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Behind the Gemstone Files |
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AUTHORSHIP ALPHA-1775 GEMSTONES A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z |
Who
is Jim Moore?
"I had been regularly writing about the whole Hippie movement, the anti-War movement and so on," he says, "so it was only natural to see what was going on with the Kennedy and McCarthy campaigns and the Yippies and Abbie Hoffman." "I lost interest in the Yippies pretty quickly. They were a bunch of clowns having a good time, making a name for themselves. It was all ego. They were the court jesters, not the political warriors who would have to take on the corrupt system. Abbie and his guys were good street theatre."
"You have to understand that Bruce Roberts did not have an exclusive franchise on history. Much of what he claimed was already in the public domain, so to speak. It had been published already, though in much different form and usually with better documentation. What was different about Roberts was the way he connected events - many of them known - and came to his own conclusions." On June 6, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in a kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel and Moore found himself in a campaign with no candidate. "What few people know is that it was the second assassination attempt in just a matter of hours. He was almost gunned down earlier that morning as he entered an elevator. I think it was Rosie Greer who saved his butt by putting himself between Bobby and the suspected gunman, as the elevator doors were pulled shut." On June 16, Moore's daughter, Merideth, was born, and Moore himself began the shift over to the campaign of Eugene McCarthy. A meeting was held in Chicago between the McCarthy and Kennedy camps, both untrusting of the other. Kennedy had angered a lot of anti-war supporters because he seemed to be trying to steal McCarthy's thunder. He was accused of waiting until McCarthy proved Lyndon Johnson could be beaten before he took the plunge himself, and it was a valid criticism. The Kennedy "opportunist" label had some basis. The groups cautiously felt each other out, says Moore, who was at that meeting. "The Kennedy group wanted to make sure some of their platform goals were incorporated into the McCarthy campaign, and the McCarthy team wanted assurances the Kennedys weren't going to try to just muscle in and take over. Some of them went over to Lyndon Johnson, but most stuck with us - at least until LBJ announced he wouldn't run, and some of them went over to Hubert Humphrey." McCarthy believed he could still work within the system, and continued to seek the Democratic nomination, gaining momentum against a very vulnerable Humphrey, who had loyally stuck by LBJ's side throughout the Vietnam War and was now trying to clumsily disassociate himself from the president he had faithfully served. The Democratic Convention that year was a disaster. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley pulled out all stops to make Chicago look good on national television, but his tactics were fascist and repressive to the point they exploded in his face. Dirty Tricks and the US Supreme Court Decision "Daley made front page news when he accused the hippies of planning to assassinate Humphrey and put LSD in the water supply," Moore recalls. "That was a total crock of bull, and Daley knew it. It was a propaganda war. A lot of us thought the Chicago cops themselves had been drugged with something that turned them so violent. They were inhuman." Moore watched the convention on television, like most Americans. A group had gathered at his Metropolitan News Service office at 35th and Paulina on Chicago's South Side. America was horrified. The kind of violence they had seen on TV that had been coming from Vietnam was now coming from Chicago. The insanity was encircling the country. That night, the straight-laced newsman smoked his first joint of marijuana. "I know it must have been totally inappropriate, but as I watched the violence and the pot took its effect, I started giggling at the sheer insanity of what I was seeing in front of me. I was embarrassed, at myself, and I was at the same time experiencing a sort of decompression from all the stress that had built up over the months." He and his wife, Barbara, and their new daughter, Meri Kaye, lived just half-a-block around the corner from his office. Barbara's aunt, Celia Bersheim, lived upstairs, and noticed frequent visits by "telephone repairmen" to fix telephones that weren't broken. Strange men were sneaking around in the yard taking pictures and peering in windows. "I don't know what they found, if anything," Moore says. "That was the only time I smoked pot for years and years - and that was actually after all the surveillance, and I just didn't do drugs. I wasn't part of the hippie revolution until much later. I was the guy in the tie, one of 'the suits'. One day I got a call from what we assumed had to be one of Daley's operatives, asking me if I wanted to come around the corner and get a blow job. I said 'no thanks' and hung up. Maybe they knew about Manuel in Des Moines and mistakenly assumed that because he was queer and we were roommates, I was, too. "But we knew we were under heavy surveillance, and had to be extra careful." After Humphrey won the nomination, and McCarthy delegates