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1963, Articles, Assassination, Conspiracy, educational, History, JFK, Kennedy Assassination, Uncategorized

Happy Birthday Mr. President!!!!

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Today marks the 97th Birthday of President John F. Kennedy. Today is a day to remember a person who meant so much to so many people around the world. We spend a lot of time trying to figure out the real assassins in his murder and it is sometimes overlooked on the impact that he had on people then and still does to this day. This site is dedicated to some new and old research into his assassination and I think that on this particular day there should be no talk about that and more about the legacy of JFK. As the years have past since 1963, the world seems to forget about certain days like this and the next time the media will pay attention to remembering JFK, will be around the time of his 100th birthday. To the many researchers and admirers of John F. Kennedy this day is a day that we would like to see become a National Holiday.

The story of John F. Kennedy has been told many times over the years in the countless amounts of books and a variety of movies. What I would like to talk about today is the impact that he still has on the many Americans who lived during that time and to the young Americans who inspire to like him. We have searched for a President like him and have looked for his characteristics in all of them ever since his assassination. Almost every democrat that runs for President of The United States feels the need to plug in some sort of JFK characteristic into their campaign. For instance, the last two democrats that ran for President have tried this tactic, John Kerry and his ties to the Kennedy family, and his initials being JFK, and President Obama using his Presidential campaign and his endorsement by Caroline Kennedy to show America that Camelot would be back. To the people that remember President Kennedy in office, they remember a President that was fearless and when it came down to making a decision he would take the advise of his best advisors and make the best decision for the country. To the many Americans today who only were able to read about JFK in history books, the thing that sticks out is his inauguration speech. As students we learn the phrase “Ask not what our country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”. My children are just now learning about JFK in school and they asked me what that saying meant. My response is that JFK wanted us to take pride in our country and not let the country always be the one to take care of you, but as people what we can do for each other throughout the country.

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The idea of Camelot is something that was started 50 years ago and it is something that will carry on for another 50 years and beyond. The time of John F. Kennedy was one of hope and passion, and the country believed in our government. If you are to watch some of the press conferences and television debates of the 1960 Presidential Campaign, you will see some of the same problems we had then are the same today. But there was a belief and a hope of change, and that a President who had the passion and willingness to make the right decisions will get it right. President Kennedy was not the perfect President nor was he the perfect man. We all have our faults and weaknesses, but it is how we react in tough situations that make us who we are. We saw that in President Kennedy, and we want that today in our leaders. Sometimes we look for leaders that need to be perfect in every which way. They need to have the perfect education, perfect marriage, excellent health, in order to be a great leader, and yet JFK lacked in many of these areas and we never knew it. We saw his actions in the battlefield both in World War II and in the Oval Office and that’s what makes him one of the most beloved Presidents of all time.

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Sources:

Kelley, K. (2013, January 23). Obama and the Legacy of Camelot. .

Mimi Alford
1963, Articles, Assassination, Conspiracy, educational, JFK, Kennedy Assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, Uncategorized, Witnesses

Assassination Attempt That Went Unnoticed..

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Throughout history there have been many different assassination attempts on the life of the President of the United States. Some attempts have been successful and others go unnoticed. But when a President of the United States is assassinated and a commission is set up to investigate the assassination, why are they not looking at the other attempts on the President’s life. President Kennedy was the victim of several different assassination attempts, including one that was one month after his election. However, there was an attempt that the government never wanted the public to hear about. To no surprise it was also excluded from the final Warren Commission report delivered to President Johnson. It is important to learn about the back story of how this information got out and who leaked the information. The story titled “JFK Secret Service Guard Stepped Up” was published on October 5th, 1961 in newspapers throughout the country by syndicated columnists Robert S. Allen and Paul Scott. These two men would write about the in and outs of politics in Washington D.C. The accuracy of their stories would go unmatched for years because of the sources that these two men would use.

