ANNIVERSARY #52 & “SIXTH FLOOR MUSEUM” HEAD DIES!
Figure in Dallas PD Uniform On Grassy Knoll
San Francisco, CA– When the curator (see face) of the Sixth Floor JFK Assassination Museum in Dallas, TX died some months ago, Gary Mack’s death got him and the JFK assassination both national and international mainstream press. But as they say, the devil is in the details as the media attention the Kennedy Assassination received with Mack’s passing was simply a regurgitation of the “Oswald did it” sandwich, something mainstream media devours time and again.
Before I go any further, it was November 22, 1963, sitting in Miss Benedict’s class in SF’s Alvarado elementary school, the principal enters the room just prior to lunch and told the thought to be iron-willed Benedict something that shook her to the core. She went from a blackboard exercise to sitting at her desk as the a administrator told us, “President Kennedy has died.” Although things got quiet with Ms. Benedict in tears, I asked how did he die? “He died in Texas,” was all she said and left the room.
With my father grilled to the TV and reading “special edition” newspapers, something he never did before or after, my 6th birthday party set for November 24th was nixed and I was sitting on the couch at his side when gangster Jack Ruby shot a man NOT born Lee Harvey Oswald*. At this my dad just went crazy. Screaming while running up and down the hall of our Castro St. flat, a neighbor Dayton Brooks had to come over and calm him down. He kept saying, “They shot him, they shot him.” They?
With nothing more than a degree from the “school of hard knocks,” my father told anybody that would listen. “Powerful people killed Kennedy and then they had Oswald killed.” When the Warren Report was released, it was the only book on my father’s bookcase. The actual report and the books that followed were “too deep” for his limited education. But he did say one thing, “They’re locking this s*it up until 2017. “Bear (my nickname), you’ve got to live a long time to find out what these people did to the president.”
I first met the late Gary Mack circa 1986 via telephone at a time when I would talk with several people in the JFK world. My getting people to answer the phone was facilitated because I was a San Francisco Policeman, who called time and again on the City’s dime and wasn’t afraid to leave messages. In addition to Mack, the late Harold Weisberg and Jack White, I called witnesses Bill Newman, Jean Hill and Beverly Oliver, all of whom (except Weisberg) I would meet in November 1993 at the 30th anniversary proceeding highlighted by a speech and moment of silence on the Grassy Knoll led by first generation assassination scribe Penn Jones of the Midlothian Press.
Although I cruised the papers on anything assassination related, there were magazines like PROBE & Spotlight, that proved invaluable over the decades. But my spending two years attempting to understand what went on reading the 26 Warren Commission volumes, I realized the reported 4.2 million words were just that, millions of words just bunched together sans any index. Thank you Sylvia Meager. Unbeknownst to me while trying to navigate the 26 volumes, Geraldo Rivera and Robert Groden would air the Zapruder film of the JFK execution on late night ABC in 1974.
Split Face Passport Photo-Harvey(L) & Lee(R)
After House Select Assassinations Commitee report called the assassination a “probable conspiracy” in 1978 and that a “shot fired from the Grassy Knoll missed Kennedy,” things were quiet on the JFK case until Nigel Turner’s epic series dubbed, “The Men Who Killed Kennedy” ran on the History Channel in the late 1980s. My telephone calls to Mack were not as riveting as chats with Jack White, still it was Gary and Jack that really developed the background of the Mary Moorman Polaroid photo (above top left) that shows a man firing a rifle at JFK while wearing a Dallas Police uniform on the Grassy Knoll.
Because of the work of author/researchers Doug Horne, Jim DeEugenio and John Armstrong that followed the Assassinations Records Review Board, formed by the G in the 90s after the public went crazy over Oliver Stone’s self described counter myth, JFK the movie, we know a lot more than we did. What most Americans don’t realize is that there are still locked away documents pertaining to the JFK case, especially pertaining to Oswald, his mother(s) and his relationship with the CIA.
Sticking with the Assassinations Record Review Board, of which Doug Horne was like the #3 guy, I think the most critical thing learned from it was “Operations NorthWoods.”
The ¨US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military chiefs, through Defense Secretary Robert McNamara sent two plans to Kennedy in 1962. One was to launch an unsuspecting and full Nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Unknown to the Chiefs, at the same time mobile Russian Nukes were being dragged around Cuba by trucks. It would have cost millions of lives on both sides, but according to General Lemitzer, “As long as we had more people alive than the Russians, we’re the winners.” Forget the lives destroyed, imagine the world being semi-obliterated by men who smoked cigars AT and controlled the president’s autopsy.
In addition, the Joint Chiefs wanted to (please read this carefully) “fake a hijacking” by repainting a passenger drone plane and blow it up over Cuba. But wait, the Generals and Admirals were not done. At the same time, they wanted to “launch fake terrorist attacks by blowing up bombs in cities like Miami and Washington DC.” To some, that sounds a little like what happened on a September day in 2001. The military leaders that would give the CIA the “green light” to take JFK out, and as I said controlled his autopsy by telling the autopsists “NOT to probe the JFK gunshot wounds,” had they gotten their way you probably would not be alive and reading this.
Back to Gary Mack, now the deceased curator of the Sixth Floor Museum, which is where the “G” says (never proved) Oswald shot Kennedy from. When Mack and I were on the phone, Gary was always of the opinion “Oswald was framed.” His work on the “Men Who Killed Kennedy” series like the Badgeman photo, were stellar. But when the position of “fronting” for the museum came up, Mack had lost a local TV job and took the six figure gig which features movies and pictures that still refuse to show the final shot or it’s effects. Every movie or photo on display in the Sixth Floor Museum stops before Kennedy was shot the final time.
In short and closing, researcher Gary Mack was to the JFK Assassination Movement what Pontus Pilate was to alleged Biblical times. When I look at Gary’s running to the money job, “Oswald did it” and away from reality, I can best describe it as the metamorphosis of Gary Mack, as he went from a butterfly of free flowing JFK information to a caterpillar that slowed down the flow of the JFK case to the crawl it is today. You can’t take away from what he did early on with Jack White and others. Still, the sins he committed as head of the museum, that trumps anything Gary did positively.
*I believe the work of the aforementioned John Armstrong proved that the man killed by Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963 was not the man born Lee Harvey Oswald in 1939. See more at www.HarveyAndLee.net
Pedro Fernandez
Note: Mr. Fernandez is an award-winning writer, TV commentator, radio talk show host, former San Francisco Policeman, licensed California Private Investigator and four-time Golden Gloves boxing champion, who also pens feature stories for the R & B band Tower of Power. Comments regarding this submission can be left below.