Category Archives: 1960’s

Just to clarify the JFK LBJ thing

Posted on September 3, 2013 by | 10 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

Jeanne told me on the phone last night she was surprised by my several references to LBJ arranging for the death of JFK.  “I didn’t think you believed in conspiracies, for the most part.”

And for the most part she’s right.  I don’t believe human beings are honest enough and consistent enough to pull off successful conspiracies over the long haul.  Someone’s going to let the cat out of the bag.  And I think the cat has been coming out of the bag about the Kennedy assassination gradually for a considerable while.

I don’t know or care who was directly responsible for the Dallas shooting.  To me, JFK was just another US President, no better, no worse than the last several.  I’m not offended, not in any way exercized by the fact someone offed him.

But I do believe there’s a fair body of evidence LBJ knew ahead of time Kennedy was going to be killed.  And he knew who knew everything else about it.  Other than that he mightn’t have been involved, beyond giving it his tacit approval.

The LBJ Library in Austin has the tapes of all the White House LBJ telephone conversations of the time.  Here’s a conversation between LBJ and J Edgar Hoover, FBI Director, shortly after the Dallas event.  LBJ starts by grilling Hoover about why his friend John Connally, Governor of Texas, got a bullet.  Then he goes on to discuss how the investigation into the assassination can be kept small.

LBJ TAPES: Kennedy Assassination 1 (J. Edgar Hoover) .
http://youtu.be/4ZWERQevzms

Seems to me it’s clear that Hoover knew exactly who did the shooting and what the shooter intended to hit.  And that LBJ knew that Hoover knew.

The people who upload YouTube videos frequently intend to use the videos to help watchers interpret them as the uploaders think they should.  I believe this has happened with a number of the Kennedy assassination YouTube videos.  For instance, I don’t believe LBJ’s mistress knew whether LBJ engineered the killing of JFK.  But I believe it’s clear from what she describes that LBJ knew about the plans to kill Kennedy before it happened.

LBJ’s Mistress Blows Whistle On JFK Assassination .http://youtu.be/79lOKs0Kr_Y

Again, I don’t think this means LBJ told anyone to kill Kennedy.  He might just have tacitly approved of them doing it and agreed to keep his mouth shut.

By one of those strange coincidences of history, Richard Nixon, a man who hated Kennedy as much as anyone alive at the time, happened to have been in Dallas for a couple of days when Kennedy came to town.

November 21, 1963 – Richard M. Nixon in Dallas, Texas .
http://youtu.be/UkeCQWk9ID8

Nixon evidently believed there was a middling good chance LBJ had Kennedy shot, as he joked years later.

NIXON jokes about LBJ killing JFK .
http://youtu.be/OJIb73SPzkE

E. Howard Hunt, one of the guys who went to prison for the Watergate affair, admitted on his death bed he’d been involved in the Kennedy killing and named others.

E. Howard Hunt Outs Lyndon Johnson in JFK Assassination Plot
http://youtu.be/bD4611qW6R8

This one’s hokey and unreliable, but I think at least it can be said RFK probably believed LBJ had John Kennedy killed.

RFK to Johnson: “Why did you kill you have my brother killed
http://youtu.be/zzWNDPx4Pm0

The conversation you hear on tape isn’t about LBJ, JFK, though.  It’s about Hoover investigating RFK and whether RJK is trying to violently overthrow LBJ and the US Government by force.

Lyndon Johnson Admits To Walter Cronkite That He Killed Kennedy .
http://youtu.be/xd1wuXrVPjo

This Walter Cronkite interview with LBJ years later is probably the strongest testimony that LBJ didn’t actually give the orders for the killing.  But that he thoroughly believed there was a conspiracy involved involving several others.

As I’ve said, I don’t think it matters who was behind the Kennedy killing.  Nor why they did it.  But I don’t blame LBJ for being pissed Connally got shot with JFK.  Connally was still alive, knew a lot about LBJ and was able to talk.  LBJ needed to be able to assure Connelly it was an accident, him getting hit.

John Connally’s first interview after 11/22/63
http://youtu.be/cP04_lGjkO0

Collateral damages, no harm intended.  “Sorry old buddy.  Someone screwed up.”

And 50 years later, who the hell cares?  Human beings make lousy conspirators.  People eventually talk.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1960's, America, Government, History, Texas

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John F. Kennedy and Barbie go to Boston – 1962 – The rest of the story

Posted on September 2, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

I promised the other day that I’d relate one more precious memory of John and Jackie Kennedy’s Boston adventure. 