were beaten by police, "an intense despair" set in over the McCarthy campaign. The McCarthy campaign in Illinois was in disarray, managed by a Chicago councilman from one of the black wards. Resignations were coming in left and right, Moore recalls. "The top guys couldn't afford to turn their backs on the Daley machine; they owed their careers to it and they wanted to get re-elected. They caved, leaving the campaign leaderless and facing a deadline for signatures to get on the ballot as independents. We had the manpower at the grassroot levels, but the leadership had evaporated and the resources we had were badly disorganized. "Up to that time, I was still 'officially' just a reporter covering the campaign, but in the next moment it all changed. We were in the campaign headquarters just off the campus of the University of Chicago, and someone said we might as well close it up and quit. I blurted out that 'Look, we can get those signatures!' I sounded so damned sure of myself that everyone stopped and looked at me, as if maybe I knew something they didn't. Truth is, I didn't know a damned thing. We had maybe two weeks to get tens of thousands of petition signatures. I worked like hell to organize our resources, our volunteers. We did it. We got the signatures." But the day before they were to be filed with the Secretary of State, something strange happened. One of the drop-off points was the home of a wealthy Jewish supporter in one of the North Side's fanciest high-rises. "She called and said that she wasn't going to let us have the signatures she was holding unless we gave her complete authority over the campaign. Everyone was thrown into a panic. After all that work, we seemed doomed by our own internal people." Moore recalls he sent out the order to "promise her whatever she wants, just get those damned petitions." As soon as they were in hand, Moore sent word to the saboteur that they could forget any promises made; she was out. The CIA, FBI and Operation Chaos "Years later, I found out it was just a Republican dirty trick. The GOP, along with George Wallace's people, had been funneling money into our national headquarters, trying to keep the Democrat party divided, so they could enhance their own chances. I think the Wallace people coughed up $10,000; I don't know how much the Republicans put in. "Locally, Marcus P. Raskin was our money man from Washington. We were broke at the local level, running on nothing but fumes. Raskin and these guys came in and started taking over. Nothing could be done without their approval. They were very shadowy, very secretive. We had no idea what they were doing. They'd show up, put a little money in the bank account, have some secret meetings with I don't know who, and then disappear back to Washington or New York, wherever they came from. "We had to go with them, because the Secretary of State had just ruled we couldn't get on the ballot, even with all our signatures - well over the requirement of, I think, 25,000. As state chairman and one of the electors (Electoral College), I had to mount a legal battle in the U.S. Supreme Court and we didn't have a pot to piss in." Moore says much of the confusion that may have resulted from just who sued who in that case is his. "There were two governors - Shapiro and Ogilvie, and I sometimes mixed them up in trying to recall from memory just who it was we sued. It was, in fact, Richard B. Ogilvie, who had been Daley's Cook County Sheriff. He'd been a real storm trooper, Moore claims. Moore appealed the case from the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Illinois - controlled by the Daley machine he was suing. The decision, in Moore's favor, was printed in U. S. Law Week, 3 May 1969, settling any confusion. The case (James L. Moore, et al. v. Richard B. Ogilvie, et al No. 620 - October Term 1968) was finally decided May 3, 1969 and the decision handed down by Justice William O. Douglas May 5. But by then, the election was history. McCarthy never got on the ballot in Illinois, and Richard Nixon became president. During that time period, and before the election, the New Party, as the McCarthy movement had called itself in Illinois, held a "state convention." "Our convention was infiltrated by hundreds of people I'd never seen before. Those of us who had done the hard work realized we were being taken over from outside, and these outsiders kept getting up saying crazy things, like our next move had to be terrorism ... they never used that word, but that's what it was. They wanted to dynamite the polling booths and start killing innocent people to make some kind of crazy political statement. "I was at the head table, as chairman, and I got up and in a very impromptu speech, made what I hoped was a passionate plea denouncing this insanity. Then when I finished, I picked up my briefcase and walked out and never looked back." Moore suspects that agents provacateur had been planted, probably by the Republicans, to lead the McCarthy organization into a violent direction that would forever discredit both the candidate and his followers. "It was a typical Nixon strategy he used over and over throughout his career," Moore says. "It's probably what the Republican secret contributions were going for. I don't know. I never saw anything about the money end; Raskin had tight control over that. "None of us knew about Operation Cointelpro, Operation Chaos or all those other