The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, from a 6th floor window in the Texas Book Depository, fired three shots from a Mannlicher-Carcanno rifle he had purchased through the mail for $12.78. The first shot missed; the second hit Kennedy in the back and, after exiting, struck Gov. Connolly, who was riding in the limo with him, fracturing one rib and wrist. The third and fatal shot struck the right rear of Kennedy’s head. From film of the motorcade shot by Abraham Zapruder, a spectator, the Warren Commission determined 5.6 seconds elapsed between the first and third shots. The conspiracists say this couldn’t’ve happened.
Salandria dismisses as a “myth” the claim that a single “junk rifle” could have been responsible for the “fusillade” that “inflicted…(this) carnage.” Talbot regards as worth repeating the claim that Oswald could not have gotten off three shots in under six seconds. Douglass says little about the actual mechanics of the shooting, except to agree with the others that someone (or “ones”), firing from the grassy knoll in front of the limousine fired a shot that entered the front of Kennedy’s throat and exited through the rear, causing the massive damage there. I’ll get to the knoll and entry wound later.
But first, the rifle wasn’t “junk.” It was Italian army surplus, manufactured in 1940, one of a hundred Oswald’s dealer had bought $8.50 apiece. Probably it had been used. (I will resist the temptation to demean the Italian army’s fighting spirit by adding “minimally.”) But FBI experts had test fired it 47 times and found it “quite accurate.” The same model was still being used by the Italian rifle team in international competition, and it was every bit as accurate as the U.S. Army’s M-14.
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Whodunnit xii: Progress report
I realize yesterday’s blog wasn’t up to my accustomed standards. I should have stuck those guys into the one before, but I had missed them. (I’m nowhere near finishing Bugliosi’s book, and while I try to use his index as a guide to responses to arguments, I miss some stuff. I’ll try to do better.
Anyway, I understand my sister-in-law and niece have joined my brother-in-law, my pals Budd and Milo (I think), and hoards of unknown others as regular readers. Welcome, aboard. And Adele told me our friend Marilyn has offered to drop by a book by her friend Joe McBride, which proves Johnson did it. I nearly fell off the toilet, laughing; but I said, “Sure!”
Anyway, so it doesn’t take me 20 years, which is how long Bugliosi spent, I’m going to discuss only a few of the conspiracists’ points. Unless it strikes me as particularly thought provoking, amusing, or gorge-raising, I’ll stick to those all (or maybe a majority) of my selected experts set forth.
I’ll begin with a no-brainer tomorrow.
Whodunnit xi: More Men in the Window
While we’re on the subject, let’s not overlook, as Douglass, Salandria, and Talbot do, Ronald Fischer and Bob Edwards, county employees, directly across from the TBD, who saw a slender, casually dressed white man, in his early 20s, in a 6th floor window, kneeling or sitting, surrounded by boxes in what-would-be-called “the sniper’s nest.” Not the 5th or 7th floor. Not with someone beside him. Not heavyset, in a hat and glasses.
Douglass does mention Howard Brennan, a 45-year-old pipefitter, who, according to Bugliosi, was 120 feet from the TDB – and farsighted. Before the motorcade arrived, Brennan saw a man on the sixth floor, seated on a window’s sill. After the first two shots, Brennan looked again and saw the same man, now standing, fire a rifle. Within the hour, Brennan described the man to the police: – slender, white, about 30 years old, and 5’10.” That evening he picked Oswald out of the police line-up. Douglass rejects this evidence because the window was only partially open, meaning the shooter had to have been kneeling or squatting, so Brennan could not have estimated his height. (The WC also reached this conclusion.)
Still, three out of four isn’t bad – and, actually, if you have seen someone’s head and torso, it isn’t out of the question, you could estimate his height. The Greeks, you will recall, believed you only needed a head to proportion someone exactly.
Whodunnit x: The Man in the Green Rambler (a.)
My favorite single law school class occurred during Evidence. The professor had us take out pen and paper. He asked us to write down his age and height and weight. He asked us to describe, without turning, what was on the wall above the door through which we exited daily. So we had him 40-to-60. We had him 5’6″ to 5’11”, from 140 to 180 pounds. Most of us knew there was a clock on the wall. No one knew there was a thermostat. Three of us remembered a non-existent painting, which, as the professor put it, “In case of a fire, you would be prepared to come into court and place a value on it.” And that was us a group of keen-eyed, aggressively competitive second-year law students paying direct attention. Imagine if someone had shot him from a nearby building before he spoke.