A better way – Getting new royalty when the President croaks

So here it is.

All those men lined up along Boylston Street, including Julio, Tonyand I were still mesmerized by the thoughts of whether Jackie Kennedy would be an inspired bed partner.  The street between the police cordons was vacant for a moment, when suddenly the sound of a bell clanging brought our attention back.

Hell bent down empty Boylston came a vehicle pulling an open trailer.  A guy was on the back of the trailer ringing a huge bell mounted there, big bell.  Church bell sized, rather than locomotive sized.  On the side of the trailer was a huge sign, “KRUSHCHEV SAYS, ‘WE WILL BURY YOU!”

They zipped past us, hung a hard left around Boston Plaza, and swung in behind the emptying motorcade in front of the Plaza Hotel.  Still ringing that damned bell.  [Likely the granddaddy of the patriots of today, I’m thinking by hindsight.]

Friends and readers, this whole thing was not in keeping with the high standards Boston wanted in their welcoming Ken and Barbie to town.  Every cop on Boylston forgot about that yellow tape and ran across Boston Plaza, pulling their billy clubs out as they ran.  Wasn’t any time at all before that trailer was surrounded by Boston’s finest and all an observer could see was the backs of cops and a forest of billy clubs rising and falling.

They weren’t aiming for that bell, either.  Didn’t hear it clang one single time after the first club rose and fell.

But you’ve got to admit the guy had imagination and class.  A freaking liberty bell!  You surely don’t see that anymore.  All these teapartying occupiers just go around telling one another inane BS about what they think about guns and abortion and Wall Street.

If that guy with the liberty bell lived through the next five minutes after the cops got him, he might be still alive.  He could teach these modern jerks a thing or two about how to deliver messages to the Kens and Barbies.

Having some Secret Service or Homeland Security thug put a rifle bullet through your face before the cops arrived with mace and 20,000 volt non-lethal zappers to finish you off ought not deter anyone from a little display of class and imagination.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1960's, America, Government, Human Behavior, Politics

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Farnham’s Freehold, by Robert A. Heinlein 1964

Posted on August 6, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Hi readers.  Here’s another one of those old early-days RAH tomes to give you some smiles, some anachronisms to feel smug about, and a couple of truly interesting things to think about.

The first part of the book is all the usual suspects, family with a bomb shelter before the bombs fall, etc.  If you haven’t read a thousand others, might as well get it done  with this one, I reckons.

But then the bombs hit, one of them dead-center.  Spang blows Farnham and his family into sometime a longish while in the future, same spot.  Then the fun starts.

The big powers destroyed themselves and most of the other non-ethnic places full of advanced white people.  So when Farnham and his white family come up for air it isn’t long before they’re discovered by the meek who inherited the earth.  Africans, mainly, in this area.  A sort of do-it-yourself African empire sitting atop the ruins of the US.

Sure, some white people survived.  Most have been adopted as slaves in a manner similar to the way the Ottomans treated captured Europeans during an earlier time.  Bred the good ones for physical and mental traits, castrated the others and put them to work.  Kept a lot of females for breeding stock, too.

So once they’re captured, Farnham and his family are forced to adapt themselves to a lifestyle most white people have spent a lot more generations becoming unaccustomed to than was good for them.  Farnham’s wife lucks into being the paramour of one of the black rulers, and being a 20th Century mom, wants her son with her.  But him being a male, her being part of the harem, he’s got to be castrated first.  Which gives her pause, but only momentarily.

And so on.

Lots of laughs in this book.  A truly fun read.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1960's, Adventure, America, Book Reviews, Books, Human Behavior

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The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein circa 1966

Posted on July 27, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by.

Just when you think the early work of RAH is bogging itself down in frozen-in-time anachronisms he drops a mickey into your martini.  Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one such.

Suddenly he’s taking a close look at political revolutions, at the institutions of marriage, at the relationships between men and women [and why they become what they become], why revolutions don’t work usually, and how to prevent them from becoming what revolutions invariably become.  He throws in a quickie about how you can always, always come out ahead betting the horses.  And an imaginary penal colony on the moon, several generations later when the prisoners are only a tiny percentage of a population composed mainly of the descendants of prisoners.

A society where males outnumber females 10 to 1, where the earth is on the brink of starvation and depends heavily on the labors of the Luna population for wheat production, crops catapulted to the earth surface to land in the Indian Ocean.  Depleting inevitably the water-ice reservoirs on the moon with no attempt to replace, even pay for the labors of folks who physically will never be able to ‘return’ to earth.

