I wanted to verify, it's been 15 or so years since I recall Grant telling the story on his radio show out of WOR. Yes the liberal nut cases blamed Pyne and the emerging modern conservative movement.. the liberals even tried to connect Barry Goldwater to the assassination. We Goldwater supporters were branded "purveyors of hate" even by the Republican likes of Mitt Romney's father George.
I noticed on the same youtube page is a recording of when Grant filled in for Savage. Grant was so popular that IIRC Savage contacted the station that he'd do the remainder of the show and Grant could leave. Grant had some things to say about Savage later.
I used to listen to Bob Grant in the 1970s when he was on late night on WOR. The Fairness Doctrine was still in effect, but Bob's show was unabashedly conservative anyway.
The article I mentioned earlier about the liberals' politicizing the JFK assassination is here:
The Kennedy Phenomenon by James Piereson
It's the best I've ever read on the topic.
For those who don't like clicking on links, I excerpt the following:
On the day after the assassination, The New York Times ran a banner headline across the front page: “KENNEDY IS KILLED BY SNIPER AS HE RIDES IN CAR IN DALLAS; JOHNSON SWORN IN ON PLANE.” In the middle column the editors ran a signed article by a reporter on the scene about Lee Harvey Oswald, the suspect arrested for the crime. The headline read “Leftist Accused,” with the subtitle “Figure in Pro-Castro Group is Charged.” Oswald, according to the article, had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and returned to the Dallas area in 1962. Since returning to the United States, he had been active in a pro-Castro organization called Fair Play for Cuba. Several fellow employees placed Oswald on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository where police found the rifle used in the assassination, while witnesses on the street reported seeing a gunman firing from an upper-floor window in that building. Oswald fled before police could seal off the building, but he was arrested an hour after the assassination in another section of the city after a policeman was gunned down on the street. Witnesses to that crime directed police to a nearby movie theater where Oswald was arrested still carrying the pistol used to kill the policeman. Within hours local police identified the rifle used in the assassination as belonging to Oswald and ballistics tests confirmed that the bullets that killed President Kennedy were fired from his weapon. The hard evidence, as related by the reporter in Dallas, pointed strongly to Oswald as the assassin with his motives linked somehow to Castro, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War.
Adjacent to that article on the front page, readers found an opinion article penned by James Reston, the Washington bureau chief of the Times and at that time the dean of national political journalists. The article was titled, “Why America Weeps: Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation.” Reston wrote:
America wept tonight, not alone for its dead young President, but for itself. The grief was general, for somehow the worst in the nation had prevailed over the best. The indictment extended beyond the assassin, for something in the nation itself, some strain of madness and violence, had destroyed the highest symbol of law and order. Reston seemed to be searching for an explanation for the assassination that reached beyond the assassin and his possible motives. “The irony of the President’s death,” he continued, “is that his short Administration was devoted almost entirely to various attempts to curb this very streak of violence in the American character.” Reston went on to observe that “from the beginning to the end of his Administration he was trying to tamp down the violence of extremists on the Right.” Reston suggested that the nation itself, in combination with violent tendencies from the radical right, was somehow responsible for the death of the president.
Two narratives of the assassination were thus juxtaposed on the front page of The New York Times on the day after the event. One was based upon the facts, which pointed to Oswald as the assassin and to the Cold War as the general context in which the event should be understood. The other was a political narrative, entirely divorced from the facts, that pointed to “extremists on the Right” and a national culture of violence as the culprits in the assassination. According to Reston’s interpretation, the assassination arose from domestic issues, with the civil rights crusade front and center.
Oh how history just keeps looping.. this from an Internet source.
"Oswald’s role as a lightning rod to draw the public’s bolts of wrath upon the heads of the Left was meeting with success, so much so that responsible figures in the Washington Establishment were becoming alarmed lest a tidal wave of neo–McCarthyism sweep the nation. James Reston reported in the New York Times on November 26, 1963 that 'one of the things President Johnson is said to be concerned about is that the pro–Communist background of Lee Oswald, the man who is accused by the Dallas police of assassinating President Kennedy, may lead in some places to another Communist hunt that will divide the country and complicate the new President’s relations with Moscow.'"
repeat
"Hasan’s role as a lightning rod to draw the public’s bolts of wrath upon the heads of the Islamists was meeting with success, so much so that responsible figures in the Washington Establishment were becoming alarmed lest a tidal wave of anti-Muslims sweep the nation. The NY Times reported on November 26, 2009 that 'one of the things President Obama is said to be concerned about is that the pro–Islamist background of Nidal Hasan, the man who is accused by the Fort Hood police of assassinating military men and women, may lead in some places to another witch hunt that will divide the country and complicate the new President’s relations with the Middle East.'"