Umbrella Man: Suspicious

[Richard Smith]

FWIW, I'll wager that most of those Bircher types in Dallas were registered Democrats. There really wasn't much of a Republican Party in the South at that time. Voting Republican was throwing away your vote. You may have voted for Nixon but you were still a registered Democrat. That's just a guess admittedly.

Any far right candidate would run as a Democrat since winning the GOP nomination was a dead end. As Edwin Walker did the year before in the gubernatorial race.

On the other hand (there's always at least one of these): Eisenhower won Dallas County in 1956 with 65% of the vote and in 1952 with 62% of the vote. So the Nixon vote/win was not an anomaly.

Yes, no state is all republican or democrat.  To suggest JFK's death has something to do with the fact that some republicans lived in the Dallas area is absurd.  JFK won Texas.  Oswald was not a republican.  He lived in the Dallas area.   He was a radical leftist Commie.  It's unreal to suggest that republicans somehow were responsible for JFK's death.   Don't tell CNN, though, or they may run with it.  I don't blame Dems for JFK's assassination simply because the assassin was a left wing nut and lived in a state where Dems were in the majority.
The responsibility belongs solely to Oswald himself.   

[Steve M. Galbraith]

Yes, no state is all republican or democrat.  To suggest JFK's death has something to do with the fact that some republicans lived in the Dallas area is absurd.  JFK won Texas.  Oswald was not a republican.  He lived in the Dallas area.   He was a radical leftist Commie.  It's unreal to suggest that republicans somehow were responsible for JFK's death.   Don't tell CNN, though, or they may run with it.  I don't blame Dems for JFK's assassination simply because the assassin was a left wing nut and lived in a state where Dems were in the majority.
The responsibility belongs solely to Oswald himself.

It's a reminder that, although it's worse now, we've always had people willing to use tragedies for political benefit, to gain an advantage over their opponents using these deaths of people. Maybe they're sincere but it's still cheap wrong. And yes, sometimes - sometimes - it's fair to make a connection. Sometimes.

We see this with the Garrison followers: Oliver Stone, the risible DiEugenio. They use JFK's death as a political weapon to go after those who opposed the Soviet Union. Stone thinks the Cold War - all of it - was due to US's policies. Moscow had nothing to do with it. And those Cold War militarists killed JFK because he was going to expose their corruption. It's hooey.

Dallas didn't kill JFK. Even Marxism didn't kill JFK. One angry lost guy for whatever reason - there likely was a political factor involved - killed JFK.

[Zeon Mason]

Agree with Richard with regard to Republican party being the only suspects. There were as many if not more Democrats influenced by the MIC as were Republicans.

LBJ himself who immediately reversed JFK foreign policy towards Vietnam just 3 days after JFK was dead and LBJ who readily accepted the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a reason to authorized war against Vietnam.

And it’s LBJ’s good friend , Harold  Byrd , the owner of the TSBD, who was awarded by LBJ the contract to build A-7 Corsair fighter planes to be used in Vietnam.

And everyone has seen or heard the recording of LBJ saying the “N” word and everyone probably has read what LBJs mistress claimed LBJ said about “after tonight those blankety blank Kennedys will never bother me again” .

[Jerry Freeman]

  Fact:  JFK won the 1960 election in Texas.  Fact: He was assassinated by a left-wing loon not a republican.  Fact:  Your premise is demonstrably false.

    No one ever said he was killed by a Republican.
But he was hated by many Dallas right wing radicals including Edwin Walker...so why would a lefty wing want to shoot JFK?
Fact...
 

Fact...

[Zeon Mason]

Shooting at  Walker and also at JFK who forced Walker to resign and sent Walker to a mental institution . does seem to be contradictory.

The LN usually responds that this isn’t necessarily a contradiction if Oswald was Some kind of lone nut desiring to acquire fame by extraordinary shocking deed such as killing the POTUS and therefore the political orientation of the POTUS was irrelevant.

