In what was a very accurate on-the-scene account of the murder of the President, an experienced Reuters correspondent wrote, “Three bursts of gunfire, apparently from automatic weapons, were heard.” This first news report by a seasoned combat journalist shows that those in and around Dealey Plaza heard numerous shots -- more than the three bullets reported by the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Warren Commission.
Permitting the vice president to ride in the same procession with the President violated one hundred years of Secret Service policy. Why did this occur on that momentous day? Who directed these changes in standard procedures, and why?
As described in earlier chapters, this normally entails a series of orchestrated events that elevate a person, such as those mentioned, to a position where he is regarded as an extremely popular hero.
Less developed countries, or LDCs, is a term much used for these small, underdeveloped nations in the banking community.
This novel was published in 1967. Today it might have included the Strategic Defense Initiative “Star Wars” project as another boondoggle.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981).
A military term referring to the number of years of effective use of an item of military hardware before it is replaced by a newer or updated model. The life of type of most items normally averages between ten and twenty years.
On several occasions in 1964, I spent a few hours alone with President Fernando Belaunde Terry of Peru discussing the subject of border patrol. Peru controls the entry and exit of almost 100 percent of its goods through the port of Callao, adjacent to Lima, and a special “free port” in the remote region east of the Andes, at Iquitos on the upper Amazon River.
Belaunde wanted to establish a network of border surveillance by the use of small, capable aircraft, the Helio Aircraft Corporation’s “Courier,” which had been designed by members of the MIT aeronautical engineering staff and purchased by the hundred by the CIA. This small plane could land, STOL (short takeoff and landing) fashion, on unprepared airstrips and even on mountainsides.
Belaunde told me that in conjunction with that type of modern border patrol he had repeatedly refused foreign aid projects for road-building because “all they would accomplish would be to facilitate the movement of the indigenous natives from their ancient communities to the jammed barriadas of Lima.”
With entry into Peru limited, for the most part, to these two ports and their airfields, it was possible for the government to control all import and export business to benefit the Belaunde governmental team, which included certain old and rich families with traditional and banking power.
Fuller, Critical Path.