Here is Jacob Cohen's second article on the JFK assassination: June, 1992. Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy Even the strongest supporters of JFK, Oliver Stone's notorious film on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, concede that… by Jacob Cohen Even the strongest supporters of JFK, Oliver Stone’s notorious film on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, concede that it is deceptive: fabricated footage gussied up as documentary fact; fictional characters and scenes offered as proof of perfidy; paranoid insinuations about the conscious involvement of the highest officials in the land; outright lies. Yet to an extraordinary number of often intelligent people, these characterizations seem utterly beside the point. “Don’t trust anyone who says the movie is hogwash,” writes a Newsweek critic, David Ansen, “and don’t trust the movie either . . . [it] is a remarkable, a necessary provocation.” “One of the worst great movies ever made,” declaims Norman Mailer. One wonders: how false, fanciful, and downright mendacious does a work purporting to portray and interpret historical events need to be before it is not just chided but discounted, disqualified, disgraced? Those who defend the film’s meta-purposes seem confident that if not all, then some and certainly at least one of its basal assertions of fact reflect what actually happened in Dallas: more than one person fired at the President. And if there was more than one gunman, there is prima-facie evidence of a conspiracy of some sort or another. Having spent a considerable part of my life over the last three decades studying and discussing the Kennedy assassination, I can testify to the tenacity of that basal assertion. Challenging the notion of multiple gunmen has become tantamount to suggesting that it was the United States which attacked Japan in 1941, Poland which attacked Germany in 1939. And yet, I will contend that for anyone who has seriously studied the original Warren Report on the assassination (and not just had it read to him by its critics); has gone over the materials produced in the reconsideration of that Report by the House of Representatives in 1977-78; and has familiarized himself with the many scientific studies over the years, including three separate reviews of the medical material, which have examined the testable bases of the single-assassin theory—to anyone who has done all this, the notion of multiple gunmen, on which nearly every conspiracy theory extant rests, is a demonstrable chimera. And if there was one and only one assassin, and if that assassin was Lee Harvey Oswald, then nearly every insinuation in JFK, and in the mountain of conspiracy literature which it summarizes, collapses. _____________ II The case for multiple assassins consists of four lines of argument: (1) there was not enough time for a single gunman to have done what the Warren Commission alleges Oswald did; (2) compelling eyewitness, photographic, and earwitness testimony place a second gunman on the fabled grassy knoll; (3) the evidence of Kennedy’s wounds and the reaction of his body to the shots establishes the presence of assassins other than on the knoll; and (4) the so-called “single-bullet theory,” popularly known as the “magic-bullet” theory, the indispensable prerequisite of the notion that there was only one assassin, is a palpable absurdity. These arguments are mutually reinforcing, but it is fair to say if any one of them holds water, the single-assassin theory would be untenable. However, as we shall see, all four are baseless. Consider the issue of timing. Repeatedly, like a mantra, JFK, and the critics it mimics, declare that the famous Zapruder film (a home movie taken of the assassination by a Dallas manufacturer, Abraham Zapruder) “established three shots in 5.6 seconds” and that such a feat would stretch the capacity of the most expert rifleman, and undoubtedly was beyond Oswald and his gun. In interviews and speeches Oliver Stone frequently refers to “the 5.6-second Zapruder film,” as if that were all there was to it, 5.6 seconds, and many commentators on JFK dutifully repeat these data, usually in the movie’s own tone of outraged incredulity. Yet: (1) The Zapruder film, which is 30 seconds long in toto, firmly establishes only the final and unmistakable shot to Kennedy’s head. (2) Even assuming that two hits occurred 5.6 seconds apart, nothing in Zapruder indicates that a possible third shot, which missed, had to have come between the two hits. The Warren Commission concluded only that there were probably three shots and that the two hits, not the three shots, came within 5.6 seconds of each other. The miss could have come first, or last, though it probably came first. That means the gunman had more than eight seconds to shoot, and more than five seconds—ample time—between the two hits. (3) Even if the miss had come between the two hits, there would still have been 2.8 seconds to fire and refire—enough