Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Russians had advanced to within fifty miles north of Kharkov by taking Belgorod, and within 40 miles from the east and south as they slowly encircled the city, a key steel center in Russia.

In Tunisia, heavy rains continued to hamper ground and air operations. Nevertheless, there were Allied bombing raids on German positions at Kairouan to aid the advance of the Eighth Army under General Montgomery, reported by General Alexander to have eliminated all Axis forces east of Tunisia, now advancing into Tunisian territory, the previous day having been reported fully 60 miles into the heavily disputed terrain.

From India, Mohandas Gandhi stated his intent to begin a 31-day fast unless freed, indicated the report, by the British from his house arrest under which he had been maintained since August 9 when he called for Satyagraha, civil disobedience to obtain for India full and immediate independence from Great Britain. He was provided conditional release by the British-controlled government to undertake the fast but was refused unconditional release. The fast was, strictly speaking, likely not staged for his own personal release, but rather another demonstration of "firmness in a good cause" to obtain for India the ultimate goal of independence. The British Viceroy to India, Lord Linlithgow, had asked Gandhi not to fast for he viewed it as a form of blackmail of the British Government.

Dr. Robert Kempner of the University of Pennsylvania, a former member of the pre-Nazi secret police in Germany until reported as killed in the purge undertaken through the Gestapo in 1933, actually escaping into exile, contended that the Gestapo, being composed of the worst, most hardened criminal element within Germany, would continue to fight after each country was liberated and after the war, itself, was finished.

Dr. Kempner had recently testified for the prosecution in Connecticut during a spy trial. He had also been the first law enforcement officer in Germany to investigate Hitler after the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. He claimed to have recommended that Hitler be jailed without the right of parole unless accompanied by expulsion from Germany. He criticized the leniency of officials at the time with respect to Hitler’s one-year sentence.

Query, whether deportation to Austria, Hitler’s native land and therefore the only place to which he could have been deported without resort to some medieval notion of exile to Elbe, would have done any good whatsoever to avert what ultimately occurred. Would it not have raised Hitler that much faster to the status of martyr among his young followers in Germany?

Dr. Kempner's suggested method of maintaining law and order sounds more along the lines of that which motivated Hitler and his followers in the first place. To have not sent him to jail at all for his mere exercise of freedom of speech, even if it resulted in a riot, would have likely taken the starch out of the entire movement.

But goading little Hitlers, making them into martyrs--isn’t that what secret police are for?

Ourselves, we would have asked Dr. Kempner a little more about how it was that he came to escape execution in Germany.

And the President ordered extension of the 40-hour work week to 48 hours, with time and a half for overtime pay for all who were under the umbrella of the Fair Labor Standards Act. That Act, however, did not include within its parameters retail workers, domestic service workers, or journalists, among others; nevertheless, those occupations were to have their hours likewise extended, but without therefore the benefit of time and a half overtime pay.

The object was to increase productivity. But did it not also promise inflation by raising wages?

It would appear as a compromise offered by the executive branch to Labor for the hard-boiled approach taken consistently to strikes during the previous year, threatening within the previous month a military takeover of Pennsylvania's anthracite coal mines if a three-week old strike, begun around Christmas, were not ended. It was, said the miners, out of deference to and respect of the President, not in response to his ultimatum.

Senator Gurney of South Dakota had, a couple of weeks earlier, as reported January 26, proposed that the country should adopt a 56-hour week, akin to the British, but without overtime pay, in order to stem the tide of labor fleeing the farm, in the gravitational pull of the city, by reducing thereby the requisite war-industrial labor pool, employed at considerably higher wages than paid on the farm.

The editorial page begins with a piece in praise of this move by the President, seeing it as a final push toward full mobilization of the war labor base by putting an end to the remaining labor imbroglios occasionally still rearing their heads in various industries.

"Our Victory" finds the Guadalcanal success to be a probable harbinger of things yet to be for the Allies in the Pacific, cautioning the while that victory could not be won in this manner, through a purely defensive operation, no matter how brilliantly planned and executed under the worst jungle conditions. The piece suggests that it would take a generation to defeat Japan if the war were to be fought only defensively. The next step, it insists, therefore, had to be decisively offensive, utilizing Henderson Field as the staging ground for such operations.

