November 22, 1963 - November 22, 2023 - Sixty Years After
Sixty years ago I was a 12 year old grade school student at St. Joseph's in East Camden, N.J., when shortly after 1:30 pm, EST, the principle nun came on the intercom to announce that the President had been shot and that school was being suspended for the rest of the day.
I walked home to 362 Garden Avenue and began climbing the Wheeping Willow Tree in the backyard when the phone rang, and I ran in the back kitchen door to answer the wall phone. It was my father, a Camden policeman - who told me not to leave the yard, as the President was killed and "we don't know what this is all about."
I wondered then - what the murder of a president could in any way influence me, a kid playing in the yard?
And it's still not over, as the influence is still affecting not only me but all of us.
A few years later, in 1968, as a 17 year old Camden Catholic High School student, I opposed the war in Vietnam, and came "clean for Gene" McCarthy, the poet Senator from Minnesotta who also opposed the war in Vietnam, and after narrowly defeating President LBJ in New Hampshire, forced him to decide not to run for re-election, that opened the door for RFK to run, as also as a peace candidate.
I will never forget the morning my father woke me up to inform me that RFK had been killed in California, after defeating McCarthy in the primary election there, so I went to Chicago to the Democratic National Convention as a McCarthy campaign worker, and while wearing a jacket and tie, I was caught up in the street riots that really radicalized me.
The following year, 1969, as a freshman at the University of Dayton, Ohio, I stopped by two tables that were set up outside the JFK Student Union lunchroom, one manned by two US Marines recruiting students to join their ROTC program, and the other by a long haired hippie I learned was John Judge.
Judge, who was promoting military men to become consciencious objectors to the war, handed me a copy of Playboy Magazine and asked me to read the interview with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. I knew a little about Garrison, my father, who worked as a detective in the Camden Country Prosecutors Office through a half dozen DAs, said that Garrison was just another politician looking for publicity to get votes.
But the Playboy interview sparked my interest, and Judge took me over to the new campus library and showed me where the 26 volumes of Warren Commission testimony and evidence was kept, and I began reading, and also reviewed copies of a magazine Computers and Automation, that had a series of photos on the assassination along with a number of articles.
Judge and I were sitting in the JFK Student Union lunchroom drinking coffee in 1972 as I read the Dayton Daily News, and began reading a short news report buried deep in the paper that detailed the Watergate breakin, complete with names - Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez, E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, G. Gorden Liddy. "Let me see that," Judge exclaimed, and after reading it for himself, said "These are the same muther fuckers who killed JFK."
We then went over to the UD library and began looking up the names in Whose Who in Washington books and found most of them, and copied their background details, expanding our research from JFK to Watergate.
Judge convinced the Student Body President, then Kevin Keefe, to bring in Mae Brussell from California to be a speaker. She did a weekly radio show from Carmel, California, called World Watchers, in which she tried to connect the dots of those who were running the shows - in Vietnam, Cuba, Dallas, Chicago, where ever there was a news story she would fill in the details. When she was finished with her lecture, I carried her bag of books to John Judge's car as she was to spend the night at John's apartment, and out of the darkness a man emerged and introduced himself as a friend of Mae. Ah, yes, Mae said, recognizing him, and thanking him for checks he sent her to support her research. "It's my conscience money," he said. And later, in talking to Judge, we noticed how much he resembled and spoke like Lee Harvey Oswald, and it turned out, had a similar background and may have been one of the impersonators.
Since John Judge was from Washington D.C., we often went there, and attended some of the Watergate and later Church and House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) public hearings, as well as one of the first JFK Assassination Conferences at NYU Law School in New York City, where I met Mae again, as well as other first generation Warren Commission critics - Sylvia Meagher, Penn Jones, Ralph Schoeman and Col. Fletcher Prouty.
I attended a lecture by Prouty held in a physics conference hall, where he explained how covert intelligence operations worked, and how you had to understand these principles in order to understand what really happened at Dealey Plaza when JFK was killed.
