Showing posts with label John B. Connally Jr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John B. Connally Jr. Show all posts

Sunday, September 10, 2023

I'm sure everyone will be just thrilled to know that the Secret Service detail protecting the Kennedy family had been out "socializing" until 5 a.m. the day JFK was assassinated

 Mr. Landis said he was surprised that the Warren Commission never interviewed him, but assumed that his supervisors were protecting the agents, who had been out late the night before socializing (Mr. Landis until 5 a.m., although he insisted they were not drunk). “Nobody really asked me,” he said.

Many pictures of those days of mourning show Mr. Landis at Jacqueline Kennedy’s side as she endured the rituals of a presidential farewell. Night after night, those seconds of violence in Dallas kept replaying in his head, his own personal Zapruder film on an endless loop. “The president’s head exploding — I could not shake that vision,” he said. “Whatever I was doing, that’s all I was thinking about.”

With Mr. Landis and Mr. Hill still protecting her, the former first lady was in constant motion in the months afterward. “She’d be in the back seat sobbing and you’d want to say something but it wasn’t really our place to say anything,” Mr. Landis recalled.

After six months, he could not take it anymore and left the Secret Service. Haunted, he moved to Cape Cod in Massachusetts, then New York, then Ohio near Cleveland. For decades, he made a living in real estate and machine products and house painting, anything as long as it had nothing to do with protecting presidents.


More.

That's what caught my eye about this man's story that the so-called magic bullet didn't injure Governor Connally. Landis says he found it "in the presidential limousine lodged in the back of the seat behind where Kennedy was sitting" and later put it on Kennedy's stretcher, which corrects his written testimony from the time.

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Donald Trump's little known involvement as a material, early supporter of Ronald Reagan

The UK Daily Mail reported here in May 2015:

'Donald Trump was on the Reagan Finance Committee in 1979-80 when most of the New York financial elite were for George Bush or John Connally,' the former campaign aide told Daily Mail Online, on condition of anonymity.

Trump and his father Fred were in the room when Reagan announced his candidacy in New York City in 1980, he explained, adding that without Trump the 40th president might have been dead in the water.

'When the phone company said it would be 30 to 60 days before they could install our phones at the Reagan for President headquarters on 52nd street,' he recalled, 'I called Donald Trump. They installed the phones the next day.'

'Donald also let us use his helicopter to fly our delegate petitions to Albany, where we filed 15 minutes before closing at the board of elections.'

And Fred Trump 'loaned the campaign some space in a building he owned in Queens,' the Reagan veteran said. 'Donald got us space on 52nd street. They were among a handful of Reagan's earliest New York Supporters.'

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Gold bug Ralph Benko thinks Richard Nixon had to resign over the closing of the gold window!

I like Ralph Benko. Ralph Benko often makes important arguments on behalf of the gold standard. But when he tries to force everything in the universe to be interpreted through the lens of it you know you have met an ideologue who has become unhinged from reality. Which is why Forbes is a good place for him.

His latest screed here is a mere flight of fantasy, imagining Richard Nixon was forced to resign over the closing of the gold window in 1971. Had he presented it as such, it would have entertained and illumined, even pleased. Instead, its talk of correlation only annoys, the way a chart reader plots two things on a graph and yells 'See! See! They both go up together!' Against Benko, Pat Buchanan may be forgiven for ignoring what didn't exist, just as Nixon's enemies ignored it, except in the fever camps of utopianism.

Benko makes Thomas Paine's opinions about gold a prophecy reaching 200 years into the future where gold becomes Nemesis and the end of Bretton Woods Hubris. Covering up Watergate? Well, simply an instrumental little detail:

"The House Judiciary Committee’s charges and the Connally indictment uncannily fulfill a prophecy by Tom Paine. ... Connally was acquitted on the charges of graft and perjury.  Later he underwent bankruptcy before dying in semi-disgrace.  Nixon resigned rather than undergoing impeachment, also living out his life in disgraced political exile.   The spirit of Paine’s declaration was fulfilled in both cases. Connally and Nixon engineered this violation, abandoning the good, precious-metal, money contemplated by the Constitution. Nemesis followed hubris. The closing of the 'gold window' was based, by Connolly, on deeply wrong premises.  It was sold to the public, by Nixon, on deeply false promises."

Methinks Tom Paine himself would be a little embarrassed at the almost religious regard with which some of his present day followers come to what he has left behind for us on paper.

He'd probably call them Burkeans.