Latest / The Lone Gunman Podcast : JFK Assassination / JFK Book Reviews - No More Silence By Larry Sneed
Transcript
- 0:01Speaker 1: What's up, everybody, And welcome to JFK Book Reviews, a
- 0:04Speaker 1: division of the Lone Gum and Podcast. But you already
- 0:07Speaker 1: know that because you're members of our channel now and
- 0:11Speaker 1: these are exclusively just for you for now. Today we're
- 0:16Speaker 1: going to be reviewing the book No More Silence by
- 0:21Speaker 1: Larry Snead Joe, and she is a thick one, she is.
- 0:31Speaker 1: I happen to have the paperback copy here, sir, and
- 0:34Speaker 1: it's actually from the Fairport Public Library in Fairport, New York. Yeah,
- 0:44Speaker 1: that's funny.
- 0:44Speaker 2: That's funny.
- 0:46Speaker 1: It said, it's stamped on the inside discard this piece
- 0:51Speaker 1: of shit.
- 0:55Speaker 2: Thankfully they didn't sell.
- 0:57Speaker 1: This mother effort. But yeah, it's a it's a former
- 1:01Speaker 1: library book that I picked up at the used bookstore
- 1:04Speaker 1: for like four ninety nine, many moons ago. But Joe,
- 1:10Speaker 1: tell us a little bit more about this book, and
- 1:12Speaker 1: then we'll get into the meat and taters of this thing.
- 1:16Speaker 2: Sure so. Larry A. Snead was born and raised in Indiana.
- 1:21Speaker 2: He holds a bachelors and science degree from Indiana State
- 1:25Speaker 2: University and two graduate degrees from the University of Georgia.
- 1:31Speaker 2: He has been a high school history teacher in the
- 1:33Speaker 2: Newton and Gwynette Public School System in Georgia for thirty years.
- 1:40Speaker 2: No more silenced. This is first and only published work,
- 1:44Speaker 2: and he and his wife Barbara have been together for
- 1:48Speaker 2: a long time. So the first version came out in
- 1:52Speaker 2: October of nineteen ninety eight rob By three Forks Press,
- 1:57Speaker 2: and it was rep printed by the University of North
- 2:03Speaker 2: Texas Press in March of twenty seventeen. Both books range
- 2:10Speaker 2: from six hundred and one to six hundred and forty
- 2:13Speaker 2: eight pages one point ninety five pounds, which is pretty thick.
- 2:20Speaker 2: You can get the kindle edition for eleven ninety nine,
- 2:25Speaker 2: which is like thirty percent off right now, the paperback
- 2:29Speaker 2: for thirty bucks, and used copies starting on Amazon are
- 2:38Speaker 2: about nine dollars, probably the lowest quality. But in the
- 2:42Speaker 2: Abe and thrift books world secondary it's about twenty dollars.
- 2:48Speaker 2: So I feel like we create more categories every week.
- 2:52Speaker 2: But I'd say this book has well, it has an
- 2:57Speaker 2: index of glossary and I'd say it has a compilation
- 3:03Speaker 2: of eyewitness testimony. Lean to it, Rob.
- 3:08Speaker 1: Yeah, Joe always likes to put this in it either
- 3:10Speaker 1: loan not a conspiracy, loan not a conspiracy. But sometimes
- 3:15Speaker 1: things don'tn't just that easy, you.
- 3:17Speaker 2: Know, Yeah, that's true.
- 3:18Speaker 1: They don't fit on the same hole, and this book,
- 3:28Speaker 1: it's one of those things that doesn't fit in the
- 3:30Speaker 1: round hole. And it was the first of its kind.
- 3:33Speaker 1: There have been others since, like The Lone Star Speaks,
- 3:38Speaker 1: but this book basically gives a voice to the voiceless.