time even for an amateur used to handling guns, like Oswald. Stone and/or his advisers know this, as does everyone who has studied the case. Were there shots from the grassy knoll by another assassin? Allegedly, eyewitness, photographic, and earwitness testimony placed a second gunman there. The knoll, I would remind the reader, was in front and to the right of the President’s car when he was first struck, and directly to his right when he was fatally shot in the head. The Warren Commission placed the lone gunman above and behind the President in the Texas Book Depository building. Surely, the most significant eye- and ear-witnesses to the assassination were Abraham Zapruder himself and his secretary, Marilyn Sitzman, who was standing next to him as he took his famous home movie. The two of them were on the knoll, on a three-foot-high concrete pedestal overlooking the scene and directly overlooking the entire area behind a five-foot wooden fence at the top of the knoll from behind which, Stone and the other conspiracists say, an assassin shot at and killed the President. But here is a point omitted by Stone and the conspiracists: Zapruder and Sitzman were within 50 feet, above, slightly behind, and in clear line of sight of the alleged assassin and (in Stone’s recreation) his alleged “spotter.” Fifty feet is ten feet less than the distance between home plate and the mound. Understand: Zapruder and Sitzman were on the mound facing the batter, as it were, and Stone would have us believe that they did not happen to hear or see two assassins to their right front halfway down the third-base line, firing two explosive shots. They simply failed to glance that way during the shooting or to notice the gunman while he waited for the President to arrive. Zapruder is now dead, but Sitzman was interviewed for a sensational five-part documentary produced by the Arts and Entertainment (A&E) Network on cable TV. Somehow, the interviewer did not ask her whether she noticed a man shooting the President just to her right front. Those who have seen the A&E documentary will recall the gripping analysis of a black-and-white polaroid snapshot of the knoll which was taken by one Mary Moorman just before the fatal head shot. In that picture, we are told, one may now see the clear image of “the badge man,” a man in uniform, who, allegedly, fired at the President from the knoll. Yet while that image may leap out at the consultants to the A&E documentary, it was not clear to the panel of photographic experts who, in 1977, perused it for the House Assassinations Committee. Of course, those experts were not privy to the blown-up, “colorized” enhancement of the photo developed by the A&E consultants, who claim to see in the photo not only a man (nothing remarkable in that, it’s a free country and people were allowed to roam about the knoll) but a hatless man in uniform. They even claim to be able to see the label on his shirt and, “perhaps,” a gun. Well, if “badge man” is an assassin, he fired from a spot right next to, at most fifteen feet below and to the right of, Zapruder and Sitzman. Again, they did not notice. _____________ There are other pictures of the knoll—22 persons were taking pictures in Dealey Plaza, the assassination site, that afternoon—and several are of the knoll at the time of the shooting. Over the years conspiracists have discerned in these pictures riflemen and rifles, only to have photographic expertise reveal the illusions created by light and shadow. For example, in one set of photos purporting to show a rifleman in “the classic firing position,” the rifleman, to be actual, would need to have been floating in the air nine feet above the ground. Another rifle, supposedly visible in Zapruder frame 413, turned out to be a small branch in a bush in front of the fence, and the head behind that bush, the one with a “tennis hat” on, would have to be the size of a lemon in order to have been where the critics say it is. Notwithstanding Stone’s insinuations, no one saw a gun on the knoll, though it would have been in the clear line of sight of hundreds of the 692 people who have been identified in Dealey Plaza. No one: not one of the eighteen people on the railroad bridge who, looking up Elm Street at the approaching President, could easily have spotted a gun about a hundred feet in front of them and slightly to their left; no one in the plaza, neither Zapruder nor Sitzman, who were on the knoll; none of the hundreds who, we presume, were following the presidential limousine with their eyes and need only have raised their gaze a few degrees to have seen the gun; not Lee Bowers, who surveyed the scene from a tower behind the alleged assassins; no one in the presidential caravan, including Secret-Service men whom film and photos show scanning the surrounding scene. (Were they ordered not to see anything? Have they remained silent to this day about those criminal orders?) On the other hand, six people saw the rifle inside