Erasing the Past to Protect a Fairytale

17 One mystery car chaser


Related:
118 Pics and negatives by Dallas Morning News photographer Walter Cisco

Did someone try vainly last Friday afternoon to warn John F. Kennedy that he was only ten blocks away from a violent death?
From out of the assassination aftermath of shock and grief, there emerged a nagging agonizing mystery.
Who was the bushy haired youth who chased the presidents slow moving car shouting "slow down slow down slow down, for God's sake slow down"?

(Rae Corelli, Boy chased JFK car new Dallas mystery, ? , 1963)



Main / N. Harwood, Dallas


"We also learned from newsmen that something unusual did happen on Harwood [street] shortly before the turn to Main Street. No one wanted credit for this, but we were told by reliable newsmen that a man jumped in front of Kennedy's car on Harwood shouting, "Stop, I must tell you." The man, according to ther report, was promptly wresteled to the ground and hustled away"

(Penn Jones, Gary Shaw, The continuing inquiry, 1/22/1977)



SA John "Jack" Ready (1927-2014) bottom left


"Approximately three minutes before the assassination, in the very downtown part of Dallas, I observed a young white male approximately 21 years old, running toward the Presidential car. As he got alongside the Presidential follow-up car. As he got alongside the presidential follow-up car, SA Ready, who was working the right front running board, jumped down from the follow-up car and forcibly shoved this individual back into the crowd."

(Statement of SA Jerry D. Kivett, CE 1024, Warren Commission Hearings, Volume XVIII, p. 777, 1964)


"When the shots rang out, Hill rushed forward and — in a scene that would become iconic — leapt onto the president’s car in an effort to shield him and the first lady from the bullets. Mr. Ready, too, prepared to jump. But just as the third shot was fired, and as his driver veered to avoid hitting Hill, Mr. Ready was ordered to stay in place." 

(Emily Langer, Jack Ready, Secret Service agent who guarded Kennedy in Dallas, dies at 86, Washington Post, 2014)


Erasing the Past...Discussions

19 The Pitzer Film

"At 4:30 P.M. Eastern Time on Friday, November 22, 1963, three hours after President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Lieutenant Commander William Bruce Pitzer received a phone call at his home in Takoma Park, Maryland. Lt. Cmdr. Pitzer was the head of the Audio-Visual Department of the Naval Medical School. In his audio-visual expertise, Pitzer worked closely with Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the president’s autopsy was about to take place.

After listening to his caller, Bill Pitzer hung up. He excused himself from his family’s dinner table, and said he was going to work. Pitzer took with him his 35 mm camera. He did not return home until the next afternoon. He did not discuss with his family the work he had done in the meantime.


Lieutenant Commander William Bruce Pitzer

On the Monday or Tuesday following the assassination, First Class Hospital Corpsman Dennis David stopped by the office of his good friend and mentor, Lt. Cmdr. Pitzer. David found Pitzer crouched over a film-editing machine.

“Come here,” said Pitzer, “I want to show you something.”

As Pitzer hand-cranked a sixteen-millimeter, black-and-white film through the machine, David watched the short movie on a small screen. What he saw was the body of President Kennedy viewed from the waist up, being touched by the hands of unseen individuals. He saw the hands roll the body onto its side and back.

Pitzer was editing the film. David watched him work on several reels. He got the impression, he said, that Pitzer “was pulling some of the frames off of the films to make slides with.”In addition to the movie film, Pitzer had pictures and slides on his desk. They showed the president’s body from different aspects. Pitzer shared his photographic evidence with David. The two men talked over what they were seeing.

David recalled to an interviewer his and Pitzer’s conclusions: “Number one, it was our distinct impression—impression, hell, it was our opinion, actual opinion—that the shot that killed the President had to have come from the front.”

Asked why, David said, “Because we both noted a small entry wound here [interviewer notes that David points to the right side of his forehead] from another photo, and a large exit wound back in this area [indicates right rear of head]. I had seen gunshot wounds before, and so had Bill. I’ve seen a lot of them since, and I can assure you that it definitely was an entry wound in the forehead.”

That he and Pitzer were looking at an exit wound in the rear of Kennedy’s head was even more obvious: “It is inconceivable that anyone even vaguely acquainted with gunshot wounds would conclude that the massive wound in the rear of JFK’s skull could have occurred from a rear-entry projectile, unless it was from grenade or mortar shrapnel, which tears and rends flesh and bone rather than pierces it.”

