Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

Now, let's deal specifically with James Norwood's experience with the people from the Racine newspaper, which he feels warrants a complete revamping and redirection of the Oswald Innocence Campaign.

James thinks we should abandon and renounce the many years of photographic analysis that I and Larry Rivera and Dennis Cimino and others have done just because of his experience with these Racine newspaper people.

This is from May 27, from me to James, and it deals with the time involved in receiving photographs by wire and processing them. 

"The wirephoto process allowed photographs to be transferred through telephone lines.  The process required a large, expensive wirephoto machine both at the source and at the receiving end.  The original photograph was placed inside the wirephoto machine.  A special electronic eye scanned the photograph and translated it into electrical impulses.  These impulses were sent through the telephone wire to the identical wirephoto machine at the receiving end.  At the receiving machine the impulses were translated to light that was used to develop the image onto photographic paper.  The development would take minutes to over an hour, as the photographic paper was slowly exposed line by line.  In fact, the ultimate way to identify the wirephoto (the received image) is to look for the tiny horizontal or vertical lines.  The result was that that the receiving newspaper would have a copy of the original photograph that it could use to make prints for the newspaper."

Larry Rivera points out that after you have a wire photo in hand, you have to prepare a zinc plate of it for printing. How long did that take? 

And, the photos had to be wired one at a time, and it was a slow process, done line by line. It's like how a printer prints a photograph: line by line. Except, in this case, there were a lot of them. You said that Mr. Cariello made the decision to go with Altgens6, but how many photos did he have to choose from? You have to allow enough to time to produce all of them, not just Altgens6. 

James said that Mr. Cariello said that he "pretty much ran with the caption provided by the AP."  But, is that true?

From:

"President John F. Kennedy was shot today just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas.  He was taken to Parkland Hospital.  Secret Service men are looking from where the shot came from."

To:

"President Kennedy was shot and killed today just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas.  Secret Service men are looking for the source of the shot.  The president's car is in the foreground.  The man on the left is believed to be the president.”

So, he read the AP caption and made the following decisions:

1) It was not necessary to be so formal about JFK's name, that President Kennedy would suffice, and it would save space.

2) He added "killed" to what happened, and it's surprising that it was necessary because JFK was pronounced dead at 1:00 and the fax presumably wasn't sent until 3 minutes later. 

3) He made the decision not to mention the hospital to which he was taken.

4) He rewrote the clumsy, awkward sentence: Secret Service men are looking from where the shots came from."  

5) He decided to identify the President's limo.

6) He decided to identify the President in the limo as the man on the left.

How can that be construed as "pretty much running with the caption provided by the AP?" I would call it a major rewrite, and he had to put both thought and time into it.  

And, at any point did James clarify with this 93 year old man exactly which photo they were talking about?  The fact that he said he pretty much went with the original caption wasn't true, so what else did he get wrong?  

With everything else he remembered, I would think he would have remembered having to work on that caption and rack his brain to make it better than what the AP provided.  The revision was not small and trivial; the revision was large and significant. And again; it took time.

In 1960, there were 90,000 people living in Racine, more than there are today. How many copies of the newspaper would that have meant? How big was the run? 

Remember that newspapers were much more widely read back then because there was no internet. Today, many people get their news online and don't subscribe to a daily newspaper or buy one.  I'm one of them.

The front page had to be almost completely rewritten. The whole page is devoted to JFK except for one article about the legislature and a blurb about the weather. Everything else was new. It had to be written; it had to be edited; and it also had to be typeset, one character at a time. Then, the front page had to be completely redesigned in terms of layout, and apparently the second page as well. There are several images besides Altgens6, one of JFK, Connally, and LBJ. These others were probably stock photos, but even so, they must have had to sort through a lot of stock photos to decide upon those.  That took time.  Who did it? Was it Cariello?  If so, then the work was all linear for him; he couldn't do two things at once.  It was a progression: choose among the incoming photos and decide to go with Altgens6. (Ironic, isn't it that he agreed with me that A6 was more newsworthy than A7?) Then search through stock photos to find ones of JFK, Connally, and LBJ to use. And remember that there was nothing digital back then. He didn't have the world wide web at his fingertips. How long did it take for a Wisconsin newspaper to come up with a photo of the Texas governor? Or was that a photo of Connally that the AP sent that day? In that case, we have to allow time for its transmission and processing as well.

I found out that in 1960, the Washington Press had a printing press that could print 42,000 copies an hour. They had more copies to run off than the Racine Journal Times, but the smaller papers had smaller presses.

You wrote this:

"Mr. Cariello believes that the new front page with (a) the Altgens6 photo, (b) the AP wire story, and (c) Tex Reynolds' short column was prepared by 1:45pm.  At that time, the press run began, and the printed papers were distributed around the normal time. 

Mr. Cariello believes that on November 22, 1963, the papers were ready for distribution around 2:00 pm. 

Based on the corroboration of the timeline by Mr. Dose and Mr. Cariello, the paper was printed and ready for distribution around the time of the regular deadline of 2:00pm Central Time."  

So, you are content to allow just 15 minutes for the printing of the newspaper?

That's an example of the sloppy, careless thinking that occurs in your analysis. Did you even establish that Mr. Cariello was talking about the Altgens6 photo? 