Memories are chemicals. They fade in or are augmented by the passage of time or other events or how we wish or expect things to be. They are shaped by wishes to conform and please and live up to expectations and out of fear. They are influenced by wishes to enhance one’s role in situations or desire for financial or other gain.
I mention all this before I discuss eyewitnesses.
It seems central to James Douglass’s theory that, following the shots that killed President Kennedy, a man closely resembling Lee Harvey Oswald coming from the rear of the Texas Book Depository Building entered a green Rambler station wagon and left the scene. It seems clear there was a Rambler. (John McAdams says photos confirm its presence.) It could be a man entered it, but it was not likely it was Oswald. (A former landlady identified him as entering a bus not far from the TBD, and a transfer in his pocket after his arrest established the time he was aboard.) For JD’s case, this man was an Oswald impersonator who, as I understand it, then killed Officer Tippit and led police to the Texas Theater where Oswald was caught.
JD leads with Dallas police sergeant Roger Craig. Craig says that 10 minutes (JM and VB have him saying 15 minutes) after the shooting, he saw a man coming toward Elm Street from the rear of the TBD, where he was picked up by the Rambler, driven by a husky Latin male, which was headed west. (VB says Craig said the driver could have been Negro.) RC later confronted this man (or, rather, someone who looked like him, the actual LHO), while he was being questioned in the office of Craig’s superior, Capt. Will Fritz, at which point O linked the Rambler to Ruth Paine, a friend of his and his wife, whom JD had previously semi-linked to the CIA.
There are problems with Craig’s credibility. For one, Fritz denied Craig was ever in his office with Oswald. (JD chooses not to believe Fritz because, for one thing, he did not follow up when presented Rose Cherabi’s tale.) For a second, as VB points out, it seems odd for LHO to have admitted any involvement in the killing, since otherwise he steadfastly denied any role in it. (And since LHO left in a bus, it would mean he knew an impostor was leaving by Rambler.) Third, JM says both the DPD and FBI confirmed that Paine owned a Chevvy wagon, not a Rambler. (JD chooses not to believe the FBI since the agent reporting that, he alleges, destroyed other evidence. He does not mention the DPD.) Fourth, Craig also placed himself on the sixth floor, where the shooter’s rifle and cartridge hulls were found, but his description of the rifle and placement of the shells conflicts with other accounts. Fifth, in 1971, Craig gave an account which had Tippit being shot at 1:06, which would have meant LHO could not have shot him, which is fine for JD, but most others say the shooting occurred at 1:15, when LHO could have; but in 1968 he had believed that the shooting had occurred at 1:40. (JD does not mention this.) Finally, Craig would later write an unpublished book which recounted five attempts on his life, including being shot at, run off the road, and having his car dynamited. He would later commit suicide – or, according to some theorists, be killed. VB has pointed out it is surprising that a conspiracy that killed a president would have such difficulty killing Craig – or why it would need to, since he had already given his evidence. (JD mentions none of this, but he does buttress Craig’s report of the Rambler man with the accounts of other witnesses.)
Stay tuned.
Fugging Around
My latest is up at http://www.tcj.com/reviews/fogels-underground-price-grading-guide/
It begins:
In the early 1970s, not having read a comic book in 20 years, my interest was re-drawn to them by the question of what gave value to art. I had considered comic books worth a dime, since this is what I had paid for them. But this was no longer the case. Value, it turned out, was affected by such factors as the amount of stain from staple rust and whether a woman was being stabbed in the eye on the front cover by a hypodermic needle.
Whodunnit ix: Line-up changes
But before I get to the evidence…
I’d mentioned dropping “Case Closed’ from my line-up because of its incompatibility with – and disparagement by – its more completely researched partner, “Reclaiming History.” I’ve now subbed in John McAdams’s “JFK Assassination Logic” (306 pp. 2011). McAdams, a poly sci professor and self-described “debunker” at Marquette, currently under suspension because of… Well, that’s another story. His book focuses on the fallacies in the reasoning of conspiracy theorists. (It mentions Douglass and Posner four times. It mentions neither Talbot nor, more interestingly, Bugliosi, whose ground it seems to track.)
