My new book, "Into the Nightmare"

[Joseph McBride]

Joseph: You did the article in The Nation right? The one that drove John Hankey nuts.

When you say you have been working on your book 31 years, I mean that isn't literal right?

Because you have done a lot of other things in the meantime.

The other things is, I don't think many of us knew you were a secret JFK researcher.

Clue us in: How did that start?

Hi, Jim,

Good to hear from you. Your work has long been valuable to my research. I was a devoted
reader of Probe and have read your books and posts with great interest.

Yes, I wrote the two articles on Bush in The Nation and a third they rejected
that detailed his involvement with James Parrott (I discuss this in the book). There
are fresh revelations about Bush in the book. I have a lengthy chapter on
the rightwing Texas milieu that surrounded this case.

Indeed I have done a lot else since 1982, including numerous books and articles and documentaries and
teaching at San Francisco State University. But I have always been studying the assassination
as an avocation (at least as much of an interest of mine as film history), and began researching it in earnest in 1982. I made research trips to Dallas and Washington and other places over the
years and interviewed numerous people. The writing of this book has occupied me for
the last nine years, even while I was working on other books. The book has benefited
from its long gestation because my understanding of this complex series of events and its historical context has continually deepened
through my research and that of others in the field.

I worked for Kennedy as a volunteer in his Wisconsin primary campaign
and met him three times, once when he was president. So I have been
following his story since then and have always been interested in the
assassination from the time it occurred. The very first day, I realized
Oswald was innocent. I wavered somewhat after being misled by
the Warren Report but gradually returned to my initial skepticism, which
deepened with the help of many fine writers on the case, such as
Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher among the early researchers (John
Kelin's book is an excellent study of those pioneers). Over time I have
been influenced by Penn Jones, who served as a mentor of mine
in Texas, and numerous other important writers on the case. We may
agree to disagree on some issues, but I learn from most serious
researchers, while always scrutinizing each argument or piece of evidence
critically.

My friend Abraham Polonsky, the blacklisted writer-director who was part of the OSS in World War II,
once called me "a secret man." I learned to keep this
project close to the vest -- until now.