With that, they shook hands again and Penn Jones left with a tornado of thoughts in his head.
*****
“I DON’T BLAME YOU, ORVILLE, YOU CAN NEVER BE TOO CAREFUL.
IN FACT, I DON’T THINK YOU SHOULD TELL MANY PEOPLE YOU TOOK THIS.
I THINK YOU WOULD BE SAFER IF YOU DIDN’T.
WELL, I’LL GET BACK TO YOU. THANK YOU FOR LETTING ME COME BY AND FOR LETTING ME SEE THE FILM. I DO BELIEVE YOU HAVE SOMETHING OF GREAT IMPORTANCE HERE.”
Great importance? Orville thought. Those jackasses at Time/Life called it a nuisance. He scowled at the thought of his trip to New York. Orville grabbed his new fedora, the one the UPI men had sent him along with the five thousand dollar money order and copy of his film. There wasn’t even a thank you letter with it.
“I need to play golf,” Orville said to himself out loud and grabbed his golf clubs. After the excitement and disappointment of the last month, he needed to hit some balls.
* * * * *
Later that afternoon, 3000 miles away in New York, the men from UPI were anxiously reviewing the Nix film again, but not from an investigative standpoint; no, this time for money. Whether it was because they came in second to scoring the publishing coup of modern times, the Zapruder film, or that they just wanted to stay atop of breaking news stories, they were well aware that the public had developed a huge appetite for all things JFK and huge appetites meant huge profits.
During those frantic four days in November, UPI had first reported the assassination, AP was the first to report Oswald’s arrest and Time/Life got the Zapruder film. Each of the three top media magnates claimed a first place ribbon in the race to get the news out to the world. In January of 1964, less than a month after purchasing the film from Orville Nix, UPI published a book of the Nix and Marie Muchmore frames entitled, “Four Days”.204 Marie Muchmore had also taken a home movie, but hers was much shorter than the Nix film. The UPI book contained 143 pages from the Nix and Muchmore films, news stories, personal accounts, speeches, and letters, and sold for $2.95. UPI made the money they paid for the films the first day of publishing. By the next month, they had made a healthy profit. Time/Life, on the other hand, was protecting the Zapruder film. No one was allowed to see it. Though Life had paid 3000% more for the Zapruder film than UPI had for the Nix film, they were in no big rush to recoup their investment. Why? Was Life magazine protecting the American public from something the CIA did not want seen?
Rumors abounded in the 1950s and 1960s that many of the top news agencies, magazines and newspapers were CIA fronts. It wasn’t until many years later when findings from the Church Committee were released that the American people were told these rumors were indeed facts. In many instances, CIA documents proved that journalists had been engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations. These news organizations included William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System(CBS), Henry Luce of Time/Life Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Services.205 Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the Associated Press (AP), United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald, and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune.206
By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS, and Time/Life Inc. In fact, if it weren’t for the JFK assassination, Life magazine had plans to ruin Lyndon B. Johnson‘s political career.207 Former editorial business manager for Life magazine, James Wagenvoord said in an email to John Simkin:
“Beginning in later summer 1963 the magazine, based upon information fed from Bobby Kennedy and the Justice Department, had been developing a major news break piece concerning Johnson and Bobby Baker. On publication Johnson would have been finished and off the 1964 ticket (reason the material was fed to us) and would probably have been facing prison time. At the time LIFE magazine was arguably the most important general news source in the US. The top management of Time Inc. was closely allied with the USA’s various intelligence agencies and we were used after by the Kennedy Justice Department as a conduit to the public…
The LBJ/Baker piece was in the final editing stages and was scheduled to break in the issue of the magazine due out the week of November 24th (the magazine would have made it to the newsstands on November 26th or 27th). It had been prepared in relative secrecy by a small special editorial team. On Kennedy’s death research files and all numbered copies of the nearly print-ready draft were gathered up by my boss (he had been the top editor on the team) and shredded. The issue that was to expose LBJ instead featured the Zapruder film”.208
* * * * *
In 1967, CBS would ensure Orville Nix never gave another interview.209 And for their part, Time, who owned Life magazine, had control over the Zapruder film and would not give it up until 1975 when they sold it back to the family for one dollar. This was confirmed by Richard Stolley, the man who first saw the Zapruder film and later became editor of Life magazine: “the order to acquire the film and withhold it from public viewing came from Life’s publisher, C.D. Jackson via Henry Luce.210 For many years, Luce’s personal emissary to the CIA was C.D. Jackson, a Time Inc. vice-president who was publisher of Life magazine from 1960 until his death in 1964.