I had hoped to balance McAdams with “False Mystery,” a collection of essays by Vincent Salandria, an ex-attorney and history teacher, who is the doyen of the Philadelphia School of Conspiracy Theorists, but A Libris had no copies. I settled for a speech he gave in 1998 to the Coalition on Political Assassinations, which, augmented by hyperlinks and endnotes, some as recent as 2013, prints out at 48 pp. Salandria says that, within two days of the assassination, he had determined Oswald was “a possible intelligence agent and patsy.” (If this judgment seems rushed, it was arrived at a day longer than it took Salandria to inform his 8th grade math class, in 1941, that Roosevelt had lied about Pearl Harbor being a “sneak attack” in order to thrust the country into war.) Salandria was among the Warren Report’s earliest critics, and this speech sets out what I take to be his main objections to its reasoning. (The endnotes to the “argument” portion cite 25 references, none of which are Bugliosi, McAdams, Posner, or Talbot. Six are his own works; four are Douglass’s; and eight are friends or followers of Salandria’s who share his belief.)
Which is that our national security state killed Kennedy. (Salandria considers Douglass’s the best book written about the assassination, and Douglass had dedicated his book to Salandria.) Salandria accuses, among others, McGeorge Bundy, Allen Dulles, Nicholas Katzenbach, Henry Luce, Arlen Specter, and Earl Warren of criminally conspiring to cover up the killing and blame it on Oswald. (Some may wonder at the success of this cover up, since, when the Warren report was issued, 68.4% of the public thought Oswald acted alone. Over the last several decades, somewhere between 60 and 85% report believing the opposite.) The conspirators’ aim was to undermine the American’s public’s faith in government, so it would not take politics seriously. He calls for an understanding of what happened in order to “organize the struggle through which we can make this country a civilian republic in more than name only.”
I just finished…
…Robert Roper’s “Nabokov in America.” Roper, a novelist, non-fiction writer — and friend — is a great admirer of Nabokov’s (a secret he had kept from me for over 40 years). The merging of Bud’s talents as a writer (which I did know of) and his passion has produced a work enjoyable and informative from start to finish. I learned about Nabokov, his wife, their son. I learned about Nabokov’s friends and feuds, the butterflies he caught and the crafting of his career. I learned about the family’s cross-country trips, the America they prowled and the motor courts in which they rested and how this profited “Lolita,” “Pale Fire,” and more.
Whodunnit ix: Talbot
Talbot is less precise than Douglass.
In fact, precision in terms of identifying who killed Kennedy and why, is not something Talbot, a former editor at Mother Jones and the founder of Salon.com, is about. His point seems to be that, despite investigations by the Warren Commission and two subsequent congressional committees, too much doubt exists about what happened in Dallas for it to be left to lie. He cites some commission members and investigators, as well as other congressmen, members of the Kennedy family, Kennedy loyalists, prominent mainstream journalists, and ex-CIA personnel, who either remain skeptical of or directly repudiate the Warren conclusions. He notes that polls have steadfastly shown a majority of the public – 61% in 2013, down from a high of 81%, most recently attained in 2001 – doubt Oswald acted alone. (Personally, I don’t find this surprising. I doubt many Americans have read even the one-volume summary, let alone the commission’s complete 27 volume report (I haven’t) or Bugliosi’s 1600 pages. And while Talbot faults the media for not having aggressively investigated the assassination, it has, for 50 years, faithfully reported on the many books, TV shows and films that have criticized the commission and thereby educated the public to believe it failed.)
Without committing himself to a particular theory, Talbot identifies as possible Kennedy killers the Mafia, Jimmy Hoffa, anti-Castro Cubans, pro-Castro Cubans, the Pentagon, the CIA, “rogue” CIA agents, and “a national security cabal,” The most original theory he recounts, set forth in notes for a never-written novel by David Atlee Phillips, an ex-CIA agent who figures in several of these plots. In these notes an alliance of Soviet agents and CIA-hating American leftists co-opt a CIA operation, which had established Oswald’s Marxist credentials in order to get him into Cuba where he would assassinate Castro, and use Oswald instead to kill Kennedy in Dallas in an effort to destroy the CIA. (Talbot admits he can’t tell if this amounts to a “confession” by Phillips or an effort to spread further “disinformation.”)
