Joseph McBride: Tippit, JFK and the MSM
To say that Joseph McBride has had a varied career as a writer is sort of like saying that there is a lot of water in the Atlantic Ocean. McBride thought he was going to be a lawyer and then a congressman. But this all changed at a relatively early time. He had worked in Kennedy’s primary campaign in Wisconsin, so:
My candidate’s murder made me give up my ambition to enter politics. When the federal government showed no interest in solving the crime, I lost my faith in our political system. My ambition changed: I became a writer instead….writing about films became my avocation. (I Loved Movies But, by Joseph McBride with Danny Peary, p. 63)
In fact, McBride was at the American Serb Memorial Hall in Milwaukee when filmmaker Robert Drew shot his landmark picture Primary, about the Wisconsin race between JFK and Hubert Humphrey. He is, very briefly, in that film. That picture was a milestone in the cinema verite, pure documentary form, and the first shot of Kennedy in that picture has become a cinematic icon. Off of that film, Drew got the assignment to do Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment. This is a gripping and revealing look at how the Kennedys handled the conflict with Governor George Wallace at the University of Alabama over integration. Crisis aired on ABC. So, rather unexpectedly, McBride became a part of, not just history, but the depiction of history.
At the University of Wisconsin, McBride had the misfortune to be taught by graduate assistant Lynne Cheney. Yes, that Lynne Cheney, wife of future Vice President Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney was there as an intern/grad student for Governor Warren Knowles, so he could keep on getting deferments in order not to serve in Vietnam. In his own words, McBride found the woman to be horribly ignorant and nasty as a teacher. (p. 74) Then, McBride was asked to leave college due to his very bad attendance record.
Thus began the first of his many writing jobs. He was hired as a reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal. But since he had developed a strong interest in cinema while in college, he also began writing for film journals. He actually ran the Wisconsin Film Society. From here, he began to write books on film, about famous directors like Orson Welles and John Ford. He eventually got a job at Daily Variety, where he ended up staying on and off for several years. Among other things, he reviewed current movies and plays and did revenue compilations of current film releases.
When McBride actually met Welles, he got cast as an actor in his much-delayed final film, The Other Side of the Wind. (p. 145) McBride was instrumental in getting that picture shown on Netflix.
McBride worked at a newspaper in Riverside California, The Riverside Press-Enterprise. In proximity to Hollywood, he wrote two film scripts that got produced: Blood and Guts and Rock n’ Roll High School, the latter of which has become a kind of cult film. He also had a few scripts optioned. But his most important contribution to film was that he wrote five of the American Film Institute salutes: Fred Astaire, Lillian Gish, Jimmy Stewart, Frank Capra, and John Huston. These were so good that they ended up getting nominated for a couple of Emmy awards and winning a Writers’ Guild Award.
McBride now became so well known as a film historian that he ended up being a regular commentator on DVD/Blu-ray films. He has done almost forty of these. He has also written film biographies, e.g., Steven Spielberg, and later, critical studies of famous directors like Billy Wilder. He finally settled into being a film professor at San Francisco State University, which is where he retired from in 2024.
But the reason we are reviewing I Loved Movies, But.. concerns the “But” in the title. Which refers to the fact that McBride never lost his interest in the Kennedy case. And that subject is dealt with in this volume. As McBride says:
I continue to pursue that mission relentlessly because of my loyalty to the candidate I had worked for and because his unsolved murder disrupted my belief system so radically that I have to do all I can to understand what happened to him and why. (p. 526)
In fact, McBride actually wrote a short story about JFK’s murder two years before it happened. Why? Because the two times he saw him during the Wisconsin primary, he was struck by how close he could get to him, the loose security. The first time, at the town of Wauwatosa, he could detect no security at all. The second time, at a much larger rally in Milwaukee, there were some police around, but not encircling him. In fact, McBride got so close that the flash bulbs from his camera startled Kennedy for a few seconds. (p. 58)
Like many others, McBride was puzzled by how the official assassination story changed from a frontal shot through the neck to Lee Oswald shooting Kennedy from behind. He was also struck by Oswald’s fervent declaration while in custody of the Dallas police, “I’m just a patsy!” By 1966, he wrote a letter to a liberal newspaper in Madison ending with, “No dead man can be convicted of a crime, and no unprosecuted dead man’s reputation should be such.” (p. 528)
The years of Watergate and the Church Committee increased his cynicism about the case, and he purchased both the Warren Commission and House Select Committee volumes. He also began to resent the incessant rubric of labeling people like him as “conspiracy theorists”. So while he expanded his reputation as a film historian and scenarist, his initial interest in the JFK case never left him.
