Orville again felt patronized. Why did these men think they could insult him and offer him money in the same breath? He looked at his son and nodded his head in agreement. He just wanted to get out of this hell-forsaken city.
Orville Jr. said, “That will be fine. But we want a copy of the film and you’re not to reveal my dad’s name as the maker of the film. My mother doesn’t want a lot of phone calls.” They shook hands and Orville Sr. signed the contract written on notepaper. He would receive a copy of the film and a cashier’s check for five thousand dollars within the next five days. He also would receive a new fedora. As they were shaking hands to leave, Orville said, “Can we have the film back after the copyright term is over?”
“That will be 25 years or more,” Mr. Reinhardt said, “but yes, you certainly may.”148 They shook hands and the Nixes left.
Orville was downtrodden. He had been treated rudely. He had been insulted. His dreams of retirement had evaporated at the fancy Time/Life Building. Now he just wanted to get home to Texas. The two men took a cab back to the Hilton and retrieved their bags. Though their tickets weren’t for departure until the next day, they went straight to LaGuardia to catch the earliest flight from New York they could board. I would have been treated better if I had been a business man, or had a degree, Orville chided himself silently. Next to him, his son was also berating himself. Maybe I should have asked for more; maybe I should have been a better negotiator. I won’t let this happen again, never. Neither of them put voice to their thoughts; they both napped on the three hour flight home.
The next day, December 7th, 1963, Fox Movietone ran a newsreel in movie theaters about the assassination.149 UPI news subscribers also received several frames of the film. All of them mentioned Nix’s name, in direct violation of the newly-signed and verbal contracts.
This would be the beginning of the many lies Orville Nix would be told until he died.
* * * * *
The American people were also being lied to in regards to the assassination. As of December 1963, questions were already being asked about the assassination. Nothing seemed right. Nothing seemed fair. So many logical questions weren’t answered. Fifty years later those feelings still exist and questions linger. Through five government funded commissions to find the truth as to what happened that day, classified files still exist.
In 2013 President Barack Obama approved the CIA’s measure of keeping classified the over 1,100 files relating to E. Howard Hunt (CIA agent and Watergate burglar), William Harvey (when the CIA wanted to create an organization capable of carrying out assassinations in 1960, they gave it the code name of ZR-RIFLE and put Harvey in charge), David Sanchez Morales (David Morales was a career CIA officer who served as the chief of operations at the CIA’s Miami station in 1963 where he worked with David Phillips and Howard Hunt), George Joannides (declassified CIA records show that Joannides obstructed two official JFK investigations by not disclosing what he knew), and David Atlee Phillips (who oversaw CIA anti-Castro psychological warfare operations in 1963) until at least 2017.150
Aren’t fifty years filled with lies and waiting and spending taxpayers’ dollars on committees enough? Releasing all documentation and demanding transparency from our government in regards to the JFK assassination is long overdue. If Oswald acted alone, what on earth could be in those files that could hurt our National Security?
In Orville Nix‘s case, why would Life magazine consider his film a ‘nuisance?’ In hindsight, it’s a good thing Life magazine didn’t want the Nix film. If UPI hadn’t bought it, researcher Jones Harris would have never gotten a chance to see it, and without Jones Harris, the Nix film’s importance may never have been known.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
OF CONSPIRACIES AND MADNESS
“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”
John F. Kennedy151
The first time Orville heard the words “conspiracy theory” was from a man named Penn Jones who lived in Midlothian, a southern suburb twenty-five miles from Dallas.152 To Orville, Midlothian was ‘out in the country’, so how could a man from the country know anything about what happened in Dallas that day? Orville soon found out that he knew a lot. While Life Magazine was protecting the Zapruder film and by contract not showing the more horrific frames of the film and never in movie form, Orville’s film, now called “The Nix Film”, was being shown in movie theaters. UPI did not protect the Nix film like Time/Life protected the Zapruder film. Why?
