JFK - THE SITTING DUCK IN DALLAS

THE NOT-SO-SECRET SERVICE: AGENCY TALES …

(Waterville, OR: Trine Day, c2017)

BY VINCENT MICHAEL PALAMARA

Rev. by Hugh Murray

This is a difficult book to read, literally and figuratively. The author includes many clippings and articles from old newspapers, but the black print (at times blurred) on the seasoned columns can be impossible to decipher. Palamara also includes pages listing Secret Service Agents assigned to various missions: p. 61, 113-15, 157-59, 173-74. These lists should have been reduced to footnotes or included in an appendix, not in the text unless the purpose is to pad out a 200-page volume. The quotation by Pres. Truman that the Secret Service is the only boss that the President of the US has to obey is repeated several times (28, 29, 58), but the repetition is justified to stress to the reader the importance of this little-known reality.

What is positive about this book is that Palamara's research makes it abundantly clear that the Secret Service procedures normally followed elsewhere were not followed in Dallas. Reviewing reports, supplemented with photographs, of the motorcades going back to Franklin Roosevelt, the evidence is conclusive. Agents might place snipers atop tall building along the route of a president's motorcade. Along the route, buildings would be cleared of enemies of the president, or any other possible crank or violent person. If the Secret Service did not have sufficient men for this, they would be supplemented by local police or other agencies. Plainclothes officers might mingle with the crowds. If the president's limo were moving fast, it might be alone in the caravan, but when it slowed, motorcyclists would be beside and behind the limo, and on older cars, on the running board. Recent models had a place for agents to stand on the back of the limo, but some ran along side of the car. Palamara provides the old clippings to clinch his argument about what normal procedures were, and these were operative for FDR, Truman, Ike, and Kennedy. They were the procedures even for Kennedy's trip to Tampa of 18 November 1963.

In Dallas, there were no marksmen atop buildings, and the buildings were not purged of potential threats, and as the limo slowed down for the turns and deep turn in Dealy Plaza, there were no cyclists beside the limo, no agents running along with it or standing on the back of the President's vehicle. Palamara notes that an FBI informant on 9 November 1963 had taped Joseph Milteer when he spoke someone shooting Pres. Kennedy with a high-powered rifle from a tall building, and then having the murder quickly blamed on a patsy. Milteer was not questioned further at that time, and he phoned the informant on 22 November 1963 saying that he was in Dallas (though this is not mentioned by Palamara in this book.

Palamara does much to challenge the view, popularized by the best-selling author William Manchester, that the reason the motorcyclists and agents were absent from the sides of the President's limo was to obey the wishes of Pres. Kennedy himself; JFK had ordered the agents to stay away from the sides of the car because he wanted to be close to the people. Yet, the alleged source for this information in Manchester's book, Agent Floyd Boring, denied both the quotation and the content and even that he had ever been interviewed by author Manchester.(31) The effect of Manchester's assertion that Kennedy himself ordered the removal of the Secret Service agents from the sides of the limo was, in effect to blame the President for the success of the assassination. Thus, the Secret Service “was prevented from doing ...[its] job by the president.”(26)

Palamara concludes that the source of this “blame the victim” myth was Secret Service Agent Gerald Blaine, and part of this book is a debate between the claims of Blaine about the blame for the assassination, and Palamara's interviews with other agents that deny that Kennedy ever ordered the removal of guards surrounding the limo. Typical of Palamara's approach were his questions to Special Agent Vincent Mroz: “When asked point blank, if JFK had ever ordered the agents off the car, Mroz said forcefully, 'No, no - that's not true.' When asked a second time, the former agent responded with equal conviction: 'He did not order anybody off the car.'”(37)

Palamara concedes that the Secret Service may have been understaffed in 1963, that married men required to travel often may have missed some of their family life, and other problems. But this was no excuse for the failure to protect JFK in Dallas as they had done on his other trips.

There is a video where two agents are preparing to run along with Kennedy's limo, and they are ordered back, away from the President's car. They look bewildered by this order, wondering why the regular procedure is being aborted. Palamara contends that the video reveals the agent who gave that order to stand down, was Emery Roberts.(195) Palamara reports that Agent Roberts was a favorite of Vice President Lyndon Johnson, and following the assassination, Roberts, while still assigned as a Secret Service agent, became the receptionist for President LBJ.(107) Palamara argues that Roberts abandoned the general policy of the Secret Service that agents be non-political; the receptionist post was political. Moreover, Johnson then nominated Roberts for a high-paying cushy job with the US Parole Board.(108)

Palamara relates that the Secret Service Agency destroyed files when the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) had already indicated it wanted to peruse some of those very files. Before that, in an attempt to cull the JFK file, Agent James 'Mike” Mastrovito had destroyed a fragment of Kennedy's brain that had been included in the file.(162) But in the 1990s the Agency itself essentially defied the ARRB in trashing files that had perked the interest of the new investigators.(162) Interestingly, Mastrovito in an interview with the ARRB revealed: “[Agent Thomas] Kelley interviewed Oswald in the DPD jail... he never wrote a final report....Kelley wrote detailed reports regarding his participation in the interviews with Lee Harvey Oswald.”(163) Did these notes reveal what Oswald said under questioning in Dallas?

