Reclaiming History (371 page)

†Many of the early researchers considered themselves liberal, which is why they weren’t prepared for the disdain or indifference they received from even the liberal establishment and media (such as the estimable
Nation
magazine and leading lights of the Left like Alexander Cockburn and I. F. Stone), who, apart from other reasons to support the findings of such an august body as the Warren Commission, were reticent about attacking a Commission whose chairman, Chief Justice Warren, had become a liberal icon for the civil rights’ rulings of his court, and who had been the subject of vitriolic attacks by the nation’s right wing. Indeed, a liberal like Vince Salandria was astonished to find his message of questioning the Warren Commission resonating more with Republican groups than with those to the left of center. (Trillin, “Buffs,” p.46)

^*
The barrage of books prompted the
New York Times
to comment in an editorial that “debate on the accuracy and adequacy of the Warren Commission’s work is now approaching the dimensions of a lively small industry in this country” (
New York Times
, September 1, 1966, p.34; “Playboy Interview: Mark Lane,” p.42).

^*
Why the members of the conspiracy community so loathe the appellation
buff
and consider it as pejorative as they do is not clear, since it’s not a new word that applies only to them. For many years before the assassination the word had been used, without a negative connotation, to describe a devotee or well-informed student of some subject, like a Civil War, opera, or trolley-car buff.

†Garrison also had the nation’s attention on New Orleans, nearly two out of three Americans telling a nationwide Harris Poll in late May 1967 that they were following the investigation. And Garrison was winning in the court of public opinion. In an earlier Harris Poll conducted in February, 44 percent thought there was a conspiracy, 35 percent thought Oswald acted alone, and 21 percent weren’t sure. But the late-May poll, just three months into Garrison’s probe, found 66 percent believing there was a conspiracy. Only 19 percent did
not
believe there was a conspiracy, and 15 percent didn’t know. (“66% in Poll Accept Kennedy Plot View,”
New York Times
, May 30, 1967, p.19)

^*
The 1980s didn’t get off to a good start for the conspiracy theorists. British conspiracy author Michael Eddowes, convinced that an imposter was buried in Oswald’s Fort Worth grave, actually succeeded in having the body exhumed on October 4, 1981, and examined by medical experts. The buffs had their fingers crossed but the body turned out to be Lee Harvey Oswald.

^*
Some of these neophytes have elbowed their mentors out of the way and have themselves become part of a new wave of Warren Commission critics presently comprising the dominant force in the conspiracy movement. They include theorist James Fetzer, who has wisely gathered the best technical minds in the conspiracy community to write scholarly scientific essays in books that he edits. Other members of the new wave include, but are not limited to, Walt Brown, Drs. Gary Aguilar and David Mantik, James DiEugenio, Vincent Palamara, and John Newman. One of the best examples of the old school working with the new is that of Josiah Thompson, one of the most respected Warren Commission critics ever, becoming a friend to and colleague of Aguilar’s, who seems to be following Thompson’s footsteps in terms of rigorous, high-quality research.
In this book I use the terms
Warren Commission critic
and
conspiracy theorist
somewhat interchangeably, not because they are linguistically so, but because in the context of the assassination they essentially are. One could certainly be a critic of the Warren Commission without being a conspiracy theorist, and some have been, in an article or column. But show me a critic of the Warren Commission down through the years who isn’t also attached to one or more conspiracy theories or the general notion of conspiracy in the assassination. For the most part I use one or the other term for a person to describe what I perceive to be his or her primary interest—conspiracy, or being a critic of the Warren Commission’s work.

^*
Book One has already examined some allegations that, if true, spell conspiracy, such as that one or more of the shots came from the grassy knoll, and that the Zapruder film was altered. I made the decision to include them in Book One because they were an intrinsic and inseparable area of inquiry that more properly fit into the subject of discussion—for example, grassy knoll, to the murder of the president in Dealey Plaza; Zapruder alteration, to the Zapruder film.