secret and illegal CIA operations back then, but if you could get to the records - if they exist anymore - you would probably find the Chicago disaster was a part of that." Draft Dodger or Resistance Fighter? Moore was promptly called up for the draft by the Selective Service Board. "I fought it, which was unusual because years earlier I had tried so hard to enlist in the Air Force and had been rejected. Now they wanted me to be cannon fodder in Nixon's Vietnam war. I showed up, took the physical, and went through the whole routine. I wrote down every pseudonym I'd ever written under, in hopes it would make me look suspicious enough they wouldn't want me. When it came time to put my hand on the Bible and take the oath, I said, 'I'm sorry, but I can't do that.' The FBI told me I would go to prison, and I was prepared for that. I didn't want to flee to Canada. To me that wasn't right; I had to draw a line in the sand here, in my own country, the country I loved, and make my stand." He says an anti-war group provided him with a lawyer who uncovered Selective Service documents that had ordered Moore's induction, regardless of what results the physical or other exams might show. "I don't know how he came up with that letter, but it saved my butt. If I'd gone to Vietnam - and I would have - I would have been a victim of 'friendly fire' and no longer a threat to anyone. Barbara had become pregnant again and the stress, I think, triggered a miscarriage right in the middle of all this. But those heartless bastards didn't give a damn. Confronted with their illegal letter, they backed off very suddenly and reclassified me, 1-Y, I think. It wasn't 4-F." He says Freedom of Information Act requests have turned up nothing. "They say they have no records whatsoever of me. I know that's a lie unless they destroyed them, but I never pursued it." "I had switched jobs again and was working for some little Jewish weekly. I was spending most of my time either at his paper or in my own office just across the street at that point. I had the whole second floor to myself and had stacks of thousands of newspapers and thousands of books relating to the Kennedy assassination. We had a falling out when he fired me on Christmas Eve for being sick and stopped payment on my paycheck after I had cashed it. I got arrested and kept going to court, but he'd never show up. His mouthpiece lawyer showed up and kept asking for continuances while Morrie was off vacationing in Florida. I beat his butt in court - without a lawyer of my own - when I simply told the judge that these continuations had gone on long enough, that Morrie should come to court if it was so damned important to him. The charges were dismissed and he was ordered to make good all the bad checks and fees that resulted from the domino effect of my pay check being bounced." Moore abandoned activist politics and went to work for his boss' brother, Vincent Sorren, where he launched Consumer Confidential. "It was a tabloid, but a different kind of tabloid, focused on consumer protection issues," he recalls. "I think Ralph Nader and Ted Kennedy were among our first subscribers and we printed letters to the editor from both of them. Bob, Frank and Vince Sorren were brothers, but they were also competitors, and I don't think Bob and Frank were real happy when I switched over, but the issue of my files was the deciding factor." He also worked as a freelancer for the Lerner Newspaper chain. "We tackled issues like cyclamate, an artificial sweetener. There was a lot of controversy over whether it caused birth defects, but the way I finally nailed them was in the required labeling. The manufacturers had changed one word, watering down the warning. I went out one day and bought two bags full of cyclamate products and took pictures of the whole lot spread out on a table, then did close-ups of the labeling and compared it to the wording required by law. The FDA banned it and I got a call from the office of the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (under Nixon) thanking me for my work." Another story he recalls was a brief one, actually taken and rewritten from an article in Esquire, in which a poll showed that Ralph Nader could beat Nixon if he ran against him in 1972. "I got a letter from Nixon's press secretary asking where I had gotten the poll information. I guess they didn't read Esquire, but they read Consumer Confidential. I told them about Esquire and never heard any more." During this time, Moore learned a $10,000 contract had been put out on him because of the watch fraud story he had written earlier for The National Insider. "My life was already falling apart without that," he admits. "I made the mistake of falling in love with a woman who wasn't my life - Marie Adkins. We never had a sexual relationship but it wasn't because I didn't want to. She was stronger than I. She and her family moved to Huntsville, Alabama. Like a damned fool, I left everything and moved me and my family to Huntsville, too. "There we were, all living together in one house, with all that growing stress. Marie's husband, Doug, already drank a lot and started drinking even more. Barbara did her best to hold on to me, but I was a bastard. I hate to talk about this, because I'm not proud of who and what I had become as a husband and a father. But if you want to know the story of my life, I have to include it. I wasn't always some shining