In this book Palamara, after additional interviews and research beyond his earlier books, concludes: “JFK's assassination was either attributable to gross negligence or worse of the part of the Secret Service...At the very best, by standing down with security in the Dallas motorcade, the Secret Service left JFK a sitting duck.”(195)

Palamara's book covers more than the assassination of Kennedy, the attempted murder of Reagan and the many attempts on Truman and threats to all the presidents, up to those who jumped the White House fence and actually entered the White House itself. Palamara has interviewed many agents, including family members of agents, some of whom, like the woman who had led anti-Mussolini underground fighters in WWII Italy, had led fascinating lives of their own. But the details of the book are still centered on the Kennedy murder. Some of the rest is almost like a high-school year-book of the agency. There is padding and disorganization. Nevertheless, there is convincing material that makes the book worthwhile.

MURDEROUS EUROPEANS CREATE AN ICE-AGE? BULL

If you become too bored by the article, drop down to my comments about it below.  HM

America Colonisation ‘Cooled Earth’s Climate’

Jonathan Amos, BBC, January 31, 2019

Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth’s climate.

That’s the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK.

The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation.

This pulled down enough carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere to eventually chill the planet.

It’s a cooling period often referred to in the history books as the “Little Ice Age” – a time when winters in Europe would see the Thames in London regularly freeze over.

“The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas led to the abandonment of enough cleared land that the resulting terrestrial carbon uptake had a detectable impact on both atmospheric CO₂ and global surface air temperatures,” Alexander Koch and colleagues write in their paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews.

What does the study show?

The team reviewed all the population data it could find on how many people were living in the Americas prior to first contact with Europeans in 1492.

It then assessed how the numbers changed in following decades as the continents were ravaged by introduced disease (smallpox, measles, etc), warfare, slavery and societal collapse.

It’s the UCL group’s estimate that 60 million people were living across the Americas at the end of the 15th Century (about 10% of the world’s total population), and that this was reduced to just five or six million within a hundred years.

The scientists calculated how much land previously cultivated by indigenous civilisations would have fallen into disuse, and what the impact would be if this ground was then repossessed by forest and savannah.

The area is in the order of 56 million hectares, close in size to a modern country like France.

This scale of regrowth is figured to have drawn down sufficient CO₂ that the concentration of the gas in the atmosphere eventually fell by 7-10ppm (that is 7-10 molecules of CO₂ in every one million molecules in the air).

“To put that in the modern context — we basically burn (fossil fuels) and produce about 3ppm per year. So, we’re talking a large amount of carbon that’s being sucked out of the atmosphere,” explained co-author Prof Mark Maslin.

“There is a marked cooling around that time (1500s/1600s) which is called the Little Ice Age, and what’s interesting is that we can see natural processes giving a little bit of cooling, but actually to get the full cooling – double the natural processes – you have to have this genocide-generated drop in CO₂.”

Where’s the support for the connection?

The drop in CO₂ at the time of the Great Dying is evident in the ice core records from Antarctica.

Air bubbles trapped in these frozen samples show a fall in their concentration of carbon dioxide.

The atomic composition of the gas also suggests strongly that the decline is being driven by land processes somewhere on Earth.

In addition, the UCL team says the story fits with the records of charcoal and pollen deposits in the Americas.

These show the sort of perturbation expected from a decline in the use of fire to manage land, and a big grow-back of natural vegetation.

Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at Reading University, was not involved in the study. He commented: “Scientists understand that the so-called Little Ice Age was caused by several factors – a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, a series of large volcanic eruptions, changes in land use and a temporary decline in solar activity.

“This new study demonstrates that the drop in CO₂ is itself partly due the settlement of the Americas and resulting collapse of the indigenous population, allowing regrowth of natural vegetation. It demonstrates that human activities affected the climate well before the industrial revolution began.”

Are there lessons for modern climate policy?

Co-author Dr Chris Brierley believes there is. He said the fall-out from the terrible population crash and re-wilding of the Americas illustrated the challenge faced by some global warming solutions.

“There is a lot of talk around ‘negative emissions’ approaches and using tree-planting to take CO₂ out of the atmosphere to mitigate climate change,” he told BBC News.

“And what we see from this study is the scale of what’s required, because the Great Dying resulted in an area the size of France being reforested and that gave us only a few ppm. This is useful; it shows us what reforestation can do. But at the same, that kind of reduction is worth perhaps just two years of fossil fuel emissions at the present rate.”

The study also has a bearing on discussions about the creation of a new label to describe humanity’s time — and impacts — on Earth.