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Their articles were becoming so accurate that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered a wiretap at the homes of these two men. Because the information they were writing about was so classified he wanted to know who was giving them the information. The operation which fell under Project Mockingbird, in which it was discovered that the conversations that these two writers were having was with several key members inside the government. Some of these sources included 12 Senators, 6 members of Congress, staff member at the White House, Assistant Attorney General, and a member of the Vice President’s office. This also does not include the several well placed individuals the report mentions as sources for these two writers. A CIA memo that was released in 2007 describes how the Attorney General wanted this wiretap and the results of the wiretap. I have included a link to the memo at the end of this article.

So know that we know that the sources of the two writers are of value, then we can look at their articles with full confidence that they are speaking the truth. Back to the article about the failed assassination attempt on President Kennedy, this occurred sometime in late Sept. 1961 and the article was written in early October. In the article it states that before the President was getting ready to board Marine One ( Presidential Helicopter) the secret service noticed a .22 caliber bullet hole in the seat in which the President normally occupies. The secret service was trying to figure out if their was a ” mysterious sniper” according to the article. As of the printing of the article no arrests were made and they were trying to determine where the bullet came from. How can a piece of information like this go unnoticed by the Warren Commission? I know how, they never wanted to look further into the events that lead up to the assassination and only wanted to fuel their own fire. But an attempt like this should have been looked at more closely. This attempt could have been done from someone on the inside and the finding of the investigation covered up. I tried looking up more about this assassination attempt and was unable to find anything else about it. The writers of this story never go back to it in later years and it is pretty much off the radar. Considering that JFK was assassinated by a sniper, this kind of information could have helped the Warren Commission out. This story is just one of many that are out their to find, if we spend the time looking for them. The writers of this article would spend the rest of their lives under the assumption that they were being watched and finally in 1981 Robert S. Allen took his own life. Paul Scott would go on to live a long life, but not without worrying about the government watching him and his family. The people that knew too much and were trying to tell us the stories inside of Washington D.C, somehow found themselves in a situation they could not get out of, and along the line they were finding out information they should not have known in the first place.

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Sources:

Shapira, I. (2013, March 2). Long ago wire tap inspires a battle with the cia for more information. Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/long-ago-wiretap-inspires-a-battle-with-the-cia-for-more-information/2013/03/02/8ebaa924-77b0-11e2-aa12-e6cf1d31106b_story.html

Project Mockingbird- http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/607427/cia-report-on-project-mockingbird.pdf

Flickr- https://www.flickr.com/photos/giarc80/11003895165/in/set-72157637958103875

1963, Articles, Assassination, Conspiracy, educational, History, JFK, Kennedy Assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, Oswald, Uncategorized, Witnesses

Digging Deeper into the JFK Assassination.

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Well, it has been a while since my last posting because of a much needed job promotion and now that I am finally settled in, its time to get back to the research. In the last post I wrote, I mentioned a company by the name of Acme Building Maintenance. This company was a janitorial company that specialized in cleaning the high rises of downtown Dallas. The company was well known in the city, and over 200 companies in downtown Dallas used them as their primary cleaning service. The company the was founded in 1920 by Frank C. Jones was also the  cleaning service provider of The Texas School Book Depository.

In early Secret Service reports, the company is mentioned a few times. In his statement Roy Truly mentions that a cleaning service comes in after everyone has left the building and they have keys to the building for that reason. Seems odd that I was only able to find this company mentioned only a few times and none of which seems to be investigated really well. I have spent a few months looking into this company and learning more about their history and how they simply just disappeared.

The founder of the company Frank C. Jones wanted to start a company that would be able to not only clean buildings but also the streets of downtown Dallas. A resident himself of the city, the company followed his vision of a cleaner Dallas throughout the next several decades. In articles published in the Dallas Morning News, the company is featured several times about how they go about their business and how they are able to maintain low costs. The names of the top executives are mentioned which include Milt Thomas, Paul Clark, Robert Whitener, and Buck Butler. The company was located at 1901 Laws Street, Dallas Texas ( It has since been demolished).