Because UPI had negated their contract within 24 hours of signing it, specifically ignoring Orville’s request to not use his name, Orville and Ella had begun to receive phone calls; long lost family members, friends, some nut cases, and strangers like Penn Jones. At first, the phone calls were mainly friendly ones, but Ella was skeptical. She was not one for public drama, though she didn’t mind a bit of personal drama from time to time - it kept her family on their feet. So when Penn Jones called, she was concerned. Orville had told her of his dismay over the way he had been treated by those Yankee newspapermen on his trip, and she wasn’t about to allow a reporter from Texas to do the same.
“I think the whole country is going mad,” she told her husband after speaking with another stranger who had told her Jackie Kennedy was the one who was supposed to be shot, not her husband.
* * * * *
Penn Jones was an amiable fellow, though sometimes frightening. His tenacious quest to find answers to assassination questions was at once noble and irritating… he never let go of an issue until he was convinced the person was being truthful. He grew up in the same era as Orville and Ella, and like them, never forgot his roots. In his first phone call to Orville, he explained his background and Orville was instantly endeared to him. Mr. Jones had bought a newspaper in 1945, The Midlothian Mirror, and as his biography states, he “quickly established a reputation as an outspoken advocate for transparent, responsible, and honest local government as safeguards for democracy.”153 With the Kennedy Assassination, Jones would become an outspoken advocate for transparent National Government as well. In 1962, his outspoken and controversial opinions led to the firebombing of his newspaper.154 Penn Jones was no stranger to hostility. He called Orville on December 8th, 1963, a day after UPI had screened the Nix Film in select movie theaters.
“Mr. Nix, this is Penn Jones of the Midlothian Mirror. Do you have a moment to speak with me?” he asked after Orville answered the telephone.
“Sure do, Mr. Jones, how can I help you?”
“I’ve just become aware that you took a film of the JFK assassination. I understand your film shows the pavilion and little hill by the picket fences. I think you have the most important film of the assassination as I think your film will show there was another shooter besides Lee Harvey Oswald. I was wondering if we could meet this week and discuss this. Do you have time?” Jones asked.
“Well, I work nights, but I could get up early, say Wednesday, and we could meet for lunch somewhere or you could come here.”
“I’d like to come there if it’s alright by you, Mr. Nix, say Wednesday at 1 P.M.? Is that too early?”
“No, that would be fine. My address is 2527 Denley Drive and I’m on the corner of Elmore and Denley, across the street from the Cedarcrest Shopping Center. I’ll see you then.”
* * * * *
That short conversation would be the first of many conversations Orville would have the next few years with reporters and researchers alike.
Penn Jones wasn’t the first to question the logistics of the assassination. On December 19th, 1963, Mark Lane wrote an article for the National Guardian entitled “A Defense Brief for Oswald”.155 This piece wasn’t viewed by a large audience. On December 21, 1963, another article, this one entitled, “Seeds of Doubt: Some Questions about the Assassination,” by Jack Minnis and Staughton Lynd was published in the New Guardian.156 In it, the authors question several areas of contention th
at exist still today: the wounds, the rifle, the Parkland doctors’ interviews, the target and the bullets. Conspiracy thoughts were already being proposed by cutting-edge independent journalists across the country.
Later, in the spring of 1964, six months after the assassination, Thomas Buchanan’s book, “Who Killed Kennedy?” was the first of many books to be published suggesting there was a conspiracy to kill the thirty-fifth president.157 In his book, Buchanan asserted that “the assassination had been the work of Texas oil interests who felt that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, once elevated to the presidency, would protect their favorable percentage depletion tax treatment more vigorously than the Kennedy administration.” 158 Was this more hatred directed toward the City of Dallas and Texas? Or could Buchanan have been on to something as early as 1964? Another book, of mysterious authorship and not published in America was Hepburn’s Farewell, America.159 The book was a stinging and name-dropping bomb of a book that would be considered slanderous by many Americans. The elusive ‘Hepburn’ named everyone a suspect from the FBI to the Secret Service to Texas Oilmen.
