Earlier this week, my mother-in-law called and wondered if I wanted to go with her to a talk her City of Hope group was hosting. The speaker was Judd McIlvain, a well known consumer reporter here in Southern California. Expecting an interesting talk with good “how to be a smart consumer” anecdotes for seniors, I decided to give it a whirl. Needless to say, it wasn’t what I expected.
I should have been suspicious when a codger in the audience kept asking him when he was going to talk about Kennedy. Mr. McIlvain kept responding that he was still dead, so I thought it was just a heckler. But then McIlvain started talking about a book of stories he was working on that his superiors never let him air… and one of them was on the Kennedy Assassination. He then told this story about a woman who purportedly worked for the CIA in Mexico delivering cash to operatives, who was put in jail for 5 years because she told Adelei Stevenson that one of the operatives she paid, a Mr. Oswald, kept hinting that the CIA planned to kill Kennedy. There were all these coincidental deaths, you see, … well, you know the theories. Supposedly this particular one wasn’t on the Internet yet, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t true (and, of course, it is on the internet if you know where to look). Of course, McIlvain had testified to a congressional commission on this, but the results and such won’t be released for 99 years. Even more suspicious.
Now, my job is to be skeptical, and I didn’t believe this at all. Sure, Oswald could have been framed, but at this point it doesn’t make much of a difference (as most of the folks are dead). The likely answer, whatever it is, was too sensitive to be released at the time. But the CIA? C’mon. That’s stretching plausibility even for me. I’d be more likely to believe another government.
So it was definitely one of those off the wall evenings.
Music: The Marvellous Toy & Other Gallimaufry (Tom Paxton): Katy