- 3:44Speaker 1: And I say that somewhat loosely because some of the
- 3:48Speaker 1: people that were interviewed for this book, their stories are
- 3:55Speaker 1: out there. They've been in the war and report they
- 3:59Speaker 1: may have an affid David on November twenty second, sixty three
- 4:02Speaker 1: to what they saw. But in his own words, you know,
- 4:09Speaker 1: larryus the Neeid first got interested in the case after
- 4:17Speaker 1: reading David Lifton's best evidence in the eighties, and he
- 4:24Speaker 1: wasn't really sure whether there was a conspiracy or Oswald
- 4:31Speaker 1: acting alone. You know, there's evidence on both sides of
- 4:36Speaker 1: the fence, of course, and he wasn't convinced either way.
- 4:42Speaker 1: So what he did, starting in the late eighties was
- 4:47Speaker 1: making several trips to Dallas over the course of ten
- 4:50Speaker 1: years or so and managed to track down a lot
- 4:56Speaker 1: of former police, former Dallas sheriff, even Harry Holmes, the
- 5:01Speaker 1: postal inspector, people in the school bok depository, people that
- 5:06Speaker 1: work there, people the new Lee, Harvey Oswald, witnesses from
- 5:10Speaker 1: Daly Plaza.
- 5:13Speaker 2: Forty nine combined Sir.
- 5:16Speaker 1: Yeah, forty nine combined witnesses into a written It says
- 5:21Speaker 1: it's an oral history, but oral is talking, much like
- 5:24Speaker 1: the sixth Floor has oral histories from the people. These
- 5:29Speaker 1: are written oral histories, you know, straight from the horse's mouth,
- 5:34Speaker 1: where they're not led somewhere down a path by an interviewer.
- 5:40Speaker 1: He basically asked these people for their personal experiences and
- 5:45Speaker 1: recollections concerning November twenty second, sixty three and the assassination
- 5:50Speaker 1: of JFK. And like I just said, a lot of
- 5:54Speaker 1: these guys are former law enforcement Dallas police officers, share
- 6:00Speaker 1: of deputies and people like that. And there are some witnesses,
- 6:09Speaker 1: if you will, from Dally Plaza, like Bill Newman, Ike
- 6:19Speaker 1: Autionins people like that. There's an account and hear from
- 6:23Speaker 1: Jim Yule, who we talked about on the show when
- 6:27Speaker 1: he rode to the school book Depository in Captain Westbrook's
- 6:31Speaker 1: car and then the scene of the tip and murder,
- 6:34Speaker 1: and of course the Texas Theater, and you know he
- 6:38Speaker 1: tells about what he did that day, you know, and writing,
- 6:41Speaker 1: catching a ride with the cops, and being involved in
- 6:43Speaker 1: all of this stuff, and to me, it's very interesting. Now,
- 6:51Speaker 1: of course, these are all recollections from twenty to thirty
- 6:54Speaker 1: years ago at the point that these are taken from people,
- 6:57Speaker 1: and he even acknowledges in the introduction, you know that
- 7:01Speaker 1: there are there appear to be some fact wears, some
- 7:06Speaker 1: maybe faulty memories, if you will. I mean, because eye
- 7:12Speaker 1: witnesses is a funny thing, Joe. You know, they're one
- 7:15Speaker 1: of the least reliable, especially thirty years after the fact,
- 7:21Speaker 1: twenty years after the fact, that there's some of the
- 7:23Speaker 1: least reliable witnesses because things get convoluted over time and
- 7:34Speaker 1: memories get polluted with all the shit that comes out,
- 7:38Speaker 1: you know, and you might think you saw something or
- 7:41Speaker 1: you know, you hear whatever. Shit. I heard four shots,
- 7:44Speaker 1: but everybody else they say they heard three, So I
- 7:46Speaker 1: got to be wrong, you know, instead of standing by, well,
- 7:50Speaker 1: look I thought I heard four, right, you know. For sure,
- 7:56Speaker 1: to me, it was cool to see this kind of
- 8:00Speaker 1: book because it doesn't really take a stance one way
- 8:02Speaker 1: or the other. It lets these people, these witnesses speak
- 8:10Speaker 1: their own story in their own words, and you can
- 8:14Speaker 1: choose to believe them or not, you.
