Reclaiming History Read online

  Refusing to accept the plain truth, and dedicating their existence for over forty years to convincing the American public of the truth of their own charges, the critics have journeyed to the outer margins of their imaginations. Along the way, they have split hairs and then proceeded to split the split hairs, drawn far-fetched and wholly unreasonable inferences from known facts, and literally invented bogus facts from the grist of rumor and speculation. With over eighteen thousand pages of small print in the twenty-seven Warren Commission volumes alone, and many millions of pages of FBI and CIA documents, any researcher worth his salt can find a sentence here or there to support any ludicrous conspiracy theory he might have. And that, of course, is precisely what the conspiracy community has done. To give the critics their day in court (which they never give to the Warren Commission and the HSCA), and thus effectively rebut their allegations, does regrettably and unavoidably take a great many pages. For instance, it takes only one sentence to make the argument that organized crime had Kennedy killed to get his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, off its back, but it takes a great many pages to demonstrate the invalidity of that charge.

  There are several reasons, over and above Jack Ruby’s supposedly “silencing” Oswald and a general distrust of government and governmental agencies, which was only intensified by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, why the majority of Americans have embraced the conspiracy theory and rejected the findings of the Warren Commission. One is that people inevitably find conspiracies fascinating and intriguing, and hence subconsciously are more receptive to conspiratorial hypotheses. As author John Sparrow points out, “Those who attack the Warren Report enjoy an advantage over its defenders: they have a more exciting story to tell. The man in the street likes to hear that something sinister has been going on, particularly in high places.”38 And, of course, we know that humans, for whatever reason, love mysteries (which, to most, the JFK assassination has become), whether fictional or real, more than they do open-and-shut cases. For example, who killed JR? Who is Deep Throat? (Now answered.) Are there really UFOs? We all know about the considerable popularity of murder mysteries in novels and on the screen. Tom Stone, who teaches a course on the Kennedy assassination at Southern Methodist University, says that “by the late 90’s I had come to believe that Oswald was probably the only shooter. But I found I was taking the fun out of the assassination for my students.”39 Stories of conspiracy, then, are simply more appealing to Americans than that of a gunman acting alone. And when one prefers an idea, one is obviously more apt to accept its legitimacy, even in the face of contrary evidence.

  Secondly, a wide-ranging conspiracy, in a strange way, gives more meaning not only to the president’s death but to his life. That powerful national interests killed Kennedy because he was taking the nation in a direction they opposed emphasizes the importance of his life and death more than the belief that a lone nut killed him for no reason other than dementia. Abraham Lincoln scholar Reed Turner says, “Somehow it is more satisfying to believe that a president died as the victim of a cause than at the hands of a deranged gunman.”40 Even Jacqueline Kennedy was moved to say that her husband “didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little communist. It even robs his death of meaning.”41 In the unconscious desire of many to make a secular saint out of the fallen president, the notion of martyrdom was inevitable. But a martyr is not one who dies at the hands of a demented non-entity. Only powerful forces who viewed Kennedy’s reign as antithetical to their goals would do.

  And thirdly, in a related vein, there’s the instinctive notion that a king cannot be struck down by a peasant. Many Americans found it hard to accept that President Kennedy, the most powerful man in the free world—someone they perceived to occupy a position akin to a king—could be eliminated in a matter of seconds by someone whom they considered a nobody. On a visceral level, they couldn’t grasp the enormous incongruity of it all. To strike down a king, as it were, something more elaborate and powerful just had to be involved—“It’s preposterous on the face of it to believe that a mousy little guy with a $12.95 rifle could bring down the leader of the free world.”42 But of course this type of visceral reasoning has no foundation in logic. The lowliest human can pull a trigger just as effectively as someone of power and importance. And bullets are very democratic. They permit anyone to fire them through the barrel of a gun, and they injure or kill whomever they hit. There have been three assassinations of American presidents other than Kennedy (Lincoln, 1865; Garfield, 1881; McKinley, 1901) and six attempted assassinations (Jackson, 1835; FDR [president-elect], 1933; Truman, 1950; Ford, 1975 [twice]; and Reagan, 1981). With the exception of Lincoln’s murder and the attempt on Truman’s life (both of which, particularly in Truman’s case, were very limited conspiracies in their scope), all were believed to be carried out by lone gunmen—demented assailants, acting alone.