knight in white armor. I was sometimes a real asshole. I was still very young with too much testosterone and I did things in the marital department I'm ashamed to admit." From Chicago to Alabama to Tennessee Barbara and the kids (they now had a son, Jimmy, born May 8, 1970) moved to Fairview, Tennessee, where she lived with her parents. After a chilling winter working in a cast iron foundry, Moore found work for a Birmingham space engineering company that wrote the manuals used by the Army Navy, Air Force and NASA, Hayes International. After being there just a few months, Hayes lost a major government contract and laid off thousands, including Moore. He followed his family to Fairview, where he started a weekly newspaper, The Fairview Flyer. "It was a newspaper and it wasn't," he says. "It was only about 8 x 10 inches big, printed on a little Davidson 500 offset press. It was the smallest weekly community paper in America. Publisher's Auxiliary did a story on it, about how I had started it with a $700 income tax refund." The first issue was published July 1, 1971. He again got caught up in politics, but the more deadly local kind. "Small-town politics can get you killed probably quicker than national politics. I brought my Chicago journalism experience to Fairview and it was a bombshell. People either loved it or hated it. I took on the local 'families' that controlled Fairview - the Tidwells, the Taylors, the Mangrums. I was promptly labeled a troublemaker by the vice mayor, Sterlin Rainey." One day, while he was away from home (he put out the paper in a garage off the house), a car drove by with two men inside. One stuck a rifle out the window and started shooting at the house and front yard, where the children were outside playing, according to Barbara Moore. "She was terrified and had every right to be. She demanded to know why I couldn't be like everyone else and work a sane job like pumping gas or something. I told her that just wasn't who I was. Our marriage wasn't doing too good, even though we tried to patch it up. I had worked for her father mowing yards and busting firewood. He never cared much for me, and I guess I can't blame him." They moved to a small apartment behind what was known as Hutcherson's Grocery Store on Highway 100 at the outskirts of Fairview and it was there that Moore made friends with Rick McNeese, a high school senior about to graduate. Rick, he says, re-introduced him to pot, as well as mushrooms, mescaline and LSD. "I don't blame Rick. Rick was a great person and I learned a lot from him about human nature, something I guess I didn't understand too well. Rick and I would drive around Fairview all night getting high and listening to La Gada da Vida and Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother. It got to where I spent more time at Rick's than at my own home. He was taking me places my mind had never gone before and I wanted to learn more. At some point, Barbara told me it was her or him. I refused to make a choice, so she made it for me and filed for divorce. I don't think I ever saw the divorce papers, and never knew about the court date. It was a done deal and over with before I knew anything about it." Murder in the First Degree Before he moved out, he became embroiled in a sensational murder case, when a Williamson County Deputy, Morris Heithcock was shotgunned to death at pointblank range at the Williamson-Hickman county line. Unknown to Moore, he had been planning to stop by to see Moore that night. "I got a call the next morning from his wife, Viley. I had just seen the news about the murder and like all of Fairview I was shocked, even though I had never known the man. Viley asked if he had stopped by before he was killed. I said no. She said she needed to talk to me in private. Morris had evidence of a drug and burglary ring involving several of his fellow deputies, and he'd been keeping a diary. From it, he wrote an article he was going to ask me to publish 'because you're the only one with guts enough to print it' his wife said. He had it on him when he left the house the night he was killed. When she saw his body at the funeral home, it was missing. She thought he'd dropped it off before he was killed, since he had passed my house on the way. "It had been his night off, but he was still on call, like all lawmen are. He got a call at home asking him to drive over to the county line to backup another officer. It was supposed to be a drunkenness case involving a guy named Harry Conley. Now Harry was a drunk, for sure, and a violent one. There was a little log cabin at the east end of Fairview, and Harry would get drunk and stand in the doorway shooting off his gun. Harry was crazy when he was drunk, and probably deserved to be locked up just for the public safety. "Well, no one knows what happened after Morris left the house. They found him dead with his arm blown off. There was no 'other officer' requesting backup, it seems, and Harry was charged with murder - but not before he was taken into the woods and had the hell beat out of him. The cops beat him with the stock end of a shotgun until it broke; it was supposedly the murder weapon. "When Morris' body was put in the ambulance for the ride to Franklin, the ambulance assistant was one of the local Fairview cops named Adcox, one of the very men Morris had fingered. Viley believed that was when Morris' manuscript disappeared. I think