- 8:19Speaker 2: Know, yeah, he lets he lets kind of the reader
- 8:22Speaker 2: decide in a.
- 8:23Speaker 1: Sense, right, Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, I think
- 8:29Speaker 1: you know, looking back, we always could try to attribute
- 8:32Speaker 1: Oh but the Dallas police they're all liars, they're evil,
- 8:36Speaker 1: Sheriff's office, you know, they're all liars and evil. And
- 8:41Speaker 1: you know, you have your preconceived notions about what eyewitness
- 8:45Speaker 1: has said, because sometimes their stories do change over time
- 8:48Speaker 1: and you don't know what to believe. He even acknowledges
- 8:52Speaker 1: that there are certain people that he did not put
- 8:54Speaker 1: in the book because he felt that they were just lying.
- 8:59Speaker 1: At this point, he calls him out by name. He says,
- 9:02Speaker 1: Beverly Oliver Whisky, Lady ed Hoffman, Gordon, or people like
- 9:10Speaker 1: that that he could have put in the book. He
- 9:13Speaker 1: chose not to because he wasn't convinced of their stories
- 9:21Speaker 1: because there's no actual evidence backing the fact up that
- 9:25Speaker 1: they were there. He even excluded gene Hill from this book,
- 9:31Speaker 1: right because their story has changed so much over time.
- 9:36Speaker 2: Right, So.
- 9:40Speaker 1: He was judicial in who he put in this book.
- 9:43Speaker 1: And if you want to be hyper critical of this book.
- 9:48Speaker 1: You could say, well, you know, he didn't put this
- 9:50Speaker 1: person in. He didn't put that person in. Or maybe
- 9:54Speaker 1: but maybe they had passed by then maybe he couldn't
- 9:57Speaker 1: find them. You know, maybe maybe this maybe that because
- 10:00Speaker 1: a lot of it was networking between the Dallas Police
- 10:06Speaker 1: and the Sheriff's office. Because these guys keep in touch.
- 10:09Speaker 1: You know, they pretty much all knew each other or
- 10:11Speaker 1: know each other, stayed friends. That's why there's so many
- 10:14Speaker 1: of them in here. You know, when you have people
- 10:17Speaker 1: that aren't connected in real life, like with Jesus Aza,
- 10:22Speaker 1: or people that happened to work at the school depository
- 10:25Speaker 1: for a year or on different floors that didn't really
- 10:28Speaker 1: know each other and didn't really stay in touch. But
- 10:32Speaker 1: you know, you have a lot of people from the
- 10:35Speaker 1: DPD and the Dallas Sheriff's Office in here because he
- 10:38Speaker 1: was able to use them to network, to track people
- 10:41Speaker 1: down that you know, hadn't really spoke too much or
- 10:46Speaker 1: at this point, you know, it was probably really hard
- 10:49Speaker 1: to find, like Gus Rose's HSCA testimony, you know what
- 10:53Speaker 1: I mean. I mean we're talking about late eighties, early nineties.
- 10:58Speaker 1: I mean, you had to you know, live at the
- 11:01Speaker 1: archives or you know, like go through the Dallas Police
- 11:05Speaker 1: archives when they opened, and you know, trying to track
- 11:09Speaker 1: this stuff down, and that's a lot of work. And
- 11:10Speaker 1: that's not what he was trying to do here. You know,
- 11:14Speaker 1: he didn't really write this book. You know, he let
- 11:17Speaker 1: it write itself through the words of the people that
- 11:22Speaker 1: he chose to put in the book, you know. And
- 11:26Speaker 1: I think it's very good that he put a glossary
- 11:28Speaker 1: in the back. So if there's a name of somebody
- 11:33Speaker 1: you come across and you don't know who it is,
- 11:37Speaker 1: you know, you can look them up and see who
- 11:39Speaker 1: see who they are. Like I'll give an example. I'll
- 11:42Speaker 1: just open the book. Richard Dodd. Do you know who
- 11:44Speaker 1: Richard Dodd is? Joe?
