A few weeks ago, I spent about 4 hours discussing Rob Reiner's podcast on the JFK assassination with Michel Gagné, author of Thinking Critically About the Kennedy Assassination: Debunking the Myths and Conspiracy Theories. You can read an excerpt from Michel's book here. And check out his website: Previous Relevant Blog Posts Rob Reiner's Podcast Series, Part Two Was there a fake defector program at Nags Head, North Carolina? Rob Reiner's Podcast Series, Part One Flimsy evidence is cited that originated in Hustler Magazine. Rob Reiner on the Two Oswalds Reiner believes the two-Oswald theory. Jefferson Morley: Able to Leap Intellectual Chasms in a Single Bound This blog post also covers the concluding episode of Reiner's podcast.

Penn Jones The Texas Observer printed a profile of Penn Jones in its September 29, 1967, issue: Here is a letter from the October 13, 1967, issue of the Texas Observer that addresses the supposed mysterious deaths. Penn Jones then replied in the October 27, 1967, issue: By the way, Penn Jones was profiled in Time Magazine in November 1966: Nation: The Mythmakers Friday, Nov. 11, 1966 For many who believe that there was a conspiracy to assassinate John Kennedy in Dallas, the most mesmeric argument of all is that an extraordinary number of people involved in the case —however remotely—have since lost their lives under mysterious circumstances. As of last week, the toll had, in fact, reached 14. To conspiracy theorists, the clear implication is that the victims knew too much and were systematically liquidated. Chief mythologist and drumbeater for this theory is Penn Jones Jr., 52, the diminutive (5 ft. 2¼ in.) editor of a Texas weekly newspaper, the Midlothian Mirror (circ. 765). In 1965, Jones began a seemingly inexhaustible Mirror series intended, as he put it, to "bring into some intelligible whole all the events surrounding the assassination." This month, San Francisco's slick Ramparts magazine, a onetime Catholic quarterly turned New Left monthly, also carried several of the Jones reports, along with the outcome of what the magazine breathlessly describes as an eight-month probe by "a team of Ramparts editors, aided by researchers and trained investigators," who "traveled to Dallas a dozen times and interviewed nearly 100 people throughout the country knowledgeable about the assassination." Oddly enough, a majority of the people most closely involved in the incidents reported in the Ramparts article never heard of the magazine or its "team." Thus it is not so odd that the Ramparts-Jones non-history is riddled with factual errors and perverse conclusions. Items: > Earlene Roberts, 60, the fuzzy-minded housekeeper who ran the Dallas rooming house where Lee Harvey Oswald lived—and proved a helpful witness before the Warren Commission—died last January. Ramparts says that she had been subjected to "intensive police harassment," adds with sinister implication of foul play that "no autopsy was performed." In fact, Mrs. Roberts had severe heart disease, throat ulcers and cataracts. The cause of death, "acute myocardial infarction," was determined after an autopsy by a doctor at Parkland Hospital. > William Whaley, 51, the cab driver who picked up Oswald after he fled the book depository building, was killed in a head-on car crash in December 1965. Ramparts views his death with suspicion because Whaley had never had an accident before and was the first Dallas cab driver to die on duty since 1937. In fact, Whaley was killed because an 83-year-old man (who also died) was driving north in a southbound lane. > Eddy Benavides, 29, identified as the look-alike brother of Domingo Benavides, a witness in Oswald's slaying of Patrolman J. D. Tippit, was shot to death in a Dallas tavern in February 1965. Ramparts reports that Dallas police classed it as death by "pistol shot, wrote up a cursory report and marked the case 'unsolved.' " The magazine also suggests that "Domingo was the intended victim." In fact, there is a full police report on the shooting (it was a shotgun, not a pistol). Moreover, one Radford Lee Hill, 41, confessed that he killed Eddy and served 20 months in prison for manslaughter. > On the Sunday night that Jack Ruby shot Oswald, six men met in Ruby's apartment. Editor Jones reported that three of the men at that "significant meeting" have "died strangely." With typical hint-and-run reporting, he wrote that Dallas Times-Herald Reporter Jim Koethe was later "killed by a karate chop" in his apartment, that Long Beach (Calif.) Independent Reporter Bill Hunter was shot to death in a California police station., and that Dallas Attorney Tom Howard died of a heart attack after which "no autopsy was performed." All three are indeed dead, but it takes a powerful imagination to detect any connection. Reporter Koethe was a beer-drinking bully who liked to hang out with thugs; he had been strangled, not "karate chopped," and police suggested that homosexuality may have been a motive. Hunter was shot accidentally by an exhibitionistic detective he had known closely for years while the cop was clowning foolishly with a revolver in the station pressroom. As for Tom Howard, according to others who were there, he was not even at Ruby's apartment that night. > Hearst Gossip Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen died in her Manhattan house in November 1965. Because she was the only journalist ever allowed a private interview with Jack Ruby after his arrest, Penn Jones naturally decided that hers could be added to "that list of strange deaths." Even Ramparts editors could not swallow that one, conceded that "no serious person really believes" Kilgallen's death—from alcohol and barbiturates—was part of the plot. Nor, for that matter, can a serious person really believe that the rest of the Ramparts-Jones saga is anything but a macabre and mischievous exercise in mythmaking. I was never impressed with Jones' theory of mysterious deaths. In the 1970s, I bought just about every assassination book I could find -- except for Jones' books. I was dumbfounded to find that Sylvia Meagher included a section on mysterious deaths in her book, Accessories After the Fact. And conspiracy theorists still mention the topic from time to time. Previous Relevant Blog Posts on Penn Jones Penn Jones' Phone Call with Sylvia Meagher Meagher argues with Jones about Jim Garrison. Mary Ferrell and Sylvia Meagher on Roger Craig Meagher also comments on Penn Jones. Was Rose Cherami Murdered? No, she wasn't. Jim Garrison Names the Grassy Knoll Gunman! In 1972, Penn Jones said that Larry Crafard killed J.D. Tippit.

Here is an article that appeared across the United States when Robert Groden started showing the Zapruder film in February, 1975: The Atlanta Journal, February 5, 1975 Note the quote above from Marina's husband, Kenneth Porter: Porter said Monday his wife is interested in any development that would absolve her former husband of Kennedy's murder "for the sake of the kids." But concerning Groden's claims, Porter said his wife "has no positive feelings either way to the best of my understanding." Previous Relevant Blog Posts Morley's Interview of Marina Oswald Porter Fizzles! Morley forgets to ask Marina the important questions. Was Marina Oswald Involved in the JFK Assassination? Fletcher Prouty writes that Marina Oswald might have been involved. Jim Garrison Claims Lee Harvey Oswald was a Victim Garrison writes to Marina Oswald. Marina Oswald's Doctor was a Homosexual! Here is a memo written to Jim Garrison by Roger Craig. Jim Garrison's Grand Juries... Marina Oswald was fearful of Garrison's subpoena.

I finally got around to listening to the entire Rob Reiner podcast series on the JFK assassination. I had previously listened to the last episode to hear his conclusions. It took a while because of the large number of notes I had to take - over 15 pages worth. Conspiracy theorist Dick Russell provided much of the research for the series and a lot of material has been taken from his two books, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and On the Trail of the JFK Assassins. Unfortunately, there are no research notes associated with the podcast, so one has to search Russell's two books and the web to find the source material for a variety of its allegations. Rob Reiner's narrative has a very flimsy foundation. Here is one example that gives you a very good idea of how he examines evidence. Here is a short excerpt from a transcript of Episode 4, The Patsy: (14:40) Dick Russell: He [Oswald] goes home, shortly before Christmas, around 1958 and he spends a month leave with his mother. And then he reports to Marine Air Control squadron number nine in Santa Ana, California. The Marines who served with him there said that they often called him Comrade Oswaldkovitch because, he would. you know, start talking about the wonders of Karl Marx. Another Marine who was stationed with him, a guy named David Bucknell, said that Oswald told him he was going to be discharged. And he's going to Russia to go to work on an assignment for American intelligence. I had never heard this allegation before. I looked up David Bucknell on the Mary Ferrell Foundation website and found that this name does not appear in any documents. However, Bucknell is mentioned in a October 1978 article by Mark Lane in Hustler magazine. Bucknell tells two stories about Oswald, with the first about his service at Atsugi: Did Bucknell actually serve with Oswald? He's not listed in any FBI or Warren Commission documents. Edward Jay Epstein didn't list him in his book, Legend. The Lane article claims that James Botelho confirmed that "they had been there together with Oswald." Perhaps he was. But does the story sound reasonable? There is no documentation to support it. And would Oswald tell Bucknell but no one else? The next story is even more remarkable: Was this before or after Oswald was recruited to feed false information in the bar? This story is even more ridiculous. So, in Japan they were recruiting young Marines for an intelligence operation against Cuba? No one else who served with Oswald said anything about such a program. And Oswald supposedly told Bucknell he was going to "surface" in the Soviet Union, and return in 1961? We're supposed to believe this. Despite the lack of any documentation, Jefferson Morley believes Mark Lane: After Oswald joined the Marines in 1956, one of his first assignments was at Marine Air Corps Squadron 9 at El Toro base in Santa Ana, California. One of his bunk mates, David Bucknell, told author Mark Lane that he and Oswald and others were ordered to report to the counterintelligence division, where a civilian was recruiting those present for an operation in Cuba. According to Bucknell, Oswald later told him that his civilian contact during his assignment at the Atsugi airbase in Japan had taken over a similar role in Santa Ana. Still later Oswald told Bucknell he was being discharged very soon and would resurface in the USSR — that he was being sent by American intelligence and would return as a hero. Morley's source is Lane's article in Hustler magazine. As for Bucknell and Botelho, here is an excerpt from Adam Gorightly's book, The Prankster & the Conspiracy: The story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald: Here we have Bucknell "refreshing" Thornley's memory about the supposed intelligence recruitment. Perhaps Bucknell also refreshed Botelho's memory. This is an example of the standard of proof Rob Reiner has used in these podcasts. Why would anybody find it convincing? Previous Relevant Blog Posts on Rob Reiner Rob Reiner on the Two Oswalds Yes, Reiner believes in John Armstrong's theory of two Oswalds. Jefferson Morley: Able to Leap Intellectual Chasms in a Single Bound This post on Jefferson Morley also goes over the conclusions of Rob Reiner's podcast series. Previous Relevant Blog Posts on Jefferson Morley Jefferson Morley's Podcast on New Orleans Lays an Egg Morley's podcast on New Orleans relies heavily on Michael Kurtz. Chad Nagle and Dan Storper Lay an Egg Believing Michael Kurtz is problematic. Jefferson Morley is Wrong on William Harvey, Again! Only one word is redacted in Harvey's deposition. Jefferson Morley is Wrong about Operation Northwoods, Again! There are no redactions in the Operation Northwoods document. Did Dorothy Kilgallen Have any Special Knowledge about the JFK Assassination? Kilgallen had nothing to tell. Morley's Interview of Marina Oswald Porter Fizzles! An underwhelming interview of Marina Oswald. Jefferson Morley: Able to Leap Intellectual Chasms in a Single Bound Morley often repeats stories and changes their meanings. There was NO Assassination Plot in Chicago Chad Nagle claims there was an assassination plot against JFK in Chicago in November 1963. One problem: There is no evidence of such a plot. Fred Litwin, CIA Apologist? A response to Morley's Substack post alleging that I am a CIA apologist. Is Jefferson Morley Seeing Double? Morley thinks there are two redacted memos on CIA reorganization, but there is only one. A Reply to Jefferson Morley on Bill Harvey A rebuttal to Morley's response to my post Was Bill Harvey in Dallas in November of 1963? Was Bill Harvey in Dallas in November of 1963? There is no credible evidence Harvey was in Dallas in November of 1963. Does it Matter Where Allen Dulles was on November 22, 1963? Morley repeats the claim that Dulles was at a CIA training center during the weekend of the JFK assassination. He wasn't. Jefferson Morley's Claims about Reuben Efron Morley's claims about Efron are all wrong. A Reply to Jefferson Morley regarding Operation Northwoods Morley responded to my article "The Truth about Operation Northwoods." Here is my reply. W. Tracy Parnell on Jefferson Morley W. Tracy Parnell is one of the best JFK assassination researchers out there. Here is his look at Jefferson Morley with several important articles. The Truth about Operation Northwoods Operation Northwoods can only understood as being part of the Kennedys' war against Cuba and Operation Mongoose. Jefferson Morley Responds to my Post on MK-Ultra and Jack Ruby And a response from me. Did Dr. Louis Jolyon West Ask to Examine Jack Ruby in November 1963? There is no evidence that Dr. West petitioned the court to examine Jack Ruby before his trial. Did the CIA use a MK-Ultra Psychiatrist to Interfere with Jack Ruby's Case? There is absolutely no evidence that Dr. Louis Jolyon West interfered with Jack Ruby's case. Jefferson Morley is wrong about "Who Shot John?" The phrase 'who shot John' does not refer to the JFK assassination. "JFK: Destiny Betrayed" Misleads Viewers on Oswald's "Hands Off Cuba!" Handbills, Part Four Jefferson Morley used a fake Oswald handbill in his press conference for the Mary Ferrell Foundation. Redactions, Redactions, Redactions... An examination of redactions in the JFK collection of documents.

Hugh McDonald's book. I read this book when it first came out and thought it was ridiculous. McDonald claimed that the Mexico City mystery man was Saul, the ultimate assassin of JFK. Saul was firing from the County Records Building while Oswald was firing from the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald's shots missed and Saul's shots hit. It's hard to believe they reissued his book for the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. The HSCA actually talked to Hugh McDonald: McDonald was the only person to ever find Saul. Previous Relevant Blog Posts on Conspiracy Theory Mordecai Richler on Conspiracy Theorists... The famed Canadian novelist wrote a good article for Playboy Magazine on conspiracy theorists. Hollywood must bear some blame for the rise of QAnon And specifically Oliver Stone.