Morris was set up and Conley was blamed for the murder. Months later I had a young kid show up at my door, scared to death. He said he had seen the whole thing. The police had been chasing him for speeding that night and he had eluded them on a dirt road near Conley's house. He said when he circled back he witnessed the murder; he said it was a cop who pulled the trigger, not Conley. The kid was scared and I never printed his story, but just kept it in the back of my mind. "I had been doing some digging around at the murder scene and found some shotgun shells the police had missed. They were maybe a hundred yards away and probably had nothing to do with the murder - but still ... At the same time, Viley presented me with what she said was a first draft of Morris' missing manuscript, and asked if I would print it. I felt obligated. The man had given his life for this, so it was the least I could do. I removed all the names because I couldn't prove anything, and printed what was left. I was immediately subpoenaed as a witness by both the prosecution and defense in the Conley trial, and put under a convenient gag order. I couldn't print anything more in the paper. By this time, I had a Brentwood newspaper and one for Hickman County, so I guess they thought I was becoming a real threat to them. I sat in the witness room all day and was never called by either side. I thought it was just a way to shut me up, with the gag order." "The Fairview police chief stopped by the newspaper-pool hall one day - I know that's a helluva business combination (more on that below), and had a couple of Conley's sons with him. I think the chief's name was McAdon or something - Don McAdon, a young guy. He said the boys were being taunted at school and needed a place to hang out away from the abuse, and could they stay here? I said sure. One was Eugene, a tall gaunt guy that reminded me of Richard Speck; the other I think was Roger. We never talked about the murder; I figured they'd been through enough. They just hung out for a couple of days shooting pool, both real quiet." Cops Investigating Cops During this time Barbara filed for divorce and Moore moved out. He lived out that winter in his office, which contained both the newspaper and a pool room called The Yellow Submarine, which he partnered with a local named Jack Adams, who put up the money for two new pool tables. "I'd sleep on the tables at night, get up in the morning and roll up my bedroll and open up the place." It was the only place in Fairview that local kids had where they could go for entertainment, and it was always packed after school let out and on weekends. One night, Williamson County Sheriff Fleming Williams came in, looked around, and announced, "I'm going to put a stop to this shit." "We didn't sell alcohol and I tried to keep it out, but at night when I was cleaning up, I'd often find empty beer cans that had been snuck in." One day, he says, two of his regular customers came in and one of them was acting suspicious. "The one guy was trying to keep me occupied at the candy counter, while the other one was back at the jukebox fiddling around behind it, supposedly to turn up the volume. When they left, I checked it and found a planted bag of pot. Within an hour, Fleming Williams showed up to raid the place. The first place his deputy went was to the jukebox, but by then there was nothing there. I realized I was being set up." Moore took the pot to a lawyer friend who had an office in Nashville. "He told me he didn't care what I did with it, but to get it the hell out of his office. I took it home and smoked it." In early 1973, two youths were pulled over at a roadblock, set up to funnel them into Moore's parking lot, where they were busted for pot. The competition paper in Franklin, The Review-Appeal, published that they had been arrested inside Moore's business - and local parents were outraged, thinking Moore was a drug dealer leading their kids astray, and refused to let their kids go to The Yellow Submarine. Business plummeted. "The police chief, McAdon, told me I had been deliberately set up to try to close the business. McAdon and Adcox, who was under him, had not gotten along. He said Adcox was trying to put the make on a woman officer and thought something was going on between her and McAdon. There may have been, I don't know; they were pretty tight. Anyway, Adcox was jealous and at one point got into a physical fight with his chief, was fired and charged with assault. The City Commission reinstated him, so there was a lot of tension there. "McAdon knew about Morris' Heithcock's charges about a burglary and drug ring and took me into his confidence and told me there was truth to it. He said the TBI (Tennessee Bureau of Investigation) was trying to investigate it, but was getting nowhere. The investigation also involved the Dickson County sheriff at the time because a girlfriend of one of the Williamson deputies involved had had a fight with her boyfriend and went running to the Dickson sheriff to spill the beans. She was telling them in advance where the burglaries would take place, and they always turned out to be true, but they could never catch the guys. "McAdon said the Dickson sheriff was afraid to set foot in Williamson County because he felt Williams would have him killed. McAdon would take me with him on some of his midnight meetings with the Dickson sheriff, on a side road just across