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RECOLLECTIONS: THE JFK ASSASSINATION; Home Edition

RECOLLECTIONS: THE JFK ASSASSINATION
By SHARON BERNSTEIN

Los Angeles Times Sunday April 12, 1992 Home Edition TV Times, Page 5 Type of Material: Sidebar

Bill Moyers was sent down to Texas to be an advance man on John F. Kennedy's fateful trip to Dallas in November, 1963.

He was sent by the administration to smooth relations between warring factions of the Democratic Party in his home state.

It was Moyers who approved the publication of the president's motorcade route in the Dallas Morning News, a decision Oliver Stone criticized in his film, "JFK," as possibly contributing to the assassin's knowledge of the president's whereabouts.

But it was common practice to publish the route, Moyers said.

"The Secret Service and other people were objecting that if we published the route in the paper, it would open the President to vulnerability," Moyers said. "But he was there to get a crowd. And he can't get a crowd without publishing the motorcade route."

The assassin, Moyers said, would have known the president's route anyway, possibly through his own investigation of the Kennedys' trip.

Moyers also took issue with Stone's suggestion that Lyndon Johnson might have known about the assassination in advance.

"The man was too staggered, too stunned, too distraught to have known it," said Moyers, who flew back to Washington with LBJ after the assassination. "Furthermore, Johnson was capable of great cupidity, but he wasn't capable of murder."

Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times, 1992.

BERNSTEIN, SHARON, RECOLLECTIONS: THE JFK ASSASSINATION; Home Edition., Los Angeles Times, 04-12-1992, pp 5.