  But the above reasons are only ancillary to the principal reason why I believe the conspiracy theorists have been successful in persuading the American public that their charges are true. To paraphrase Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of Hitler’s Third Reich, if you push something at people long enough, eventually they’re going to start buying it, particularly when they haven’t been exposed to any contrary view. And for over forty years, almost all that the American people have heard has been the incessant and all-pervasive voice of the conspiracy theorists. (The evidence that supports this view of mine is the previously stated fact that when the Warren Commission first came out with its findings, the majority of Americans did accept its conclusion of Oswald’s guilt and no conspiracy.) Oliver Stone’s widely seen but factually impoverished movie in 1991, JFK, only augmented for millions of Americans all the misconceptions and myths about the case. Then, too, there’s the reality that you only know if someone is lying to you if you know what the truth is. If you don’t know, and you make the assumption that the author of a book, for instance, is honorable and has a duty to the reader and history to be truthful, you accept what he says as being factual, and hence are misled. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Einstein may have had an IQ in the stratosphere, but if he didn’t know anything about chess and a purported expert on chess told him a lie about the game, Einstein would likely accept it. To know whether authors or film producers like Stone are telling the truth, you’d have to have on hand the Warren Commission and HSCA volumes so you could check out the accuracy of everything they say. But the Warren Report and its supporting volumes, for instance, cost around a thousand dollars today (originally, around four dollars for the report and seventy-six dollars for the twenty-six volumes), and very few Americans have them. In fact, even most libraries don’t. Only 2,500 sets of the volumes were printed by the Government Printing Office, 1,340 of which went to selected libraries.43 And the HSCA volumes are almost impossible to find anywhere.

  So those peddling misinformation about the Kennedy assassination have been able to get by with their blatant lies, omissions, distortions, and simply erroneous statements because their readers aren’t in a position to dispute the veracity of their assertions. A few examples among countless others: When conspiracy theorists and critics of the Warren Commission allege, as we’ve all heard them do a hundred times, that no one, not even a professional shooter, has ever been able to duplicate what Oswald did on the day of the assassination,* that is, get off three rounds at three separate distances with the accuracy the Warren Commission says Oswald had (two out of three hits) in the limited amount of time he had, how would any reader who didn’t have volume 3 of the Warren Commission know that this is a false assertion? On page 446 of volume 3 we learn that way back in 1964, one “Specialist Miller” of the U.S. Army, using Oswald’s own Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, not only duplicated what Oswald did, but improved on Oswald’s time. In fact, many marksmen, including the firearms expert from Wisconsin whom I used at the London trial, have done better than Oswald did.

  When Jim Garrison sa
ys in his book, On the Trail of the Assassins,44 that Lee Harvey Oswald “was a notoriously poor shot” with “an abysmal marksmanship record in the Marines,” unknowledgeable readers would probably accept this if they didn’t have volume 11 of the Warren Commission. U.S. Marine Corps Major Eugene D. Anderson testified that Marine Corps records show that on December 21, 1956, Oswald fired a 212 on the range with his M-1 rifle, making him a sharpshooter.45†

  When conspiracy theorist Walt Brown tells the readers of his book, Treachery in Dallas,46 what most theorists say, that Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle was a “piece of junk” that “lacked accuracy,” how would a reader know that although it wasn’t the best of rifles, Ronald Simmons, the chief of the Infantry Weapons Evaluation Branch of the Department of the Army, said that after test-firing Oswald’s rifle forty-seven times, he found it was “quite accurate”; indeed, he said, as accurate as “the M-14” rifle, the rifle used by the American military at the time?47