This epoch would be called the Anthropocene, and there is currently a lively debate over how it should be recognised in the geological record.

Some researchers say it would be most obvious in deposits that record the great acceleration in industrial activity from the 1950s onwards.

But the UCL team argues that the Great Dying in the Americas shows there are significant human interactions that left a deep and indelible mark on the planet long before the mid-20th Century.

MY COMMENTS:

ACADEMIC HATE-WHITEY IDEOLOGY

 MASQUERADES AS SCIENCE

 

The years I mention will be approximate. There was a Medieval warm period that began perhaps in 900 AD and lasted until 1200 to 1250. Around this time the Vikings were unleashed, going into Russia, founding cities like Novgorod, trading into the Ukraine with the Byzantines. The Vikings also conquered part of Britain (the Dane Law), Normandy in France, Sicily in the Mediterranean, and they settled Iceland, Greenland, and part of Canada that was warm enough to be known as Vinland (Wineland). The settlers on Greenland were large enough to have farms with cows grazing the greenland, and once converted, a bishop was appointed for the thousands of Scandinavian settlers.

 

The smaller settlements in Canada were probably wiped out by the Skrellings. But the Little Ice Age, 1300 -1700 was to wipe out the Greenland settlement by 1350 and almost destroyed that of Iceland. THIS WAS BEFORE COLUMBUS. Indeed, to what extent did Columbus know of Iceland and Greenland? Bottom line: The Little Ice Age began, with consequences, before those "terrible Europeans" rediscovered the New World.

 

Next, 60 million inhabitants in the New World before Columbus? Were there even 6 million? If you argue 60 million, then Mexico would probably be the main population center. You mean to say 30 million Mexicans were conquered by a few hundred Spaniards? Many Amerindians were wiped out by disease once the Spaniards came. But perhaps a third of all Europeans died in the Black Death, beginning around 1340 and the plague continued in a diminished manner on and off until 1650. But we do not blame the Silk Road and the Chinese for the plague. So why blame the Europeans, who liberated the Mexicans, for the diseases that decimated so many Amerindians?

 

The The University College of London study is ideological-driven propaganda with the appearance of science. But it is not science. It will receive favorable mention by the globalist, anti-white bigotry so fashionable in the media and academia. But it is not science. Hugh Murray

    (The original article was BBC, I copied it from AmRen; the comments are my own.)

WWI East African War and Anti-Colonial Struggle

AN ICE-CREAM WAR

(New York: Vintage International, 1999; c.1983, c.1982 UK)

By WILLIAM BOYD

Review by Hugh Murray

Boyd has written a novel about the colonies – but without colonials. All of the characters are white (one Indian insurance agent is a minor exception). The Africans are described as porters, askaris (soldiers), maids, etc. They are not described individually except to reveal that some of the German askaris filed their teeth and possibly filled the British with dread due to a brutal reputation. A central character in the novel, Gabriel Cobb is a newly married English soldier who is assigned to duty in British East Africa (Kenya). The British stage a landing to capture the German East African port of Tanga; the German defense is stronger than anticipated, the British assault ends in chaos. Gabriel, fleeing from the enemy's askaris, is bayoneted in his leg and torso. He is then treated at a hospital in German East Africa (GEA, today's Tanganyika). Several years later when he escapes the POW camp there, he is pursued by a German officer, a man who farmed near the border with British East Africa (Kenya), and whose wife helped nurse the injured Gabriel at the hospital. When Gabriel flees, the Germans suspect he has overheard information about the “Chinese thing,” a secret project. The German orders his askaris to “get” Gabriel. However, the German is shocked when they return with Gabriel's severed head.

Boyd's book contains 400 pages – some about Gabriel's wedding in late summer England 1914, the couple's truncated honeymoon in Paris and its Normandy beaches, and the quick call to colors at war's outbreak. Meanwhile, Gabriel's younger brother Felix drifts from Oxford to a touch of bohemianism and into a relationship with Charis, his brother's wife after Gabriel is off in an enemy hospital in Africa. Following a traumatic ending to the affair with Charis, Felix joins the army with the wild hope of finding his brother.

When war first broke in August 1914 GEA attacked the neighboring British colony, but their intrusion was shallow – though deep enough for an American planter whose farm was near Mount Kilimanjaro. The Germans pulled up rails on his farm and burnt other supplies. On the other hand, Britain ruled the waves, so the Germans in their colonies were on their own, unable to be resupplied by the Vaterland, and one after another surrendered or were decisively defeated: Togoland, Kamerun, Germ. S. W. Africa, Kaiser Wilhelmsland, the Shandong Peninsula in China. The British, with additional troops from Europe, India, and West Africa began their assault on GEA at the small port of Tanga, where the naval based invasion failed to dislodge the German defenses. In this battle, Gabriel was wounded by the German askaris and captured. The Germans then claimed the spoils of battle, gaining supplies they could not receive from the homeland. Boyd is good at describing battles.

