[VIDEO] Brokaw: People In Conservative States Wanted Kennedy Shot

Is it possible for Americans to commemorate the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s death without the media taking potshots at the Right?

Consider former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw who while on MSNBC’s The Cycle Friday recounting where he was when Kennedy was shot decided he needed to make the case that people in conservative states wanted the president killed (video follows with transcript and commentary):

TOM BROKAW: I was a reporter in Omaha. I was the morning news editor. I did the cut-ins for the Today show on the noon news, and it was kind of an exhausting schedule, about nine hours. And I was in the newsroom kind of cleaning up, and the bells on the wire machines went off. AP and UPI was how we got the news in those days. Not a tweet or anything online. And it meant there was a bulletin of some kind. And I went over and Merriman Smith - who really became legendary for dictating on the run, the UPI reporter – had dictated that shots were fired at the presidential motorcade, the president perhaps fatally wounded. That was the first thing that we saw. And then of course it rolled out there in Parkland and then the announcement of his death.

We didn't have the network up at KMTV because NBC would give back a local station one hour of midday programming. I ran down, there was a garden show on the air. So I put it on over the garden show and then did that a couple of times. And this was unusual but it was not unheard of. As I came running out of the announce booth the chief engineer - with whom I didn't get along very well. A really curmudgeonly guy, old, kind of a gnarly guy – and he said, “What happened?” And I said, “Kennedy was shot.” And he said , “About time somebody shot that S.O.B.” That was heard in other places, mostly in the conservative states. But he was, that was reflecting his real feeling, and they had to peel me away from him. I then ran back up and continued to work.

Via: Newsbusters.org

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Americans mark 50th anniversary of JFK’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show

Americans of all nations today are remembering a tragic moment in Sixties consciousness: the day in 1963 that President John F. Kennedy, standing in the door of the University of Alabama’s Foster Auditorium, was gunned down by Manson cult member Sirhan Sirhan on the balcony of a hotel in Memphis.

But for those Americans who remember the Sixties, the sting of that horrible day is partly salved by memories of JFK’s too-brief administration: how he read the Port Huron statement to an ecstatic crowd near Checkpoint Charlie in divided Prague; how Pete Seeger had to be restrained from cutting Kennedy’s loudspeakers when he “plugged in” at the Newport Folk Festival.

Also undimmed by countless reruns are our memories of how the tousle-haired young man from Hyannis created AmeriCorps, whose “diggers” rescued strung-out Haight-Ashbury runaways as the Summer of Love turned into a year of burn-baby-burn.

Via Daily Caller

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LEE HARVEY OSWALD WAS NO ‘PATSY’

“Of all the people I interviewed in New Orleans regarding the Kennedy assassination, Carlos Bringuier was the one I trusted most. I could see in his eyes he was always telling me the complete truth.”  (Oriana Fallaci, L, Europeo, 1969.)

“The skinny guy walked into my store and started looking around,” recalls Carlos Bringuier about the afternoon of August 5, 1963. “But I could sense he wasn’t a shopper. Sure enough, after a few minutes of browsing he came up and extended his hand. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m Lee Oswald.”

In 1963 the CIA regarded the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE) “the most militant and deeply motivated of all the Cuban exile organizations seeking to oust Castro.” Carlos Bringuier was their representative in New Orleans. It was DRE agents who infiltrated Cuba and brought out the first reports of Soviet missile installations–to the scoffs of  the White House’s Best and Brightest. It took two months for anyone to finally take them seriously. A U-2 flight then confirmed every last detail of what the DRE boys had been risking their lives for months to report.

“Oswald approached me because my name was so often linked to anti-Castro activities in the local (New Orleans) news,” recalls Bringuier. “He even jammed his hand in his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills, offering to contribute to the anti-Castro cause. I was suspicious and declined, but he kept blasting Castro and Communism in very colorful terms the whole time he was in the store. He returned the next day, snarled out a few more anti-Castroisms and dropped off his training manual for the anti-Castro fight, Guidebook for Marines.”

Via: Human Events

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Poll: John F. Kennedy tops presidential rating

As the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination approaches next month, polling released Tuesday as part of a new book about Kennedy’s legacy shows that he remains one of the most highly rated presidents of the past 50 years.

Asked to rate all the presidents from 1950-2000 on a scale of 0 to 10, Kennedy scored the highest, at 7.6. He was followed by Ronald Reagan, at 6.9, Dwight Eisenhower, at 6.8, and Bill Clinton, at 6.7. None of the other presidents scored above a 5.0.

Nevertheless, Kennedy would not be Americans’ first choice to bring back as the next president, if any former leader alive or dead could serve again. Asked who they would most want to bring back, 24 percent of adults chose Reagan, 21 percent chose Clinton and 13 percent chose Kennedy. Abraham Lincoln was next, at 9 percent.

(Also on POLITICO: Sabato’s JFK book takes aim at House conspiracy theory)

The findings, from a survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted this summer, were released Tuesday to coincide with the release of a new book from University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato, which takes on evidence of popular conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination and analyzes his lasting legacy.

At a press conference unveiling his book at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Sabato said it was the findings on the impact Kennedy’s life has had that most struck him, not the findings about his death.

“The most important thing didn’t have anything to do with the assassination, it was the fact that even though John Kennedy had a terribly abbreviated tragic presidency, he’s actually lived for 50 years through nine successors,” Sabato afterward told a handful of reporters, which included press from the U.K., Germany and Korea.

Via: Politico

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