  The conspiracy theorists are so outrageously brazen that they tell lies not just about verifiable, documentary evidence, but about clear, photographic evidence, knowing that only one out of a thousand of their readers, if that, is in possession of the subject photographs. Robert Groden (the leading photographic expert for the conspiracy proponents who was the photographic adviser for Oliver Stone’s movie JFK) draws a diagram on page 24 of his book High Treason of Governor Connally seated directly in front of President Kennedy in the presidential limousine and postulates the “remarkable path” a bullet coming from behind Kennedy, and traveling from right to left, would have to take to hit Connally—after passing straight through Kennedy’s body, making a right turn and then a left one in midair, which, the buffs chortle, bullets “don’t even do in cartoons.” What average reader would be in a position to dispute this seemingly commonsense, geometric assault on the Warren Commission’s single-bullet theory? (The theory is a sine qua non to the Commission’s conclusion that there was only one gunman, and the same bullet that hit Connally had previously hit Kennedy.) But, of course, if you start out with an erroneous premise, whatever flows from it makes a lot of sense. The only problem is that it’s wrong. The indisputable fact here—which all people who have studied the assassination know—is that Connally was not seated directly in front of Kennedy, but to his left front. Though President Kennedy was seated on the extreme right in the backseat of the limousine, Connally was in a jump seat situated a half foot from the right door.48 Moreover, at the time Connally was hit, the Zapruder film, unlike Groden’s diagram, shows he was turned to his right.49 Additionally, the jump seat was three inches lower than the backseat.50 Therefore, because of the alignment of Connally’s body vis-à-vis Kennedy’s, it was virtually inevitable that a bullet traveling on a downward trajectory and passing on a straight line through soft tissue in Kennedy’s body (as both the Warren Commission and HSCA concluded) would go on to strike Connally where it did.51 But again, how would average lay readers know that Groden had deliberately altered reality to mislead them? (Groden declined a request by the defense to testify at the trial in London and thus avoided being cross-examined.)

  I am unaware of any other major event in world history which has been shrouded in so much intentional misinformation as has the assassination of JFK. Nor am I aware of any event that has given rise to such an extraordinarily large number of far-fetched and conflicting theories. For starters, if organized crime was behind the assassination, as many believe, wouldn’t that necessarily mean that all the many books claiming the CIA (or Castro or the KGB, and so on) was responsible were wrong? And vice versa? Unless one wants to believe, as Hollywood producer Oliver Stone apparently does, that they were all involved. I mean, were we to believe Mr. Stone, even bitter enemies like the KGB and the CIA got together on this one. Indeed, at one time or another in Mr. Stone’s cinematic reverie, he had the following groups and individuals acting suspiciously and/or conspiratorially: the Dallas Police Department, FBI, Secret Service, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, CIA, KGB, Fidel Castro, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, organized crime, and the military-industrial complex. Apparently nobody wanted President Kennedy alive. But where did all these people meet to hatch this conspiracy? Madison Square Garden?

  The Warren Commission has been attacked for decades by the critics for conducting a highly biased investigation of the assassination. Yes, the Commission was biased against Oswald, but only after it became obvious to any sensible, reasonable person that he had murdered Kennedy. Actually, that fact was clearly evident within hours of the assassination. Among other things, law enforcement learned that the apparent murder weapon, a 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano rifle found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building—later confirmed to be the murder weapon by firearm tests—had been traced back to Oswald; that forty-five minutes after the assassination Oswald murdered Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit, and shortly thereafter tried to shoot his arresting officer; and that during his interrogation he told one provable lie after another—such as claiming he never owned a rifle—showing an unmistakable consciousness of guilt. With evidence like this already in existence against Oswald on the very first day that the Warren Commission started its work on the case, how could the Commission possibly not start out with at least the working hypothesis of Oswald’s guilt? And of course, all of the evidence that the Commission gathered thereafter only served to confirm this original hypothesis.