What has troubled me while doing research on this company, is the fact that it simply disappeared. A company that had been around for 40 years suddenly went away, and any files on the company seemed to have gone with them. During my research, the Secretary of State of Texas, informed me that it seems that this company never existed because they had no information on it. I had sent several letters to the secretary of state, and they thought I had the name wrong. I emailed pictures of news articles that I had, and they told me to contact different organizations. The next step to finding out more about the company would be the Historical Society of both the State of Texas and the Dallas County Historical Society. Nothing to be found was what I was told. Again, I showed them the articles and they had nothing in their files.  The company was featured in a Dallas Chamber of Commerce pamphlet in the early 1960’s and yet when I tried to get information about the company, they had nothing.

Since these organizations claim that this company did not exist, I just kept digging away. I found an article from Sept 1969 that showed the company was bought out by CT (Chemtech) Corporation of Dallas. I keep finding articles about this company, but when I want to get more information about them, I am stopped dead in my tracks. When I was able to get a phone number of the business ( RI 2-7660), I went back to the Chamber of Commerce to see if that would help with providing me more information. Nothing. Trying to find out information about Frank C. Jones is just as hard as to finding out how much money is kept at Fort Knox. No one wants to tell you, but there are people that know something. A company that existed and was successful as the Acme Building Maintenance Company would leave behind some sort of trail, and yet this company seems to have been taken off the grid.

The keys to the Texas School Book Depository were in the hands of the employees of the Acme Building Maintenance Company and yet not one employee was interviewed by either the Dallas Police, or the Warren Commission. The company is only mentioned in a few reports that seem to show just how easy it was to get into the building before the assassination. As I mentioned before, I believe that employees of this company were able to get into the building the night before the assassination and set up the snipers perch. We do know that workers on the sixth floor were installing new flooring, but yet no of them mention about moving those boxes by the southeast corner window. There was no need, these boxes were set up the night before with Oswald’s gun tucked away, awaiting for the police to find it.

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1963, Articles, Assassination, Conspiracy, History, JFK, Kennedy Assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, Oswald, Uncategorized, Witnesses

Who Had Keys to The Texas School Book Depository..

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For many JFK assassination researchers, the daunting task of going through the many files that are available to them can be very challenging  at times. However, their comes a time when you find that one thing in the files that makes you just go “all in” on it. I came across that file about two months ago, and over the course of the next few posts I will go more in depth with it. The file that I found was only in a couple of reports that I have seen in the many hours of looking through them. It involved a company named the Acme Building & Maintenance Company. Not familiar with it? Neither was I, and in the report I found some key things that should have been investigated further by the Warren Commission.

The report which was in the file of Roy Truly ( TSBD Supervisor), showed in one of the paragraphs about a cleaning company that would come in each and every night and work inside of The Texas School Book Depository. The cleaning company which is named in the file as Acme Building & Maintenance would have 2 employees come into the building after hours and work inside of the building alone until about 12:00 in the morning.  The most alarming part about the paragraph was that the Acme Building & Maintenance Company had two employees who had a key to the Texas School Book Depository.

Acme Building and Maintenance Roy TrulyAcme Building and Maintenance

So here we have a company that has access to the TSBD after every employee of the warehouse is gone for the day. In looking through various files I can not find anywhere that the Warren Commission looked into this matter. We know that the Warren Commission refused to look at anything other than what would benefit their own version of what happened that day. The company which was located at 1901 Laws Street in Dallas, was one of the leading cleaning companies in the city. The Texas School Book Depository was a fairly new account and to be able to have access to the building at this time would benefit any potential assassin. The names of the employees who has keys are not listed in the report, and this should have been of some concern to law enforcement looking into the assassination. At no time did any of the officials look  into this matter.

At any time during the night someone could have planted the gun that was found on the sixth floor. This would have given the conspirators plenty of time to set up the boxes without the worry about anyone seeing them up there. At no time does anyone see Oswald stacking boxes on the sixth floor near the southeast corner. Some of the fingerprints found on the cartons of boxes did not match those that were employees of the Texas School Book Depository. The employees who would have had access to those particular cartons were not found anywhere on them. The fingerprints that were found were not matched up to anyone who may have worked for the Acme Building & Maintenance Company during this time.

What I found in this file about the Acme Building & Maintenance Company may not be new to some, but for me it was something that I was not aware of. It sparked a new interest as to who else might have had keys and who were the ones handing out the keys to the building. A simple paragraph that seems to have been forgotten about in the many pages of the JFK assassination files. In the coming weeks I will be posting about the owner of the Acme Building & Maintenance Company and how the company completely went away and the location of the company is now a parking lot.