By January 1917 Dar-es-Salaam, capital of GEA was in British hands as they prepared assaults against German positions to the south. However, the Vaterland has not forgotten the colony. In November 1917 the Germans prepared a large zeppelin, the L57, to depart from one of the Central Powers, Jamboli, Bulgaria, carrying 15 tons of medicine, food, and military supplies to the beleaguered GEA. Boyd weaves this fascinating episode into his narrative. The zeppelin flew across the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas, across Egypt, across half of the Sudan. But then it turned back to Bulgaria. This was the secret “Chinese matter” that is part of Boyd's plot. In the novel, Boyd has British intelligence, aware of the German secret codes, signaling the airship that GEA has already surrendered, and therefore it should return to Europe. Wikipedia relates that the German commander in GEA, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, then stuck in mountainous areas, believed it would not be safe for the dirigible to successfully land in the rugged terrain as the airship might be punctured and explode in flames; so he ordered it to return to Europe. Whatever the source, the airship did return to Bulgaria, but in doing so it established a world record of 94 hours in continuous military air flight – a record that still holds after a century.

Soon after WWI erupted W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that when Germany invaded Belgium, it conquered the Congo. The Congo barely appears in this novel, but had the Central Powers been victorious, surely the African colonies would have been redistributed, with Portuguese and Belgian colonies already discussed for transferal to more advanced nations. Instead, the Kaiser Reich lost; all the Central Powers had surrendered by 11/11/1918. All except German East Africa.

While the Germans of GEA were losing Tanganyika to superior British forces, the German forces (most of whom were native Africans), crossed the River Rovuma to invade Portuguese Mozambique. They easily conquered and resupplied the themselves while still being pursued by slower, but more powerful British forces. Showing that they were not simply picking on the weaker of the allies, the German forces then invaded British Northern Rhodesia and continued to conquer and resupply. When they overtook a British town, they discovered newspapers, days' old, telling of the armistice and the end of the war in Europe. Consequently, on 25 November 1918 von Lettow-Vorbeck capitulated to the British. WWI was over. Those he surrendered were “155 Europeans, 30 of whom were officers, medical officers and higher officials, and 1,168 askaris.”(p. 392)

Was there any memory of these long-lasting battles that showed the fragility of some of the colonies? That town upon town in Portuguese and British Africa could fall to a small army composed mainly of natives, which supplied itself on the spoils of battle?

In the 1920s the films of Hollywood and perhaps Babelsberg were pre-eminent, but Britain too had a film industry. And some of those films were to be shown in the colonies. Some of the films for the largest empire on earth would feature the American actor/singer/former all-American football player, Paul Robeson. Various African students studying in the UK were hired as extras, to be natives in the films. Robeson would speak informally with many of the Africans on the set, befriending some. One of the extras in “Sanders of the River” was a young Kenyan, Johnstone Kenyatta, and he and Robeson discussed issues of the day, such as Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia. In the 1930s the most famous civil rights case in the US was the Scottsboro rape cases, beginning in 1931 in Alabama after 2 young white women lied and said 9 young Blacks had raped them on a freight train when all of them were hoboing in Great Depression America. The Communists dominated the defense team of the accused Blacks, and appealed the cases to the US Supreme Court for 2 major decisions on civil rights. The international Communist movement also led in demonstrations to free the young men, making the cases an international cause celebre with petitions signed on behalf of the defendants by the likes of Albert Einstein and many prominent intellectuals of the era.

In Britain, a Scottsboro Defence Committee was organized in the 1930s, co-chaired by Paul Robeson and the young African, Johnstone Kenyatta. In 1939 the European war began and in 1941 it was a widespread Asian war too. Robeson returned to the US. Kenyatta worked in the UK. After WWII, in 1945 Kenyatta co-organized a Pan-African Conference in Manchester, and the next year returned to Africa. He dropped his Europeanized first name and became Jomo Kenyatta. He also became head of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya against the British colonial authorities. The 1957 film “Something of Value,” sought to depict the struggle in the colony by pitting Rock Hudson against Sidney Poitier in the battle for Kenya. In the movie, Hudson wins. In reality, Kenyatta became the first president of an independent Kenya in 1964.

Was Kenyatta aware of the role of German askaris in overturning settled colonial areas in eastern Africa? His brother had joined the British troops in WWI but disappeared and never returned. Jomo Kenyatta had studied at missionary schools for much of his early life, a short stint at a university for toilers in Moscow, and various universities in Britain. Nevertheless, could that determined “German” army of WWI have been an inspiration for the successful Mau Mau rebellion following WWII?

Boyd's novel is a vocabulary builder, and many words from the WWI era are sprinkled to season the pages of the book. Here is a list of some, not all of which I was able to find in dictionaries: topee (p. 41), dickie (66), landaulet (77), boater (89), jodhpurs (112), bandoliers (125), pillion (131), Subadar (153), tarbooshes (179), puttees (229), and kopje (367). Boyd, who is Scottish, includes a Scot who speaks with such a brogue that neither the English Felix Cobb nor this reader could comprehend the dialect.