It was an incredible pleasure to interview Dr, Martin J. Kelly, Jr., a man of enormous intellect and humor. You can read two of Professor Kelly's excellent book reviews here: A review of Michel Gagné's book: Thinking Critically about the Kennedy Assassination: Debunking the Myths and Conspiracy Theories. A review of Alecia Long's book: Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime. Previous Episodes of On the Trail of Delusion: Episode 1 My first guest was Robert Reynolds who is an expert on the JFK assassination files. Episode 2 Robert A. Wagner discusses his new book, JFK Assassinated. Episode 3 Gerald Posner discusses the JFK assassination and conspiracy theories.

I bought this book when it came out in 1976. When I went to MBA school in 1978, I gave away all of my JFK assassination books except for two: this book and Sylvia Meagher's Accessories After the Fact. Here is a link to Wecht's statement: Wecht writes: " ... I must emphasize that I have never myself advocated that President Kennedy was shot from the Grassy Knoll or similar forward locations, so that this statement in no way represents a change from my previous views." We all know that Cyril Wecht eventually changed his views on the fatal head shot. But, he never explained why he changed his mind. As I have shown in previous blog posts, Wecht freely talks about his 1972 examination of the autopsy materials, but leaves out the above conclusion. Previous Relevant Blog Posts on Dr. Cyril Wecht Dr. Cyril Wecht Complains Wecht complains about the HSCA's forensic pathology panel. Dr. Cyril Wecht writes to Dr. Michael Baden Wecht has a suggestion for Dr. Baden. The Wecht Conclusion that Dare Not Speak Its Name, Part Two Wecht's memoir mentions his examination of the autopsy materials in 1972 but neglects to talk about his conclusion that the fatal head shot came from behind. The Wecht Conclusion that Dare Not Speak its Name James DiEugenio's obituary of Dr. Wecht leaves out his conclusion that the fatal head shot came from behind. Dr. Cyril Wecht (1931 - 2024) זיכרונו לברכה My obituary for Dr. Cyril Wecht. Dr. Cyril Wecht and Governor Connally's Coat Bulge Wecht fights with Posner over Connally's coat bulge. Dr. Cyril Wecht Rules Out a Head Shot From the Front A letter from Dr. Wecht to Thomas Stamm on the head shot. Sylvia Meagher and Dr. Cyril Wecht Discuss the Head Shot A letter from Dr. Wecht to Sylvia Meagher on the head shot. Sylvia Meagher and Dr. Cyril Wecht Discuss Jim Garrison Dr. Wecht exchanges letters with Sylvia Meagher. Dr. Cyril Wecht on Jim Garrison Wecht writes Harold Weisberg about Garrison. Dr. Cyril Wecht: Was Gerry Patrick Hemming Oswald's Handler? A ridiculous claim from Wecht's book. Dr. Cyril Wecht on Lovelady Wecht revisits an old controversy. "JFK Revisited" Misleads on JFK's Throat Wound Dr. Wecht believes that JFK's throat wound was one of exit. Dr. Cyril Wecht Gets One Right Wecht believes that David Ferrie died of natural causes. Dr. Cyril Wecht's Error on Jack Ruby Wecht makes an error on Ruby's nightclubs. Dr. Cyril Wecht is Proud to be a Conspiracy Theorist He wears it like a badge of honor. Was Rose Cherami Murdered? Dr. Wecht writes that Cherami was not killed by a gunshot.

Here is episode 3 of On the Trail of Delusion. It was a delight talking with Gerald Posner. You can buy a copy of Gerald's excellent book, Cased Closed, here. Previous Episodes of On the Trail of Delusion: Episode 1 My first guest was Robert Reynolds who is an expert on the JFK assassination files. Episode 2 Robert A. Wagner discusses his new book, JFK Assassinated.

Headline of Peter Voskamp's article on Morley's Substack. When Jefferson Morley published Chad Nagle and Dan Storper's article on New Orleans, I wrote this rebuttal. This week, Morley published an article by Peter Voskamp which repeats the same nonsense. Indeed, in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s murder, the CIA destroyed any and all records of its New Orleans office and assets’ interactions with the man charged with the assassination. Hunter Leake, deputy chief of the agency’s New Orleans office in 1963, told historian Michael Kurtz in the 1980s “in a quite definitive manner, that Oswald indeed performed chores for the CIA during his five months in New Orleans” in 1963. Leake was ordered by Langley to destroy the New Orleans records. (JFK Facts recently produced a podcast discussing these events.) Michael Kurtz's claims must be taken with a grain of salt. In this case, all of the material in the podcast comes from a Dan Storper interview with Kurtz. There is no documentary evidence to back up any of the allegations. Most responsible conspiracy theorists believe that Kurtz has not provided the evidence for many of his claims. Their podcast is also pretty ridiculous. Here are some of the sillier statements: Michael Kurtz and Guy Banister The podcast includes the story that Kurtz ran into Banister at Louisiana State University in New Orleans. (2:25). Pat Speer debunked this allegation on his website: Kurtz re-appeared in 1980 with an article entitled Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans: a Reappraisal. It was published in Louisiana History, The Journal of the Louisiana History Association. It detailed Oswald's known activities in New Orleans...but with several new additions. On page 14 it related that "Two people remember Oswald as one of the participants in a discussion of the racial issue. The discussion, which took place on the campus of Louisiana State University in New Orleans, involved Oswald and (Guy) Banister debating federal immigration policies with a number of students." Banister, we should recall, was one of New Orleans DA Jim Garrison's top suspects in the assassination of President Kennedy. Kurtz cited "Confidential Interviews" as his source for this statement. And this wasn't the only revelation. On page 16 Kurtz presented new claims of Oswald being seen in the company of David Ferrie, another one of Garrison's prime suspects. He offered "Twice they were seen conversing in Mancuso's restaurant. They were seen at a segregationist meeting in the late Spring of that year." His source for these bombshells was, once again, "Confidential Interviews." And the pattern continued: on page 17, Kurtz related that "According to witnesses, Oswald accompanied a prominent leader of the White Citizens' Council and of other segregationist organizations to Baton Rouge six or eight times in July and August. These witnesses met Oswald, who was introduced to them as "Leon" Oswald. Oswald's companion, who was a personal friend of two of these witnesses, stated that he was employing "Leon" to do construction work for him. Oswald, however, was not dressed in work clothes; he was wearing what appeared to be "dressy clothes." Furthermore, Oswald and his companion engaged in discussions which included criticisms of American foreign policy as being "soft on Communism" and of United States civil-rights programs. On their last visit to Baton Rouge, the two men were accompanied by two "Latins,"neither of whom said anything to them." His source for this was, you guessed it, "Confidential Interviews." So here, Kurtz has dropped some bombshells. He's claimed that the supposedly leftist Oswald was seen in the company of segregationists and racists numerous times in his brief stay in Louisiana, and that his sources for this are all "confidential." So how did Kurtz deal with this in his subsequent writings? Well, to start off, Kurtz's 1982 manifesto Crime of the Century: The Kennedy Assassination From a Historian's Perspective, repeated his claims about Banister. On page 203 of the 1993 edition of the book, Kurtz once again claimed Oswald accompanied Banister to Louisiana State University in New Orleans. He stressed, moreover, that "During these discussions, Oswald vehemently attacked the civil rights policies of the Kennedy administration." For this, Kurtz cited his previous article Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans. And what about Ferrie? While there are a few additional sightings of Oswald in the company of Ferrie mentioned in Crime of the Century, including one by a witness named George Wilcox, the sighting of the two at Mancuso's, so prominently featured in Kurtz's 1980 article, is never mentioned. Well, then, what about Oswald in Baton Rouge? Strangely, in Crime of the Century, there is no mention of Oswald visiting Baton Rouge in the company of a prominent leader of the White Citizens' Council. There is this, however. On page 203 of the 1993 edition, Kurtz reported: "Accompanied by two 'Latins,' Ferrie and Oswald were observed in Baton Rouge, where they openly denounced Kennedy's foreign and domestic policies." Kurtz's source? His 1980 article, Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans, which said nothing about Oswald and Ferrie being spotted in Baton Rouge. So, yikes, it looks like Kurtz somehow switched Ferrie into the role formerly played by the prominent leader of the White Citizens' Council. But wait, it gets worse. On page xxxiv of the introduction to the 1993 edition of Crime of the Century, Kurtz offered "I saw Oswald and Bannister together twice. The first time, in May 1963, Bannister and Oswald arrived on the campus of Louisiana State University in New Orleans and entered a classroom. A fellow student of mine, George Higginbotham, introduced Bannister, who, in turn, introduced Oswald to the small group of students in the room. Bannister debated students about the racial policies of the Kennedy administration and about Kennedy's Cuban policies. In both instances, Bannister took what could only be called an extremist right-wing position, vehemently advocating a return to racial segregation, criticizing the students for attending an integrated university, and insisting that the United States launch a full-scale military invasion of Cuba. As far as I can recall, Oswald said nothing throughout the forty-five minute discussion. On the second occasion, sometime during July or August of 1963, I took a coffee break from my summer job at the office of the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper, the side of which was located directly across Camp Street from the 544 Camp Street building. I walked into Mancuso's, a small coffee shop on the first floor and drank a cup of coffee. Sitting together at a table some twenty feet away were Guy Bannister and Lee Harvey Oswald. Bannister waved to me, and I waved back." Well, I'll be! Apparently, the "confidential interview" Kurtz had previously cited as his source for his claims about Oswald and Banister...had been with himself! And that's not the only change in Kurtz's story between 1980 and 1993. While Oswald had previously been an active participant in Banister's debate with the students, he was now a quiet observer. And there's more. Kurtz had previously claimed that Oswald had been observed with Ferrie on two occasions at Mancuso's. He now claimed he'd personally observed Oswald with Banister on one occasion at Mancuso's. Well, what about Ferrie, then? Is he mentioned in the 1993 Introduction? Yes. On page xxxix, Kurtz claimed a colleague of his named Van Burns had been introduced to Oswald and Ferrie at Pontchartrain Beach in New Orleans. He then offered: "At the time these incidents occurred, the late spring and summer of 1963, neither Burns nor I thought anything about them, but the evening of the Kennedy assassination, both of us recognized the president's accused assassin as the same man we had observed in New Orleans. Assured by the press and news media and by government officials that a thorough investigation 'leaving no stone unturned' would be conducted, we waited for official investigators to contact us. We're still waiting." Now this is interesting. Oswald in New Orleans, an online article by researcher Dave Reitzes, described a 10-5-98 interview with Kurtz, in which Kurtz repeated his 1993 claim Oswald said nothing during Banister's debate with the students. More telling, perhaps, is this. Kurtz purportedly told Reitzes that, subsequent to Kennedy's assassination, and Oswald's arrest, he'd "contacted the FBI" to tell them of Oswald's relationship with Banister, but "was brushed off." So, which is it? Did Kurtz wait to be contacted about Oswald and Banister, as claimed in the 1993 introduction to Crime of the Century? Or did he reach out to the FBI, only to be brushed off, as claimed in his 1998 interview with Dave Reitzes? Now let's jump ahead to 2006, and see how Kurtz handles Banister, Ferrie and Baton Rouge in The JFK Assassination Debates, apparently his last word on the subject. Well, on page 159 he stuck to his most recent story, and claimed he'd observed Banister and Oswald together both at LSU in New Orleans, and Mancuso's. Then what about Ferrie? While Kurtz mentions a number of ties between Oswald and Ferrie, including a new witness to their being together named Santos Miguel Gonzalez, his 1980 story of their being seen at Mancuso's, and his 1982 story of their being seen together in Baton Rouge, are both no-shows in The JFK Assassination Debates. And forget about George Wilcox's and Van Burns' purported sightings of Oswald with Ferrie. George Wilcox and Van Burns are never even mentioned in The JFK Assassination Debates. This is truly disturbing. A disciplined writer of history--an historian--should be forever building on the established facts, not presenting one set of facts in one book, and another set in his next book. The changing of all these stories--significantly, the stories in which Kurtz has inserted himself as either a witness or protector of a confidential source-- suggests that Kurtz is unreliable at best. But that doesn't mean he lied. Perhaps he's merely lazy--in that he rarely double-checks his current impressions of an incident against what he'd previously written on the incident...and has a terrible memory... If only it were as simple as that... 2. Helms and Leake incinerate CIA files from New Orleans The podcast claims that Hunter Leake got a phone call from Richard Helms (5:41) with instructions to find all the New Orleans CIA files on the assassination and pack them up and take them to Langley. Leake then rented a U-Haul and met Helms at CIA headquarters and the two of them incinerated the documents. Does anybody really believe this Michael Kurtz story? Interestingly, Nagle and Storper admit in the podcast that they did not check Michael Kurtz's voluntary testimony before the ARRB in 1995. You can read it here. He didn't say one word about Hunter Leake or the supposed destruction of the New Orleans files. Kurtz suggest to the ARRB certain questions they should ask of Richard Helms - all about a supposed 1964 investigation into the assassination -- but not about the claim that he incinerated any New Orleans files. The podcast also makes the claim that Lee Harvey Oswald was doing some work for Hunter Leake. (11:24) Here is what Speer wrote about Hunter Leake and Michael Kurtz: Leake was purportedly interviewed over the telephone on 3-15-81. No other interview is listed. And yet, on page 158 of the JFK Assassination Debates Kurtz relates that "In several interviews...Leake stated that Oswald came to New Orleans in April 1963 because the CIA office there intended to use him for certain operations. His job at the Reilly Coffee Company merely served as a front for his actual role." And that is just the beginning. On page 162, Kurtz relates that "Leake stated that on the day of the assassination, he was ordered to collect all of the CIA's files on Oswald from the New Orleans office and transport them to the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia...They proved so voluminous that Leake had to rent a trailer to transport them to Langley...Leake later learned that many of these files were, in the term made infamous by John Ehrlichman during the Watergate crisis, 'deep-sixed.'" And that's not all. On page 178, Kurtz further reveals that "Leake told me that on one of his several visits to that city (New Orleans), Robert Kennedy ordered them (the CIA) to focus on 'getting rid of Castro' and specifically declared that he did not care how that objective was accomplished." It goes on. On pages 184-185, Kurtz reveals that Hunter Leake told him that Guy Banister worked for the CIA, and that he sometimes reported to...Hunter Leake. And that is just a sample of the things Leake purportedly told Kurtz, but no one else. On page 189, to continue, Kurtz claims "In reality, Lee Oswald had made several trips to Mexico City in 1963 to carry out missions for Guy Banister and Hunter Leake." His source? Hunter Leake, of course. But wait, there's more. On page 213, Kurtz puts the usual suspects in Kennedy's killing in the same room...in New Orleans, naturally. He relates that "Hunter Leake recalled (mafia-fixer-heavily-involved-in-the-CIA's-assassination-plots-on-Castro Johnny) Roselli meeting with Guy Banister and David Ferrie in Banister's office on Camp Street." It's perfect. A little too perfect. From what can be gathered, Hunter Leake was unknown to JFK assassination researchers until the late 1990's, when documents and testimony from the 1960's and 1970's were released that indicated he'd been a member of the CIA's Domestic Contact Service in New Orleans, and had frequent contacts with the man Jim Garrison ultimately brought charges against, Clay Shaw. With the release of The JFK Assassination Debates in 2006, Kurtz stepped up and said he'd interviewed Leake in 1981, and that Leake had told him just about everything. Wherever there is confusion in the record--Did Oswald work for the CIA? Did Robert Kennedy order Castro's assassination? Was there any connection between the CIA's assassination attempts on Castro and the activities of Banister and Ferrie in New Orleans?