Sources:

Roy truly. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://research.archives.gov/description/7461227

1963, Articles, Assassination, Conspiracy, educational, History, JFK, Kennedy Assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, Oswald, Uncategorized, Witnesses

Oswald Seen at Rifle Range By Many Witnesses..

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In a post that I put together a few weeks ago, I talked briefly about a rifle range that Lee Harvey Oswald was seen at. During the course of November, Lee Harvey Oswald is seen by witnesses at the SportsDome Rifle Range in Irving.  As many as 9 witnesses are able to place Oswald at this location on several different dates in the month of November. To some people this may not seem too important because they believe that Oswald did not shoot the rifle on November 22nd, 1963. There is evidence that points to the paraffin tests that conclude that Oswald only had residue from a pistol on his hands that day and that he did not fire that rifle. I am with the opinion that he may not have shot the rifle on that day but he did shoot it on other days in that month. The witnesses not only saw Oswald, but they saw him with other people as well. These other individuals that were seen with Oswald could have been key witnesses had the Warren Commission not left them out.

The story of the SportsDome Rifle Range, which is owned and operated by Floyd Davis and his wife , could be a link to other individuals involved in the assassination. The Warren Commission in their report put the rifle range story into their “rumors and speculation” part of the report. They only mention Oswald practicing with the rifle with his brother during a hunting trip. So why would they want to leave the rifle range out? It would seem to fit their intention of putting Oswald behind the trigger on November 22nd, but yet they choose to leave out these witnesses. It is simple, the witnesses at the rifle range saw Lee Harvey Oswald, but he was not alone. The rifle range was opened to the public towards the end of October 1963, and during the time before the assassination, Oswald is seen at least 3 different times at this rifle range.

On November 16th, 1963, Dr. Homer Wood and his 12-year-old son Sterling were at the SportsDome Rifle range when they noticed an individual firing a rifle in the booth next to them. It seemed to them that he was acting strange. The individual in the booth next to them was firing his weapon and catching the shell casings as they were being ejected from the weapon. This caught the attention of the son, who then started to watch this individual more. According to the son, the individual who looked identical to Oswald according to their statements, was firing his weapon and the weapon would have a spark come from the rifle after each shot. An important clue, because no one in Dealey Plaza who looked up at the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository  noticed any sparks coming from the window. So, if this was Oswald using his gun at the rifle range, then the gun seen by others during the assassination would have noticed these sparks. No sparks were reported by any of the witnesses in Dealey Plaza. These two witnesses noticed someone was with Oswald at the time he was at the rifle range, and they describe this person to be about 6 ft. tall, weighing anywhere from about 220-240 pounds. There is no indication that the Dallas Police ever tried looking for this man. This same description of the individual with Oswald was given by others who also saw both of these men at the rifle range together.

Another witness to Lee Harvey Oswald being at the SportsDome Rifle range was Garland Slack. This individual is interesting because of not only him seeing Oswald at the rifle range, he was also present in Dealey Plaza when the motorcade came by. According to the statement given by Mr. Slack, he had an incident with the man he later identified as Lee Harvey Oswald. According to Mr. Slack, he got into a slight argument with Oswald because of him shooting at Mr. Slack’s target. There were some words exchanged by the two men, and eventually Oswald left the rifle range without further incident. According to his statement, Mr. Slack kept the target paper that Oswald was shooting at the day of the incident, and that he handed it over to police.  On November 22nd, 1963, Garland Slack is standing near the intersection of Houston and Elm Street when the Presidential motorcade goes by. He is unable to see the President, as the crowds had pushed him too far back. As the motorcade made the turn onto Elm, he heard the first shot which he thought came from the Triple Underpass. When the third shot went off, he was more convinced that some of the shots came from the depository. It is interesting to note, how a man who claims he saw Oswald at the rifle range just a few days before, is able to be in the prime location of the assassination. The statements that Mr. Slack gives, states that he was at the rifle range November 9th, 10th, and 17th. Again, he mentions that Oswald is not alone at the rifle range when he sees him. In some of his statements, Mr. Slack mentions that Oswald was being driven to the rifle range by a man named “Frazier”. The Warren Commission decides that this does not fit their story too well, and they decide to leave out these witnesses in the final report.