This was a great read in 1966, the first time I read it.  2013 I read it again, and aside from pickypickypicky details, it’s still a great read. 

Sheeze, catapults on the moon hurling rocks down the gravity well turning out the equivalents of H-bomb explosions after the earth governments dig in their heels and bomb moon colonies as an alternative to replacing the water required to grow the wheat.  A computer gone intelligent.  Marriages lasting 150 years through dozens of multiple-husbands and wives, always being replaced when one dies. 

I’d rank it one hell of a lot better than Stranger in a Strange Land.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1960's, 2013, Book Reviews, Books, Government, Human Behavior, Police, Politics

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Ever wondered who the Vietcong were?

Posted on July 10, 2013 by | 22 comments
Eddie Adams

Eddie Adams photo 1968

Last night I came across a thrift store book I’d never gotten around to reading.  One of those ‘last resort’ books set aside again and again.  A backup for a time when I would be desperate for anything besides the labels on sardine cans.

But as I thumbed through it I was abruptly captured.   When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from War to Peace, by Le Ly Hayslip.

Here’s a woman born in 1949 in a Vietcong controlled village near Danang where her family’s spent the previous generations fighting, first the French, then the Japanese, then the French again.  As a small child she watches relatives and neighbors in her village raped and slaughtered by French mercenaries.  Then:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ly_Hayslip

“Hayslip was born in Ky La, now Xa Hao Qui, a small town in central Vietnam just south of Da Nang. She was the sixth and youngest child born to farmers. American helicopters landed in her village when she was 12 years old. At the age of 14, she endured torture in a South Vietnamese government prison for “revolutionary sympathies”. After being released, she had fallen under suspicion of being a government spy, and was sentenced to death but instead raped by two Viet Cong soldiers.[2]

“She fled to Saigon, where she and her mother worked as housekeepers for a wealthy Vietnamese family, but this position ended after Hayslip’s affair with her employer and subsequent pregnancy. Hayslip and her mother fled to Da Nang. During this time, Hayslip supported both her mother and an infant son, Hung (whom she would later rename Jimmy), while unmarried and working in the black market, as an occasional drug courier and, once, as a prostitute.

“She worked for a short period of time as a nurse assistant in a Da Nang hospital and began dating Americans. She had several disastrous, heartbreaking affairs before meeting and marrying an American civilian contractor named Ed Munro in 1969. Although he was more than twice her age, she had another son with him, Thomas. The following year Hayslip moved to San Diego, California, to join him, and briefly supported her family as a homemaker. In 1973, he died of emphysema, leaving Le Ly a widow at age 24.

“In 1974 she married Dennis Hayslip. Her second marriage, however, was not a happy one. Dennis was a heavy drinker, clinically depressed and full of rage. Her third and youngest son, Alan, was fathered by Dennis and born on her 26th birthday. The couple filed for divorce in 1982 after Dennis committed domestic violence. Shortly thereafter, he was found dead in a parked van outside a school building. He had established a trust fund, however, that left his wife with some money, and he had insurance that paid off the mortgage of the house.”

So here’s a woman, a real, no-shit Vietcong, tortured by the South Vietnamese, suspected of being a traitor by the Vietcong and sentenced to death, raped and escaped.  Married a US civilian and became a US citizen.

Probably a person couldn’t be more caught-in-between from birth than she was.  Surrounded by hundreds, thousands of other peasants caught in-between.  Trying to dodge the steamrollers of forces they didn’t understand, South Vietnamese and US rifles pointed at them daytimes, Vietcong rifles pointed at them nights.

Yep, this lady is one of the people the guys with Vietnam Veteran caps walking around mining for praise and ‘Thank you,” spent their tours in Vietnam trying to kill.

Damned book ought to be required reading for anyone buying a SUPPORT OUR TROOPS sticker.  Because at a foundation level, SUPPORT OUR TROOPS isn’t about the troops.  It’s about people who are being defined as ‘the enemy’ those troops are going to do everything in their power to ruin the lives of.

People in US government who couldn’t locate the place on the map defining one side as ‘the enemy’ and the other side as ‘friends’.

Old Jules

Grandkid:  Granpaw, what did you do in the Vietnam War?

Old Vet:  I helped Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon kill a lot of people who didn’t need killing, helped destroy a country that didn’t need destroying, helped get a lot of GIs killed and maimed in the process.  And I’m damned proud I did.

Grandkid:  Oh wow!  Thank you Grandpaw!