  One of the most common arguments made by critics of the Warren Commission—even by those few who do not impute dishonorable motives to the Commission members—is that it was acting under intense political and societal pressure to reach a conclusion in the case and that it was very rushed in its investigation. This is one reason why, they say, the Commission reached an erroneous conclusion. But this is invalid criticism. The Commission had nine months, far more than enough time to reach a conclusion that was obvious to nearly everyone involved in the investigation within days—that a nut had killed Kennedy, and he had himself been killed by another nut, with the possibility of a conspiracy being highly implausible. If the president weren’t the victim, a normal investigation of a murder with the same set of facts and circumstances as this one could be wrapped up by any competent major city police department in a few weeks, with the prosecution being a rather short one. The Warren Commission, in addition to having one hundred times the investigative manpower and resources of a local police department, took, as indicated, nine months. As Warren Commission member John McCloy said, “The conclusions [we reached] weren’t rushed at all…[They were] arrived at in our own good time.”52

  It should be noted that the completely natural and almost humanly unavoidable bias of the Warren Commission against Oswald, as one piece of evidence after another kept pointing ineluctably to his guilt, did not prevent it from conducting an extremely thorough, almost microscopic investigation of the assassination.* Nor did it militate against its being willing to examine, even seek out, any evidence that would controvert this bias. As David Belin, assistant counsel for the Warren Commission, said about himself and his colleague Joseph Ball (the two Warren Commission lawyers whose job was to answer the sole question of who killed President Kennedy, not other, related areas of inquiry), “Ball and I were always looking for something that might shed new light on the assassination. Could it be that Oswald was not the assassin? Could it be that if Oswald was the assassin, one or more people were involved? Could it be that Oswald merely aided the assassin, or that he unwittingly aided someone else?”53

  Though the Warren Commission perhaps should have considered the possibility of a conspiracy more than it did, contrary to popular belief it did conduct a fairly extensive probe into the issue of whether or not any person or group was behind Oswald’s act. Apart from a great number of references to the possibility of a conspiracy in the multiple volumes of the Commission, and many sections in the Warren Report itself that, by definition, inferentially dealt with the issue (e.g., discussion about grassy knoll witnesses), the report co
ntains a 131-page chapter (by far the longest chapter in the report) dealing exclusively with the issue of conspiracy. The Commission asserted that it “has investigated each rumor and allegation linking Oswald to a conspiracy which has come to its attention, regardless of source.”54 Indeed, one very long June 1964 document, titled “Oswald’s Foreign Activities: Summary of Evidence Which Might Be Said to Show That There Was Foreign Involvement in the Assassination of President Kennedy,” wasn’t even included in the Warren Commission volumes. The authors of the document (a memorandum from Assistant Counsels W. David Slawson and William Coleman to the Warren Commission) noted that “one of the basic purposes of the [Warren] Commission’s investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy is to determine whether it was due in whole or in part to a foreign conspiracy,” and concluded that “there was no foreign involvement” in Kennedy’s murder.55

  One of the key pieces of documentary evidence that conspiracy theorists cite as proof that the Warren Commission only had an interest in presenting a case against Oswald, and had no interest in ascertaining whether there was a conspiracy, is a January 11, 1964, “Memorandum for Members of the Commission” from Commission chairman Earl Warren in which he sets forth a “tentative outline” that was prepared, he said, by Warren Commission general counsel J. Lee Rankin to aid in “organizing the evaluation of the investigative materials received by the Commission.” Since by January 11, a month and a half after the assassination, it was very obvious that Oswald had killed Kennedy, subdivision II of the memorandum was titled “Lee Harvey Oswald as the Assassin of President Kennedy.” Under this subdivision were subheadings like “Brief Identification of Oswald [Dallas resident, employee of Texas School Book Depository, etc.]”; “Movements [of Oswald] on November 22, 1963, Prior to Assassination”; “Entry into Depository”; “Movements after Assassination until Murder of Tippit”; and so on. I respectfully ask, what other way was there for “organizing the evaluation of the investigative materials” when the investigative materials (i.e., evidence) all dealt, of necessity (since the evidence that had already been gathered all pointed to Oswald as the killer of Kennedy), with Oswald? To give Oswald an alias? Or mention some third party who was not identified in the investigative materials as the chief suspect? Moreover, the Warren Commission critics don’t mention that Warren, to allow for the fact that the investigation might take the Commission in different directions, wrote, “As the staff reviews the [investigative] materials, the outline will certainly undergo substantial revision.” Perhaps most importantly, what the critics usually fail to mention is that subdivision II H reads, “Evidence Implicating Others in Assassination or Suggesting Accomplices.”