the sixth-floor, southeast-corner window of the Book Depository: Oswald’s rifle, the one that fired all the bullets that were recovered. Two people actually saw the rifle as it was fired, and two of them identified Oswald in a police lineup. Those who have seen the Stone film, or the A&E documentary, or are familiar with the conspiracy literature, may now protest vehemently: what about Jean Hill, the woman in the Stone film who fervently claims she saw a “gunman” running? What about the others who swear passionately that the shots came from the knoll? What about the many, like A.J. Holland, who saw gunsmoke on the knoll, and the sheer weight of earwitness testimony that the shots came from the knoll? What about the deaf mute who for 28 years has been trying to get someone to understand his signing message that, a few minutes before the assassination, from a distance of over a hundred yards, he saw men walking with rifles near the knoll? And what about the lady who now claims to be the “babushka lady” visible in photos of the plaza, and who says she will go to her death believing there was a gunman on the knoll? And what of Gordon Arnold, who claims, after more than a quarter-century of silence, that he filmed the assassination from in front of the fence on the knoll, that he sensed bullets whizzing past his ear, and that after the shooting a man with “dirty hands,” in a uniform, came up to him, weeping, and threw him to the ground, physically forcing him to relinquish the incriminating film? Arnold’s is one of several stories by people who claim they were roughed up and threatened because they had seen inadmissible things. Stone graphically depicts these alleged brutalities and the reign of terror which insiders to the assassination have been enduring. _____________ Here are the answers. Jean Hill said she “saw a man running,” not from the knoll but from the Depository. Stone has Hill say that the man was a “gunman.” But a gunman, presumably, is a man holding a gun. Hill did not say that she saw a gun. Is it possible that, as many witnesses do, she has fused two disparate facts—the President is shot, a man is running—and created the saga she has made a career of telling? Holland, who is the only one to say he saw a man with a submachine gun stand up in the back of the President’s limousine, claims also to have seen smoke over the knoll. Others, too, saw smoke, and identified it with a shot. The Stone film shows a considerable puff of smoke wafting above the knoll, pretty much as Holland described it. But modern weapons do not make big puffs of smoke. Hot steam pipes do produce such cumulus effects, and there were hot steam pipes at the top of the knoll where the smoke was seen. Beverly Oliver, the woman who claims to be the “babushka lady,” not only swears “to her death” that the shots came from the knoll (although she saw no gun), but she also identifies herself as having been a nightclub singer in a club next to Jack Ruby’s and has said that when Ruby, Oswald’s eventual assassin, introduced her there to Oswald they casually identified themselves as “CIA agents.” She says, too, that in 1968 she met for two hours with Richard Nixon, whom she ties to the killing. Stone knows all this detail, but omits much of it in order to create the character of a sympathetic nightclub singer terrified to tell the world about her certain knowledge of links between Oswald and Ruby. (No persuasive links between the two have ever been established.) Was Gordon Arnold there? He does not appear in photos, though some find him in the Moorman photo right next to “badge man.” (Apparently Arnold did not notice the “badge man” shooting the President.) As for the story that he was brutalized and his film removed—it is interesting that no one brutalized or even spoke to Zapruder and Sitzman, or removed them from the pivotal perch from which they filmed the assasination and, presumably, saw the assassins. And as for the deaf mute, whose 28 years of silent frustration were ended when A&E finally found someone to read his signs and put him on television, is it indecorous to suggest that his story sounds like a routine on Saturday Night Live? Stone and others would have us believe that on the knoll that day there was a platoon of conspirators, incognito, surveying every person’s eyes, entering minds and cameras, knowing infallibly who had incriminating evidence and who did not. Like Santa Claus, they knew who had been bad or good, and they brutalized only those who saw or photographed the bad thing. And these people, in fear and trembling, agreed to be silent. Now, nearly three decades later, these same victims have agreed to take their ten minutes in the spotlight at the invitation of A&E and Oliver Stone. And the earwitnesses? Undeniably, several people thought shots came from the knoll, said so freely to the Warren Commission, the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Dallas police, and were reported as having said so. Fourteen