*****
THE BOOK WAS A STINGING AND NAME-DROPPING BOMB OF A BOOK THAT WOULD BE CONSIDERED SLANDEROUS BY MANY AMERICANS.
THE ELUSIVE ‘HEPBURN’ NAMED EVERYONE A SUSPECT FROM THE FBI TO THE SECRET SERVICE TO TEXAS OILMEN.
Everyone who had lived in Texas for more than two years, especially the Dallas and surrounding areas, knew about the Big Oil boys. This group of men consisted of D.H. Byrd (owner of the Texas School Book Depository), Clint Murchison (owner of the Dallas Cowboys), H.L. Hunt (owner of Hunt Oil as well as most of the East Texas Oilfields), Sid Richardson (Murchison’s partner), and the malleable LBJ state politician from the Dallas area Sam Rayburn. Many in this group were members of Suite 8F.160
In the early months following the assassination, sides were again being taken: either Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nut or there was a conspiracy to kill the President. Why was it so hard for Americans to believe there could have been a conspiracy (even if not against the murder of a president), but a conspiracy against the world to hide the truth? Was it hard because we would have to admit that our country lied to us? Because it would be one more foundational truth of Life, Liberty, and Justice found to be a lie? Were we all really in need of an emotional escape and believing that Lee Harvey Oswald did it alone could keep our small, little minds at ease? Or was it because we were losing God to the likes of atheist activist Madeline Murray O’Hair who was desperately trying to assassinate all vestiges of Him by taking prayer out of the classroom? Or was it just madness caused by the Hippie movement and the use of mind-altering drugs?
Contrary to history books, newer books explain the LSD phenomenon as one not just for ‘rock and rollers’ and ‘beatniks’, but the mind-altering drug of spiritual seekers and the intelligentsia. Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, JP Morgan’s Vice-President Gordon Wasson, and Henry and Clare Luce all were acid-eaters of one type or another.161Why would this matter in a JFK Assassination book? This push to change accepted behavior and beliefs were another example of how strong the media/government relationship was becoming. In November of 1963, Life magazine was arguably the most important general news source in the United States. The top management of Time/Life Inc. was closely allied with America’s intelligence agencies and was used often by the Kennedy Justice Department as a conduit to the public.162
If socialites like the Luce’s could imbibe in the usage of illegal drugs, then it set a precedent for those that weren’t leaders of society and gave an okay to those who were. Henry Luce and his wife Clare, the publisher and editor-in-chief of Time/Life were using LSD during the mid-sixties and that bled over into their publications during the period. Their magazines ran several articles during Luce’s navigational tenure of the magazines’ content and author Stephen Siff credits Time and Life coverage, with “raising public awareness that a drug with the unique effects of LSD existed and was possibly desirable.”163
Ironic isn’t it? Life magazine was withholding exhibition of the extant Zapruder film for fear of public shock, but was touting the benefits of LSD, now known to remain in your brain for the remainder of your life. This was truly history making madness.
Philosophically, in the mid-sixties, the great intellectuals Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucault were wrestling with the concept of madness and history. It seemed fitting as one of the most popular modern leaders, JFK, had just been assassinated. In the Ideology of Tyranny: The Use of Neo-Gnostic Myth in American Politics, author Guido Giacamo Preparata discusses madness and history. In Chapter Seven he states:
According to Derrida, Foucault’s imprecision (in regards to his take on the relation of the history of madness and Descartes) was to have cast maladroitly the conflict opposing sense to nonsense as a historical theme: as if the chasm between the clear rays of reason and the ‘dark light’ of madness could only be grasped as a significant development of our times. Derrida contended that there existed, in fact, a “virgin soil”- some sort of primordial grounds-upon which, “obscurely” the battle had ever unfolded. The madman himself does think: the “ancient madness” is the ultimate wisdom, but the difference is that the madman cannot articulate (“speak”) such madness. His is the “garrulous silence of a mind that cannot think its words.” There wasn’t madness before modernity, and reason thereafter. Rather there exists a plane, for Derrida, where the two appetites lie inextricably, though antagonistically twined to each other, and the alternate convulsions of the one and the other are what we designate as the signs of reason or unreason. Bataille’s project was thereby vigorously reaffirmed; Derrida referred to it as the “hyperbolic project,” which was to enable “the violent release of the word”–a word shedding its “alien” light on the inexpressible realm of the impossible, of nothingness. So, there was something deeper and prior to madness, and in the vision of Derrida, this was a pseudo-divine principle of “difference”: that is, a life—and meaning-giving essence by which the play of opposites–like reason and unreason–punctuates a trace, a scribble, a text.164
In regards to the JFK assassination, this play of opposites can be seen in every online forum, every review of a book on the assassination and in every heated debate overheard at a conference. Are we allowing madness to become articulate; letting it ‘speak for itself’ as Foucault suggested or are we giving the many government subsidized official reports on the JFK assassination that are filled with madness a ‘tongue of logic’ as Derrida opined?