The CIA’s practice of controlling the media had ensured that any secrets the Nix and Zapruder films would later reveal would not be found out now. The CIA didn’t know the Church Committee, convened in 1973 would spill many secrets of how they used the aforementioned newsgroups to propagandize, disseminate disinformation, and smear the lives of innocent people. Orville Nix was one of the CIA’s practice victims…UPI just took advantage of him. Latter day reporters who worked for the CIA included Richard Billings and Hugh Aynesworth. Both also worked on the Jim Garrison staff during the famous Clay Shaw trial.
At first, UPI’s interest in Orville Nix and his film was more for greed than for sharing information. This was proven with Orville’s own experience and Marie Muchmore‘s experience with UPI.211
The UPI tag team of Reinhardt and Schonfeld had licensed the Marie Muchmore film for a song; one thousand dollars. In later years, Maurice Schonfeld would write about it in the Columbia Journalism Review, bragging about how he and Reinhardt procured the film:
“I’ve got a lady here who says she has a movie of the assassination. What do I do with her?” asked the deskman. “Lock the door,” said Reinhardt.
Reinhardt hurried to the office and set about shaking Miss Muchmore’s confidence in the value of her film by asking if she was positive that she was filming at the very moment of the assassination, if the film was in focus, if the exposure was right. UPI would be pleased to develop the film and see if it was any good and then make an offer, Reinhardt said, or, if Miss Muchmore preferred to play it safe, UPI would make a blind cash offer. Miss Muchmore chose to play it safe and accepted a check for $1,000. Reinhardt took the film to the Eastman Kodak lab in Dallas. At first it seemed that Miss Muchmore had gotten the better of the deal. All we had was a grainy, jerky glimpse of the last seconds of the assassination and the confused aftermath; but back in New York we slowed the picture down, blew it up, zoomed in and stop-framed and turned it into two minutes of respectable TV news. By the time we released the edited sequence, however, Jack Ruby had killed Oswald, the president’s funeral had just occurred, and showing the film seemed in such poor taste that most UPI client stations chose not to show it.”212
How unfortunate for UPI.
* * * * *
UPI, under the direction of Burt Reinhardt, developed several projects with the Nix and Muchmore films. They produced the above-mentioned book, “Four Days,” including several color frames from the movies. They made a composite movie in 35mm from
the original 8mm movies by David Wolper. The composite used the technique of repeating a frame several times to give the appearance of slow motion or stop action during key sections of the films; a technique that wasn’t truthful, but was widely used at the time. Reinhardt, Schonfeld, and Mr. Fox, a UPI writer, made the composite movie available to researchers at their projection studio in New York in 1964 and 1965.213 Researchers who viewed this “technique” film at the time included Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher, and many others.214
That UPI offered the film to researchers was a transparent gesture, unlike the secrecy with which Life magazine surrounded the Zapruder film. The grandest gesture made by UPI though, was due to the insistence of one man in New York who vehemently believed he too had seen an image, though different from the image Penn Jones had seen. This man was named Jones Harris.
