In a welcome development, the Sixth Floor Museum is holding a debate about the causes of JFK’s assassination on October 29. Long reluctant to engage with critics of the official story, the Dallas museum is opening itself to new points of view.
I suspect curator Stephen Fagin is responsible. I did an oral history of my JFK journalism for the Museum, and I found him to be a perceptive questioner who was interested in different interpretations of November 22.
The two participants in the Oct 29 could not be more qualified to represent their views.
For the first time ever, Howard P. Willens, former Warren Commission attorney, and G. Robert Blakey, former head of the House Select Committee on Assassination investigation, will appear together to publicly discuss the context of these investigations and their findings, offering unique firsthand insights into why questions remain still today, almost 55 years after the assassination.
Willens was a senior attorney on the Commission who kept an interesting diary of his work. I interviewed Willens for JFK Facts a couple of years ago. He acknowledged that he was “naive to say the least” about the CIA when he was investigating the assassination in 1964.
I have interviewed Blakey several times about how the CIA, in the person of George Joannides, obstructed the HSCA investigation. He talks about Joannides here.
Google search might interest some.
https://www.google.com/search?q=elementary+school+children+in+Dallas+cheer+assassinnation+in+1963&rlz=1C1NHXL_enUS726US726&oq=elementary+school+children++in+Dallas+cheer+assassinnation+in+1963&aqs=chrome..69i57.77710j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
I met Stephen Fagin back in 2008, when he bravely presented the Rev. William Holmes at the Sixth Floor Museum. Holmes had rocked the movers-and-shakers of Dallas on Nov., 24, 1963 by delivering a sermon at Northhaven Methodist Church in which he revealed that elementary schoolchildren attending Everett Lee Degollier School in North Dallas had happily cheered the assassination. And Fagin invited the pastor to re-deliver that historic sermon at the Sixth Floor Museum on the 45th anniversary of the JFK murder, and he did so over the objections of the late Gary Mack…
Steve Fagin certainly seems to have the courage to steer the Sixth Floor Museum into the 21st century by taking a real look at the width and breadth of research conducted on the assassination, including theories which run counter to the official story put forth by the Warren Report.
That should be a helluva showdown. Blakey has become the best advocate for conspiracy to me.
I just have one question for Willens:
Why did Helms, Phillips, Kent and Joannides all hide the CIA’s relationship with the DRE during the time of LHO from both the WC and HSCA?