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Posted in 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, 2013, America, Book Reviews, Books, Government, History, Human Behavior, Military, US Army

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The nightmares of acceptance

Posted on July 7, 2013 by | 22 comments

high water

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Probably I was four years old, must have been 1947, I was a kid with a recurring nightmare.  I was walking along a raised roadway with my mom, my granddad, and my two sisters.  A deep gravel pit reached alongside the road and my feet slipped, I fell and began sliding into the pit screaming for help.  None of them looked around, none paused, they all just kept walking and I kept sliding and screaming until I’d wake.

With all these decades of hindsight I find that dream of a four-year-old amazing.  I had no business knowing that much about people, about life, about my particular gene-pool at that age. 

At the time my mom was between marriages and we were living in Causey, New Mexico in a two-room shack with no running water, an outdoor toilet, maybe no electricity, though we might have had electricity.  I can’t recall.  My granddad’s presence in the area was the only thing to draw us there.  My mom was doing anything, seamstress work, pulling cotton, trying to operate a miniscule variety store in the house to earn a living. 

A deeply troubled young woman with three kids and almost certainly more nightmares of her own to keep her company than anyone purely needs.  Her financial woes gradually improved when she married again, but my thought is her mental processes turned concurrently to lies and manipulation.  Maybe they’d never been otherwise.

Such a woman!  I don’t believe my sisters ever recovered from the experience of having her for a mother, of always being caught in the vice of ‘love your mother’ and that mother being a destructive, master manipulative sociopath.  I believe I did recover, but it’s just me believing it.  I do know that when she died a couple of years back and I heard the news I felt nothing but a sense of deep relief, of peace.

I suppose it was the neighbor got me thinking of this.  He came down bringing a cup of expensive coffee before dusk.  As we sat he told me about some trial in Florida of a man who killed someone who was beating him up in a parking lot.  An angry tale of violence and racial politics and justice.

As he described it to me I remembered something else he’d told me a while back, off-hand and matter-of-fact, about how his father had murdered two, maybe three people he [the neighbor] knew of.  One a whiskey salesman who didn’t get his purchases for the bar he operated delivered.  Beat him to death on the sidewalk in front of his bar.  Another salesman he beat badly might have lived, might have died.  I can’t recall for certain because when I heard the story I was still digesting the first salesman.

The next homicide by his father he was sure of involved a Mexican [or at least a Hispanic] who did farm work.  Evidently screwed up a switch on an irrigation pump.  That night the neighbor says the father took his .22 pistol and went out somewhere.  The next day the Mexican farm worker was found dead on the railroad tracks shot nine times with a .22, then run over by a train.

The jokes around town proclaimed it to be the most elaborate suicide ever.

When he told me this story it didn’t include any value judgements, no overtones, no repudiation, no anger of the sort contained in the story of the trial in Florida.

I suppose an infinite number of monkeys pounding an infinite number of typewriters will indeed eventually write the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as someone claimed.  I’ve seen enough families and enough parenting this lifetime to accept that some families and some parenting must fall within the ‘normal’ part of the bell-shaped curve.

But to go a step further and suggest there’s enough ‘normal’ floating around among the father and mother components to celebrate seems to me to be a possible overstatement.  I count myself lucky my nightmares were only my own.  When Bobby Dylan’s song offered to let me be in his dream if I’d let him be in mine I was never tempted.  Still ain’t.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, 2013, Adventure, America, Human Behavior, Parents, Relationships

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Hungry for heroes? Find a thief, a robber, a killer, or an aristocrat

Posted on June 28, 2013 by | 11 comments

 frank and jesse james

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

I was thinking last night before I dozed off about what TV, movies and fiction have done for us that reality couldn’t.  I concluded it all boils down to mythology and self definition.  An attempt to bring little guys into a larger picture where, in fact, they don’t exist.

Consider this:  Can you name a single person involved in the American Revolution below the rank of Colonel other than Paul Revere?  Anyone between then and the War of 1812? 

From then until the Mexican War you might recall Nat Turner and his brief slave rebellion, or Davy Crockett, Travis, Sam Houston, et al.  The mountain men and the fur traders.  Meriwether Lewis and Clark, the Kit Carsons, Bridgers, the Coulters and Joe Meeks.  The wild and wooly.

And all the names from the lower paygrades you might recall from the Mexican War are there because they were colonels and higher during the Civil War.

Follow it right on through from then until the Wars and whatever else is happening today.  Where the hell are the lower-paygrade heroes?