Jones Harris, the colorful son of actress Ruth Gordon, is a man of many influences and connections.215 With his refined vocabulary, charming demeanor, and unique style, he has always been a force with which to be reckoned. He believed from the day the thirty-fifth president was murdered that there was a conspiracy within a conspiracy. He began making phone calls and interviewing witnesses as early as December of 1963. Then, after the Warren Commission was convened due to the overwhelming public questioning of Lee Harvey Oswald‘s guilt, a twenty-six volume set was published listing their findings and photo, audio, and witness exhibits. Few people could afford such a complicated set of findings, but Jones Harris, a man of independent means, could. He was appalled and mystified as he pored over the laborious tome day and night. He knew several people within the JFK administration, several of them lovely women. He had been advised by one of them, Pamela Turnure, the petite and beautiful press secretary for First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, that even some of the Secret Service men felt there was a conspiracy to kill JFK.216 “She said that they thought there was gunfire from more than one place,” he related to the author. “That’s when I went to Dallas to interview witnesses myself.”217
Early in 1964, not long after Penn Jones visited him, Orville Nix got a phone call from a man asking if he knew Jones Harris. Orville, thinking this was the friend of which Penn Jones spoke, said, “Not that I recollect, though I do know a Penn Jones.”
The caller hung up and Orville long wondered why the phone call was made. Later in the year he would find out why.
Burt Reinhardt and Reese Schonfeld were contacted by Mr. Harris in order to view frames from the Nix film. Harris was, and still is, convinced that in the Nix film, the viewer could see a man dressed in a police uniform, aiming a long-barreled revolver at the President. Behind this image is the automobile that Forrest Sorrels questioned Jack Ruby about, Honest Joe’s Gun and Pawn Shop Edsel. Honest Joe’s Gun and Pawn Shop unique car was parked by the Dallas Police Department basement doors the day Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald.218 Coincidental? Harris thinks not. In a telephonic interview on November 9th, 2013, with me, the author, Harris told me:
Dearest Gayle, have you read the full Warren Commission testimony of Forrest Sorrels? I know he was friends with your grandfather, but do you realize what a bad day he too was having on November 22, 1963?
Think about it…he was sitting in the same seat as JFK was except in the car in front of him. He was looking out the right window. He saw things that he only told a few people. I think that must have been one of the saddest days of his life, not only because the President died, but because he saw the person that did it. I’m convinced because he is the only one who mentions Honest Joe’s car not once, but twice in his testimony. And no one ever questioned him.
I was well aware of the Mafia connection to the assassination, even as early as 1963, but what kept me researching the case was the government involvement---and your grandfather’s film proves it. You see, in the river of time, Forrest Sorrels was 7 to 8 seconds ahead of President Kennedy. He would have been looking the same direction Kennedy was looking and I believe he saw something on the knoll. Why else would he be the only one to mention the Honest Joe’s car? The Zapruder film doesn’t show that area, but the Nix film does. It is the most important film of the assassination. 219
Jones Harris contacted Reese Schonfeld of UPI. Schonfeld relates the UPI experience with Jones Harris:
“In some of the pictures published in the Warren Report, Harris found something new. First off, he saw a station wagon with a machine gun mounted on the roof. Such a station wagon did exist in Dallas—it was used to advertise a Dallas gun shop—and it was Harris’s theory that the station wagon and the shop were involved in some way in the Kennedy assassination. Then he found a curious shape on the grassy knoll, a shape that could be read as a man aiming a gun at John F. Kennedy. We gave Harris some of the key stills made from the Nix film. They showed the knoll and, atop the knoll, “the pergola”—a concrete structure consisting of two octagonal towers connected by a wall thirty-eight inches high and 100 feet long. In the process of enlarging these stills, two things happened: the station wagon went away and the head, shoulders, arms, and gun of the rifleman was standing behind this car, leaning on it, as he took aim.”220
In 2013, during an interview conducted by the Sixth Floor Museum with the late Eddie Rubinstein, Honest Joe’s son, he too would relate the sightings of his dad’s car that day. He recounted the Secret Service coming to the business and later the FBI asking questions because someone had “reported that a young guy got out of Honest Joe’s car and was carrying a long package wrapped in newspapers and ran up to the knoll.”221 The Secret Service had asked if it was him to which he adamantly responded “no.” Rubinstein later relates during the same interview that he and his friend had gone to Austin the weekend the president was assassinated. As they were having breakfast at Nighthawks diner, they saw a picture of his dad’s advertising vehicle on television. For a scared moment, Eddie Goldstein thought his dad may have been involved in the death of Lee Harvey Oswald because his mother (Eddie’s grandmother) was a huge Kennedy supporter. This love for Kennedy would also be the reason Jack Ruby gave for killing Lee Harvey Oswald.