Pitzer did not tell David he had taken the film he was editing, but David assumed he had. “I never asked him,” David said. “He was head of the Audio-Visual Department. I just assumed he had done it, he had taken it.”

What Dennis David says was on Bill Pitzer’s film contradicts not only the Warren Report but also the increasingly challenged official photographs and X-rays of the autopsy, as well as the questionable testimony of Drs. Humes, Boswell, and Finck. If David is right, the Pitzer film and photographs would constitute powerful evidence of a systematic government cover-up of the gunshot wounds. Pitzer himself would be a critical witness to the process whereby he either took or obtained the government-incriminating movie and photographs of the president’s body.

Bill Pitzer was shot to death on October 29, 1966. His body was discovered at 7:50 P.M. on the floor of the TV production studio of the National Naval Medical Center, Pitzer’s working area. The estimated time of his death was approximately 4:00 P.M. As an FBI teletype reported early the next morning, the victim was found dead with a gunshot wound in his head and a thirty-eight caliber revolver lying close to his body. Pitzer’s body was found lying face down “with the head extending under the lower rung of two aluminum step ladders which were leaning against a foundation post.” Following a joint investigation by the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) and the FBI, the Navy ruled that Bill Pitzer had committed suicide. The members of his family were certain that he had not.

The Navy investigative board’s verdict of suicide rested on its claim that Pitzer “was experiencing marital difficulty and was intimately associated with another woman.” Bill Pitzer’s friends and family resisted the board’s theory of suicide and Pitzer’s supposed motivation, both of which contradicted their knowledge of the man.

(Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, s. 314-316, 2008)





"Fort Bragg, August 1965. Green Beret Dan Marvin was approached and asked to carry out an assassination of an American citizen (William Pitzer) who was going to sell sensitive United States materials to the enemy. Bill Pitzer was found shot to death on October 29, 1966. He was about to retire from the navy. An investigation by the Naval Intelligence Service and the FBI concluded that Pitzer had killed himself.
FBI files on the investigation, released in 1997 under the Freedom of Information Act, revealed that there was a strong possibility that Pitzer had been murdered.

Daniel Marvin is the author of the book, Expendable Elite (2003). He was working on a book about William Pitzer entitled The Smoking Gun: The Conspiracy to Kill LCDR William Bruce Pitzer when he died on 19th January, 2012. "

(Spartacus Educational)


Q: One last question, and this is probably
repetitive from earlier questions we have. Was
there anyone taking any motion picture
photographs - 

A: Negative.

Q: - during the night of the autopsy?

A: Negative.

MR. GUNN: Thank you very much.
And how about Mr. Pitzer?
Was Mr. Pitzer present at the autopsy?

A: He was not present. In fact, I shot his
autopsy.

Q: Photographed his autopsy?

A: Yeah, excuse me.

MR. GUNN: Okay. Thank you very much,
Mr. Stringer.

[Whereupon, at 4:30 p.m., the taking of
the deposition concluded.]

[Signature waived.]

(Page 228 of John T. Stringer's testimony before the ARRB, 1996)

20  Fourteen minutes recording of Hoover – LBJ phonecall on 23-11-1963


Further reading:
183 Tapes of Lee Harvey Oswald calling the Soviet embassy in Mexico City

Whatever Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover knew of the plot to kill Kennedy before Dallas will perhaps
forever remain in the realm of speculation. Fact is that on the morning after the brutal public execution of JFK,
both men knew that the CIA had been preparing a fake link between arrestee Lee Harvey Oswald and foreign
communist agents during the last week of September 1963. They then thwarted the CIA's objective of an
invasion of Cuba by making the decision, without further investigation, that Oswald was guilty, but acted
alone. There would be no further probing into the true circumstances of the assassination of Kennedy. They
discussed this over the phone. A transcript of this conversation survives, but the actual call has been
deliberately erased. (AH)

LBJ:  Have you established any more about the visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico in September?

Hoover:  No, that’s one angle that’s very confusing, for this reason—we have up here the tape and the
photograph of the man who was at the Soviet embassy, using Oswald’s name.  That picture and the tape do
not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to his appearance.  In other words, it appears that there is a second
person who was at the Soviet embassy down there.


