My new book, "Into the Nightmare"

[Joseph McBride]

Joseph, nice to see you here and like Jim below I was kind of surprised to see your name attached to this. I've read a couple of your other books (on Ford and Welles, both of which I greatly enjoyed) and it took a double-take upon visiting the Amazon page to see that Joseph McBride was indeed that Joseph McBride. It's a pleasant surprise, anyway.

I plan to order your book this coming Friday, and then to Oz it'll take another near fortnight by post, then a week to read it. Hopefully you may still be around to answer questions then as I'm sure actually reading the book will raise a few.

Page 659 of your book (c/o the Amazon 'look inside' feature) lists a respectable list of authors and websites that you've noted as helpful and indicates to me immediately that you're made a genuine and careful attempt to connect to the quality research in the field. (Jim D gets a mention, as does CTKA, the Education Forum, William Kelly, John Armstrong and others). I just have a passing query as to how conspiratorial your overall viewpoint is regarding other political and historical events outside the JFK assassination. For example, what is your view on some of the later US political assassinations? (Or other 'deep events', as Peter Dale Scott calls them - there are a number of those to pick from). Also, could you make a comment as to which books by the above authors and others proved particularly useful to you? I'm just curious.

Anthony,

Thanks much for your interest in my book. I go into a fair amount of detail and analysis about how
the Kennedy assassination is part of the overall pattern of political murders since then and the degeneration
of our democracy that followed it. It would be impossible to summarize my views in a short space, so I am glad you will be reading the book. Peter Dale Scott helped educate me on "deep politics"; see my chapters on the Texas rightwing political milieu in 1960s and on Oswald's connections with U.S. intelligence and Ruby's connections with the underworld and overworld. My George H. W. Bush research is part of this study. I influenced Russ Baker's book, which starts with my discovery of Bush's early CIA involvement, and his book in turn influenced me, and I report on previously unknown aspects of Bush's involvement with the events surrounding the assassination and his associations with Houston and Dallas rightwingers who were investigated by the FBI after the assassination.

As a longtime investigative reporter, I've always believed in following stories that are inadequately reported or understood, as I did, for example, with my biography FRANK CAPRA: THE CATASTROPHE OF SUCCESS, a project that deconstructs the mythic persona Capra created with the help of the media. I wrote a great deal about Capra as a political artist and about the blacklist period in that book, and I have long been as interested in American political history as in film history, so I always combine those two interests in my work. In INTO THE NIGHTMARE I write about films and TV programs that deal with the assassination and discuss the role of the media in distorting the case, another major interest of mine.

I mentioned in another post some authors who influenced me. David Lifton's BEST EVIDENCE provided a major paradigm shift in my thinking on the case. Josiah Thompson's book helped me understand the physical evidence. Douglas Horne's recent books are of great value in advancing the case. John Armstrong's book provided another key paradigm shift for me. I may differ with some views in these books and others, but the role of a researcher is to learn from those who have ploughed the ground before and then test every piece of evidence for himself/herself while combining previous findings with new findings turned up in fresh research. We learned from this case to be skeptical of everything and not take anything for granted. I always do that; with my Capra research, I took nothing for granted and checked every "fact" that had been reported, finding most of them wrong. I do exhaustive study of documents and many interviews to help me find the truth.