There are fashions in literature as there are in women's clothing. This book was nominated for various prizes when first published in the UK in 1982, even for the prestigious Booker Prize. But today, a novel set in Africa without any real Black African characters would likely be dismissed from consideration for lacking inclusion. There are also fashions about book titles, designating them with titles that have nothing to do with the novel. I have no idea why this is called the Ice-Cream War after reading the volume. One hopes that fashion has abated. After discussing the novel with an American friend in Paris, he decided to google the ice cream war, and there found the reason for the title. I quote from wikipedia: “The title is derived from a quotation in a letter (included in British editions of the book but not the American ones) 'Lt Col Stordy says that the war here will only last two months. It is far too hot for sustained fighting, he says, we will all melt like ice-cream in the sun!”" As this is NOT included in the America version of the book, no wonder the title seems bizarre. If the essential quotation was deleted, the title should have been changed for the American editions. Boyd is no Dostoevsky with trick stories that force philosophical questions that haunt readers. Boyd's novel is a simple. well-written story, and one from which I learnt much.

SLEEP DEPRIVATION? OR ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION

   The Smithsonian on line just included an article by Meilan Solly on the growing problem of sleep deprivation, with some saying they sleep less than 5 or 6 hours a night.(26 Dec. 2018)  The author found nearly a third of Americans sleep deprived, especially in the Black and Hispanic communities.  I posted a comment, which I also post below:

A decade ago, I taught in China. There was a 2-hour break after 12 noon, when I did some shopping and ate lunch. But the supermarket was quite empty of customers, and most cashier aisles were closed. Some workers napped near their cashier. On the walk to and from the market, some folks slept on their carts. When I sought to have office hours from 1 to 2, students complained that would interfere with their naps. I had not thought of the word SIESTA for China, but clearly many took the mid-day snooze. Now retired, I sleep only 5 or 6 hours at night. But in the day, I take a nap. Is the Western notion of 8 hours sleep a night simply a cultural norm, that may or may not be better than societies that have a broken sleep pattern, of some hours at night with a daily siesta?---Hugh Murray

"The Green Book" movie and an earlier,1962 integrated road trip in South

To All,  I went to a movie last night and saw one I heartily recommend, The Green Book.  It is "based" on a true story.  I assume there were many, stronger, bitter words between the 2 main characters that are not mentioned in the film.  I suspect it is sanitized.  BUT IT IS STILL A GOOD FILM.  No special effects.  But the basics are there; the basics are true.  If you can, see "The Green Book."

     All that reminded me of a car trip I took in the South.  The Green Book takes place in 1962; my trip was 1960.  Hugh Murray

CAR-RIDE NEW ORLEANS TO MIAMI, AUGUST 1960

Hugh Murray

 In August 1960 the Congress of Racial Equality, which had been involved in student sit-ins that had begun earlier that year, decided to hold a training institute in Miami, Florida.  I desperately wanted to go, and the newly formed CORE chapter in New Orleans was preparing to send some people.  I assumed there would be about 1,000 people from all over the nation who would meet in Miami.  I was living with my parents who were not enthusiastic.  Would I be the only white going?  They asked.  I told them another white from Loyola U. of the South (a Jesuit institution) would be going.  He probably made it easier with his parents by telling them I was going.

8 from the NO area were finally set to go - one who was not an activist but he had a car, Marvin Robinson, a student at Southern U. (in Baton Rouge, which was then the largest Black university in the world).  I think he had been arrested in some of the SU protests in the spring of 1960, and he also had a car.  Ruth Dispenza, a young Black woman (though physically very light), from New Orleans; another young Black woman, I think it was Joyce Taylor; Rudy Lombard, leader of NO CORE, and a student at Xavier U. in NO (a Black Roman Catholic univ.), Archie Allen, a Black student at Dillard U. in NO (a Black Protestant univ.), and the 2 whites.

We were to depart from NO early in the morning.  I did not want the car to come to my parents home, where a possible argument and scene might erupt.  Oliver and I decided to stay the night NOT at our homes, but renting a room at the Negro YMCA.  He did not stay the night, but went out the the French Quarter with friends for a drinking session.  I stayed but got little sleep.  The room had a large window, it was hot, humid summer night in NO, and no air con or fan.  Just outside my window was the big lighted sign for the YMCA, the light filling my room.  Far worse, there was no screen on the window, and mosquitoes buzzed all night.  I got little sleep.

Oliver would not be driving (I learned later he was legally blind).  He would be in the car with the 2 young women and the driver (who may have been related to one of the women.  So in that car was Oliver (white), Ruth (looking, most would think who was white, though she was not), and Joyce (Black) and the driver.  I was in the car with Marvin, Archie, and Rudy (they were all Black).