--Leake pops up in Kurtz's book to show us the way. It's incredible. Nearly as incredible as Kurtz's supposedly sitting on this stuff for 25 years. 3. David Ferrie Comes into Money The podcast notes that Michael Kurtz's brother was a bank teller at David Ferrie's bank. After the assassination, Ferrie deposits five to seven thousand dollars (10:03) Is this nefarious? Well, no. Ferrie had finished working for G. Wray Gill in helping him with the trial of Carlos Marcello. Ferrie got paid. The podcast makes it sound like the payment was associated with the assassination. 4. Hunter Leake was the Liaison for the CIA with Guy Banister. The podcast makes the claim what Leake was the CIA's liaison with Guy Banister (13:19). But this claim comes from Dale Oriol who gave the information to Kurtz: This allegation is third hand and there is no corroboration for this anywhere. There is no evidence that Guy Banister worked for the CIA. 5. Oswald was getting paid $200/month from the FBI This is a very old allegation which has been repeatedly debunked. It all stemmed from a made-up story by Lonnie Hudkins. 6. Richard Helms Called Michael Kurtz Dan Storper said in the podcast that Kurtz told him that Richard Helms called him on the phone to tell him that he appreciated that Kurtz's book took a neutral position on whether there was a conspiracy. Kurtz asked him about Leake driving the files to Langley and the two of them destroying them, and Helms told Kurtz, "It's kind of a natural thing to do." (23:58) I don't believe this story for a minute. On the podcast, they say that it's hard to imagine Leake making things up like that (24:55). But what about Kurtz making it up? 7. Dean Andrews Put Clay Bertrand and Clay Shaw Together. At 35:49, the podcast claims that Dean Andrews was the person who put Clay Bertrand and Clay Shaw together. This is just not true. At no point did Dean Andrews ever intimate or say that Clay Shaw was Clay Bertrand. In fact, Andrews testified at Clay Shaw's trial in his defense. Kurtz told Dan Storper many stories, and it appears that he believes all of them. In the next edition of Webster's dictionary, you'll find his name under the word, gullible. Previous Relevant Blog Posts on Jefferson Morley Chad Nagle and Dan Storper Lay an Egg Believing Michael Kurtz is problematic. Jefferson Morley is Wrong on William Harvey, Again! Only one word is redacted in Harvey's deposition. Jefferson Morley is Wrong about Operation Northwoods, Again! There are no redactions in the Operation Northwoods document. Did Dorothy Kilgallen Have any Special Knowledge about the JFK Assassination? Kilgallen had nothing to tell. Morley's Interview of Marina Oswald Porter Fizzles! An underwhelming interview of Marina Oswald. Jefferson Morley: Able to Leap Intellectual Chasms in a Single Bound Morley often repeats stories and changes their meanings. There was NO Assassination Plot in Chicago Chad Nagle claims there was an assassination plot against JFK in Chicago in November 1963. One problem: There is no evidence of such a plot. Fred Litwin, CIA Apologist? A response to Morley's Substack post alleging that I am a CIA apologist. Is Jefferson Morley Seeing Double? Morley thinks there are two redacted memos on CIA reorganization, but there is only one. A Reply to Jefferson Morley on Bill Harvey A rebuttal to Morley's response to my post Was Bill Harvey in Dallas in November of 1963? Was Bill Harvey in Dallas in November of 1963? There is no credible evidence Harvey was in Dallas in November of 1963. Does it Matter Where Allen Dulles was on November 22, 1963? Morley repeats the claim that Dulles was at a CIA training center during the weekend of the JFK assassination. He wasn't. Jefferson Morley's Claims about Reuben Efron Morley's claims about Efron are all wrong. A Reply to Jefferson Morley regarding Operation Northwoods Morley responded to my article "The Truth about Operation Northwoods." Here is my reply. W. Tracy Parnell on Jefferson Morley W. Tracy Parnell is one of the best JFK assassination researchers out there. Here is his look at Jefferson Morley with several important articles. The Truth about Operation Northwoods Operation Northwoods can only understood as being part of the Kennedys' war against Cuba and Operation Mongoose. Jefferson Morley Responds to my Post on MK-Ultra and Jack Ruby And a response from me. Did Dr. Louis Jolyon West Ask to Examine Jack Ruby in November 1963? There is no evidence that Dr. West petitioned the court to examine Jack Ruby before his trial. Did the CIA use a MK-Ultra Psychiatrist to Interfere with Jack Ruby's Case? There is absolutely no evidence that Dr. Louis Jolyon West interfered with Jack Ruby's case. Jefferson Morley is wrong about "Who Shot John?" The phrase 'who shot John' does not refer to the JFK assassination. "JFK: Destiny Betrayed" Misleads Viewers on Oswald's "Hands Off Cuba!" Handbills, Part Four Jefferson Morley used a fake Oswald handbill in his press conference for the Mary Ferrell Foundation. Redactions, Redactions, Redactions... An examination of redactions in the JFK collection of documents.

Countering the Conspiracists Responses to Jacob Cohen's “Will We Never Be Free of the Kennedy Assassination?” by Our Readers To the Editor: Like Jacob Cohen, I have been teaching about the JFK assassination—at Boston University, New England College, and the College of Central Florida—for almost 30 years. Unlike Mr. Cohen, I have reached other conclusions after a lifetime of study, although we have some points of commonality. His December piece [“Will We Never Be Free of the Kennedy Assassination?”] on the crime of the 20th century is, alas, just not good history. First, he admits that the Warren Commission was deeply flawed. That is a very good place to begin. But then Mr. Cohen sets up a straw man in Jerome Corsi’s Who Really Killed Kennedy? Of the thousands of assassination books, why pick the one that sets up the wackiest theories? Why not set the compass to a more realistic balance in the direction of some of the best books and lay out the pros and cons of both sides of the assassination argument? Mr. Cohen could have balanced his piece by arguing Vincent Bugliosi’s long but well-written case against a conspiracy in Reclaiming History, or Gerald Posner’s easy-to-read Case Closed. On the other side, there is David Lifton’s The Best Evidence for a well-reasoned scientific argument, or Gaeton Fonzi’s The Last Investigation, which chronicles Fonzi’s work as an investigator on the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which came down on the side of conspiracy. There is also a recent book, Brothers in Arms, by Gus Russo and Stephen Molton, that makes a pretty convincing case that Oswald had been recruited by Castro intelligence operatives in Mexico City. Instead, Mr. Cohen chooses to roam far afield historically with the most outlandish theories possible and then he throws other monkey wrenches into the assassination stew by comparing the JFK case with other high-profile assassinations and conspiracy theories, and even the ever-boring Obama birthers, the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, and the Vince Foster murder theorists. True, in just six pages nobody is going to get to the bottom of the JFK murder. But there are just too many events surrounding the assassination that are unexplained and where the Warren Commission did not or could not go: the many eyewitnesses who claimed shots and saw smoke from “the Grassy Knoll,” the murders of Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana, the unexplained curious public statements of Jack Ruby, the documented claims of involvement by Carlos Marcello, Oswald’s time in Mexico City, to name a few. Mr. Cohen and I agree: Lee Harvey Oswald was obviously involved; he killed Officer Tippett and was, most probably, the JFK shooter (or one of them). But as Mr. Cohen would have to admit, if it was a conspiracy—well, the very nature of conspiracy is secrecy. So, there are the wackos like Mark Lane whose recent book on the CIA’s complicity offers up little documentation and makes no sense whatsoever, or the important work of Edward Jay Epstein who should not be overlooked. Maybe, just maybe, the conspiracy worked. Or, as Rutgers Professor William L. O’Neill has written: “Like UFO’s, it seemed the assassination of John F. Kennedy would always puzzle us.” Martin S. Goldman Summerfield, Florida To the Editor: Jacob Cohen missed numerous facts in his critique of Dr. Jerome Corsi’s book Who Really Killed Kennedy? Among them: 1. Oswald’s job at the depository: His job application and the school district’s follow-up documents have not been produced. The application would have work history, references, and other qualifications. Who at the book depository actually hired him, and when? 2. On November 22 there were contract workers on the sixth floor repairing various things such as flooring and air-conditioning, whose work order has not yet been produced. What was the name of the contractor and names of the workmen? Where were they all around 12:30? 3. Was any gunshot residue found on Oswald? Were any such tests performed? 4. The bullet that killed JFK had to come from the front in order to blow his brains out onto the limo trunk. It could not have come from behind. The entrance wound was on the front. 5. Bystander Tague, who was standing on the median near the underpass, was hit in the cheek by a bullet. Where did that bullet come from? In must have come from behind JFK. 6. Gunsmoke was reported by numerous bystanders and riders in parade limos. Where did it come from? Was it the Secret Service agent in the car behind JFK who stood up and took a couple shots with his automatic rifle? 7. Where did the bullet come from that went through the JFK limo’s windshield? It must have come from the front. 8. Two independent witnesses saw Oswald in the second-floor lunchroom getting Coke at the time of the shooting. So who was up on the sixth floor? 9. The bullet entry wounds on JFK have a different diameter than those that were from the sixth-floor shell casings. Where else could these bullets come from other than the sixth floor? 10. In order to enlist participation from the CIA, Secret Service, FBI, Dallas police, etc., the driving force must have had enormous financial resources to give orders to them all. The only ones of this magnitude were the worldwide drug cartels. Let’s hope further production of evidence and documents will come forth to detail just how big the conspiracy against JFK and America was. Carl Olson Woodland Hills, California Jacob Cohen writes: I appreciate the responses to my reflections on the perpetual storm of inquiry around the Kennedy assassination. Martin S. Goldman ignores the occasion for my article and badly misstates one of its principle conclusions. The occasion was the 50th anniversary of the assassination and the lamentable legacy of that event as evidenced by the avalanche of new books that appeared late in the year, last year, almost all of them rehashing or gussying up the many outlandish conspiracy theories that have been posited over the last half century. I chose to concentrate on Dr. Jerome Corsi’s new book because it, uniquely, ardently commends nearly all of those theories, even when they contradict each other, and uses their flawed postmodern approach. I also wrote about the 50-year legacy of the Warren Commission, which is routinely savaged in these works. Amazingly, Mr. Goldman claims that I “admit that the Warren Commission was deeply flawed.” On the contrary, I said that no report could have silenced this hallucinatory tsunami, and that after a half century of further research and counter claims, the commission’s account of the actual killing seems to be correct in every important essential. Ignore all the crazies, Mr. Goldman says. They are easy targets and should not be linked to the responsible scholars and writers, presumably like himself and others he names, who do solid work, carefully pointing to evidentiary anomalies so disturbing, so urgent, that they force us to keep open the possibility of wider conspiracies. So what anomalies does he have for us and what proper attention is due the writers he recommends? Well, he says, what about the “many eyewitnesses who…saw smoke just above ‘the Grassy Knoll’”? Does that not suggest that there may have been shots from there and therefore more than one gunman? He’s right, several people reported a considerable amount of smoke, wafting above the knoll, and precisely where conspiracists place a would-be assassin. What might have caused so much smoke? Not modern weapons clearly, which exude a tiny puff, if any at all. A better explanation may be the burning hot steampipes, just atop the knoll, exactly where they need to be. On April 1, 1964, testifying to the Warren Commission, Seymour Weitzman, deputy constable of Dallas County, spoke of hearing the first shot and running immediately to a spot very near the reported smoke. “I scaled the wall, and apparently, my hands grabbed steam pipes. I burned them.” I am tempted to coin a new phrase: With so much smoke, there cannot have been (gun) fire. But the whole question about smoke is academic. For many very powerful reasons it is clear there was no shot from the knoll; all that smoke is a false flag. I have developed this point at great length in previous articles in Commentary (see “Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy,” from June 1992). To offer one detail, I wonder what answer Mr. Goldman gives himself when he ponders how it could be that Abraham Zapruder, he of the Zapruder film, and Marilyn Sitzman, his secretary, standing atop a pedestal that enabled them to look down into the crucial area behind the fence, failed to see an assassin preparing to shoot the president during that half hour they awaited the late arrival of the president’s limousine. And did they not glance to the right and see him with his gun when a loud bang went off in their right ears? What of those other formidable conspiracists, whose work, Mr. Goldman says, I avoid, preferring to shoot at sitting ducks? He mentions David Lifton’s “well-reasoned, scientific argument.” Actually I did take Lifton on in my article without naming him, as Mr. Goldman, if he had read Lifton closely and read my article, should know. Mr. Lifton is a very nice man, but in conversations with me, he has posited that, yes, Kennedy’s body showed every evidence of shots from a single source behind the president, just as the Warren Commission concluded. What I had neglected to consider, he would say to me, was the possibility that upon arrival in Washington of the plane carrying Kennedy’s body, that body had been slyly removed, and, unnoticed, brought to a secret laboratory where it was altered. A decoy empty coffin was brought to Bethesda to disguise the operation. When the work was complete, the altered body was then smuggled into the autopsy room (again unnoticed) and the official autopsy performed. How the conspiracists could know which changes to make or how such a complex scheme could be kept secret is never explained. Is this the “well-reasoned scientific argument” that Mr. Goldman is referring to? As for Edward Jay Epstein, the best known and probably the most widely respected of the sane conspiracists, I did not, as Mr. Goldman suggests, ignore him. I mentioned, for example, the easily refuted “fake Oswald” theory he posits. There is not space here to comment on the other authors that Mr. Goldman praises, including Fonzi, who did great mischief as chief consultant to the House Assassinations Committee. But I know the work of several of these authors, and to me they too seem to be conspiracy wolves in sheepish clothing. As for Carl Olson: here are quick responses to his questions. 1. The job was as a warehouse man; I’m not sure what qualifications he seeks. Oswald got the job on October 15; the decision that brought Kennedy to Oswald at his place of work was made in early November, by one of Kennedy’s close friends. 2. The workers on the sixth floor went down to the fifth floor to eat their lunch and watch the presidential cavalcade. They can be seen in pictures, they are named in the report, and they testified. 3. Paraffin tests are often unreliable. But we know Oswald fired his pistol, he was seen doing it by several people, and we have persuasive reasons to believe he fired his rifle as well. 4. The wind was blowing so hard toward the back of the car that several Dallas police motorcyclists in their testimony later recalled its strong blast into their faces as they turned onto Elm Street. The wind may be the reason that matter was found on the back of the car. 5. Bystander Tague was not struck in his cheek by a bullet but by a sliver of cement sent flying when a missile hit the curb on which he stood. The scar in the cement showed only traces of lead, there is no copper. Oswald used copper-jacketed bullets, with a lead core. This missile probably came from a portion of the bullet that cracked apart when it struck Kennedy’s skull. It is not the much sought-after “fourth bullet.” 6. See my earlier response on gunsmoke. 7. No bullet went “through” the windshield. There was a lot of stuff flying around inside the car, which probably accounts for the damage to the glass. 8. In my view, the witnesses are in error, as eye and ear witnesses often are. Oswald was seen walking into the lunchroom a few minutes after the shots, by Roy Truly and a Dallas police officer. He had time to get down there, as Justice Warren showed by personally retracing his likely steps. 9. Is Mr. Olson referring to the measurements the autopsy doctors scribbled on their worksheets? Remember we have the bullet that actually struck Kennedy and went on to hit Governor Connally (see my article). It must have caused the holes in Kennedy. 10. I had no idea the drug cartels were so rich. Thanks for the information.