Talbot ends Brothers by calling for the release of documents never released by the CIA, the Kennedys, Cuba, and Moscow, so yet another formal investigation can take place. I wouldn’t mind seeing more documents, but I don’t share Talbot’s faith that they would yield more light than they would blow further smoke. In either event, I’m not sure what they would accomplish either. Since Warren, Americans have learned truths about Watergate, Vietnam and Iraq, without experiencing any enlightenment I am able to discern.
But anyway, onto the evidence.
Whodunnit viii: Douglass (cont.)
What accounts for Douglass’s choices? Did he find the stories too delicious to resist? (Oliver Stone apparently did, utilizing another of Cherabie’s multiple versions – that she was thrown from a car, not a bar – to open JFK.) Was Douglass unconsciously motivated by doubt or fear or guilt to sabotage his own credibility? Does he have such faith in the strength of his convictions to believe they can carry the weight of such dubious tales? I know some among the conspiratorially minded who believe that the reason there are so many different conspiracy theories afloat is that the CIA has been sponsoring them in order to discredit by association the one true theory, which is whichever it is in which the CIA-accuser believes. I would not be surprised to read someday that Douglass was a CIA agent employed to undermine the truth of the National-Security-State-as-assassins theory by associating it with the doubt-inducing accounts of Cherabie and Vinson.
But I don’t dismiss Douglass.
Unspeakable is sincere and well-intentioned. It is the best-written of the four books I set out for consideration and better written than any of the other similarly themed books or articles to which my perambulations took me. Douglass, a 78-year-old non-violence activist and theologian, is a devotee of Thomas Merton, whose thinking gives his book a compelling spiritual dimension. (Merton, incidentally, along with Allen Ginsberg and Bertrand Russell, was among the “prominent personalities” mentioned by Talbot, who responded to a 1966 survey as doubting the Warren Commission’s findings. Dwight MacDonald and Norman Thomas sided with those who supported them.)
Douglass’s book is also, at least partially, persuasive. Coming from a family of Stevensonian Democrats and, in the early 1960s, more focused on civil rights than foreign affairs, (in which, I confess, I considered the United States a force of “good”), I regarded JFK as a foot-dragger, uncommitted to the progressive cause. And Douglass goes a long way toward convincing me that Kennedy is to be respected and commended for his efforts to move the country and the world toward peace.
But that doesn’t absolve the rest of Douglass’s case from analysis.
Whodunnit vii: choice of characters (b)
Or take Robert G. Vinson.
Again, if you were writing a book – thriller or history – given all the information at your disposal, would you include an account of the escape of one of several men who had impersonated Lee Harvey Oswald in order to frame him for the assassination of President Kennedy which utilized a cargo plane landing in mid-afternoon on a road under construction outside Dallas? And instead of having a plane ready and waiting, would you instead divert one already in flight from Washington, D.C. to Denver? And would you have aboard as its only passenger a serviceman (Vinson) returning home from an interview about a promotion he desired, which, coincidentally, had been interrupted by the officer conducting it to engage in a phone conversation, in which the serviceman had overheard the officer urge someone not to let the president go to Dallas? Would you then deliver the serviceman and the imposter to an air force base in Roswell, New Mexico, where you maintained the secrecy of your extraction only by restricting the serviceman to the base for two hours before letting him return home? Would you then ensure his remaining silent by having him sign a confidentiality agreement while he worked at a hidden CIA base at which took place the development of “flying saucer”-like aircraft? And would you have him maintain this silence for 30 years until a lawyer convinced him it no longer applied, at which point they co-authored a book (Flight From Dallas)?
Would it not have bothered you in your plotting, as it did the conspiracy skeptic John McAdams (JFK Assassination Logic), that not one person in the Dallas area reported seeing the cargo plane land or take-off, or that, given other events you had previously described, it had taken three hours and four different vehicles for your impostor to travel the four or five miles to the landing strip where he rendezvoused with the plane, whereas, if he had jumped in a van, he would already have been halfway to Roswell?
David Talbot omitted Robert Vines’s story. James Douglass gave him five pages.