Nevertheless, things had to move relatively slowly, to insure continued success, however battle tested the previously green troops among the Marines had been by the six-month Devil Dog fight. For they were still relatively green when compared to the Japanese, with five years of fighting behind them in China. Moreover, the leadership understood that Americans would not tolerate the kind of mass losses which the Japanese, the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese appeared to take as a matter of indoctrinated course. Nor would the British. The American naval losses left only two operational carriers in the Pacific--until the newly launched Essex, Yorktown, and others could become fully fitted, broken in, and deployed. Bomber and fighter operations thus had to be limited to an available range, the extent of which from Henderson Field was, for the present, Rabaul, Buin, and Munda in the Solomons, at least to be accomplished with a reasonable degree of certainty that most of the pilots would return from a mission.

Raymond Clapper plumps for more Cologne-type raids of the previous June 1, arguing that a series of such major thousand-plane raids would hasten the internal collapse of morale and command structure within Germany, already on the ropes. He recognizes, however, that the war could not be won only through bombing, that such raids were only precursors to soften the terrain and hinder the capability of manufacture of war materiel, that finally infantry operations on the Continent must be undertaken to liberate it.

Yet, he says that the more bombs to be dropped the better, for the Russian campaign had so taken a toll on Hitler’s armies that they might be quite as susceptible to self-annihilation as were the troops of Napoleon down the Smolensk Road, across the blood-soaked Berezina River, as winter harshly chased the Grande Armée, reduced from half a million to 100,000, in November and December, 1812, seeking retreat from the guerilla-burned and looted Moscow.

Were, in other words, the rattlesnakes beginning to commit suicide?

Ah, time would tell.

Samuel Grafton challenges Eddie Rickenbacker to back up his attacks with facts regarding the alleged lack of production for too many strikes and labor slowdowns during the previous year, as he was touring the country claiming to be the case. Captain Rickenbacker, the World War I flying ace who had recently returned stateside after having been fished out of the drink in the Pacific back in October while reviewing air operations in that theater and attempting to carry a special message to General MacArthur, had been contending that production could be increased by a factor of anywhere from 30 to 100 percent if the soldiers were returned and put back to work in the factories to replace slack labor practices. Mr. Grafton obviously found the claim to be disingenuous in light of demonstrated production increases to record levels in 1942, despite occasional strikes and labor demands.

And the quote of the day from M. Poe carries us inevitably back to our favorite tv series of the 1960's. We add to that discussed yesterday, re the episode aired originally November 19, 1963, titled "Fatso", that its "Epilogue" segment, a two-minute conclusory portion accompanying each four-act episode of the program, consisted, in addition to the aforementioned mailbox check by Mr. David O. Lambert, Fatso by any other name, of a second scene in which the good doctor is walking down a street in daylight, now transposed somehow suddenly from Kentucky's blue grass horse country to the setting of the first episode of the series, titled "Fear in a Desert City", Arizona.

As the doctor walks beyond a sign, "El Charro", he suddenly sees a horseman, that is a motorcycle policeman, turn the corner onto the street. Making furtive gestures, the doctor stops, turns away toward a chain link fence, lights a cigarette, the while keeping one peripherally glancing wary eye on the moment of the copper's horse, hoping to avoid the sting of the police, the breath of the cannon going boom, the movement made of the cycle, as the copper stops astride the position of the inscrutable but scrupulous doctor on the long white ribbon of walk to nowhere--albeit a position intervened by a chopped-top version of the Little Deuce Coupe, which, judging inferentially by the contrasting tone of the gray, was not light blue but probably cherry red, and with only single headlamps, not the dual vertical jobs.

As Jean Valjean continues to pause suspiciously, the copper dismounts from his horse, proceeds toward the chopped-top hot rod to write a ticket, an equipment violation, maybe a parking violation. The citation book out, Jean momentarily once again breathes his sigh of relief, puffs voraciously, helplessly again on the cigarette, nonchalantly slips down the concrete ribbon, the camera panning to expose the plates on the cycle and the hot rod, both Arizona, the cycle bearing "129", the hot rod, "CVU 204".

Those numbers, given the date of original broadcast, naturally led us to return to the infamous film shot three days later. In it, frame 129 shows the horseman, alone on his motorcycle, after the first to round the corner had gone ahead, and one other had dropped off apparently to a side street, in fact, merely drifting within the left side periphery of the frame, within the sprocket strip of the film. Nevertheless, in the original film as viewed from a projector, only the one motorcycle policeman is visible, center frame, in frame 129. The film advances three more frames to 132, at which point the camera was stopped.

At frame 133, the President's limousine comes initially into view after having already turned the corner of Houston onto Elm.