- 11:48Speaker 2: The name sounds really familiar. I believe he was. I
- 12:02Speaker 2: don't know. Tell me, sir, I don't want it to
- 12:05Speaker 2: guess wrong.
- 12:06Speaker 1: Well, apparently Richard Dodd was standing at the Triple Underpass.
- 12:11Speaker 1: Dodd stated that there was smoke coming from behind the
- 12:13Speaker 1: grassy and old fence immediately after the assassination.
- 12:16Speaker 2: Oh, he was a rail road worker, I believe.
- 12:22Speaker 1: Maybe maybe not, you know, so it's you know, things
- 12:31Speaker 1: like that, if you come across a name you don't
- 12:32Speaker 1: really know. It makes it easy to look up. Or
- 12:36Speaker 1: even places like the Criminal Courts Building. A lot of
- 12:40Speaker 1: people have heard of it, but they don't really know
- 12:43Speaker 1: what it is or where it was. You know what
- 12:46Speaker 1: he tells you. It's located into the corner of Maine
- 12:48Speaker 1: in Houston. The Criminal Courts Building was the headquarters of
- 12:51Speaker 1: the Dallas County Sheriff's Office and the site of the
- 12:55Speaker 1: Jack Ruby trial. The jail upstairs was where Ruby was
- 12:57Speaker 1: in carus already from November twenty fourth until December sixty sixth,
- 13:02Speaker 1: when it was discovered that he was suffering from terminal cancer.
- 13:07Speaker 2: He was a railroad track supervisor for the Union Terminal Company.
- 13:13Speaker 1: Yeah. Do you know who Elgin Krawl was?
- 13:16Speaker 2: I have no idea what that is.
- 13:18Speaker 1: He was a city manager of Dallas. Dallas police officers
- 13:22Speaker 1: blamed Krawl for acquiring Chief Curry to permit the news
- 13:26Speaker 1: media into the basement to witness the transfer. Napoleon Daniels no,
- 13:38Speaker 1: a former Dallas police officer who claimed to have seen
- 13:40Speaker 1: Roy Vaughan let Ruby enter the main street ramp leading
- 13:44Speaker 1: into the basement of City Hall. Yes. Yet, Napoleon Daniels
- 13:49Speaker 1: later failed a DPD polygraph exam.
- 13:56Speaker 2: So there are a lot of good tidbits in here
- 14:00Speaker 2: from not well known witnesses.
- 14:04Speaker 1: Right, yeah, there's there's all kinds of names in here,
- 14:08Speaker 1: and it's it's very interesting to hear like Harry Holmes
- 14:12Speaker 1: in his own words, uh, you know, describe everything. And
- 14:22Speaker 1: I'm just gonna give you a little tidbit from the
- 14:25Speaker 1: Harry Holmes thing.
- 14:28Speaker 2: Please do.
- 14:30Speaker 1: Let's see, he's got quite a lengthy oral history. I'll
- 14:34Speaker 1: tell you that he says no agency or individual ever
- 14:46Speaker 1: thought that anybody was trying to get in touch with him,
- 14:50Speaker 1: which would consummate a conspiracy. And what he's talking about
- 14:53Speaker 1: there is through the mail with Oswald, so based on
- 15:01Speaker 1: his mail, and of course he's opening it and reading it,
- 15:06Speaker 1: but he doesn't think that there was a conspiracy because
- 15:09Speaker 1: at least through the mail, nobody was ever you know,
- 15:13Speaker 1: trying to talk about a conspiracy. But he even says,
- 15:17Speaker 1: you know, and here when you're talking about the interrogation
- 15:19Speaker 1: of Oswald, that somebody was banging on the goddamn door
- 15:23Speaker 1: every five minutes asking to talk to Fritz, you know,
- 15:31Speaker 1: and then Chief Curry comes banging on the door. We
- 15:33Speaker 1: need to move him now, so they had to wrap
- 15:36Speaker 1: it up and it Originally the interrogation of Oswald started
- 15:42Speaker 1: about nine o'clock and it was only supposed to last
- 15:46Speaker 1: for an hour. It ended up lasting almost two hours,
- 15:52Speaker 1: and then Curry's banging on the door, it's time to
- 15:54Speaker 1: move him, let's go, And then of course the rest
- 15:58Speaker 1: is history. So he even speculates that had they not
- 16:05Speaker 1: called him in to interrogate Oswald, that that interrogation wouldn't
- 16:13Speaker 1: have lasted two hours, and that Oswald may have lived
- 16:17Speaker 1: because Ribby would have missed his window of opportunity right allegedly.