This station wagon, some would call a van or truck, was also seen the day Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby. The Dallas Gun Shop was actually a Pawn Shop named Honest Joe’s and indeed had a non-working machine gun attached on the back.222 Honest Joe’s had two advertising vehicles: a jeepster and an Edsel.223 Harris’s contention of seeing a gunman was later dismissed by a study conducted by a firm UPI had hired-ITEK, a CIA run film analysis plant. What the public didn’t know, nor did the unquestioning Schonfeld, was that the ITEK study did indeed state there could have been another gunman there: just not the one Harris claimed to see. Little did Schonfeld and Reinhardt know, Jones Harris had teamed up with renowned photo analyst and photographer Bernard Hoffman who had devised a way of enhancing film using a microscope called photo-micrography. Hoffman was a famous photographer and inventor and became fast friends with Jones Harris who, unlike Schonfeld, respected Hoffman’s work. Nevertheless, Schonfeld and Reinhardt had found another money-making opportunity from the Nix film:
Harris wanted Hoffman to analyze the key frames of our original film, hoping to be able to firmly establish the existence of the rifleman. If the UPI-owned Nix film bore out Harris’s theories, it would obviously be worth a lot of money. Reinhardt and I cooperated. We produced the original so that Bernie Hoffman could make the best possible reproductions. As the custodian of the original, I worked through the winter of 1965-66 with Hoffman and Harris in Hoffman’s photo lab, searching with them for the frame that would prove, once and for all, that there was a man with a gun on the grassy knoll, where no man was supposed to be, as well as a car parked where no car was meant to be parked.224
The urge to make money superseded the urge to find the truth. Schonfeld continues:
At this point, the question was how to proceed. Jones Harris wanted the publicity which only a national magazine could provide, but he seemed reluctant to carry his research any further.
> Additional research in to the film would be extremely costly. UPI was unwilling to pay for it, since there would be no immediate financial return (UPI does not sell exclusive stories and it is impossible to assign a dollar value to a wire service scoop). Also, there was always the chance that further analysis would reveal that the shape which seemed to be a man was nothing but a mass of shadows, so that a great deal of money would be spent for what would finally be an epic nonstory—about a frame from a film no one had heard of which proved only that there was nothing remarkable to be seen. But if this sort of nonstory could hardly succeed as a wire-service piece, it could very well go over big on the cover of a national magazine: a blown-up frame of the knoll, a white circle drawn around the shadowy shape, and a bold title reading “WAS THERE AN ASSASSIN ON THE KNOLL? See page 6.” So, though as a journalist I hated giving up control of the story, as a businessman I realized that it made more sense to take it to a magazine than for UPI to go on with it.225
Schonfeld shopped the Nix film and the Jones Harris discovery to Richard Billings, an assistant editor at Life magazine. Billings was unable to interest the CIA fronted Time/Life powers that be, because in doing so, the Warren Report findings would be questioned. This, of course was not the excuse they gave for being disinterested. Jones Harris spoke with Billings personally, aside from Schonfeld and showed him the enhanced frame Hoffman had made from the Nix film. The blood drained from Billings face as he stared at the frame. “Would you mind if I show this to the head of our photo lab?” he asked Harris. Harris agreed. They walked to the lab where Harris was introduced to a distinguished, white-haired man. Billings handed the enlarged frame over to the man, who Jones Harris later learned was George Karas. Karas looked down at the blowup slowly, inspecting the image with a technical eye. A few seconds later, he looked up at Billings and tears were gushing from his eyes as he shook his head in horror. Jones Harris realized Mr. Karas had seen the same image Jones had seen when he first saw the Nix film: an image of a sniper in front of a car. Without saying a word as his tears flowed freely, Karas handed the frame back to Billings who quickly escorted Harris from the lab. For the second time, Life magazine had a chance to break a story about the Nix film, but did not. Their excuse, Billings said was, “They felt that they had already given sufficient space to the Kennedy assassination.”226
The Missing JFK Assassination Film Page 14