That which is interesting is three-fold:

First, the only difference between frame 129 and its predecessor frame is the presence of the left rear shoulder of an individual standing, back to the camera, on the north side of Elm, within the perspective of the viewer, just to the left edge of the back of the Stemmons Freeway sign, that person being shown more fully in the ensuing two frames, and subsequent frames after the limousine appears, wearing a light blue scarf. By frame 131, (remembering that each frame in running sequence represents approximately 1/18^th of a second), the light blue scarf lines up on the right side of the frame with a light blue coat worn by a woman standing on the far side of the street on Houston, just before the corner of Elm, next to the WPA-constructed reflecting pool at that location.

The latter woman in the blue coat also first comes fully into view in frame 129, having made a brief appearance in frames 121 and 122, but before that, being shielded by two men, one wearing a red jacket and the other dark clothing. Her position disappears with the camera's pan of the frame between 122 and 129. She then remains in view after that point, in line with the woman in the blue scarf, through frame 204.

Second, there is a person, apparently a woman, dressed in a light tan dress with what appears to be a white collar, standing on the north side of Elm, fourth person to the left of the woman in the blue scarf. This woman in the tan dress lines up in these frames with a woman also wearing a tan dress with a white collar, on the same corner as the woman in the blue coat, albeit standing on the Elm side of the corner.

Both sets of persons are still in the same locations as the camera again begins operation when the blue Lincoln first enters the view at frame 133. The four persons form a parallelogram within the camera's frame at frame 133 and subsequently through frame 191, a period of three and one-quarter seconds, when the woman in tan on the near side of Elm disappears into the left edge sprocket strip of the film by the process of the camera's slow pan to the right.

Third, if running the film through a projector, both women in blue remain visibly in line with one another until frame 204, at which point both pass into the left side sprocket strip of the film, as the left side of the frame reaches the left side of the sign. At frame 208, and for the ensuing three frames, the sprocket holes themselves completely disappear, apparently sheered away at some point through wear. By this latter point, frame 211, only the uppermost portion of the President's head is visible over the top edge of the sign, completely disappearing behind the sign between frames 213 and 223, slightly over half a second--and insofar as being able to detect his movements, between frames 207 and 223, nearly a full second.

It is at frame 224 that the President partially re-emerges from behind the sign and appears to be beginning the movement of his hands which ultimately more plainly ensues a ninth of a second later, the sudden movement toward his throat, a motion which becomes abruptly reactive at frames 227-228, with his elbows becoming extended upward in the course of one-ninth of a second, fully clutched upward, hands clasped in front of his throat by frame 230, thus all occurring in the course of one-third of a second after re-emerging from behind the sign. At frame 226, one-ninth of a second after coming into view from behind the sign, the first clearly visible sudden movements of his hands occur, as he is looking directly at the cameraman.

At frame 195, just as the person wearing the blue scarf and the juxtaposed left edge of the Stemmons Freeway sign line up in the frame with the leading edge of the rear door of the limousine, the President appears to react in some manner, albeit in a blurred subsequent series of frames, before he disappears behind the sign. This reaction, if it is that, however, appears to continue throughout the series and matches in continuity the movement of his hands toward his throat, plainly visible after the interval of less than a second while he is obscured by the sign.

We make these assessments incidentally by viewing stills of the frames in a standard software photo viewer in sequence, with their sprocket holes visible, not by viewing the running film. This sequence which we have described is not grotesque, as the subsequent sequence becomes. It is frightening, nevertheless, given knowledge of what is happening and, moreover, that which is about to happen. But one must repress that emotion if one is to understand what happened.

And as we first noticed a few months ago and duly pointed out, there are three people, ostensibly women, standing in a row on the north curb of Elm, wearing, in order, white, red, and black scarves, suggestive of three of the four horsemen in the proper order of their color as found in Revelations. The fourth, the pale horse, the horse after whom Death follows, we suggest, could be represented by the person in the light blue scarf juxtaposed, from the camera's perspective, to the left edge of the sign, the next person in the line wearing any scarf at all--or, as previously suggested, the man with the open umbrella, the right side of which becomes visible on the other side of the sign, the tip of which is first visible along the right lower edge of frame 206.

That which we are suggesting, therefore, is that the camera was used as a timing device, as well as a viewfinder for the assassination, using the point of entry to the scene of the police motorcycle as a timing reference point, an establishing shot. That would presuppose necessarily that the camera was connected, probably by a simple radio signal and a switch, to the guns or the gunmen, triggering virtually automatic fire, adjusted slightly for elevation to account for slight variation in the position of the vehicle versus that predictable, all based on sight lines previously determined--as we suggested seven years ago, easily accomplished in advance by a surveyor's transit and level, establishing lines at angles, thereby working effectively to compensate more easily for any change of position of the vehicle in the lanes of the roadway.