- 16:22Speaker 1: So it's very interesting some of the perspectives that these people,
- 16:31Speaker 1: you know, who just happened to be having their brush
- 16:35Speaker 1: with history experienced, and not everything is a conspiracy. Not
- 16:42Speaker 1: everybody's lying. And I don't know. I enjoyed the book
- 16:47Speaker 1: when it first came out because it was different, you know,
- 16:53Speaker 1: and it's in the same vein of like I said,
- 16:56Speaker 1: the lone Stars Speak, someone would have talked the six
- 17:02Speaker 1: floor museums, oral histories, things like that. So I don't know, Joe,
- 17:08Speaker 1: tell us what you thought about it.
- 17:11Speaker 2: Okay, Well, I read this book a long time ago,
- 17:15Speaker 2: and I bought up on Kindle recently, I could have
- 17:21Speaker 2: found my copy. But you know, a lot of names,
- 17:26Speaker 2: the forty nine of them. You know, if you know
- 17:29Speaker 2: who all forty nine are, you're a better man than
- 17:31Speaker 2: I am. But like you mentioned earlier, some of the critiques,
- 17:42Speaker 2: critics of this book say that maybe he should have
- 17:48Speaker 2: gotten more people from hospital or Parkland Hospital, and he
- 17:54Speaker 2: might have just focused on the law enforcement aspect a
- 17:59Speaker 2: little too much. But I do respect the attempt, and
- 18:03Speaker 2: you know, like you mentioned one of the earlier attempts
- 18:05Speaker 2: to get some of their stories on paper, because let's
- 18:08Speaker 2: face it, a lot of these people are falling off
- 18:10Speaker 2: at this point in nineteen ninety eight, right So, And
- 18:15Speaker 2: I really respect the fact that he really didn't give
- 18:18Speaker 2: his opinion. He's kind of letting the reader decide and
- 18:29Speaker 2: my writing. I really respect the effort. I respect the
- 18:35Speaker 2: effort he put into this book, the author, and I'm
- 18:39Speaker 2: going to give it a very or little above middle
- 18:43Speaker 2: of the road six guns up, just for the fact
- 18:46Speaker 2: that he doesn't try to let the reader or lead
- 18:52Speaker 2: the reader, like all the investigators and the warrant Commission
- 18:55Speaker 2: and the lawyers and a lot of people that talk
- 18:59Speaker 2: to some of these people after the fact dead and yeah,
- 19:06Speaker 2: I am going to go to a very solid six
- 19:12Speaker 2: guns up.
- 19:15Speaker 1: Alrighty. Just to counter that little point from about the
- 19:20Speaker 1: critics like not having the Parkland doctors in here, what
- 19:23Speaker 1: you got to remember, this book is designed to hear
- 19:29Speaker 1: from people that we don't hear from much. And the
- 19:34Speaker 1: Parkland doctors I have heard from a lot, have been
- 19:38Speaker 1: heard from a lot, especially in the eighties with Best
- 19:40Speaker 1: Evidence and a lot of these other eighties conspiracy books
- 19:45Speaker 1: that wrote a lot about the Parkland doctors, and hell,
- 19:48Speaker 1: even the Parkland doctors themselves, like Crenshaw. You know, we're
- 19:51Speaker 1: putting books out in the early nineties, so they had
- 19:55Speaker 1: their voice, they've said, they said their stories. You know,
- 20:00Speaker 1: maybe they didn't get enough play in the in the
- 20:02Speaker 1: Warren Report, but that's something totally different. Yes, So I
- 20:06Speaker 1: don't I don't begrudge him for not including Parkland doctors
- 20:11Speaker 1: in this book because they said, this is not what that.