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Garland Slack 3

The decision to not further investigate the individual who was seen with Oswald at the rifle range, further fuels speculation that others were involved. The Warren Commission could have used these witnesses to back up their story of Oswald using the rifle before the assassination, but instead they decided to leave it out, because of the mention of others with Oswald at the time. Another witness at the rifle range is Malcolm Price. In his statements he claims that he helped sight the scope on Oswald’s rifle, and that Oswald tried out the new scope right in front of him. Their are lots of these types of stories and not all of them may be true, but when you have witnesses that are all seeing the same thing, then maybe these types of things should have been looked into further. The rifle range story is just one of many stories that were never fully told by the Warren Commission. The description of the man seen with Oswald on these dates, fits the description of a man walking in Dallas with a rifle case, on the morning of November 22nd, 1963.

Sources:

Dallas (Tex.). Police Dept.. [Information Regarding Oswald’s Firing His Rifle on the Sporting Gun Range #1], Text, December 2, 1963; digital images, (http://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth337276/ : accessed January 13, 2014), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, http://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Municipal Archives , Dallas, Texas.

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1963, Articles, Assassination, Conspiracy, educational, History, JFK, Kennedy Assassination, LBJ, Oswald, Uncategorized

Who do we blame for JFK’s Assassination?

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For many people, the answer to who was involved in the killing of President John F. Kennedy stems from either years of research or is formed from an opinion based on everything they have heard from the media.  The answer is not simple and it is something that still has not been answered completely.  There are those that want to believe that Oswald acted alone in this and they have every right to that opinion.  Then, there are those that believe that one man could not have planned and executed this crime in front of hundreds of people.  I, for one, believe that Oswald could not have done this by himself and that others were behind this assassination.  I have been reading books about the assassination since I was a kid and it seems that I still find new and interesting things in each of these readings. For example, I recently came across a book that shows some motive as to why someone would want JFK killed.

Dallas 2013 005Dallas 2013 006

The book, which I found at a local flea market, is titled “Robert F. Kennedy: Assistant President”.  The title of the book says it all for me.  The authorclearly believes that RFK had more influence inside the government than the Vice President of the United States.  My own daughter (who is 12) noticed the title and asked me if Robert Kennedy was the Vice President and why they would title the book that way.  The book, which was published in 1962, shows how RFK fell into the position of Attorney General.  At the time, it received reviews from Look magazine and U.S News and World Report which described RFK as “the man  who is second only to the President in power and influence”.  Now, put yourself in the shoes of Lyndon Baines Johnson. This is a man that, at one time, was the most powerful man in the Senate, only to find himself a few years later, playing second fiddle to a young, inexperienced lawyer who happened to be the President’s brother.  How can he compete with that?  The answer to that question is simple.  He could not.  So, it would seem to me that publications like this would serve as a means of motive.

 

In most crimes, there has to be a motive involved for someone to commit a crime.  Whether it is to get back at someone or maybe even to get ahead in some faction.  I am not saying that Johnson was the man behind the Kennedy assassination nor am I denying his possible involvement in it.  I am simply showing those that are interested a possible means of motive.  Here we have a book, published in 1962, that refers to Robert Kennedy as the Assistant President.  The author goes into detail about decisions that he helps make on a daily basis and the trips around the world he takes during his first couple of years as Attorney General.  These feelings that Johnson harbored towards RFK would carry on even after the assassination and would last until RFK himself was assassinated in 1968.  Lyndon Johnson would go on to become President after the assassination of JFK, finally attaining the power that he so desperately wanted.  It could be possible that Lyndon Johnson saw books like this and became so angered by them that he felt he had to do something.  All I know is that questions still remain about the assassination.  Maybe finding little clues like this book could help those that feel they have the answer.

Sources:

Gordon, G. (1962). Robert F.Kennedy Assistant President. Derby, Connecticut: Monarch Books, Inc.

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