Here is Jacob Cohen's third article on the JFK assassination: DECEMBER 2013 HISTORY Will We Never Be Free of the Kennedy Assassination? Fifty years later, all the false conspiracies are converging into one. by Jacob Cohen The fall semester is almost gone, and it’s time to order books for a spring course I have offered at Brandeis University for more than 30 years: “The Idea of Conspiracy in American Culture.” I have found the perfect book, for my purposes, from the profusion of tomes on the Kennedy assassination that have appeared in this 50th-anniversary year of that mesmerizing tragedy. Some are freshly written, others are essentially rehashes of older works gussied up with unfulfilled promises of startling new revelations.1 In the course, I cover the assassination and other cases that have provoked conspiratorial theories—the Lincoln, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations; the Sacco and Vanzetti, Hiss, and Rosenberg cases; the alleged murder of Vince Foster by or for the Clintons. Usually, though not invariably, I am a skeptic in these cases, accepting the official, the governmental, view. Apart from one period in the late 70s when I briefly wavered, I have publicly defended the conclusions of the Warren Commission for nearly 50 years. I agree there was one shooter only, named Lee Harvey Oswald; no satisfactorily proven conspiracies to employ him; no massive conspiracy in operation well before the killing and long after to cover up the first conspiracies; no even more massive conspiracy to frame an innocent or merely peripheral Oswald. In brief, on the Kennedy front, I am persuaded, and I attempt to defend to my students and readers, the notion that, all in all, given what we now know, the Warren Commission got it right. But how can one defend the Warren Report and its 26 volumes of supporting evidence? Is it not clear that the commission failed utterly to anticipate, defeat, and in that way preempt and silence, the tsunami of doubt that followed, and indeed preceded, its publication in September 1964? It has been argued ever since that the commission seems to have begun with its conclusions and, undistracted by justifiable doubts, including those voiced by its own members and staff, proceeded to defend the indefensible. What’s more, the commission did this in a manner that was manifestly inept and ridiculous. If you have been following the books and articles, or have visited the myriad websites, or have considered a fraction of the millions of references to the Kennedy conspiracy that Google can provide—even if you have only seen Oliver Stone’s howler JFK2—you have probably already concluded that the claims of the Warren Commission are not just mistaken, but transparently absurd and stupid. Due to the conduct of its commission under the direction of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, the report, we are told, virtually pleads for much of the contempt it has received. No wonder 80 percent or so of the polled public have continued through all these years to voice doubts about this or that aspect of the official line. How could the commissioners, Warren and the rest, have thought that they would get away with this wicked nonsense? When I get to this point in the argument, I will offer my students a slightly different version of these assertions: Is there anything the Warren Commission could have done that would have silenced or deterred these critics as we have come to know them? That question makes Jerome Corsi’s Who Really Killed Kennedy?,3of all the books to have been published at the assassination’s half-century, the ideal text for my purposes. Corsi, who holds a doctorate in political science from Harvard, is an inveterate conspiracist, and at times a bestselling one. He started off quite impressively. In 2004 he wrote, with the redoubtable John O’Neill, Unfit for Command, a devastating takedown of John Kerry’s claims of heroic service in Vietnam and of Kerry’s allegations about the war crimes he allegedly witnessed that were committed by the American military. That book may not have caused Kerry’s defeat in his campaign for the presidency, but it certainly contributed appreciably to that outcome. Then, for Corsi, a darker turn. As a staff writer and columnist for World Net Daily, he has written detailed exposés of the alleged influence of Islamic terrorism and criminal drug networks on American politicians, John McCain included, and has claimed to uncover Barack Obama’s allegedly virulent homosexual past and present. Corsi has also been a 9/11 Truther, suggesting the possibility that those buildings in Manhattan and Washington collapsed not as a result of the airline collisions, but because planted explosives were detonated just as the planes hit. He has also been one of the celebrity advocates of “birther” claims that Obama was not born in Hawaii and that documents attesting otherwise were elaborately, and clumsily, forged. Those last claims can be found in a much-discussed book, Where’s the Birth Certificate? (2011). Just before the release of that book, Obama finally supplied his missing long-form birth certificate, taking considerable wind out of Corsi’s wind. My favorite aria from this opera is Corsi’s claim that newspaper stories, most certainly published in Hawaii, announcing Obama’s nativity a few days after his birth were themselves part of the plot to misrepresent his birthplace. This suggests that the plan to elect him president was already afoot when his foot was a day old. All the foregoing imputations by Corsi might be filed under the category of “ideological opposition research.” They argue a pointed thesis of what allegedly happened or didn’t. They attempt to refute contrary versions, even contrary conspiracy theories. In other words, they follow, roughly, the rules of rational argumentation. Each can be seen as serving some aspect of the conservative cause. Similarly, most of the Kennedy conspiracy books I have read through the years can be labeled right-wing, perhaps extreme right-wing, or, as has more often been the case, left-wing or radical left-wing. Not so Corsi’s latest. Here, he is all over the place ideologically, and in the course of his book he seems to be trying to summarize every extant conspiracy theory on the Kennedy assassination. Each he presents enthusiastically, notwithstanding the blatant contradictions, ideological befuddlement, and flat-out foolishness this approach tolerates. He does not review any of the lines of criticism that have been raised against these works, if only to refute them in order to strengthen their argument. He seems to have learned nothing from the huge amount of research done since the Warren Report, research that confirms many of its previously challenged findings. Who Really Killed Kennedy? is in one respect an example of postmodernism gone berserk wherein the only “reality” is “perceived reality”—and any declared perception or opinion offered in support of any conspiracy theory is not only unchallengeable but worthy of respect presumably by virtue of its ineluctable human source. An example: Like most conspiracy authors, Corsi needs to establish that the president was shot at by more than one assassin to prove that there was, by definition, a conspiracy (“two or more” must be involved). His major argument here is that the wound in Kennedy’s throat was a wound of entry, and therefore had to have been fired by someone facing him; it could not have been fired by Oswald or anyone else who was behind him. Now, no one in the entire discussion about the assassination disagrees that if the throat wound had been an entry wound, there had to have been multiple assassins. Flying bullets cannot make 180-degree turns. So how does Corsi know that it was an entry wound? It’s easy, he says; it is irrefutable, he implies. The experienced doctors in Dallas who examined the president and declared him dead said that the throat wound looked very much like an entry wound. On their testimony alone, it is eminently “conceivable” that that was the case, or at least “arguable.” Of course, it is easy to prove that something is arguable; all you need do is argue it, just as something is conceivable once you conceive of it. How could the Warren Report have ignored this serious possibility? Doesn’t its refusal to engage on this point reveal its purblind insistence on its pre-concocted conclusions? No. Look. If Kennedy had been hit in the throat, that bullet would have had to go somewhere—lodge in his body or exit somewhere. It would have caused internal damage and thus have been easily discernible. Nothing in the head-to-toe photographs of the president taken during the autopsy, or, even more pertinently, the x-rays, shows anything that suggests in any way such a frontal hit. The Dallas doctors did not even undress Kennedy as they attempted vainly to save him, which means they did not, could not, examine him in a way that would have tested their first perception and opinion that it was an entry wound. They saw a hole in his throat. They widened it immediately to perform a tracheostomy to aid his breathing, such as it was. Later, they recalled the hole’s shape and opined. Later, the Dallas doctors conceded their honest error fully and publicly. The morticians at the Lawson funeral home in Washington, which prepared the body for burial, did not report anything that might be related to a frontal hit. There is not a single forensic pathologist who has examined the x-rays and photos and then claimed there was an entry wound in the throat—and several groups through the years have been summoned to review that material. Even Cyril Wecht, a well-known forensic pathologist and a prominent skeptic of the Warren Commission, said after viewing the images that all shots came from behind Kennedy. The House Select Committee on Assassinations which took up the case again in the 1976–77 session, produced research that only a lunatic, or fanatical postmodernist would dare defy, proving that the x-rays and photos are beyond peradventure of arguable doubt, authentic pictures of John F. Kennedy and no one else. All this Corsi simply ignores. He does not mention the x-rays and alludes to the photographs only in regard to another matter (conceding, in that instance, that the photos seem to support the commission). And he does not report that all the Dallas doctors, in light of subsequent discussions and study, have changed their minds about the throat wound, though he must know that, as his publisher tells us, he has read nearly everything. Here’s another for the perception-is-reality file. Shortly after the assassination, a Dallas policeman identified the rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where eyewitnesses had placed a gunman, as a German Mauser. The rifle was actually the one Oswald probably ordered from Klein’s mail-order service in Chicago. It was the one ballistics tests showed had fired all the bullets, or testable portions of bullets, which were recovered. It was an Italian made Mannlicher-Carcano. It was not a Mauser. But why, Corsi fulminates, did the commission ignore the identification of a second gun, or refuse to consider the possibility that the actual murder weapon was the Mauser? After all, someone said it was a Mauser! (The Mauser has never been produced, by the way.) Want some more perceived reality? Many sightings of Oswald have been found to be false sightings. For example, he could not have been driving that car he was seen driving, because he could not drive. He could not have been in Louisiana training anti-Castro forces, as confidently perceived by a source, because he was in Russia at the time. He could not have been driving with his own assassin, Jack Ruby, from Florida to Dallas shortly before the assassination, because we know he was elsewhere. There are many reports putting Oswald in the presence of Ruby that turn out to be based on the exhibitionistic, or mischievous, or narcissistic but probably incorrect ravings of a sort that surface in the investigation of any lurid crime. Consider the Lindbergh kidnap and murder trial, or the Boston Strangler case, for illustrations of the same. Two hundred people confessed to having collaborated in or committed the Lindbergh crime who didn’t. Six people confessed to being the Boston Strangler who weren’t. Here is Corsi’s retort. All these perceptions are plausible and perhaps are not sightings of Oswald, but rather of a platoon of Oswald look-alikes unleashed by the conspiracy to paralyze the investigation or perhaps to frame Oswald. There is a vast literature positing false Oswalds. Stitched together, these ubiquitous perceptions can generate myriad grand schemes that are offered as “conceivable” or “arguable” in this book. So it turns out that each of these perceptions of a not-Oswald are, in their way, valid. One conspiracy book, not referred to by Corsi, even argued that Oswald himself was a look-alike, a replica selected after a long search by the Soviets when the original Oswald was living in Russia; the look-alike was trained to talk like the original, walk like him, and, presumably, for his wife’s sake, make love like him. The Oswald stand-in had to know everything important about him that he would have known, and be capable of surviving a reunion with his family, undetected. This was the “Oswald” sent here to do Soviet mischief; the real Oswald was murdered but is alive in these historic representations of him. For, in the last postmodern analysis, how could any of us know that we are alive but for these socially or personally generated perceptions? (And consider: Maybe the false Oswald was the lone assassin.) The ingenuity of nearly all the conspiracies Corsi rehearses and endorses is similarly breathtaking. Asked for a favorite, I would vote for his explanation for how a bullet that ballistics established was fired from Oswald’s Italian gun—Commission Exhibit 399—found its way to a stretcher in the basement of the Parkland Hospital where Kennedy and the wounded Texas