- 20:15Speaker 1: This is not that type of book where you just
- 20:17Speaker 1: put every every conspiracy person in the book. You know,
- 20:23Speaker 1: there's there's plenty of people who uh claimed that there
- 20:28Speaker 1: was a conspiracy and they saw shots or heard shots
- 20:31Speaker 1: from the know or saw smoke from the knowl or
- 20:34Speaker 1: you know, things like that. So I'm gonna have to
- 20:41Speaker 1: go for what this book was and for the easy
- 20:48Speaker 1: readability of the book. I mean, it's a very it's
- 20:52Speaker 1: a very well written book. And of course the dude's
- 20:56Speaker 1: a college professor, so it's going to be and with
- 21:03Speaker 1: his ability to extract himself from the equation and lead
- 21:08Speaker 1: his speculation into the book and just let the eyewitnesses
- 21:13Speaker 1: the history talk and give their story. Just boom here
- 21:18Speaker 1: it is nuts, fruit bolts and all.
- 21:22Speaker 2: Yeah, let the reader decide.
- 21:26Speaker 1: I'm gonna give it a solid eight guns up Joe
- 21:38Speaker 1: Flair and a volley.
- 21:40Speaker 2: I always have trouble counting my shots, That's.
- 21:44Speaker 1: What she said. So yeah, that's no more silence. An
- 21:49Speaker 1: oral history, not an anal history, An oral history of
- 21:52Speaker 1: the assassination of President Kennedy by Larry A. Snead. And
- 21:59Speaker 1: I said, this is a good book, you know, I mean,
- 22:01Speaker 1: I know it's stick. I know it's but you can
- 22:08Speaker 1: read it in bite sized chunks. It's you know, it's
- 22:10Speaker 1: broken up into six parts, and each part has its
- 22:13Speaker 1: own sub chapters of individual oral histories that are maybe
- 22:18Speaker 1: anywhere from three pages to ten pages long, and you
- 22:24Speaker 1: can really read it at your own pace and not
- 22:26Speaker 1: not miss anything, you know. Yeah, yeah, So for that
- 22:33Speaker 1: reason it gets an eight from your boy.
- 22:35Speaker 2: Okay, I respect that, and yeah, I mean it's it's
- 22:40Speaker 2: definitely one of those books that I think is good
- 22:43Speaker 2: to have around, especially like you said, like to refer
- 22:47Speaker 2: back to it. You don't have to read it in
- 22:49Speaker 2: one fellow swoop type of thing, or if.
- 22:53Speaker 1: You come across somebody that's you know, there's not much
- 22:58Speaker 1: out there on and you you know, you want to
- 23:00Speaker 1: hear what they had to say in their own words
- 23:02Speaker 1: without somebody putting words on their mouth on paper. It's
- 23:07Speaker 1: a good resource to have, you know.
- 23:09Speaker 2: Definitely, definitely, definitely.
- 23:13Speaker 1: Well that's it for this book review. And I can't
- 23:18Speaker 1: really say what I used to say because you're already here,
- 23:24Speaker 1: you're already members, you already love the show. I mean,
- 23:27Speaker 1: what can we say.
- 23:27Speaker 2: Joe, Yeah, stay subbed.
- 23:32Speaker 1: Yeah, give this shit a thumbs up. I don't know,
- 23:36Speaker 1: it's not monetized anymore. It is what it is. And yeah,
- 23:43Speaker 1: we hope you enjoyed it, and we'll see you on
- 23:45Speaker 1: the next installment of JFK Book Reviews. And we do
- 23:50Speaker 1: here just for you lovely members, So for Joseph Barelli
- 23:57Speaker 1: and Big Bad Bob we bid you hm, I do.
- 24:02Speaker 1: Until next time, folks, peace, see you later and