Even if they lied to him about the route, he could see with his own eyes that he was a sitting duck. Do you think a man with so many enemies would be smiling and waving to the crowd, supposing he was ever stupid enough to get caught in that position? No, he would be hiding under the seat, ordering the driver to get him out of there as fast as possible.

I refer back to a post here from November of 2023, Find the Floating Hand, where I focused on a photo of JFK, Jackie, and the Connally’s in the stretch limo, the photo supposedly taken on 11/22/63.

I found the photo to be a fake, noting:

• The photographer is stationed to Jack and Jackie’s right and above them, allowing for a perfect shot, so to speak.
• They are horribly exposed. I could have made a shot that day.
• The spectators look pasty, and are most likely pasted in, dark room work. The real JFK would never appear in public in an open limousine.
• Among the spectators, there is a floating hand. See if you can find it. It is waving at us.

As usual, a couple of commenters added to what I wrote:

TimR: “The lighting… Soft and from the left on the crowd and rear cop, hard and from the right on the motorcade. If there’s a building behind the crowd putting them in shade, it should have a hard edged cast shadow like the cars, but there’s no evidence of that. The two cops are in different light but we don’t see the same blazing light contrast on the ground between them as we do between the cars. Thus the rear cop may have been part of the crowd scene, rest of the motorcade overlaid on top.”

Tyrone McCloskey: “Wider out on that reflection we can see they are in a vast lot, likely at the airport, which would mean that the car portion of this paste up was inserted. Keep piling on.”

Anyway, Manhattan Contrarian, it’s over. They say the best way to break up with someone is to tear that Band Aid off and get over of it, let the healing start. For me, not having any desire to harm anyone, I am going to just slip out the back, Jack. We’re done, buddy.