Governor John Connally were taken immediately after the shooting. CE-399 is the sine qua non of the Warren Commission’s thesis that one bullet hit Kennedy first and then Connally, causing some of the damage to Kennedy and all of Connally’s five wounds. The last of those was a shallow flesh wound in his upper thigh. For the thesis to be true, the bullet had to be capable of having broken one of Connally’s ribs, and his wrist, en route to his leg. Every knowledgeable person on all sides of the debate agrees. Corsi describes the bullet as “pristine,” and also as “almost pristine.” He goes back and forth from one formulation to the other. In either case he stipulates that CE-399 is incapable, given its shape, weight, and metallic content, of breaking Connally’s broken bones and of leaving the lead elements that were extracted from his wrist and chest. I have dealt with and I think resolved this issue twice in articles in Commentary over the years4, so I will not rehearse that demonstration here except to speak of the nature of the would-be conspiracy involving it. Conspiracists believe it had to be placed at Parkland that day to be used as a piece of evidence to support the single-assassin theory—which would not even be formulated for another two months. The bullet was found in the basement of the hospital under Connally’s stretcher. At the time, Connally was upstairs. Kennedy, who was dead at this point, and his stretcher were also upstairs. A neutron-activation analysis of the bullet and the lead extracted from Connally’s wrist, reported by Dr. Vincent Guinn in 1978, established that the lead extracted from Connally almost certainly came specifically from CE-399. Simple logic suggests the bullet fell from Connally’s thigh when he was lying on the stretcher. But simple logic is not in play here. How, according to the conspiracists, did the bullet get to the hospital? Implicitly conceding that the bullet had indeed been fired from Oswald’s gun, Corsi avers that the bullet was planted by the conspiracy—and nothing establishes the Warren Commission’s commitment to its own foregone conclusions more than its obdurate refusal to explore this entirely plausible possibility. Let me translate. The news came to Assassination Central that the president had been taken to Parkland. The conspiracy then dispatched someone, perhaps a college intern, to take a spare bullet that had been fired from Oswald’s rifle—a bullet ever so slightly bent through its axis, the rim of its base visibly flattened, lacking a bit of lead from its core (in other words, “almost pristine”)—and told her to drop it somewhere in the hospital where it would be discovered. Our intern then placed the bullet near a stretcher in the basement—a stretcher she couldn’t possibly have known was Connally’s. Nor could she possibly have known that the conspiracy needed the stretcher to be Connally’s, not Kennedy’s, because it was necessary for the construction of a single-bullet theory not formulated until months later. And all this was for the purpose, mind you, of proving that there was not a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. It’s like the newspaper birth announcements in Hawaii, planted there at the time of Obama’s birth, three years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, to establish his subsequent presidential eligibility. I urge my students to apply the question “what must be true if?” to all conspiracy theories we examine. Thus: Corsi recounts theories that allege every single piece of evidence proving Oswald was the sole assassin was manufactured by the conspiracy to entrap him—an immensely complicated task which would take the collaboration of thousands (all of whom have remained silent about their forced collaboration to this day). Thus, Oswald didn’t shoot the police officer, J.D. Tippitt, who stopped him for questioning less than an hour after the assassination. Oswald wasn’t on the sixth floor when the shooting occurred. The doctors who performed the autopsy, the basis for the single-assassin theory, deliberately falsified their observations, ordered to do so by ominous military figures looming in the autopsy room who told them, commanded them, to see what they could not see, and not see what they could see. There are witnesses who allege all of this. On this last point there is a rival, and contradictory, conspiracy theory, which Corsi also endorses. When the president’s body arrived in Washington from Dallas, on the afternoon of the assassination, it was not taken immediately to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the autopsy was performed, but to a secret laboratory, where, for an hour, the body was feverishly altered to indicate a single rear source for the shooting. But how could the conspiracy know so soon what changes to make, since it could not have predicted what damage would be done by all those bullets fired by unseen assassins from several directions? Many of these alleged shooters, according to Corsi, were right out in the open along the parade route but were somehow missed by the many onlookers. And, yes, we must dispose of all the bullets from guns other than Oswald’s that Corsi and others tell us were fired. The invisible sweepers employed by the conspiracy must have known on the spot which ones were which. And where they were. And whether any bystander had discovered one. Which is to say, this conspiracy theory, like most others, implicitly posits a omniscient Intelligence that sees past, present, and future at once and knows how to act in all three realms to disguise the truth. We have not yet considered Corsi’s answer to the question posed in the title of his book: Who Really Killed President Kennedy? Here it is, pay attention to all of this, it will be on the final exam: It was the concatenation of everyone, every force, every movement, every group, every individual that, in their own perception, stood to benefit from the death. It was anti-Castro elements, furious at Kennedy for his betrayal during the Bay of Pigs invasion and his failure to dispatch Castro during the Bay of Pigs crisis. It was pro-Castro forces, furious at Kennedy’s attempts to assassinate Castro, also alerted by Kennedy’s sudden turn to a strongly anti-Communist position during the campaign, a turn that resulted in his contested victory over Nixon in the 1960 election. It was Nixon, angry about the outcome and also fearful that Kennedy was preparing to lead the United States out of Vietnam. Nixon’s connections with organized crime, derived from his involvement with illegal drug rings, also led him to think ill of the president, which naturally means to think of killing him. Suspiciously, Nixon was in Dallas the night before the assassination and departed just after or before the assassination, or perhaps he did not depart. (It is clear from Corsi’s book that just being in Dallas invites suspicion.) It was the Soviets,5 who, having programmed and trained Oswald to assassinate Kennedy, may have changed their minds and tried to deprogram him during his visit to Mexico City in early October 1963. It was the KKK, a former member of which foretold that Kennedy would be assassinated in Miami. It was, of course, organized crime, which hated Kennedy’s brother Bobby, their nemesis, and whose drug and gambling interests were being threatened by either Castro or Batista, and therefore by Kennedy, who swung all ways on these matters as well. Organized crime then ordered Ruby to kill Oswald, a kind of suicide bombing to which Ruby agreed because he favored a slow death in prison to the torture he would have received had he defied orders. It was the CIA, which actually had engineered previous assassinations, most notably of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. The Arbenz assassination set the stage for their unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion, which in turn prompted anti-Castro Cubans to hate Kennedy and, therefore, proves that the CIA was the cause of the Kennedy assassination. It was Lyndon B. Johnson, for obvious, Macbethean reasons, but also because he hated the Kennedys, who constantly humiliated him—and because he, too, opposed Kennedy’s intent to leave Vietnam. Did you know that Johnson’s long-time mistress claimed that Johnson whispered to her (at a party they attended in Dallas the night before the assassination), “After tomorrow, goddamn Kennedy will never embarrass me again”? (To be fair, here, for one of the very few times in the book, Corsi concedes that this part of the tale may be “unlikely.” I would have said “impossible,” since Johnson was in Houston that night.) It was the Justice Department. It was the Watergate burglars and especially Howard Hunt (punished for his illicit knowledge by the assassination of his wife). It was the same people who organized at least three other assassination plots against Kennedy, each similar to the Dallas assassination, with a patsy who was an ex-Marine looking “remarkably” like Oswald and an attack plan replicating the events in Dealey Plaza. It was China. It was jealous husbands whose wives consorted with JFK. It was the Dallas police. It was Washington insiders like the legendary James Jesus Angleton (who knew all about Oswald well before the assassination), and Allen Dulles. It was the French drug mafia, which was allied to the South Vietnamese drug mafia. It was the Corsicans, those notorious assassins, one of whom, world renowned, was in Dallas on the day of the assassination and was never even detained and questioned! Have I mentioned the Military-Industrial Complex? Corsi does, several times.6 Oswald, though, did not do it, although he was involved and would need to be framed as the designated patsy. After all, there is “credible evidence” that Oswald worked for the KGB, but also Naval Intelligence and the CIA. He was, therefore, simultaneously, a single, double, and triple agent. How did the various conspiracies hear about him, and how did they enlist him? Oswald worked in the building from which the president was shot. He took the job on October 15, having heard about it from a neighbor. He did not, by the way, take an available job at the airport where the president was sure to be. The decisions that brought the president’s limousine to the front of the Texas Depository were made in early November by a close friend of the president. Oswald could not have known when he took the job that the president would come to his doorstep. He shot the president from the sixth floor of the building in which he worked. That he was alone when the president’s car arrived, 25 minutes after the announced time, is pure coincidence. Three other men who were working on the sixth floor, an open space with no walls, decided to go down to the fifth, to eat their lunch and wait for Kennedy. If they had not moved, he would not have been free to shoot. All the bullets recovered were traceable to his gun, an old, unreliable Italian rifle. Given his gifts as a marksman, the hits were unlikely, but then, unlikely things happen in reality, and it is only after they have happened that they are proved plausible. Even if the Russians had programmed Oswald to assassinate the president, how could they have predicted that this was the way he would get to him? Any theory of the killing that does not add these dots to the matrix and connect them fails. I return to the question raised at the outset. Was there anything the Warren Commission and, more particularly, its staff could have done to preempt and silence this tempestuous dubiety? I do not dispute that the Report should have paid closer attention to conspiratorial possibilities. And I can understand why so many members of the staff, vividly recalling their actual doubts, their unanswered questions at the time, humiliated to have been bludgeoned all these years, now want to redeem their names by joining the complaining chorus. But I ask my students and my readers to attempt an exercise of intellectual reverse engineering. Imagine a report that sought to answer some of the intelligent questions floating around in the months following the killing—but which also, by entering into the conspiratorial mindset, attempted to predict the “imaginable,” “conceivable” allegations to come, and the kinds of evidence and tortured logic those allegations would proffer, and then attempted to answer them, no, to silence them. In my view, far from dispelling doubt, such a report would have been like Christmas morning for the conspiracists. It would have averted nothing. There was not, and there never could have been, an escape from the cottage industry of half-baked fantasies the Kennedy assassination has become. 1 Among the new ones I have consulted are Flip De Mey’s Cold Case Kennedy, James DiEugenio’s Reclaiming Parkland, Bill Minutaglio & Steven L. Davis’s Dallas 1963, Ion Mihai Pacepa and Ronald Rychlak’s Disinformation, Philip Shenon’s A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination, Roger Stone’s The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, and Lamar Waldron’s The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination. Also a novel (wrong but a terrific read): Stephen Hunter’s The Third Bullet. 2 See my article in the June 1992 issue of Commentary, “Yes, Oswald Was the Lone Assassin.” 3 Corsi, Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination, World Net Daily Books. 4 See also: “Conspiracy Fever,” from the October 1975 issue of Commentary. 5 Among the new books listed above, I excluded a splendid one: Peter Savodnik’s The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union, which decimates all the theorizing about Oswald’s activities in the USSR. It is one of the very few anniversary books on the conspiracists. 6 Corsi omits one explanation of Kennedy’s death, popular at the time, and now resurrected, quite impressively, in a new book by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, Dallas 1963. The book argues that Kennedy was killed by the climate of intense hatred in Dallas.