^*
Ray originally pleaded guilty to the murder of Martin Luther King, but at the time Lane was representing him in 1978 he had recanted his confession, denied his guilt, and declared he was an innocent victim of a large conspiracy. In defense of Ray, Lane alleged that the HSCA’s investigators and their agents had suborned perjury, criminally received stolen property, and unlawfully tape-recorded telephone conversations, all to prevent Ray from receiving a fair hearing before the HSCA, which, along with Kennedy’s murder, was reinvestigating the assassination of King. Lane added that the HSCA itself had engaged in conduct which was part of a “conspiracy” to prevent a fair investigation. (Anthony Marro, “Mark Lane Charges Panel Conspiracy,”
New York Times
, August 8, 1978, p.A10)

^*
With respect to the above four witnesses, conspiracy-leaning author Henry Hurt, who overall is not nearly as bad as Lane, doesn’t mention their names either in his best-selling book,
Reasonable Doubt
, much less say they identified Oswald as being at or running from the Tippit murder scene with a revolver in his hand.

†Some further examples, among many, of Lane’s suggestion that the Warren Commission not only was completely unobjective about the facts of the assassination (“the Commission was biased toward its conclusion before the facts were known…The Commission worked from the
a priori
assumption that Oswald was on the sixth floor, was the assassin, and acted alone” [Lane,
Rush to Judgment
, p.71]), but actually attempted to frame Oswald: “[The Commission considered] only such testimony as did not endanger [its] case”; “the symphony of conformity
arranged
by the most active Commission members, Warren, Dulles and Ford, their counsel Rankin, and their eager accomplices among the younger lawyers, David Belin and Arlen Specter”; “In attempting to” prove that no shots came from the grassy knoll, the Warren Commission, in its report, “ignored and reshaped evidence”; “evidence against [Oswald] was magnified, while that in his favor was depreciated, misrepresented or ignored” (Lane,
Rush to Judgment
, pp.193, xxxvi, 45, 378). In a related vein: “Thus, the Commission met its mandate to attempt to quell the many rumors about Jack Ruby, but it did so, apparently, by deliberately suppressing the truth” (Lane,
Rush to Judgment
, p.xiii).

^*
Although he couldn’t represent Oswald’s interests before the Commission, Lane continued to be retained by Marguerite, and he and she made several joint appearances together, including one at a New York City town hall meeting on February 18, 1964 (FBI memorandum from Mr. Branigan to Mr. Sullivan, March 13, 1964). Marguerite dismissed Lane as her attorney on April 1, 1964 (
New York Times
, April 2, 1964, p.37).

^*
Lane’s “attorney-client” privilege and “working papers” arguments were legally indefensible. This is why, I am quite sure, he came up with a completely new legal argument in his book to shore up his legacy on this point; but his new story didn’t hold water either. Lane wrote, “Had the Commission been motivated by an authentic desire to know the truth, surely it would have directed me to give the tape recording up. I was eager to furnish this evidence, but I was reluctant to break the law, for to make and divulge a recording of a telephone conversation may be a violation of the Federal Communications Act,” and Lane said he feared being prosecuted (Lane,
Rush to Judgment
, pp.181–182). But number one, at the time the Warren Commission asked Lane for the tape, he had already disclosed its contents, and number two, if Lane knew enough about the law to quote the Federal Communications Act (47 USC § 605), then he almost assuredly also knew that under the act it is not prohibited and not a crime for a party to a telephonic communication to tape the conversation, even without the knowledge of the other party, and to furnish this tape and/or divulge its contents to a third party. Such a taping does not involve an “interception” of the telephone message, which would be prohibited by the act. (
Rathbun v. United States
, 355 U.S. 107, 110 [1957]; see also
U.S. v. McGuire
, 381 F.2d 306, 314 [1967])

^*
Lane claims he voluntarily decided to turn over his tape to the Warren Commission (“Playboy Interview: Mark Lane,” p.55).