The idea that that this newspaper, that until 12:30 PM was proceeding in normal fashion to get its afternoon issue out at 2:00, but then the President suddenly got shot, and yet, they were able to revamp everything, including all the articles except for one, and all the photographs, and redo the entire layout- for 2 pages- and get all of that done and still meet the exact same deadline of 2:00 is preposterous. It is absurd. 

Reportedly, the second page of the Racine newspaper was also revamped because of Kennedy, but I haven't seen it. But, the time to create and arrange the content of that second page has to be factored into the timeline separately. It's additive.

But, here's the most important point: if the Racine, Wisconsin newspaper had the Altgens6 photo at 1:03, then we have to assume that every newspaper had it at that time.  And even the distinction between UPI and AP is fuzzy because these are all UPI papers and many of them featured the Altgens photos, particularly A7.

http://www.downhold.org/lowry/JFK-NUPFRONTS.html

If the Racine paper could have been on schedule to put out it's daily edition at 2 PM, and then the catastrophe struck, and they had to revamp everything- articles and photos alike- and yet, they still managed to meet that deadline, without the slightest delay, then a great many newspapers could have done the same thing. They weren't Supermen in Racine. So, the Altgens6 photo should have appeared all over the place on November 22. There were lots of evening papers back then. The majority of US papers were evening papers. And many morning papers had evening editions. And, there were also extra editions. The transmission of the Altgens6 photo at 1:03 would have resulted in many hundreds of newspapers publishing it on November 22- perhaps even 1000. 

So, what really happened in Racine? I suspect that it came out much later than 2:00 PM, despite what those men told James Norwood.  And that's assuming that the issue being heralded is legit, and I don't know that it is. 

Let's remember that we also have the Extra Edition of the Benton Harbor News-Palladium, which supposedly got out a 10 page all-Kennedy spread by 5:00. 

It included numerous photos of Kennedy, the Kennedy family, Johnson, Connally, Oswald, etc. It had long articles about JFK's career, all his accomplishments, etc. It included an article by Dallas Times Herald reporter/photographer Bob Jackson which wasn't even published in the Dallas Times Herald. So, the Benton Harbor News-Palladium published Jackson's article but not his own newspaper, the newspaper for whom he worked and paid his salary. 

Since that extra edition of the Benton Harbor News-Palladium consisted mostly of AP articles, you would think a near-identical copy of it would have been published by all or most of the AP newspapers. The AP didn't do all the research and write all those articles just for the Benton Harbor News-Palladium, did they? Yet, I have yet to find anything similar or comparable to what the little Benton Harbor News-Palladium put out. It's like that tiny little newspaper out-did every big city newspaper in the country in covering the JFK assassination. And note that it is no longer in existence. It went out of business in the 1970s. So, who is there to talk to? 

I am going to repeat the account of Paul Rigby, the British researcher, which we have on the OIC website about the handling of Altgens6:

  

 British JFK researcher Paul Rigby maintains that the Altgens6 photo (there were 7 altogether) was handled differently than the other 6.  There was a delay in the release of Altgens6 because it was first wired to AP headquarters in New York, where it was "cropped twice."  Rigby maintains that there was roughly a two to three hour window of opportunity for them to alter it.  His exact words were: "I don't wish to exaggerate the window of opportunity for alteration. It was, at most, I hazard a guess, two to three hours. But, a window of opportunity there does appear to have existed." 

Paul Rigby is a well-respected JFK researcher, so we are going to let him expound:

"On the basis of the available evidence, we can, provisionally at least, conclude the following: 1) Altgens did not develop his own photos; 2) Altgens6 went by fax, not to the world at large, but to the AP New York HQ, at just after 1:00 PM CST; 3) the negatives were sent by commercial airline, ostensibly to the same destination but did not arrive until hours after the initial fax; 4) the dissemination of the image from NY did not occur until at least 2 hours after the fax arrived but before the arrival of the negatives; 5) Both the AP and Altgens appear to have sought to conceal this hiatus; 6) AP acted against its own commercial interest in delaying release of Altgens6; 7) the version which first appeared in the final editions of newspapers in Canada and the US on the evening of November 22 was heavily, and very obviously, retouched; 8) point 7 may not be the explanation, either full or partial, for the concealed delay; it is quite conceivable that obvious alterations were used to draw attention away from other more subtle stuff."

We also have the testimony of Roy Schaeffer that he was working at the Dayton Daily News, and the Altgens6 photo didn't arrive until 7AM on the Saturday.  Why should his claim be dismissed in favor of what those Racine people said? 

Then, we have this letter to the Warren Commission from the FBI, which became CE 457a:

It states that immediately after the photo was taken, it was wired to AP headquarters in New York. It doesn't say that it was wired to the whole world, but just to AP headquarters in New York. And then it says that subsequent to that, it was wired to other AP offices throughout the country. An AP office does not refer to a client newspaper but to an office of the AP. 

This is an official document from the FBI to the Warren Commission. Why should the account of the Racine people to whom James Norwood spoke trump this? 

The Altgens photo WAS altered, and we know that from observing the alterations, which an expert, Roy Schaeffer, noticed immediately-on first sight- without even having a mindset to look for them.  And that trumps everything, including James Norwood's conclusions based on his interviews.