Hoover and Johnson, friends and neighbors in Washington

"I had spent the day before the Lancer conference at the LBJ Library in Austin, and purchased some 17 tapes
of LBJ phone calls, a few of them assassination-related.  But not included among these was the incredible
LBJ-Hoover call of the 23rd, which Newman showed in transcript form. 

I called the LBJ Library to inquire about whether a tape of this phone call was available.  I spoke with library
staff member Regina Greenwell, who informed me that yes they did have it, but it was of such poor quality as
to be inaudible.  Having been impressed by the quite good quality of the other tapes in my possession, and
given the import of the conversation, I half-jokingly asked if this was another “18-minute gap.” 

Several days later the single cassette tape arrived.  Imagine my surprise when the first few calls, taped on
the evening of the 22nd, sounded perfectly clear (they may indeed be of somewhat lesser quality than the
later Dictabelts, but not by much). 

Then came, according to the printed call log on the cassette label, the 10:01 AM Hoover call.  At this point,
the tape emits over 14 minutes of silence interrupted only by some kind of “pop” or “beat” about every seven
seconds (presumably at the seam where the end of the belt meets the beginning, though that is just a guess). 

The succeeding conversation, which is denoted as beginning at 10:17 AM, sounds perfectly clear again."

The log for side A of this compilation cassette tape is printed below, and only the Hoover call is silent.

11/22/63
9:06 PM
Arthur Goldberg

  11/22/63
?
(Machine Noise)

  11/22/63
9:10 PM
Richard Maguire

11/23/63
10:01 AM
J. Edgar Hoover  

11/23/63
10:17 AM
George Meany

11/23/63
1:10 PM
Carl Albert

11/23/63
1:15 PM
Fred Kappel

11/23/63
1:35 PM
Edwin Weisl, Sr.

11/23/63
1:44 PM
Ralph Yarborough

11/23/63
1:50 PM
Everett Dirksen

11/23/63
1:55 PM
Robert Anderson

11/23/63
2:00 PM
Mrs. J. D. Tippitt

Underlined names denote the beginning of a new magnetic belt.  Note that the Hoover conversation occupies
its own belt.  There is thus the possibility that a blank belt has been substituted for the original.  Expert
testing could presumably distinguish between this and erasure of the real belt.  In any case, the effect and
inferred motivation remain the same.

(Rex Bradford, The Fourteen Minute Gap, 2000)


Portion of Johnson’s daily diary, available at the LBJ Library web site

22 Oswald's pre-Dec 1960 CIA-File


Related:
112 One CIA memo on Oswald in USSR

James Angleton has been heavily fingered in the story of Lee Harvey Oswald. Angleton had a pre-assassination file on Oswald that was opened - officially, although dates on documents in Oswald's file suggest otherwise - only after the State Department queried CIA about American "defectors" to the Soviet Union. Oswald never actually defected, and after decades of file releases, it now seems Oswald was likely sent to the Soviet Union by the CIA as a false defector as part of a hunt for a mole in the U-2 program.

(Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big To Fail, 2018)




ANGLETON and CI/SIG opened an OSWALD dossier, or 201 file only because it was forced to do so. ANGLETON wanted as little a paper trail between him and OSWALD as was possible that was one reason why OSWALD’S documents were sent to the Office of Security. No CIA documents existed on OSWALD until his 201 file was opened on December 9, 1960. David E. Murphy, Soviet Russia Division Chief, was told by Allen Dulles that "Warren Commission members could not understand why CIA had not begun an investigation of OSWALD as soon as it received word that he had defected." Some component other than CI-SIG should have opened a 201 File on OSWALD immediately after he threatened to give military information to the Soviets but ANGLETON took over the investigation.

(Coup d'etat in America, Nodule X6, 2010 edition)

 
James Jesus Angleton (The "Jesus" is silent)

When JFK investigators asked Angleton and retired CIA director Richard Helms about the 12 month delay in opening of Oswald’s 201 file, neither man could explain it.
Testifying under oath to the HSCA in October 1978, Angleton pleaded ignorance.
“I don’t know the circumstances,” he said, which was almost certainly not true. Angleton did know the circumstances of Oswald’s defection because it was reported in the Washington Post and his aide Jane Roman wrote several memos about it.

(JFKfacts.org)