Orville Nix asked himself that question each time he answered the telephone or was stopped by a stranger.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
OF CHARACTER AND CABALISTS
“We’ll know our disinformation campaign is complete, when absolutely everything the American people believe is false.”
William Casey, Director of the CIA 165
The Kennedy family was like most families, a mix of dysfunction and success. The paternal head of the family, Joseph Kennedy, made his millions by bootlegging Scotch during prohibition and having astute investment acumen in the stock market. He married well: Rose Fitzgerald was the daughter of the famous politician ‘Honey’ Fitzgerald and their union produced a family of nine children. Though his business sense was impeccable, his paternal instincts weren’t as much: he had his eldest daughter Rosemary lobotomized.166
No self-made man put greater pressure on his children than did the elder Kennedy. When first son Joseph Jr. was killed during World War II, Jack became the designated heir. Himself a Navy veteran and survivor of a collision with a Japanese destroyer, he would write to his friend Paul Fay that, once the war was over, “I’ll be back here with Dad trying to parlay a lost PT boat and a bad back into a political advantage.”167
Joseph Senior was important to his son and groomed him to become the politician he had wanted his namesake to be. There was no doubt: Joseph piloted all nine of his children’s lives.
“From the time Jack first ran for Con
gress, his father had taught him everything from wearing a suit and the best way to cut his hair, how to appear youthful and wise and serious at the same time,” says David Nasaw, whose biography of Joseph P. Kennedy was published in 2012.168 Joseph not only advised his children, he shared with them the tricks for becoming aristocratic. Joseph had learned these talents from his days of being looked down upon for his profession and because he was an Irish-Catholic. He had endured the stereotypes, biases, and ignorance that comes from narrow-mindedness and was not about to let them get in the way with his desire to ensure his children important futures in society: he had taken care of their economic needs through his career decisions. He sensed the upcoming stock market crash and quickly removed his funds.169 Like all financially successful people, Joseph Kennedy had astute business acuity and was a seasoned political adviser for his sons.
He made sure his son Jack was a public figure years before he ran for office. “Why England Slept” released in 1940,170 was a book-length edition of a thesis Jack wrote at Harvard about the British in the years before World War II. Most theses don’t get published by a big publishing company, but then again, most people don’t have Joseph Kennedy for a father. An introduction was provided by one of the country’s foremost image makers, Time magazine publisher Henry R. Luce. “You would be surprised how a book that really makes the grade with high-class people stands you in good stead for years to come,” Joseph Kennedy had advised his son.171 Again, the Time/Life influence intertwined with John F. Kennedy long before the acid-eating days and purchase of the Zapruder film that would follow.
Even with all the revealed skeletons in the Kennedy’s closet and rumors of infidelity, the short JFK administration got more things done in his 1,036 days in office than presidents who have served eight year terms have since. John F. Kennedy‘s personal talents included charisma and hope. “He had a gift for rallying the country to its best, most humane and idealistic impulses,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Robert Caro172 It also helped that he had a beautiful and elegant wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy
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