The film in the camera, we suggest, was timed in sequence, timed from frame 133, with the final shot fired not by accident at frame 311 and hitting the President at 313, but rather in a pre-determined, deliberately timed sequence governed precisely by radio signal, all to make a symbolic point, just as the opening of the umbrella served a dual symbolic and murderous purpose to let the cameraman know that the first shot, the reaction to which was hidden by the sign, was successful.

We have covered the other symbols and the other co-conspirators in the Plaza previously. They all operated, we offer, under Poe's rule of being less likely of discovery by action in plain view.

The motive of the cameraman was simple: money. One hundred thousand dollars was a whole lot of money in 1963.

Last night, we watched that episode of our favorite program of the 1960's, which aired Tuesday, November 26, 1963, the first full day of programming on the three networks of the time since the previous Thursday. The name of the episode was "Nightmare at Northoak".

Oswald lived in the Oak Cliff section on North Beckley.

The sixth floor window of the Depository looks down to the location of the shooting through an oak tree.

The farm in the previous episode, "Fatso", was named Oak Lane Farm.

The opening sequence of the November 26 episode finds the good doctor walking down a deserted city street at night, beyond a store with a sign, "Pianos", suddenly hearing footsteps, turning about to see Lt. Gerard stalking just a few feet behind. The doctor ducks around the corner of the Larchmont Hall into an alley, then runs down the alley, turns amid extended shadows to his left. (A still frame of this shadowed point of the turn subsequently was used as a backdrop for the end credits, possibly during the second season, possibly during the re-runs of the summer of 1967.)

The doctor cannot escape the blind alley, is cornered by the lieutenant, who then reaches beneath his left jacket lapel with his right arm, brings forth his .38-caliber revolver, points it at the startled doctor, calls him by name, utters, "Finally," pulls the trigger--just as a blowout on a school bus going down a hill awakens the doctor from his recurring nightmare.

The bus careens out of control into a ditch, catches fire. The Samaritan instinctively responds, jumps aboard and pulls to safety all the children and the driver. Blown from the wreckage when the bus explodes just as the last child clears the rear doorway, the doctor awakens from his unconscious state to find that he is in the care of the local sheriff and his wife, whose son was among the children saved from the burning bus.

The son, on the prompting of a local newspaper photographer, takes a photograph of the doctor while he is still recovering in bed, asleep, with his forehead and eyes obscured by a cloth.

The photograph appears with a description of the doctor in the local newspaper of the small New England town, apparently is picked up by the wire services. Javert naturally sees the story, determines that a picture of his partial face is that of the hunted deer half-seen, flies to New England in pursuit of his quarry.

The doctor, after realizing a picture of his partial countenance had been published, seeks escape, but stumbles, falls, passes out on the road out of town, discovered by the children he had saved, returned to the care of the sheriff and his wife.

Groundhog Day, two days before Thanksgiving, 1963, continues.

The lieutenant contacts the sheriff, the sheriff takes the doctor's fingerprints, leaves the room. The sheriff's wife suddenly realizes that the reason the doctor had run away was because of the photo, puts that together with the information just imparted sarcastically by her husband that the prints were needed to prove their town hero was not the man wanted by the lieutenant for murder, whereupon the doctor shuts the bedroom door, confesses to the sheriff's wife that he is the wanted man, albeit innocent of the crime. The wife perpends, leaves the room, ponders the doctor's fate, tells her husband, following her sense of moral rectitude, that their ward is, indeed, the wanted man.

Held now in the jail, the doctor has the Gerard-stalking nightmare yet again, this time awakening to the voice of Javert calling Jean's name. Clearing his head, he sees the lieutenant staring him down from the other side of the bars.

The episode goes on a bit. Needless to say, Jean manages to escape. We won't spoil it.

You may say: So what?

That was our intial reaction. The episode aired, after all, after the fact, aired two days after the fact of Ruby shooting Oswald on Sunday, November 24, 1963, on national television.

Could the perpetrators of a conspiracy have gotten an inside track, a viewing of the episode ahead of the general audience, as part of a pre-airing test audience perhaps in Los Angeles, even during the summer months? It is possible. We don't know.

But, it occurred to us also that there were teasers at the end of each episode, previewing the next. It is entirely conceivable, therefore, that the opening sequence of "Nightmare at Northoak", a perfect teaser to keep an audience in suspense for a week, was broadcast on November 19, 1963 at the end of "Fatso".