In those days one could travel rather comfortably in an American car. There were 3 seats in the front, 3 in the back, and one did not worry with the discomfort and hassle of seat belts and other tortures imposed on the modern riders. In our car, Archie had brought an over-sized trunk that was too big for the automobiles boot or trunk, so it lay on the back seat, occupying what would normally be the seats of 2 people. So we only had room to seat 4 people. Archie did not drive, and since his trunk made it impossible for anyone to sleep in the back seat, he volunteered to sit in the middle front seat, least comfortable on the 22-hour journey.

I was not driving when we first had to stop for gas (petrol) in the very conservative state of Mississippi. In those days a gas station was a “service” station, and a young man would first come out to wipe the windshield, before asking how much gas to pump into your car. Before he came, I rushed out to the restroom (toilet), hoping he would not realize we were a mixed (racial) group. The others then followed. I tried to reenter the car only after the clerk was returning to the cash area of the station. We ate in Tallahassee, a diner operation, and perhaps Marvin knew of it through the Green Book, so it was mainly a Black eatery. I was driving deep into the night going south down into Florida. I went to sleep at the wheel. Happily, the car veered slightly to the right, we went only slightly off the paved highway and the right tires hit gravel, which caused noise and the car to jostle a bit waking all the occupants. Someone else decided to drive after that.

We arrived safely at the Negro motel where we would be staying and where CORE had scheduled its conference. It took 22 hours for our road trip. Not much happened to make it a topic for a movie – happily. The conference was nothing like I expected, for instead of a thousand participants, there were only about 50. It was a 3-week training session in non-violence. Most of our session were held during the day in the motel's cocktail lounge. One day our teacher was baseball legend Jackie Robinson, who was also promoting the cause of Richard Nixon and the Republicans (August of 1960 was a presidential election year). On another day, the teacher was Martin Luther King, Jr., who at that time was only quietly for John Kennedy and the Democrats. His father, an influential minister in Atlanta, had been for Nixon, as he was worried about a possible Catholic president. However, once his son was jailed and the Kennedy's made phone calls to help him, the elder King openly supported the Democratic candidate.

Part of our learning was testing. In Miami there was a major supermarket with a restaurant inside. The restaurant was segregated. We were divided into groups and entered the restaurant and took seats. Most of the CORE groups sat at tables to integrate the eatery. Police were called, and many of our group were arrested. Only 2 were at our table, Ruth and me, but as most assumed she was white, we were not arrested (though, in fact, we were integrating the restaurant).

A few Miamians joined the CORE institute, including the son of A D Moore, who was a student at Dillard in NO, and Bob Kunst, who in the 1970s would lead the campaign against Anita Bryant and for gay rights. One organization very sympathetic to ours was the Jewish Culture Society, which lent us their main room for a dance. You could easily distinguish between the 2 groups, their youngest member was about 60, while most of ours were early 20s. I do remember learning how to do the twist from Ruth at that dance.

I recall little of the return trip. I think we had more in the car, so perhaps Archie's trunk went in the other car. Coming with us was a white young woman from NY, Dottie Miller, who would later marry southern white Bob Zellner. The Zellners were leaders in the early days of the civil rights movement in SNCC and in the Mississippi Freedom Summer efforts of 1964.

Back in New Orleans, Rudy Lombard continued to lead NO CORE. NO, the largest city in the South for over a century, was soon to lose it place with the upcoming census. NO had had no sit-in. In early September 1960, Ruth was the chosen leader, as 7 of us were arrested after being read the law, literally, by the then DA of NO Dowling. Archie Allen, Joyce Taylor, me, another white from Tulane Bill Harrell, and 2 others were arrested. The local NAACP opposed us and our sit-in. But soon the Youth NAACP supported us, and more people joined CORE.

We 7 were convicted of a felony. During the trial, we had all sat together with our attorneys, who were Black. When the judge saw this, he threatened us with contempt of court for race mixing his courtroom. So Bill Harrell and I moved away from the others and from our attorneys. Our convictions were upheld on the local an state levels, but eventually, after some years, the US Supreme Court made a decision in our favor.

       In 1961 CORE would originate the Freedom Rides of the 1960s, in which integrated buses from the North were sent south to end in New Orleans, but often they were attacked along the way in Alabama or Mississippi when they sought to integrate bus terminal facilities along the way.  CORE National leader James Farmer beginning in 1961 would eventually furn for Congress in Brooklyn as a Republican, but he lost.  He then had an office in the Administration of Republican Richard Nixon.

This summary of events is written 58 years after the events, so there may be some errors.