from the Dickson Motel at Highway 96 and I-40. There would be a Dickson squad car parked in front of the motel, with two big tall deputies standing on each side of the car as we drove up, their arms crossed like some kind of statues. We would drive down this dirt road and stop and get into a second car with the sheriff inside. There, McAdon and the sheriff would exchange information. Real cloak and dagger stuff. The car was packed with guns. These guys were ready for a shootout, let me tell you. "I guess it was early May 1973 [May 6, 1973] when I was arrested. My crime was being open on Sunday, a violation of the old 'blue laws' now held unconstitutional. The office was closed, with a closed sign on the door, but I was inside working on the paper and some friends of mine were there as witnesses. See, I knew this was coming down; I'd been warned. I remember a friend there named Billy Hudgins, and there were maybe four or five others. Yeah, they were shooting pool, but for free and the place was closed. "They fired McAdon because he wouldn't arrest me, and got this Barney Fife-like guy named Percy Buttrey to do the dirty work. They promoted Percy to chief and then told him to arrest me, and he did. He kicked in the door and turned the closed sign around and handcuffed me at my desk. It was kind of ironic because a Waylon Jennings song just came on the jukebox as I was being led out, and it was some song about going to jail. It really stuck in my mind. Percy was related to some guy who had once been constable before I ever lived there. This constable Buttrey had beaten up an old man he'd stopped on a traffic violation. Buttrey dragged his old lady out of the truck, an old woman, and the old man came to her defense. That was his crime. Well, Constable Buttrey showed up dead one day, found beat to hell in his backyard, and no one was ever arrested for it. The locals always thought it had been one of the old man's sons. No one liked Constable Buttrey and so everyone kept silent. They said he got what he deserved. Percy wasn't much better." Moore was found guilty at a Fairview trial widely attended by the Nashville media ("Publisher Charges Fairview Trying to Silence Press" by Kenneth Jost, The Tennessean, 13 May, 1973) and when he wouldn't pay the fine, having appealed his case, he was re-arrested and jailed for three months in December 1973 ("City Probe Sparks Publisher's Court Fight" by Philly Murtha, Editor and Publisher, 2 March 1974). The Fairview Flyer, renamed The Fairview Sun sometime earlier, was now history. [FOOTNOTE: Some 15 or 20 years later, Moore was approached by a Franklin Review Appeal reporter (that paper was now under new ownership) who wanted to talk about his arrest and his charges years before against Sheriff Fleming Williams. Williams was running for re-election (he had been in power for several years) and was being accused of extortion by members of his own staff. Williams had demanded they publicly endorse them or he would run extensive criminal checks through the NCIC computer system and somehow find something to arrest them on. One of his female staffers went public and was soon joined by others who had the same story. It was then that someone had remembered Moore's long-forgotten saga, which had been regarded as fantasy, and began to wonder if there weren't some truth to it after all. Moore agreed to talk, off the record ("I didn't want to go public again because I felt Williams would win re-election and come after me if I did.") and retold his story. The reporter, a young girl fresh from college, Moore surmised, said she had had an experience one day in which Williams called her and asked her to meet him at a drugstore parking lot out of town [Franklin]. She showed up and got into Williams' front seat beside him. She said his service revolver lay on the seat between them and Williams started criticizing some of her stories and "looked down at the revolver and said 'things happen to people who pry around too much in this town.'" "She wanted to know if she should be frightened," Moore recalled. "I told her hell, yes, I'd take it seriously. I told her about an inmate that had once been shot to death - shot in the back of the head at a bridge on Highway 96 after he had supposedly tried to escape, with his hands cuffed behind him. The local legends say he was executed and the escape story was just a cover-up." After the public exposure of Williams' Gestapo tactics, he lost the election and ended up pumping gas in another county for a living. |
While writing at The Insider, Moore was
covering politics and the 1968 presidential campaign was one of
the most dramatic in American history. Chicago was the site of
the ill-fated Democratic National Convention, and by the time
American TV viewers were stunned by the site of Chicago police
on a rampage, dragging tourists from their cars and throwing
them through plate glass windows, Moore was more than just a
journalistic bystander. He was in the thick of the battle.
Moore
enlisted as a volunteer for Robert Kennedy's campaign, saying he
did nothing special - just handing out flyers, "typical
grunt work." On April 2, 1967, Moore had written in his
syndicated column that "Robert Kennedy will never live to
see the White House ..." His ominous prophecy was based on
what he knew of the Jim Garrison investigation as well as his
own, and upon what has come to be known as the Gemstone Files.