Was Fatso thus Jack Ruby, in his own mind? Was the doctor in the nightmare sequence transmigrated and transmogrified into Oswald by Ruby, such that Lt. Gerard's role was suddenly occupied by his doppelganger, Ruby, who always wanted to be a cop?

Regardless, the second episode, "The Witch", airing September 24, 1963, concluded with the return by the little girl, cured of her doll's possession, of the three long overdue school library books to their rightful depository, the teacher, titled, "Mythology", "Witchcraft", and "A Collection of Poems by Sir Walter Scott".

The third episode, airing October 1, with guest actress Sandy Dennis, was set in a West Virginia mountain town, concluding in an abandoned coal mine. There is a coalmining town in the hills of West Virginia named Beckley.

The questions arise whether the episodes were used deliberately, whether they merely reveal subconsciously retained content of the perpetrators who had viewed them, content evident in the assassination, or whether they were part of a pattern of symbols, some literary, some artistic, some legal, some from popular culture of the day, which we have discussed here many times, meant to convey a plan to co-conspirators without ever committing anything either in writing or verbally which could be utilized to trace the origins of the conspiracy, symbols meant to convey place and manner of operation, sub silentio--the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram, Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake, Poe's "The Gold Bug", for instance.

Or, was it all just an amazing set of coincidences formed, consciously or subconsciously or in a melange of both, within the mind of 24-year old Lee Oswald who never got much beyond a ninth-grade education and was dyslexic, had only worked at the Depository since mid-October, 1963, the job obtained for him through the connections of Ruth Hyde Paine's pal, George DeMohrenschildt? Maybe so. Maybe, he got it all off the television series, supplemented by a little research at the library on weekends of the symbols innocently conveyed.

We don't think so, but you are free to believe that Martians once landed in Pahrump, Idaho if you so desire.

Whatever you believe, no one has ever explained to us why the Moorman Polaroid photograph we showed you in close-up four years ago appears to have been cropped along the stone wall, such that the top half presents itself as a spliced set of bizarre images melded into montage, out of perspective, yet containing true images, conveyed truly but falsely.

Oswald may have brought the rifle, allegedly purchased by him the previous March 20, under the alias "A. Hidell", from the Chicago mail order house, Klein's Sporting Goods, to the Depository that day simply on invitation from one of his co-workers to go hunting, thus becoming, just as he said, the perfect Patsy, one with the right name, the right background, for a group of John Bircher, right-wing nuts to hang out to dry, people who thought they were going to get trickle-down, Armageddon after a showdown with the Soviets, to prevent the end of the world, while not being forced into social equality with any black man or woman.

Perhaps, he understood implicitly his dilemma, stuck between Scylla and Charybdis, and saw no way out without cooperation, for his precarious set of circumstances, a Russian wife subject to deportation. That would explain his leaving his wedding ring behind that morning.

Regardless of his involvement, there is, we suggest, no hard evidence which establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that he killed President Kennedy or even fired a shot as part of a conspiracy.

Once that is understood, and the surrounding territory of the time is fully embraced, it isn't really hard to consider to what the evidence actually points with greater force and cohesion in its totality, somewhere in the Northwoods, with the Mongoose supplying the Mannlicher. For Mongoose was still top secret and, if acting as The Loner, one would have to be pretty acutely psychic to happen to match a brand of rifle mentioned in another Kipling novel when ordering a World War II surplus job for $19.95 in March, months before the President ever planned to go to Dallas, and even six months before "The Fugitive" went on the air.

Eventually in "Nightmare at Northoak", the doctor engages the lieutenant in conversation from the lock-up, still persisting futilely in proclaiming his innocence to the hardened lieutenant. The lieutenant responds by declaring that all the cities in which the doctor had been during his time on the lamb had unhinged his mind: "Tuscon, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle, Atlanta, Miami, and Northoak, all those rooms, all those days and nights alone, remembering and imagining, until the difference between reality and fantasy is not quite so clear anymore."

Argentina's Minister of Justice, Guillermo Rothe, had been fired upon four times this date while riding in his car in Buenos Aires. The assailant was described as a short, fat man wearing a derby and carrying an umbrella. Perhaps his name was Sir Neville Churchill Downs. Stranger things have happened.

To ----

I heed not that my earthly lot
Hath little of Earth in it--
That years of love have been forgot
In the hatred of a minute:--
I mourn not that the desolate
Are happier, sweet, than I,
But that you sorrow for my fate
Who am a passer-by.

--Edgar Allen Poe, 1829