^*
I debated Lane three times, the last time in San Francisco in the late 1980s or early 1990s at a California Trial Lawyers convention. Only the first debate, in Boston, was at night, with no limitation on time. The Long Island debate was during the noon recess at the college, as I recall, and there was a time limitation in San Francisco. At our first debate, when I confronted Lane with Jack Ruby’s “there was no conspiracy” omission in his book, he had no answer at all. How could he? Neither did he have any answer for the fact that witnesses whose testimony clearly point to Oswald’s guilt, such as Johnny Brewer and Officer McDonald, weren’t even mentioned in his book. I was surprised at the poor quality of his presentation. It predictably consisted of one misrepresentation of the facts after another, and I had no difficulty exposing these misrepresentations to the audience. Lane, who is very intelligent, did better at the Long Island and San Francisco debates, where he increased the number of allegations and misrepresentations and I had insufficient time to respond to all of them.

^*
If Ruby had been involved, as Lane suggests, in a conspiracy with Weissman to murder Kennedy, it is more than highly unlikely that, as we’ve seen is the case, Ruby would have called so much attention to Weissman and his anti-Kennedy advertisement on Friday and Saturday, November 22 and 23, 1963 (WR, p.369). But Lane has never been deterred by such commonsense observations.

^*
Jones became so obsessed with the assassination that his small, rundown farmhouse in the countryside near Waxahachie, Texas, overflowing with books on the assassination and with the obligatory movie projector to show visitors the Zapruder film, became the headquarters for his crusade to prove Kennedy was killed as a result of a conspiracy. Caught up in this passion, he neglected his newspaper and in the early 1980s began publishing a conspiracy newsletter, the
Continuing Inquiry
, for conspiracy buffs. Not infrequently, he would disappear from his newspaper duties for weeks at a time to chase down witnesses and track rumors. Once, he even crawled through a storm sewer beneath Elm Street to prove that Kennedy’s assassin could have fired to Kennedy’s front from a gutter opening on Elm. (Brad Bailey, “The Obsessed,”
Dallas Morning News
, November 20, 1983, p.55)
“Penn Jones hated me,” former Dallas assistant district attorney Bill Alexander told me with a chuckle. “He thought I was a member of the killing team that was doing away with Warren Commission witnesses” (Telephone interview of William Alexander by author on December 11, 2001). The diminutive (5-foot-2½-inch) Jones, who fought as an infantry officer at the battles of Salerno and Anzio in the Second World War, was almost assuredly motivated by patriotism in his assassination research. The only problem was that his beliefs were, to be generous, irrational.

^*
Kilgallen was best known for her daily newspaper column, “The Voice of Broadway,” and for starring on the popular television show
What’s My Line?
, which had a seventeen-year run on CBS.

^*
Sam Ruby, one of Jack Ruby’s brothers, told the Warren Commission that while Ruby was in custody, “his mental condition has deteriorated very rapidly. He keeps saying that people are being killed in the streets and he hears screams in the building of people being slaughtered” (14 H 501). Another brother, Earl, told the Commission, “As of now, he [Jack Ruby] don’t even think I’m alive. He thinks they killed me and my family, my children” (14 H 428).

†In his distinguished career as an investigative reporter, Aynesworth was nominated six other times for this prize and was a finalist five times. “I’m kind of the Susan Lucci of investigative journalism,” he chuckles. He was the only reporter to have been at all four major scenes of the assassination: in Dealey Plaza at the time of the shooting; the Tippit murder scene shortly after Tippit was killed; the Texas Theater when Oswald was arrested; and the police basement when Ruby shot Oswald. (Telephone interview of Hugh Aynesworth by author on January 11, 2000)

^*
The first conspiracy theorist to raise the issue of impersonation was Léo Sauvage in an article in
Commentary
in the spring of 1964. The Warren Commission treated all of the unlikely or impossible Oswald sightings as either cases of mistaken identity or deliberate falsehoods.

^*
On November 23, 1959, Mosby, from Paris, wrote a condensed version of the long interview that was sent out over the wires to hundreds of newspapers throughout the land, and apparently a few (e.g.,
New York World Telegram
, November 24, 1959, p.9) erroneously typed up “North Dakota” instead of “New Orleans,” furnishing fuel for the Stanley, North Dakota, myth. Oswald’s brother Robert informed the FBI his brother Lee had never lived in North Dakota. (FBI Record 124-10010-10361, Letter from J. Edgar Hoover to SACS Phoenix, Dallas, Minneapolis, December 20, 1963)