JOHN MCCAIN'S MIDTERM REVENGE & KHASHOGGI MURDER IN PERSPECTIVE

My comment on Yahoo re a news story.

now

The :eft is upset because likely Muslim Brotherhood member, Jamal Khashoggi, was apparently brutally murdered in the Saudi Embassy in Turkey with the approval of Prince Mohammad bin Salmam. Democrats and pro-Iranian Republicans (Flake) are basically demanding the US cut relations with the Saudis, a most important ally. But the Left screams, Prince MbS is a murderer- we cannot be an ally of him or his nation. Turkey's Pres. Erdogan says he has a tape of the murder. But Turkey has at least 20,000 political prisoners now jailed. And Turkey is an esteemed member of NATO! Almost in the EU! In 1941 Winston Churchill said he would make a deal with the devil to defeat Hitler. He made the deal with Stalin, who murdered millions more than Hitler. And America's great liberal FDR? He called Stalin "Uncle Joe," and at least one in the White House during the war was making sure uranium was being transferred to Stalin's USSR.
There are few democratic nations in the Middle East. The most democratic, Israel, is denounced and boycotted bu the Left and many Democrats.
Trump is correct in not wanting to alter American foreign policy because of the murder of one man. Stalin killed about 20 million and FDR and most Democrats were happy to have him as an ally. Obama was making deals on behalf of Iran, sending millions of dollars in unmarked bills to its leaders. Trump rejects Iran whose leaders chant "Death to America."
The US should stay the course under Trump with Israel and the Saudis.

THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS:  JOHN MCCAIN'S VINDICTIVE LEGACY

     Before the elections, the Republicans hoped to repeal Obamacare and set up an alternative.  The Republicans had only a 1-vote edge in the Senate, so every vote was needed.  With great publicity, at around 1am McCain would appear in the Senate to cast his vote, which would make it a tie, and Vice-President Pence could then cast a deciding vote to repeal Obamacare.  McCain arrived, and voted.  But he voted to save Obamacare.  Since there was not tie vote, VP Pence did not vote.  The US was stuck with Obamacare.

     The Mid=term elections are 531 Congressional elections, with many local issues in terrains from ocean-side to mountainous, snowy to semi-tropical.  But everywhere the Democrats had one powerful isssue,  Obamacare provides insurance to those with pre-existing conditions.  Democrats had their other usual issues - global warmin (what I call a hoax), pro=crime, reduce size of prisons, more money for schools, but the hot issue in all their ads, the issue that resonated with those who were ill, or with those who had a relative who was, or those who thought they or their loved ones might become ill, that issue was pre-existing conditions.  McCain prevented the Republicans from enacting an alternative to Obamacare.  McCain, who had voted several times to repeal Obamacare earlier, who had campaigned on repealing Obamacare, but whose ego had been tarnished by a comment by Pres. Trump, McCain took his hatred out on Trump and voted to keep Obamacare.  All Americans must now suffer because of McCain's reveng against Trump.  That is McCain's vindictive legacy.

HUGH MURRAY at 80

To All, I forgot to mention that in English, the phrase "behind the 8 ball" refers to the game of pool, when it's your turn and the cue ball (the white one) is behind the black ball (#8) and thus restricts your range for a good shot.  My comment was a play on that using my age of 80.

     In my reflection on my birthday, I forgot something very important.  I added it here in bold print.  Hugh

---------- Forwarded Message ----------
From: "hu.murray@netzero.com" <hu.murray@netzero.com>
Subject: Behind the 80 ball?
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2018 06:48:33 GMT

To All,  Wednesday morning I received a phone call from a cousin in Louisiana.  She told me Jim, another cousin had just died.  He was 80.  I told her that tomorrow (today) was my birthday, and I would turn 80.  We chatted some, and when we hung up (a strange term for the mobile phones), I thought about the contrasts between Jim and myself.  He was a good Roman Catholic; I was not.  He attended Jesuit High School in New Orleans; I attended public schools.  He had been a marine;  I had not.  He had been a successful business man; I not.  He even ran for a seat on the New Orleans school board; I was more "run out of town" with some of my political activities.  After a police helicopter followed my car, and when I let out a passenger, the police swooped down and arrested him (and planned to deport him), I thought it about time to get outta Dodge (a phrase from old, US Western movies).

     Don't misunderstand - I am not jealous of Jim's success.  I am happy he was successful.  He and I were different, and we had different goals, different talents, etc.  Basically, I do not judge myself against others, I judge myself against me, against what I might have done.  I was a rebel, and that can bring problems.  I have had a few terrific days and many painful ones.  Most days were so-so, like those of most people most of the time.

     Jim died at 80 and today I AM 80.  When writing something, there is often a deadline, but Jim reminds me now of a real deadline, the deadline we all face.  For me, time is running out.  At 80, some of you might ask, display some of your wisdom of age.  In reality, I am older, but no wiser.  If I could live my life again, I might try to avoid some mistakes, but if I did so, I might make others just as bad if not worse.  I am as flawed at 80 as I was a 8.  As are we all.  Rarely, are our choices black and white - more often this gray or that gray.  But we can still try to choose the best of the grays.