Here are some letters to editor regarding Jacob Cohen's article, "Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy." NOVEMBER 1992 CULTURE & CIVILIZATION The Kennedy Assassination To the Editor: Bravo for Jacob Cohen's article, “Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy” [June]. It is concise, clear, and right… by Our Readers To the Editor: Bravo for Jacob Cohen’s article, “Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy” [June]. It is concise, clear, and right on the mark. It should set the record straight, but unfortunately those who believe there was a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy, and a government conspiracy at that, will never be silenced. . . . My own feeling is that it is quite possible that Oswald did not act alone, but I certainly believe that government officials were not part of the conspiracy either to kill Kennedy or to influence the investigation. A lone accomplice could have remained silent all these years and might now be dead, his secret buried with him. However, it is just not conceivable that our government could have been involved and that no evidence would be forthcoming over this entire 30-year period . . . no death-bed confessions, no anonymous letters, etc., etc. . . . No one is disputing Oliver Stone’s right to make a movie about the subject. However, if he were not intellectually dishonest, he would have changed the names and made the movie as fiction and let the public decide if it was relevant to the Kennedy assassination. . . . Instead, he presented it as a documentary, thereby eliciting severe criticism. . . . The fact that many of the “right people”—such as Tom Wicker and Anthony Lewis—labeled the movie bad fiction must really bother Stone. . . . On the other hand, . . . Studs Terkel was quoted as saying in effect that he doesn’t understand the criticism of the movie, since, after all, everyone knows our government acts in this manner. Unfortunately, there is a segment of the American public that agrees with Terkel. . . . In any case, the damage to our young people, as Mr. Cohen concludes, is incalculable. . . . It is one thing to be critical of government actions as the facts warrant but quite another to lead our young people to believe that a conspiracy existed when there are no facts. . . . Philip J. Schiller Chicago, Illinois _____________ To the Editor: I have never understood the fascination of the American public with the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. The movie JFK, which evidently incorporates all the various conspiracy theories, purports to be history, but is instead a distortion, a dark fairy tale. A district attorney who prosecutes a person for a criminal offense without any credible evidence would ordinarily be considered a villain. . . . Yet Oliver Stone makes Jim Garrison a hero. The movie is an abomination, yet I am certain that Jacob Cohen’s careful analysis of the facts will not change the situation. However, it is still worthwhile to reexamine the record. A former conspiracist, Jim Moore, in his book Conspiracy of One, presents a time analysis of the Zapruder film which makes sense and is based on evidence that is in the record. The first shot missed. Moore believes this shot was fired at Z-186. The movements of President Kennedy and Governor Connally at Z-228 and Z-230 were in reaction to this shot and not to the shot that hit them. The second shot, fired at Z-235, three seconds after the first shot, was the bullet that hit both the President and the Governor. The third and final shot is obvious at Z-312 and Z-313, over four seconds after the second shot. Something that never seems to get mentioned is that the Attorney General of the United States on November 22, 1963, was Robert Kennedy. Enough said. Hurrah for Jacob Cohen. Howard R. Harris San Diego, California _____________ To the Editor: Jacob Cohen’s defense of the conclusions of the Warren Commission is the best that I have encountered. . . . One qualification: the Warren Commission may have been unduly influenced by the testimony of the Connallys. . . . May it not be that the first shot (recovered bullet) penetrated the President’s neck and Connally’s body, but did not cause Connally’s wrist wound? Shot two could then have struck Connally’s wrist as he collapsed, and ricocheted, the core of it striking the curbing near where James T. Tague stood. I have long believed that the above revision would strengthen the Warren Commission’s principal conclusion, i.e., that Oswald inflicted all of the President’s wounds. Ultimately, my lesson from the controversy is fully as terrifying as any that Oliver Stone would have me learn. It has now been proven that, even without credible evidence, a few tendentious persons, their outcries amplified by the media, can discredit the work of government officials and leaders. Ivan W. Parkins Mount Pleasant, Michigan _____________ To the Editor: Jacob Cohen writes: “[I]f the idea . . . was to frame Oswald for having fired three shots, why fire six? Did the Conspiracy expect that no one would notice?” Mr. Cohen might also have added that if the idea was to frame Oswald by firing from behind the motorcade, why would the Conspiracy place its marksmen on the knoll in front of the motorcade? Necessarily, the Conspiracy would have had to instruct the assassins to shoot Kennedy from the front, but in such a way as to make it appear that the shots came from behind. . . . Jerry Spindel Newton, Massachusetts _____________ To the Editor: I thoroughly enjoyed Jacob Cohen’s spirited defense of the Warren Commission’s findings, and would like to add something for the benefit of conspiracy-minded people who might object to his casual dismissal of Jean Hill, who has made a career of claiming she saw a gunman running from the grassy knoll. Less than an hour after the assassination, Jean Hill was interviewed by a reporter from WBAP-TV, the NBC affiliate in Dallas, and her unedited interview was broadcast to the entire country. In it, she did claim that she thought she saw a man running from the scene, but never mentioned seeing a gun of any kind. However, she also claimed that from her vantage point of less than twenty feet from the presidential limousine, she could see a nonexistent fuzzy dog between the President and Mrs. Kennedy. Later, before the Warren Commission, Mrs. Hill admitted that she had been held up to a great deal of ridicule by her friends for having declared on national television that she had seen a dog in the presidential limousine that never was. Warren Commission critics who constantly point to Mrs. Hill as “proof” of a grassy-knoll gunman (as Oliver Stone does) always leave out this element of her story because it creates a problem for them. If Jean Hill could not accurately remember the details of what was in the presidential limousine just twenty feet away, then her recollection of what she thought she saw from more than 100 feet away becomes highly suspect, and would surely never have stood up in any court of law. Mr. Cohen is to be commended for providing a glimmer of sanity amid the endless barrage of mindless garbage generated by Oliver Stone’s movie. . . . Eric J. Paddon Devon, Pennsylvania _____________ To the Editor: Jacob Cohen’s “Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy” contains one small error: he conflates the names of S.M. Holland (a witness to the assassination who said he heard four shots) and A.J. Millican (who said he heard eight, a record) and gives Holland’s initials as AJ. Other than that, the article is an excellent introduction to the case. I would like to expand on one point, namely, the way the Warren Commission’s critics deal with the earwitness testimony. Essentially, they(1)ignore the broad consensus among the witnesses that there were exactly three shots; (2) ignore the virtual unanimity among the witnesses that the shots all seemed to come from one location; (3) tendentiously count the witnesses who by some stretch of the imagination might be said to have identified some place in the general area of the knoll as the source of the shots . . . ; (4) use this testimony as a springboard to postulate four, five, six, or seven shots from two, three, or four different locations . . . ; and then (5) piously accuse the Commission of a cover-up for allegedly ignoring these witnesses’ testimony. Unfortunately these machinations have served to obscure the fact that the main dispute among witnesses was whether there were three shots, all from the Book Depository, or three, all from the knoll. In Rush to Judgment, Mark Lane scored this issue 58-32 in favor of the knoll; Mr. Cohen mentions a report done for the House Committee (before its last-minute conversion to the belief that there was a conspiracy), which scores it 49-21 in favor of the Depository. Lane’s count is clearly biased, taking advantage of the very vague descriptions so many witnesses gave. But is the count Mr. Cohen cites, which is based largely on the same body of testimony, much better? I do not think so; I cannot find 49 witnesses who indicated the Depository, much as I would like to. But the exact number makes little difference; there was plainly some kind of distorting effect at work, and the rest of the evidence overwhelmingly supports the Commission’s version. . . . Still, the great thing about having a conspiracy theory is that you can always explain away any contrary testimony by assuming it to be a lie and any contrary evidence by assuming it to be faked. After all, if critics can claim that dozens of frames on the Zapruder film were somehow seamlessly retouched to remove a gaping wound and to put in another one somewhere else, then there is nothing that cannot be similarly explained. . . . Avinoam Freedman Teaneck, New Jersey _____________ To the Editor: Excepting only the Lincoln assassination and the attempt on Truman, all American would-be assassins have been “lone nuts.” And, where the assassin succeeded, the resulting outpourings of national outrage and grief have inspired precursors to Jack Ruby. Charles Guiteau, Garfield’s assassin, was shot at in his cell by a guard who was later acquitted on grounds of insanity. John Wilkes Booth was killed by a mentally unbalanced soldier who some years before had castrated himself out of religious mania. Presidential deaths have also inspired millions of credulous and suggestible people to swallow labyrinthine conspiracy theories concocted by con men and/or fanatics. Warren Harding died of food poisoning, but a book by Gaston Means, a corrupt former FBI agent fired for his participation in Harding-era scandals, convinced many that he had actually been murdered by his wife out of anger over his affairs or for some other motive. . . . The tumult, confusion, mismanagement, and subsequent charges of ineptitude that inevitably accompany a sudden, totally unexpected national calamity provide dark questions for the delectation of conspiracy nuts. (What about the other man on the train platform where Garfield was shot? . . . Why did the police allow him to slip away unidentified and unquestioned?) Lincoln’s assassination did involve a conspiracy: during the war, Booth’s gang had been encouraged by Confederate intelligence agents . . . in a harebrained scheme to kidnap Lincoln in order to bring about a general release of Confederate prisoners. The surrender having prevented this, Booth . . . struck in revenge, self consciously imitating the classical tyrannicides. But conspiracy nuts of various persuasions had other explanations. One is the familiar nefarious-Jewish-bankers scenario: led by the Rothschilds, the international Jewish bankers killed Lincoln, an economic protectionist, to facilitate their taking over the American economy. Another theory . . . was that the Catholic Church, which supposedly had supported secession in order to weaken the U.S., was behind the murder. . . . Moreover, à la JFK, it was “proved” that Catholic priests a thousand miles away knew of the assassination before it had even occurred. . . . Mr. Cohen’s analysis and debunking of the JFK conspiracy nonsense are truly masterful. But he did not have space for the following, which are among our favorite points: • Why did Oswald wait until the limousine was going away rather than shoot as it was approaching him? Pointing a rifle out a window at scores of oncoming Secret Service agents and police minimizes an assassin’s chance of living long enough to get shots off, much less escaping unscathed. Oswald was a nut, not a moron. Moreover, the approach shot, which would have involved leading and tracking the target ever downward as the limousine approached, was inferior to the going-away shot which was virtually straight-on, giving Oswald what was, in effect, a stationary shot. • Direction of the shots. Stone thinks other assassins fired from in front of JFK’s limousine, whereas the Book Depository from which Oswald fired is in back. Had there been a conspiracy to blame the shooting on Oswald, the assassins would all have been positioned to shoot from the back. Having them shoot from the front necessarily would have revealed that it was a conspiracy if any of the assassins had hit JFK or the limo or its other occupants. . . . • Non-qualification of conspiracy cult writers. The various conspiracy writers include not a single person technically qualified as a coroner, pathologist, criminologist, or historian. From the biographical blurbs on the books, their qualifications are: High Treason—Robert J. Groden wrote a previous JFK conspiracy cult book and Harrison E. Livingstone graduated from Harvard, attended an unnamed law school (from which he apparently did not graduate), and writes fiction (unspecified); Best Evidence—David Lifton is a graduate of an engineering school; Mafia Kingfish—John H. Davis has written gossip books about the Kennedys and Bouviers; Rush to Judgment—the egregious Mark Lane is a self-promoting leftist lawyer and defender of America’s foremost anti-Semitic activist group, the Liberty Lobby (which, along with the John Birch Society, attributes the assassination to the “Jew-ridden” CIA, Trilateral Commission, and similar bêtes noires of the lunatic fringe Right); Contract on America—the only nonfiction work we recall that has no biographical information about its author. Last but not least comes Colonel Prouty, Oliver Stone’s “technical adviser” on the film. Prouty’s book is published by the Liberty Lobby, on whose advisory board he sits along with the former Grand Dragon of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan. Compare the “qualifications” of these conspiracy cultists to those who reject the lunacy: Professors Cohen and Lattimer; Nobel Prize-winning scientist Luis Alvarez; Colonel Martin Fackler, M.D., an experienced battle surgeon and co-author of the NATO medical manual, who until his retirement headed the Army’s Experimental Ballistics Laboratory. • Kennedy’s politics: . . . Kennedy was an ardent cold-war liberal—with the emphasis on cold war. His world view was shaped by the failure of appeasement in the years leading up to World War II: “The 1930’s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked, ultimately leads to war” (October 22, 1962). . . . Stone projects his own violently inconsistent beliefs on Kennedy to create the myth that Kennedy was murdered to prevent his abandoning operations against Cuba and Vietnam. In the Eisenhower years, Kennedy had been a vociferous partisan of the domino theory. . . . He was deeply concerned not to be blamed for the loss of Southeast Asia, which, according to the domino theory, he believed would be lost unless he opposed Communist insurgency there. Likewise, far from being a “victim” of rogue CIA policies against Castro, he and his brother were the architects of those policies. Kennedy’s only problem with the CIA was that it had botched the Bay of Pigs invasion and was too slow in carrying out his and Bobby’s assassination and sabotage plots against Castro. In the speech he was intending to give on the day of his death, Kennedy again expressly rejected withdrawal from Vietnam as he had repeatedly done in public pronouncements in the preceding months. Or consider the speech he gave the day after the collapse of the Bay of Pigs invasion. It began by expressly reserving our right to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro whenever he menaced U.S. security. Kennedy cautioned Moscow that “should that time ever come, we do not intend to be lectured on intervention by those whose character was stamped for all time on the bloody streets of Budapest.” . . . Don B. Kates, Jr. Valerie J. Klein Novato, California _____________ To the Editor: In “Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy,” Jacob Cohen aptly demolishes the conspiracy theories regarding the Kennedy assassination. The only question remaining concerns the motivation of the conspiracists. Mr. Cohen offers one explanation when he notes the mindset of the “liberated” who “hold the view that to question any official version of anything is important in and of itself, even if the questions are based on palpable falsehoods.” I would like to suggest one other explanation—at least with regard to Oliver Stone. I have seen Stone in several televised interviews and noticed that whenever he enumerates his theories . . . , he invariably interjects a statement which in large measure tells us what prompts him. He matter-of-factly states that if Kennedy had not been killed, there would have been no Vietnam, and suggests that the assassination was a conspiracy of elements eager for that war who knew Kennedy was about to withdraw. He makes this statement without elaboration as if it were a given . . . , but offers no evidence for it. . . . Indeed, what evidence there is suggests the opposite of what Stone would have us believe, namely, that Kennedy was on his way deeper into Vietnam, not on his way out. The Kennedy administration encouraged the coup which overthrew the Diem regime in South Vietnam in the fall of 1963, thereby making South Vietnam more dependent—almost totally dependent—on the United States, and shortly before he died Kennedy sent more American troops to Indochina. Further, Kennedy’s top foreign-policy advisers were, to a man, the same people who advised Johnson. Stone . . . is not merely another example of that reflexive adversarialism which has characterized so much of the American intelligentsia since the 1960’s. Stone, I submit, is looking for an explanation of Vietnam, seeking to place blame for the tragedy in Indochina. If Stone wants to place blame for Vietnam, he should place it . . . where the evidence indicates the blame belongs—with the Presidents themselves and their advisers and, in the cases of Kennedy and Johnson, with the . . . Ivy League academics who advised both Presidents. To blame Vietnam on the machinations of “the military-industrial complex” with the Kennedy