Younger, Cole & James left to right

Well, the fact is, they were out there at the time.  They were the outlaws, the killers, the people most successful at taking what didn’t belong to them away from the people it belonged to.  The James Gang, the Daltons, Butch and Sundance, Billy the wossname, Kid, the Youngers.  Buffalo Bill, wiping a species off the face of the continent so’s the trains wouldn’t be troubled by them and cow men could use the land for cows.  Masterson, the Earps, Hickok.  Steely-eyed killers.

The US needed the genre fiction, the film industry and television to clean up history.  The country needed common people out there getting massacred by Apache, Lakota, Comanche, people with names.  People below the rank of colonel with names that weren’t John Jacob Astor and weren’t just getting filthy rich and powerful from it all.

So you want the heroes of the west today?  Well, there’s John Wayne.  Henry Fonda.  Steve McQueen.  Jeff Chandler on the generic Indian side.  Burt Lancaster.  Gary Cooper. 

All of whom also, by coincidence, became the heroes of all the other wars the US fought.  Became the common men of history where none existed before.  Winning the west from the people who owned it, whupping the Germans and Japanese, the Vietcong and NVA, the Chinese and North Koreans. 

All those heroes, frequently below the paygrade of colonel, helping us to understand our great heritage.  Because, after all, our heroes define us in ways we’d be too modest to define ourselves.  Most of us ain’t all that successful at taking shit that doesn’t belong to us, individually.

At least those of us who never got higher than the rank of major.  The aristocratic dynasties went to Washington but the heroes all came out of Hollywood.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, 2013, America, Government, History, Human Behavior, Military, Native American, Native Americans

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Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac

Posted on June 8, 2013 by | 2 comments

Been feeling the urge most of the day to read Cyrano de Bergerac again.  Dug around in piles and boxes of books trying to find it and eventually gave up the ghost.  Searched gutenberg.org and found they have a free download of it.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1254

Heck, everything else being equal I wouldn’t mind seeing the movie again.  Jose Ferrer did a great job of capturing the spirit of the book.  I still recall his ‘nose speech’ from seeing the movie as a kid.  The movie was black and white in those days.  Somewhere color slipped in on some of the YouTube versions.

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Posted in 1950's, 1960's, America, Books, Movies

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Learning handy skills while defending the US

Posted on June 4, 2013 by | 11 comments

1stcav2

When I joined the US Army in 1961 it had a lot of attractions for a young man of 17.  First off, it didn’t involve going to work in a moly mine in Questa, New Mexico.  Secondly, it was the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and I naturally hoped I’d get an opportunity to kill me some young Russians to defend this country.  Thirdly, the recruiter promised they’d teach me some skills I’d find useful in civilian life.

Eventually I learned that moly mine mightn’t have been a bad idea.  Never got to kill me any Russians, neither.  Never defended this country worth nuthun.  And thirdly, the only skill I learned that might have helped me as a civilian was how to kill a man by hitting him in the face with an entrenching tool.  A lot of years have passed since then, but I’m still hoping to put that entrenching tool thing to use.

Fact is, that like the US troops who served in WWI, the Spanish American War, the Mexican War, and all the US Army who fought the Apache, the Comanche, the Cheyenne along with dozens of other tribes, we were not ‘defending’ this country.  Until WWII a person would have to go back to the Civil War and include the soldiers fighting for the Confederacy to locate someone defending his country.

Well, I suppose you could say the Mexican soldiers who fought against the US in the Mexican War were defending their country.  And the Apache was defending his, and so on.

But those serving in the US Army were doing something else, entirely.

Care to guess what it was?

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Posted in 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, America, History, Human Behavior, Military, Native American, Native Americans

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Kings, Stings, Forgotten Stinks, Sungs and Stungs

Posted on September 1, 2012 by | 12 comments

Thanks, Mr. President
For all the things you’ve done
The battles that you’ve won
The way you deal with U.S. Steel
And our problems by the ton
We thank you so much

Before they decompose in the grader ditch.

Honest! It just fell!

The ugly?

A touch of class

That gall bladder used to be right THERE.

Mexican Standoff in Chinese

Tanked in China

A sobering night for Ted Kennedy, but Mary Jo couldn’t swim. He bounced back, though not so high as previously expected. She didn’t.

Tanked in Martha’s Vineyard

The song has ended but the malady lingers on

Tanked elsewhere.

When Cuba still seemed nearby

The Last Roundup

Who ARE these guys?

Party animals

Hi! I’m king.

El Guapo meets Godzilla

Last one on’s a rotten egg

The Presidential War’s over!  This helicopter’s destination is Panama, Grenada, El Salvadore, Kuwait, Iraq, last stop in Afghanistan!  Show your tickets.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, 1980's, 1990's, 2012, Adventure, History, Politics

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