Where was Poppy? George H. W. (Poppy) Bush may be one of the few people of his generation who cannot recall exactly where he was when John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas on November 22, 1963. At times he has said that he was somewhere in Texas. Bush was indeed somewhere in Texas. And he had every reason to remember. At the time, Bush was the 39-year-old chairman of the Harris County (Houston) Republican Party and an outspoken critic of the President. In the art of propaganda, and in the daily business of public relations, a cardinal rule is that if a problem emerges, it must be managed immediately. The trick is to quickly acknowledge and gain control of the new material, mitigating the damage by redirecting it in a beneficial way. This is known in tradecraft as block and bridge. Thus it was that the first and only Bush family acknowledgment of where Poppy Bush was on that red-letter day [JFKs assassination on Nov. 22, 1963] came in classic form--from the wife, in the most innocuous swathing. The venue was her 1994 book, Barbara Bush: A Memoir, which was published ten months after the documents declassification. Deep in that book, mostly a compendium of narrow-gauge, self-serving recollections, there it was: not just a recollection of the assassination, but the reproduction of an actual letter written by Barbara on the very day, at the very moment, that Kennedy was shot. The letter has plenty of details, but it omits one important personal item from that day: Poppys call to the FBI; perhaps Poppy did not mention it to her? Barbara begins to describe that fateful day on page 59 of her memoirs: (read the full story here: lewrockwell/2013/10/russ-baker/barbara-bush-and-the-jfk-assassination/ ) On the evening of November 21, 1963, Poppy Bush spoke to a gathering of the American Association of Oil Drilling Contractors (AAODC) at the Sheraton Hotel in Dallas. Since Zeppa himself was a former president of AAODC, it is likely that he attending that gathering. It is also likely that both Zeppa and the Bushes actually spent the night in Dallas and that they were in Dallas the next morning: the day Kennedy was Assassinated. This brings us to the vexing question of Poppys motive in calling the FBI at 1:45 P.M. on November 22, to identify James Parrot as a possibly suspect in the presidents murder, and to mention that he, George H. W. Bush, happened to be in Tyler, Texas. He told the FBI that he expected to spend the night of November 22 at the Sheraton Hotel in Dallas-but instead, after flying to Dallas on Zeppas plane, he left again almost immediately on a commercial flight to Houston. Why state that he expected to spend the night at the Dallas Sheraton if he was not planning to stay? Perhaps this was to create a little confusion, to blur the fact that he had already stayed at the hotel-the night before. Anyone inquiring would learn that Bush was in Tyler at the time of the assassination and planned to stay in Dallas afterward, but canceled his plan following JFKs death.
Posted on: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 19:24:52 +0000
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