assassination as the linchpin constitutes a fabrication of colossal proportions. . . . James E. Salyers Ashmore, Illinois _____________ To the Editor: . . . Public-opinion polls show that about half the population now believes that Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy of government officials. That opinion is spreading steadily, especially as the younger generation becomes familiar with recent research. The percentage of the population that shares Jacob Cohen’s opinion that a lone assassin was responsible is dwindling to an irreducible hard core of about 10-15 percent. Mr. Cohen has now reasserted his own fundamentalist opinion and claims that his “serious study” should cause “the mountain of conspiracy literature” to “collapse.” I do not expect COMMENTARY to provide equal space to refute all of Mr. Cohen’s arguments, but allow me the space at least to address his first argument as a typical example. He calls this the “issue of timing.” . . . In the literature about the assassination, the timing issue is normally understood as follows: It seems that Kennedy was hit the first time somewhere in the interval of Zapruder frames 210-224, while the limousine was behind the highway sign. As Kennedy emerges from behind the sign, he is clutching his neck and has obviously been hit. It does not seem that Connally was hit by that first bullet, because of his position and unpained expression. He is not obviously hit until about Z-234-238. The timing issue is that the interval between Z-210 and Z-238 is only about 1.5 seconds (the film speed was about 18 frames per second), which was less than the rifle’s minimum retiring time. The Warren Commission resolved the timing issue by concluding that a single bullet hit both Kennedy and Connally during the Z-210-238 interval and that Connally simply did not react immediately when this bullet hit him. For many reasons, the critics dispute this single-bullet explanation. Without going into the entire controversy, their point in regard to the timing is that if Connally was hit by a separate bullet, then three bullets struck during the 5.6 seconds between Z-210 and Z-312, when the final bullet seems to hit Kennedy’s head. Mr. Cohen can honestly argue for his single-bullet theory, but I say he misrepresents the critics’ argument in the timing issue. The critics do not say that Oswald could not have fired the gun twice or even three times during 5.6 seconds—of course he could have. What they say is that (1) separate bullets hit Kennedy and Connally during Z-210-238; (2) two bullets could not have been fired from the rifle during that short interval; and (3) therefore, three bullets were not fired from that one rifle during the 5.6-second interval of Z-210-312. (This issue is presented clearly in complete detail by Josiah Thompson in his classic book, Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination, 1967.) The main point is that it is simply not true that Mr. Cohen’s arguments are going to “collapse” the conspiracy literature. Anyone who understands this controversy well can clearly see that Mr. Cohen is missing this particular point widely and will only influence the uninformed. . . . Mike Sylwester Ft. Belvoir, Virginia _____________ To the Editor: Jacob Cohen’s absolute certainty that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to kill John F. Kennedy is not shared by those who are willing to consider evidence that Mr. Cohen overlooks. For example, Mr. Cohen reports in great detail how post-mortem X-rays of Kennedy’s head supposedly match previous X-rays of Kennedy, and claims that the post-mortem X-rays prove without a doubt that the fatal shot came from behind “unless the photos and X-rays are faked.” One of those X-rays clearly shows that the orbital bone around Kennedy’s right eye is disintegrated to such an extent that his eye would have been missing. Yet the autopsy photos of Kennedy’s face show absolutely no evidence of what would have been a horribly disfiguring injury. This disparity indicates that either the X-rays or the photos were not of Kennedy. Mr. Cohen discounts the length of the shadows in the backyard photos of Oswald bearing a rifle and copies of The Militant and The Worker. He does not mention that the size of Oswald’s head remains the same in each of the three pictures, while the length of his body mysteriously changes. This type of disparity is consistent with doctored photos. In addition, the photos show a man with a broad, square chin; Oswald’s chin was notable for its narrowness. The rifle found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository was identified as a German Mauser by deputy sheriff and former gun-shop owner Seymour Weitzman. Roger Craig, another deputy sheriff, later confirmed seeing the rifle at the time it was found, as well as an inscription on it that identified it as a Mauser. In contrast, Mannlicher-Carcano rifles are inscribed with “Made in Italy.” No Mannlicher-Carcano was found during the search of the Book Depository, yet it appeared later at the Dallas police headquarters, and was identified as the murder weapon. Of the six witnesses Mr. Cohen refers to who said they saw someone on the sixth floor with a rifle, four of them said that they saw two people working together. This testimony is inconsistent with the hypothesis of one assassin acting alone. None of the above discrepancies is trivial and they make it impossible to accept Mr. Cohen’s claim that Oswald alone killed Kennedy. William Kelley Eidem Bethesda, Maryland _____________ To the Editor: . . . There are a number of points where Jacob Cohen has not been as accurate and as fair as he should be in dealing with such a serious topic as the murder of a President. For example, he glosses over the fact that Oswald denied killing the President with the remark, “as though guilty people do not deny things all the time.” However, assassins typically admit their deeds with open pride. The assassins of Presidents Garfield and McKinley did. The assassin who almost killed President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt and killed Chicago Mayor Cermak instead did. . . . The Warren Commission portrayed Oswald as having “a highly exaggerated sense of his own importance,” but also as having “failed at almost everything he had ever tried to do.” Isn’t it reasonable to expect such a person, when allegedly “succeeding” in a deed that would make him known throughout the world and put him in the history books, to take some open satisfaction in what he had accomplished? . . . Mr. Cohen lists a number of alleged lies by Oswald while he was in police custody which, in addition to his refusal to submit to a polygraph test, he suggests indicate Oswald’s guilt. However, he conveniently leaves out the details. Oswald refused to submit to a polygraph test until he had been provided with an attorney. Oswald’s refusal does not seem sinister if the whole story is revealed. Regarding Oswald’s alleged untruthfulness, Mr. Cohen claims that “lies of this sort indicate a ‘consciousness of guilt,’ especially if they are explicable only by the hypotheses that the accused knows he is guilty.” But there is another possible hypothesis which explains Oswald’s prevarications: that Oswald could in fact have been innocent and, as he himself said, “just a patsy,” set up to take the blame for Kennedy’s death. If that was the case, then he could have understandably attempted to avoid admitting things suggestive of guilt. And let us not forget that Oswald never had a lawyer present when he provided the answers that Mr. Cohen says were misleading. . . . Mr. Cohen also conveniently ignores the fact that the paraffin test given to Oswald revealed the absence of nitrate compounds on Oswald’s cheek, and thus indicated that Oswald had not fired a rifle. How, then, could Oswald have fired a rifle three times and a pistol at least four times? Mr. Cohen mentions Oswald’s “historic diary” and speculates that Oswald killed Kennedy in order to “become a hero in Cuba as the assassin of Castro’s enemies.” But if so, why didn’t he admit his guilt? How could he have expected to become a “hero of Cuba” for killing Kennedy if he kept insisting he didn’t kill Kennedy? Mr. Cohen also ignores the evidence that Oswald’s diary was fabricated. It contains many inconsistencies. For example, in the entry for October 31, 1959, Oswald discussed visiting the U.S. embassy in Moscow and noted that John McVickar had replaced Richard Snyder as head consul. Oswald’s entry must have been written twenty months after its stated date, for this change did not happen until August 1961! In the entry that Oswald supposedly wrote on January 5, 1960, he stated his salary at a Minsk factory. But in fact the Soviet monetary devaluation which made one new ruble equal ten old rubles did not take place until a year later! . . . In contrast to the contention that Kennedy was shot only from the rear, the Zapruder film shows Kennedy’s head snapping backward, and a gush of bloody brain tissue spewing backward. Both suggest the impact of a shot from the front. However, the “Oswald-alone” supporters contend that the two effects are actually indicative of a rear entrance wound producing a “jet effect” and a neuromuscular reaction, even though films of people shot in the head in battle and in executions fail to demonstrate such results. . . . In an attempt to establish the existence of neuromuscular spasms from bullet wounds to the head, films were prepared for the House Select Committee which “reinvestigated” the assassination showing goats shot in the head. . . . But the goat tests were contrived to produce misleading results. The unfortunate goats were shot between the eyes from the front. The goats lurched backward slightly from the physical effect of the bullet impact—not from a neuromuscular reaction. . . . Further, the goats . . . jerked backward, away from—not toward—the source of the bullets. It does not make sense to claim that a goat jerking backward from a shot from the front proves that a man jerked backward when shot from the rear. . . . Not only did Kennedy’s head jerk backward, but a gush of bloody brain matter splattered backward, too. The “Oswald-alone” supporters claim that this gush was a “jet effect” from a rear rather than a frontal wound. Supposedly, when someone is shot in the brain, a jet of brain matter gushes back in the direction from which the bullet came. But this jet effect has never been observed in anyone else shot in the brain. Kennedy is a unique case. Everyone else shot in the brain has had brain tissue splattering out in the same direction as the exiting bullet. . . . In a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the two Kennedy autopsy pathologists mentioned the “beveling effect” of a missile’s exit, whereby an exit wound is larger than an entrance wound. The pathologists cite the example of a BB striking a pane of glass and causing a small hole on the entrance side and a much larger hole on the exit side of the pane. But the exit of a BB from a glass pane pushes the pulverized glass particles away from, not toward, the source of the BB. Kennedy’s alleged head wound from the rear drove his pulverized brain tissue not away from . . . but back toward the source of the alleged shot, if we believe the Warren Commission. Thus it seems that the beveling effect, which is readily demonstrable, is incompatible with the assumed but undemonstrated jet effect. . . . Thus the implication of the beveling effect applied to Kennedy’s head wound is that the projectile which inflicted it exited toward his back—toward, not away from, the Book Depository. Are we to believe that a bullet hit the back of Kennedy’s head, made a 150-degree change of direction inside his brain, and then exited back toward the Book Depository? . . . Evidently, Kennedy was shot from the front, while undoubtedly someone was also shooting at him from the rear. Was Oswald a gunman? Mr. Cohen claims: “Two eyewitnesses who saw the gunman in the window identified Oswald as the gunman.” This is untrue. Two witnesses, Howard Leslie Brennan and Amos Lee Euins, claimed they saw a man in the sixth-floor window of the Book Depository with a rifle. Euins believed the man was either a black or a “white man with a bald spot on top of his head.” Neither description fits Oswald. Euins himself does not believe that the man he saw was Oswald. . . . To finger Oswald, the Warren Commission relied upon the testimony of Brennan, who claimed the person he saw was standing up when he fired the rifle. The Warren Commission stated that he erred, that Oswald could not have been standing up, but still accepted his testimony. When shown Oswald at a police lineup, Brennan could not identify him. After changing his mind three times, Brennan finally decided that the gunman he had seen was Oswald—on December 17, 1963, after a session with FBI agents, a transcript of which was not made. Yet according to the Warren Commission, Brennan gave a detailed description of Oswald to the Dallas police. But the Commission did not explain how Brennan could have accurately estimated Oswald’s age, physical build, weight, and height from seeing him kneeling in a window over 100 feet away. Joseph Forbes Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania _____________ To the Editor: . . . It is obvious that Jacob Cohen has not studied the evidence, or he would not keep making so many obvious and simple mistakes. Simple stupidity cannot explain such a pattern of deliberate propaganda. Mr. Cohen’s most obvious error, which then leads to other erroneous conclusions, is his misidentification of Zapruder’s position on the grassy knoll. Zapruder was not behind the picket fence, he was 44 feet in front of the fence. Anyone who knows anything about the JFK assassination knows that simple fact. . . . While I agree that the “badge man” is an optical illusion, Mr. Cohen misidentifies the grassy-knoll gunman’s location to belittle the possibility of any gunman shooting from the knoll. The “badge man” would have been behind the fence, almost directly behind Zapruder. The real grassy-knoll gunman, as independently located by the House Assassinations Committee acoustical study, is seen in Mary Moorman’s Polaroid, taken just after—not before—the head shot, behind the fence and ten feet up from the corner. . . . Notice that Mr. Cohen does not tell you about that real person. He was well-hidden and appeared only briefly. Yet a few people reported seeing him, just as only a few of the 692-plus people reported seeing a gunman in the Texas Book Depository. Why must the burden of seeing the grassy-knoll gunman rest on Zapruder? Zapruder was concentrating on filming the President’s motorcade driving down Elm Street. His eye never left the camera’s viewfinder. To hunt for potential assassins he would have needed to stop filming and turn around on that narrow pedestal, not a pleasant task given his vertigo. . . . His secretary was behind him to his left, holding him steady by the waist. If she had glanced to the right, about all she would have seen would have been Zapruder. If she had let go of Zapruder to turn around, Zapruder probably would have fallen off the pedestal. . . . Yet, in fact, Zapruder did identify the location of the grassy-knoll gunman. Zapruder said that the shot came from behind him and that he heard the shot whistle past his right ear. That would place the origin somewhere near the picket fence. Notice, again, that Mr. Cohen does not reveal that information. Now, just a few brief words about the “single-bullet” theory. It was the Warren Commission, David Belin especially, which imposed that 5.6-second limit for three shots, not the critics. The commissioners assumed that Z-313 was the last shot of only three. They desperately wanted the other two shots to have been fired by Oswald from his sniper’s nest in the Texas Book Depository. Because it appeared that President Kennedy was unhurt before disappearing behind the sign, they assumed that the earliest possible hit would have been at Z-210. If the Zapruder camera was running at 18.3 frames per second, those 103 frames gave them only 5.6 seconds. JFK was clearly hit by Z-225. If Z-225 had been the second shot, then 2.3 seconds before that would have been at about Z-183. But Oswald’s trajectory to the limousine was blocked by a tree from Z-166 to Z-209, so the Warren Commission thought it was unlikely that the first shot would have been through the tree. That is why they thought the first shot came no earlier than Z-210. That is the origin of the 5.6-second limit for three shots. If Mr. Cohen is such a great defender of the Warren Commission, let him defend its logic on that. Interestingly, Mr. Cohen seems to take heart from the fact that even the House Assassinations Committee endorsed the “single-bullet” theory. However, there is an interesting twist here. The Warren Commission stated that the only time when both JFK and Connally could have been in the right alignment for the “single bullet” was between Zapruder frames 210 and 226, when they were hidden from Zapruder’s view by a sign (then how the hell could anyone see this supposedly perfect alignment?). Then the House Assassinations Committee tells us that its match-up of the acoustical data places the timing of the “single-bullet” shot at Z-190, the only time when JFK and Connally were in perfect alignment for a “single bullet,” when JFK and Connally are clearly visible and clearly not in perfect alignment, plus the shot would have had to go through the tree. It seems that no matter which Zapruder frame you choose, JFK and Connally are always in perfect alignment for the “single-bullet” theory, regardless of how impossible the shot. I don’t expect that COMMENTARY will allow a debate on the issues and evidence, but at least you should be made aware of the factual errors in Jacob Cohen’s article. . . . W. Anthony Marsh Somerville, Massachusetts _____________ To the Editor: Jacob Cohen’s “Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy” is persuasive, but I would be much better convinced if he would elaborate on why Jack Ruby killed Oswald. Elliott J. Howard New York City _____________ Jacob Cohen writes: Here is the point of view from which I write: I believe that there is an objective truth, which is to say that events actually happen in one way and no other, and that a correct account of the events is true. (One of the wonderments of working at a university is to notice how often this self-evident axiom is challenged, subverted, scoffed at, or ignored in the toniest scholarly discourse of our day.) However, this axiom has a corollary which helps explain why so much controversy attaches to the reconstruction of factual reality. While it is the case that things happen in only one way, it is also indubitable that one can imagine them happening otherwise; the truth is one but the imaginative possibilities are