Eventually Judge and I formed the Committee for an Open Archive, that became, along with the Assassinations Archives and Research Center (AARC) and Jim DiEugenio's outfit, the basis for the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA), that became a major watchdog organization over the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) and lasted over 20 years.
In 1992, at the urging of Jim Lesar, director of the AARC, I obtained a $3,000 grant from the Fund For Constitutional Government Investigative Journalism Project, that I used to buy a round trip ticket from Atlantic City to California and back, via Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Dallas, San Diego, Los Angeles and points in between, visiting other researchers, JFK witnesses and suspects.
I often stayed with Judge in Washington D.C. and we became Archive Associates, visiting the old National Archives in downtown DC and the new Archives II in College Park, Md., where the JFK Collection is kept.
When in Dallas one time I visited the Assassination Information Center, that was set up in a storefront on the third floor of a mall in the West End, behind the School Book Depository and Dealey Plaza. There I obtained three cassette tapes of Air Force One radio transmissions, that over the course of six months or so, I transcribed and posted at my JFKCountercoup blog.
Once when Judge and I visited the Archives II, I asked for and made a copy of what the ARRB called the "Andrews AFB Logbook for November 22, 1963," and also posted on my blog, that detailed the timing of the take off and landings of various planes, including AF1, the Cabinet Plane and the jet that brought AF Chief of Staff General LeMay back to DC in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, as he had been hunting and fishing in North Michigan and Canada.
When the reel to reel tapes of AF1 radio transmission were discovered among the effects of General Clifton, JFK's military aide, I obtained a copy from NARA and transcribed them as well, combining the longer length with what was on the cassettes that were released by the LBJ library in the mid-1970s.
From the Clifton tapes I learned the identity of two individuals, one Robert Patterson, a military officer, code named STRANGER who was in the White House Situation Room at the time of the assassination and can be heard on conversations with AF1 and the Cabinet plane.
There is also a Colonel Dorman, who identified himself as General LeMay's aide, who had an important message for LeMay, who was then enroute fo DC from Canada, but the message is not on the existing tapes.
I then learned about Ed Primeau, a Michigan Acoustics Forensic expert who agreed to combine the two existing tapes, and clean them up of static and noise so they can be heard more clearly. He also mentioned that there are many clear splices in both copies, so there is still an even longer, unedited tape out there somewhere, or it was intentionally destroyed.
I presented this clear and combined tape to the Wecht Conference in Pittsburgh during the 50th anniversary conference in 2013, and also arranged for it to be aired over WLFR - FM, the Stockton University, NJ student radio station on November 22, that year, 50 years to the hour it was originally broadcast.
Then, I really believed that by today, we would have all of the records as required by Congress under the JFK Act of 1992, and we would be much further along than we are.
I have been writing what I have learned over the years, decades, at my blogs JFKCountercoup and JFKCountercoup2, and will be putting the best of the posts together in one volume of my work, along with some of my personal narrative and an appendix - anthology of other works - news reports, magazine articles, book excerpts and transcripts of TV shows, films, movies and conference presentations that I mention in my own work and feel important to preserve in one place.
Besides collecting all of these works together, I will be continuing my research to try to answer the outstanding questions, and focus my work on areas that no one else seems to be doing. I don't want to repeat the same things over and over, nor engage in silly arguments over the acoustics, single bullet theory, Zapruder film, authenticy of photos or any of that.
Rather, instead of arguing, or focusing on who killed JFK and why - I will, to the best of my ability, address and answer the other question - How - how as JFK killed? - What was the mechanism of death, and how did those actually responsible get away with it?
I have decided to devote at least one more year to this endeavour, and will also continue some other writings I have been working on that I will fill you in on when I can.
In the meantime, I am quite somber on this 60th anniversary, as it isn't what I expected it to be, and rather than get depressed, I look forward to yet another year of continuing this quest, this great adventure that we are all involved in.
Bill Kelly
To comment on this story or this series you can contact me anytime:
billkelly3@gmail.com
609-346-0229
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