He tried to get his first book, Into the Nightmare, published by Knopf, through the famous—since deceased-- editor Robert Gottlieb. Gottlieb passed it on to another editor who deemed it too speculative. He then tried to get his second book, Political Truth—about the media and the JFK case—published by Simon and Schuster. They said they couldn’t do it since he was too critical of the New York Times, who they needed to review their books. (p. 532)
The first book, Into the Nightmare, is largely about the murder of Patrolman J. D. Tippit. McBride tells Peary that he was struck by how that case was slighted in the Warren Report, a fact pointed out by no less an authority than Sylvia Meagher. Yet, the Tippit case was trumpeted by Commission lawyer David Belin as being the Rosetta Stone in the case against Oswald. Therefore, McBride began to research that case in earnest in 1982. (p. 535). He came to a contrary conclusion than Belin: it was a Rosetta Stone, but for Oswald’s innocence in both cases.
As he notes to Peary, some of the important interviews he did were with people like DA Henry Wade, police detective Jim Leavelle and, of paramount interest, one he did with Tippit’s father Edgar Lee Tippit -who, surprisingly, had been ignored. This last interview unveiled some compelling information. Namely, that Tippit was prematurely looking for Oswald in Oak Cliff, in an area which was technically not in his patrol perimeter. But it was not just him. A second officer was on the prowl, Sgt. William Mentzel. And it was really in his area where Tippit was shot. Edgar Lee garnered this information from a rather solid source. It came from Tippit’s widow, Marie, who was told about it by Mentzel himself. (p. 547) Mentzel said both he and Tippit were assigned to track down Oswald, and they were given his name before it became public. But Mentzel was sidelined because he either stopped for an accident or had one himself. Wade confirmed part of this story: “Somebody reported to me that the police already knew who he [Oswald] was and they were looking for him.” (p. 549) Wade also told McBride that the autopsy of President Kennedy was probably the worst he had ever seen. Leavelle all but admitted to McBride that they really did not have a good case against Oswald for the murder of JFK, so they decided to arraign him on the Tippit murder. (p. 542)
About his second book, Political Truth, McBride comments on how the wall-to-wall coverage of Kennedy’s murder by the media that weekend served as a kind of mass anesthetic on the case. In fact, the MSM, e.g., Dan Rather of CBS, congratulated itself on their incurious coverage, which never dove below the surface of events. To them, it commemorated the solemn transfer of power by constitutional means. And when those four days were over, as Rather pronounced, everyone was supposed to return to regular lives, like nothing extraordinary had happened. When, in fact, the world had changed “…in ways we could not yet begin to imagine.” (p. 554)
He also adds that in his view, many of the MSM really do know what happened in the JFK case. But they cannot venture out of that hibernation without risking losses to their positions, to their access, and possible awards - which are designed to uphold the status quo. He compares this odd positioning to the literary invention by George Orwell of ‘Crimestop’, in his dystopian novel 1984. McBride comments that the reception given to Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK is an example of this. Even though it was attacked by the media heavyweights for being inaccurate, it was much closer to the truth than the MSM’s false journalism on the case.
I won’t give Political Truth a fuller treatment since I already reviewed it. (Click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/how-the-msm-blew-the-jfk-case-part-two) And I cannot really recommend the reader go out and purchase I Loved Movies, But… since the vast majority of the book is about the picture business. But I can advise the reader to please go out and read McBride’s two books dealing with the JFK case. There are parts of Into the Nightmare that I do not agree with, but when McBride concentrates on the actual murder of Tippit, in an almost moment-by-moment chronicle, there is no better treatment of that case in the literature. As I noted above, his book on the MSM and JFK is one of the best there is.
There is one thing I should add. In commenting on George Lucas’ American Graffiti, the late director Abraham Polonsky said to McBride: “How can anyone be nostalgic about 1962?” (p. 152). I would have told him:
Because one year later, Lyndon Johnson would become president under highly suspicious circumstances. He would escalate the Vietnam War and do something Kennedy would have never done: Declare war on North Vietnam. Thus, unleashing the most violently divisive conflict since the Civil War. That is why Lucas ended the film with one character MIA at the siege of An Loc, and another leaving for Canada. Watch the ending again, Abe.
Two of McBride's books that are recommended may be found here and here.