many. The evidence which trails every human event is usually ambiguous and therefore defense attorneys and conspiracists are never at a loss for words. The more evidence there is, the more alternative possibilities one can imagine, but also, I have found, the more clear the singular truth becomes. But because of the notorious impossibility of proving a negative and also because it is always possible to develop elaborate conspiracy theories which, if believed, discredit the overwhelming burden of contrary evidence, one can never “prove” a given version of reality to a certainty. All one can say, with William of Occam, is that a sufficient, direct, and simple explanation is to be preferred to a monumentally complicated one. In other words, if doubt is to prevail, it should be “reasonable” and not just imaginable. I do not and obviously cannot say that conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination are unimaginable or impossible; what I say is that the ones I have seen are unreasonable and mostly absurd. As illustration of the foregoing, consider passing comments in even these, mainly supportive, letters. Philip J. Schiller has the “feeling” that there might have been a “lone accomplice,” but he “certainly” believes that government officials were not part of the killing. My question to him is, what is the basis of that “feeling” and also that “certainty”? If the feeling arises from a vague general impression created by the Himalaya of conspiracist allegations about multiple gunmen, then I say that complete analysis would show that those writings are incorrect in every crucial respect. I know of no objective basis for Mr. Schiller’s “feeling,” although I certainly understand his desire to rewrite the often disappointing scripts which reality presents to us. Nor is there any basis for his “certainty” about the government, although, of course, I share his hunch. Howard R. Harris, also supportive, offers the suggestion that the double hit, Kennedy and Connally, took place in Zapruder frame 235 and not a second earlier. As I say in my article, if he will look at Kennedy’s and, particularly, Connally’s position in that frame, he will see that the Governor could not have received his five wounds at that time unless the bullet made several twists and U-turns in midair. Indeed, Z-235 is just a sixth of a second before the time (Z-238) when Oliver Stone and the conspiracist literature he summarizes claim that Connally was struck. The theory is untenable for both frames. The Warren Commission’s account of an earlier hit is simple, elegant, and direct; a hit at Z-235 or Z-238 requires the very “magical” behavior which Stone and the others attribute to the Warren Commission. Mike Sylwester and Ivan W. Parkins should study the same frames. Mr. Sylwester writes: “It does not seem that Connally was hit by that first bullet, because of his position and unpained expression.” If Connally was hit later, timing is an issue, he says. But he wasn’t. I have no idea of what he means by his “position,” which—as has been pointed out by the Warren Commission, the Rockefeller Commission, the House Assassinations Committee Panel, the review of the case by the Nova TV series, a photograph analysis by the Itek Corporation, and analysis by me and others—was in perfect alignment to receive all his wounds precisely and only at the time Kennedy was first struck. That was less than a second before he first got a pained expression. Delayed reactions of that brief sort are not uncommon. More to the point, as I have repeatedly pointed out: Connally cannot have been hit later, when Josiah Thompson, Stone, and their confreres say he was, precisely because of his position in those later frames. In 1975, when Thompson wrote to COMMENTARY to protest an article of mine on the subject [“Conspiracy Fever,” October 1975], he conspicuously did not engage me on this most pivotal of factual points. What I said to him then still holds: this is not an arguable point, like Hamlet and Polonius disagreeing about whether a cloud resembles a camel or a whale, it is as plain as day. On a related point, Mr. Parkins tries to salvage a somewhat later hit of Connally by suggesting, as others have, that Connally’s wrist might have been hit separately by yet another (missing) bullet. A fair hypothesis, an imaginable alternative. But did it happen that way? As I have pointed out, this theory needs to explain why lead taken from Connally’s wrist has been shown, by neutron-activation analysis, to be identical to lead in the bullet from Oswald’s rifle which struck his back, exited his chest, and lodged in his thigh. Is the analysis faulty? Are the scientists lying and fabricating elaborate scientific reports? Is it only a coincidence that Connally was in a perfect position to receive all his wounds at the time, earlier, when a bullet exited from Kennedy’s throat in a trajectory which would have carried it right into Connally’s back? William of Occam would protest against this elaborate substitution for a simple and sufficient explanation. Jerry Spindel has added to my argument and I am grateful for the help, and so has Eric Paddon by further discrediting Jean Hill. Let me supplement his information: not only did Jean Hill claim to see a puppy dog between the President and his wife, but S.M. Holland (my thanks to Avinoam Freedman for the correction), one of those who reported a puff of smoke over the knoll, also said he saw a man with a machine gun arise in the back of the President’s limousine. Needless to say, the Zapruder and other films of the car show no such weapon. Further: A.J. Millican, who indeed said he heard eight shots, claims to have heard the last of them five minutes after the assassination, at a time when Kennedy was being wheeled into the Parkland Hospital. Don B. Kates, Jr. and Valerie J. Klein sound as if they could give a fine course on the history of assassination in America. For the most part I concur with and applaud their letter. Two caveats, however: they say that a shot at Kennedy’s back as his car turned away from Oswald was easier than one at his front, when his car approached Oswald’s perch. Actually, Oswald could have shot Kennedy in the chest as he approached; the first shot after he turned away was through the leaves of a tree, which seems more difficult to me. Many have asked why Oswald didn’t shoot earlier, suggesting, as Stone does, that he wanted to wait until Kennedy had turned toward the grassy knoll and was in the range of the gunman there. My answer, of course, is that this is unlikely because there was no gunman there. I’m not sure we could settle the question of why he waited even if we asked Oswald. Maybe it’s easier to shoot someone in the back than the front. Maybe he didn’t spot the President, amid the rush of police and cars in the caravan, until after he had passed. Maybe the delay reveals some ambivalence on his part. We’ll never know; however, since Oswald is the lone gunman, speculation is entirely academic. With regard to Kennedy’s politics, he was perceived to be a Communist by the extreme Right and a fanatical anti-Communist by the extreme Left. Either misperception could, imaginably, have provoked a killing by fanatics and if it did, his actual politics are irrelevant. It is always possible to imagine “could-have-beens”; that is why I insist that getting the facts straight first is of the essence. With regard to Stone’s politics, James W. Salyers is probably right. But my sense of the film JFK and all it represents in our culture is that it is about much more than the 60’s and the Vietnam war. If Stone is right about the assassination, then whirl is king, and only a total revolution can replace it. The conspiracists, as I see them, worship chaos more deeply than any political agenda, which is why serious leftists deplored Stone’s film as infantile fantasy. William Kelley Eidem suggests that X-rays and photos of the President are fabrications, as indeed they would need to have been if a second gunman shot at and hit the President. In Mr. Eidem’s telling, these important documents are not just fake, but crudely and transparently so, and the scientists perpetrating this fraud are not only venal but monumentally clumsy. For reasons I offer at length in my article, I believe that both the X-rays and photos are of Kennedy, taken the night of the assassination, and so too has every expert who has examined them for signs of inauthenticity. Studying other conspiracy allegations, one finds the motif of the crude and transparent frameup arising again and again: the hotel registration card in the Rosenberg case is probably the classic example. It helps support a vision of a world driven by conspiracies so brutal, of powers so overbearing, that they do not scruple at scrupulosity. Not being a member of that congregation, I find such allegations funny. About the shadows in the backyard photos, over and over again those photos have been shown to be authentic by teams of experts who published their findings. As Mr. Eidem knows, those photos of Oswald holding a rifle were taken on his camera to the exclusion of all others in the world. His wife remembers taking the photos eight months before the assassination. They were found among his effects the day of the assassination, as was the camera, and they are perfectly useless as evidence against him, for a photo cannot establish that the rifle in it was the actual murder rifle. Is Mr. Eidem suggesting that the FBI (or whoever) stole the camera, staged the photo, clumsily pasted Oswald’s head onto someone else’s body, planted the photos, and persuaded Marina to lie, all for the purpose of proving something which other evidence proves much better, namely, that Oswald possessed the gun which fired all the bullets recovered? As for the Mauser tale: if a Mauser was used, why were all the bullets and shells recovered fired from Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano? Did the conspiracy shoot him with an Italian rifle and then leave a German one to be discovered? Why? Seymour Weitzman later admitted that he erred in calling the recovered gun, Oswald’s, a German Mauser. Human beings make mistakes, Mr. Eidem, don’t be frightened by that revelation. Let us turn to the suspicious Joseph Forbes who asks why Oswald would lie about killing the President: lots of political figures lie when caught; most relevant to Oswald, I believe, is Fidel Castro, his hero, who when he was caught for revolutionary activity denied those activities and then later triumphantly confessed, before the world, in open court. The Rosenbergs, also heroes of Oswald, insisted on their innocence to the end as well. As for “consciousness of guilt,” as I said, lies of the sort Oswald indubitably told do not of themselves prove guilt, though they confirm the impression. The paraffin tests on Oswald’s hands were positive, the one on his cheek was negative. But so was the test on the cheek of an FBI man who test-fired his rifle. The paraffin test is unreliable and is used as an interrogatory device to break witnesses; it is not admissible as evidence. If Oswald did not fire the cheap rifle he carried to the Book Depository that morning, the rifle which shot all the bullets recovered, who did? And why would a conspiracy which has fabricated as many documents as is alleged by conspiracists, not have faked a paraffin test? I do not dispute that Oswald’s diary was inaccurate and fabricated, in fact I insist on the point. It was fabricated by him, in his handwriting, with his misspellings, proof of his rich fantasy life. That is why I referred to it. As for the goats, heartlessly murdered: Mr. Forbes does not tell us that those tests were conducted solely to test the speed of a neuromuscular reaction, not the nature of it. As doctors who conducted the test pointed out, Kennedy’s physical movements after being struck in the head cannot be explained by any bullet or bullets, from any direction. The violent jerk of his body comes within the allowable time of a strike to the brain, as the goats prove. As for Mr. Forbes’s rehashing of other conspiracy arcana, I can only refer him back to my article. Turning to the reckless W. Anthony Marsh, while he clears me of the charge of stupidity, he suggests that I was lying when I placed Zapruder and his secretary behind the gunman, and behind the stockade fence, rather than, as he insists, “44 feet in front of the fence.” The apparent contradiction is easily explained; it depends upon what one means by “the fence.” Every prior observer, critics included, have meant by “the fence” the long stretch of fencing, nearly 100 feet, running parallel to Elm Street, down which the presidential limousine was traveling. At the end of that long stretch the fence turns at approximately a right angle back from Elm Street a short distance, perhaps twenty feet. In a sketch which Mr. Marsh sent accompanying his letter he makes the short distance long and the long distance short, as if “the fence” were that short appendage rather than the long leg which everyone has always identified as the “picket fence.” With that little trick he can get Zapruder in front of the gunman and “44 feet in front of the fence.” If, as Mr. Marsh says, Zapruder were 44 feet in front of the fence, or what everyone has always called the fence, he would have been on Elm Street and in danger of being struck by the limousine. Mr. Marsh’s argument is so much stuff and nonsense. The question is: where was the alleged gunman vis-a-vis Zapruder and his secretary as the President’s moving car came in front of the two of them? From that perspective, looking down on Elm, the alleged gunman is exactly as I described him, to Zapruder’s right and slightly ahead of him, such that Zapruder, and his secretary, facing Elm, glancing to their right, would have seen the gunman, from behind, clearly and directly. And they would have seen him even if he was crouching behind the fence in order to pop up to shoot the President and then immediately pop down again, as in Mr. Marsh’s hilarious scenario. (No wonder the gunman missed entirely; as Mr. Marsh tells it he took no time to find the President, aim the gun, and fire it.) Zapruder and his secretary were standing on a pedestal from which they could look down on the entire area behind the fence. I have stood on the pedestal and I know from direct experience how easily the alleged crouching gunman could have been seen. Mr. Marsh avoids the salient point, which is the absurdity of a plot in which the idea was that the gunman who gets away unnoticed was supposed to stand up in broad daylight, in clear view of hundreds, and their cameras, and not be seen firing a gun. (Six people saw a gun and/or gunman in the Depository where Oswald was.) Zapruder and his secretary could easily have seen the gunman firing or immediately thereafter; the gun exploded in their right ears from about 50 feet away and all they had to do was turn their heads to the right. They could have seen him preparing in the minutes before the President’s arrival. (How could he have known when the entourage, fifteen minutes late, would arrive?) They didn’t, no one did, although hundreds could easily have; and no pictures show a gunman. Was all that intended? On the timing. The Warren Commission concluded, correctly in my view, that Kennedy was first struck between frames 210 and 224, which is a time when Kennedy and Connally were in alignment to receive their wounds. (I have stressed that that was also the only time when Connally was in position to receive all his indubitable wounds.) With regard to whether the bullet which struck the two of them was the first fired or not, the Warren Report says: “The evidence is inconclusive as to whether it was the first, second, or third shot which missed.” (See Chapter III, “The Shot that Missed.”) As I said, 5.6 seconds is approximately the time between the two hits, not the time of all the shots. Mr. Marsh’s statement in his letter that the Warren Commission “imposed” a 5.6-second limit “for three shots” is flat-out false. Two final screechers. Mr. Marsh asks how analysts could have specified Kennedy’s and Connally’s alignment when the two were behind a sign during the crucial period Z-210-226. Those sixteen frames comprise less than one second. The alignment before and after is perfect and the assumption that the two men did not spring out of and back into alignment in less than a second seems sound to me. Finally, Mr. Marsh taxes me with the fact that at one point the House Committee, relying on the acoustical evidence, places the single hit at Z-190. (Relying upon the alignment of the two men the Committee placed that hit exactly where the Warren Commission placed it.) What Mr. Marsh doesn’t tell you is that, as I pointed out in my article, the acoustical evidence has now been totally discredited after reexamination by the National Academy of Science, and with that discreditation passes another shred of conspiracist credibility. Finally, there is Elliott J. Howard’s brief question about Jack Ruby. I did not deal with this inescapable question in my article, but I think he knows that I could have. An extended treatment would show that Ruby walked into the basement of the police department and directly into Oswald as Oswald was about to be transferred to another jail. He shot him then and there; if Ruby had arrived moments later, he would not have had the opportunity to shoot Oswald. The timing was perfect. When you know all that is known about Oswald’s and Ruby’s movements that morning it turns out that Ruby could not possibly have known when Oswald would be in the basement. The transfer was an hour after the announced time and the encounter was entirely accidental. And consider this: if Ruby shot Oswald to silence him, why wasn’t Ruby killed to silence him? (He died years later of cancer.) Was Ruby a kamikaze pilot ordered to kill Oswald on television and spend the rest of his life in jail, taking the rap? Oswald was interrogated for an entire weekend; he even appeared on a televised news conference during which time he could have blurted out some incriminating information about the conspiracy. Why wasn’t he killed earlier? Etc., etc. As I have tried to present the matter: Oswald killed the President by himself, there were no other gunmen sent by the Mafia, the CIA, or any of the other forces allegedly behind the killing. Nor am I persuaded that anyone helped Oswald plan the killing, or influenced him to do so. In particular, every speculation linking Oswald to Ruby, every alleged sighting, has been punctured. If what I have just said is correct, the notion of Ruby as a second lonely nut is less difficult to accept. I cannot, I would not, silence imaginative speculation about what might have been; I can only suggest that such imaginings submit themselves to the discipline of finding the singular factual reality which is the fundament of all events.