My new book, "Into the Nightmare"

[Joseph McBride]

A warm welcome to the DPF Joseph! Congratualtions on your new book. I look forward to reading it. It is certainly an area that has much of interest.

I am curious about what attracted you to Tippett in the first place and hypothetically if time was unlimited what other people in this event that are under-researched or overlooked that you would have some interest in and why?

Magda,

Thanks for the welcome and the good words. I'm glad to be here and getting thoughtful questions.

I was drawn to the Tippit area of the case because my instincts as a longtime investigative reporter are to be alert to aspects of stories that are inadequately covered or largely ignored. It bothered me that the murder of Tippit was treated so cursorily in official investigations and in most writings on the assassination, when it was clearly crucial to the case in many ways. Sylvia Meagher wrote in ACCESSORIES AFTER THE FACT (1967), still perhaps the best book on the assassination, "Tippit, the policeman and the man, is a one-dimensional and insubstantial figure -- unknown and unknowable. The [Warren] Commission was not interested in Tippit's life, and apparently interested in his death only to the extent that it could be ascribed to Oswald, despite massive defects in the evidence against him."

Indeed, my research has shown that the Dallas police focused on trying to pin the Tippit murder on Oswald partly because they knew it would be hard to prove a case against him for shooting Kennedy, but that they did a poor investigation of the Tippit case as well and mostly dropped the investigation after the first weekend. I had revealing interviews with former District Attorney Henry Wade and Detective James Leavelle, who was in charge of the Tippit investigation, as far as it went, and managed to get them to admit to many of the problems with both cases and to help me demolish what Oswald called the "so-called evidence" against him. Watergate taught us that the coverup is often the key to the crime. The deliberate inattention paid to the Tippit case helped alert me to its great importance. I took Meagher's words as a challenge to show that Tippit was not unknowable. I found much about the case that had not been known and am able to demonstrate much about what he was actually doing that day.

As for your question about other people deserving of more study, I would like to see more about Ruth and Michael Paine -- Carol Hewett has done excellent work on the Paines, and I hope more would be done on them. Some others who come to mind who should be subjects of further research: Curtis LeMay; Guy Banister; General Edwin Walker; Richard Helms; Cord Meyer, Jr.; Dan Rather. I wish Bill Moyers would finally write his memoirs.