     Overall, I have been fortunate to have met some wonderful people along the way.  Many of those friends are now dead; they were kind to me and most.  (I was remiss, forgetting something obvious, which I now add to the letter.  I owe much to my family who had to endure some of the painful consequences of my rebelliousness, my "criminal" actions.  Even tho they did not agree with me, they were often supportive in important ways.)  I have been lucky with health, even tho I now have eye problems.  Sure, I still have a deadline, but how much can I do before night falls?

     All the best,  Hugh Murray

Dear Professor Hugh, I still remember the days when we together played the tennis. Hope you are well.  Best regards, Mr. Kang Zhenguo,   Deputy Director,  Division of International Cooperation & Exchange ...Shijiazhuang, (China) From Tony Flood, an old friend. (We met in the early 1970s doing research for the editor of the W E B Du Bois Correspondence and reprints of many of his works funded by U. of Massachusetts and Kraus-Thompson Publishers.  We had lost contact for decades and when we re-met, discovered, that he. like me, had moved from Left to Right politically.): A poignant birthday reflection, one that hits home. A milestone. You've been blessed with life and have blessed others with yours. Happy Birthday, Hugh. May you have many more in good health, pain-free. I'll give you a call midday. Tony  From Irwin L. (he and his wife were co-workers when we were young and began teaching in elementary school in New Orleans. We went on strike together.) Hi Hugh I appreciate what you just put together. I am just a bit older than you and in the process of losing an old friend of about 50 years. Getting older is not fun. Nevertheless, i have produced a booklet i call Hebrew Pronunciation Guide, containing everything significant that i have been able to find on that subject. I am working on my third edition. It is a never ending task but i want to leave something hopefully useful behind to make it easier for others to obtain what i have taken in without my struggle. It keeps my mind busy. I would like to think that my being here was not only to partake but to give something back. If you can find the time and energy i suggest you put something together showing where you were and where you now are. I believe that yours is a very interesting story, much better than most of the stuff that comes out today. Furthermore, i believe that you are honest and anything you put out would be spin free, something uncommon nowadays. Keep on trucking. Irwin From Pat Conery, a co-worker at the court and union representative at the court in Milwauakee. Happy Birthday, Hugh!!!! That was a good reflection of life.  Although I am not 80, I'm trailing you by 11 years and reflect on my life and think about my expiration date as well - maybe more than I should. There are mistakes I've made during my life and a few that still slaps me in the face when I think about them.  The key I guess is to let those thoughts go and go forward. You should be a writer.  Your emails are very interesting and informative and the books would be best sellers.  Just think there are some people that did great things at 80!  I just pray I can make it to 80 and still take care of myself and have my sound mind. Enjoy your day whatever you decide to do.  Who knows, with all the walking you do, you might live to be 100! Have a happy birthday! Pat From Huy (I met him in a free tourist-helping group in Saigon, and he was my tour guide in Thailand. Now he has been awarded a scholarship and is a grad student at World Maritime U. in Sweden.) HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU! You called me Mr.28! Now you are Mr.80! 80 is a nice number with a lot of experiences in life! I still remember about your story with Luther King! I admire you And keep a lot of memories with you in Thailand, Vietnam! Enjoy your life! I wish you a a happy day, better health and beautiful trip...! From my Cousin Merle (though the name can be ambiguous, she is a very feminine lady, like her mother and sister with a flair for art and beauty.) Happy 80th birthday. Been there- done that. We are fortunate we have the abilities to stay active both physically and mentally. Slowing down a bit-yes, forgetting some things-yes but it's okay. Enjoy the day. ‚Merle From Cousin Debi D. I  am proud of many of your accomplishments: Woolworth-standing ground for what you believed in the 60s. Taught at Tulane [no, only studied and received a BA and MA at Tulane but was there long enough to help force the Board to change the rules of the university; I did teach], in Germany, China, and other places abroad (I'm sure). I believe you were a large influence when the World Trade Center got lighting in the stairwells.  You saved many people in 9/11. You are very intelligent/ you still review novels today and share your viewpoint. Not counting all your published works. You are accomplished world traveler who shares his adventures with all. I could go on & on. All of us are flawed . There are many things we all wished didn't happen in our lives. All things good & bad make us who we are today. I'm so glad I got to share many of your travels, novels, stories, reviews, and visits to New Orleans. I am excited you are family. Thanks for being you-Hugh  Love, Debi  From Mollie G., a friend Happy 80th birthday, Mr. Hugh!! What an insightful, thought-provoking reflection. Hope there are many more before night falls. Can't wait to see you next Thursday for Thanksgiving!... Mollie G Some of the emails included photos and composite pictures, but I don't know how to paste them on this properly, so I didn't. A friend took a photo of me with a phone on 14 November, and I had hoped to include that, but don't know how. Perhaps in future. ANYWAY ALL THE BEST TO ALL OF YOU! hugh murray