[Dan O'meara]

But nobody here, not me in particular, said that it was a well known symbol of appeasement in Dallas (or anywhere in the US) at that time. So it's not surprising that only one person used it that way. My posts were in response to the original poster, Michael Griffith, and his claim that it was "absurd" that anyone would use the umbrella as a symbol for anything in protest (as Witt claimed). He said he never heard of its usage for such things.

But the links I provided show the origins of this symbol and how it came to be seen as a sign of appeasement in the UK in particular or weakness politically. In another link there was a story about some German students sending JFK umbrellas as criticism for his lack of response when the Soviets constructed the Berlin Wall.

There was nothing in the links about how popular the idea was and/or whether the Birchers/Klansman in Dallas (or elsewhere) knew that it could be used to heckle JFK because of his father's support for the appeasement policies of Chamberlain. Some people knew about it; but most probably didn't.

Apparently Witt knew something about its symbolism. As he testified:

Mr. GENZMAN. Why were you carrying an umbrella that day?
Mr. WITT. Actually, I was going to use this umbrella to heckle the President's motorcade.
Mr. GENZMAN, How had you gotten this idea?
Mr. WITT. In a coffee break conversation someone had mentioned that the umbrella was a sore spot with the Kennedy family. Being a conservative-type fellow, I sort of placed him in the liberal camp and I was just going to kind of do a little heckling.

We have Witt himself says he vaguely knew about the symbolism and how it was a "sore spot" with the Kennedys. So he decided to just heckle him with it. We have one person doing an odd thing. And LBJ knew about the symbolism too when in the campaign he directed a criticism at Kennedy Sr.

Y'know, not everything has to be jammed into the conspiracy against JFK? Sometimes a guy scratching his nose in a photo in Dealey Plaza is not a signal, it's just a guy with an itchy nose?

But nobody here, not me in particular, said that it was a well known symbol of appeasement in Dallas (or anywhere in the US) at that time. So it's not surprising that only one person used it that way.

This appears contradict other your other posts.
Whatever the case, you now seem to agree that the umbrella was a weird and unusual thing to do which is evidenced by the fact that one single person decided to do it. Witt knew nothing of the Kennedy/umbrella connection, he just overheard someone mention it and that was good enough for him.
What makes Witt suspicious is not his use of the umbrella (that's more odd than suspicious), it's his testimony. Witt's HSCA testimony is hard to swallow. In it he states that as the motorcade is coming down Elm he is sat on the grass of the grassy knoll. He stands up, begins to walk forward whilst opening up his umbrella. As he is opening his umbrella he hears three or more shots (but doesn't recognise them as shot sat the time), and misses what is going on because he still hasn't opened his umbrella. By the time he gets his umbrella open he is aware of the limo slowing down, a Secret Service agent running towards the limo and "a pink movement...Jackie Kennedy, I think, wearing a pink dress or something."

However, Willis 5, thought to represent Zapruder frame 202, shows the umbrella clearly raised. This is way before the throat shot or the head shot:



Betzner 3 (z186) shows the umbrella already up in place even earlier. It's partially obscured but it is picked out by the red arrow below:



Witt goes on to state he never saw JFK hit, was unaware he'd been shot and was only aware that there had been slowing down of the limo and Hill running towards it. Yet he was aware "something terrible had happened" and was so stunned by what he'd not seen he had to sit down.
Witt claims to remember the limo slowing down and Hill running from one car to the other. This is the moment of the head shot, the moment JFK's head explodes yet Witt seems to have missed this detail. Strange, considering he'd made the effort to go out of his way to heckle JFK specifically.

The problem is that Willis 5 and Betzner 3 show UM already in position, umbrella raised and, I would argue, before a single shot has been fired.
His testimony appears to be a fabrication - this is what makes him suspicious.

[Jim Hawthorn]

Therefore the only probable  CT reason (imo) for Umbrella man to raise the umbrella must have been to distract the SS agents in the follow up car to look forward at both umbrella man and his comrade DC man who was raising hand and moving towards the JFK limo, to aid a gunman from behind the limo to not br inadvertently detected by DS agents who SHOULD have been covering a 360 degree area with each agent observing approximately a 72 degree arc of area.

Now that is a more credible theory. Distractions and NOT a signals of any sort.