years later, in 1977, at the request of the House Assassinations Committee, a panel of acoustical scientists and psychologists examined all the earwitness evidence and then correlated it with observations they made at Dealey Plaza when rifles were test-fired from the knoll and the Book Depository. They discovered that of 178 earwitness accounts which they sampled, 132 thought there were three shots, 149 thought there were three or fewer. Six people thought there were four shots; one thought there were five, and one, Jean Hill, heard six. (Six is the number that Stone, and most conspiracists, say were fired.) With regard to the source of the shots: 49 of the 178 thought it was the Depository, 21 thought it was the knoll, 30 gave other sources, 78 did not know. Crucially, however, only four of the 178 thought shots came from more than one direction. Since we know that at least some shots came from the Depository—the rifle, Oswald’s, which fired all the recovered bullets and shells was found there, and six people saw a rifle in the window—shots would have needed to have come from two directions if there were also shots from the knoll. The panel concluded: It is hard to believe a rifle was fired from the knoll. . . . [D]espite the various sources of confusion in the locus of any single shot, a second shot from a different location should be distinctive and different enough to cause more than four witnesses to report multiple origins for the shots.1 _____________ According to JFK, there were ten to twelve assassins, firing six shots from three directions. No one heard it that way; no one. Nor do the conspiracists answer this question: if the idea (as Stone suggests) was to frame Oswald for having fired three shots, why fire six? Did the Conspiracy expect that no one would notice? To take the full measure of what Stone and the others are suggesting, we must remember that this ingenious plot intended that the assassins on the knoll be invisible and escape unnoticed. But how could they have known where spectators would be, where cameras would be? Just behind the fence was a public parking lot, filled with cars. Anyone could have gone to retrieve his car at any time. And why does Stone not show us the (inevitably hilarious) planning session where it was decided that a feigned epileptic fit fifteen minutes before the shooting to distract attention from the gunmen on the knoll, a diversionary shot from the Depository, and an omniscient goon squad to rough up awkward witnesses would be enough to provide anonymity and safe passage to assassins standing in broad daylight, in clear view? There is a further reason to scoff at speculations of a shot from the knoll: the alleged gunman, one of the world’s finest (according to Stone) or one of the Mafia’s finest (in other versions), firing at point-blank range, missed the car and everyone in it with a bullet which was never recovered. The now decisively authenticated X-rays and photographs which were taken of the President’s body the night of the assassination establish that no shots struck the President or Governor John Connally (who was with him in the motorcade) except shots fired from above and behind. There were no hits from the knoll. Again, viewers of Stone’s film will protest: what of the doctors at Dallas’s Parkland hospital, who for years after the shooting insisted that the small neat wound in Kennedy’s throat was a wound of entry, inflicted from the front (hence, by another gunman)? What of their insistence, for years, that there was a massive wound of exit in the back, occipital region of his head, where the autopsy doctors had purported to find only a small wound of entry? And most memorably, what of the dramatic thrust of the President’s body, backward and “to the left”—Kevin Costner, playing Stone’s heroic protagonist, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, repeats the phrase “to the left” five times, while the gory Zapruder frames show the President, indeed, thrust backward and leftward—a movement consistent only with a hit from the right front? It is true that several Dallas doctors once thought the throat wound was an entry wound, and said so at the time. And a few of them later recalled massive damage to the back of his head, not on the right side where the autopsy doctors placed the damage. The Dallas doctors agreed that there was no time for a proper “medical examination” of the President; all of their efforts were aimed at saving his life, not examining his wounds. So frenzied were their ministrations that they did not even notice at the time a small wound of entry in his back and a small wound of entry in the back of his head. Later, after the President was peremptorily removed from Dallas to the autopsy in Washington, to the considerable professional chagrin of the Dallas doctors, several of them came to insist that the wound in the throat “looked like” a wound of entry, and that there was a massive default in the rear, occipital, portion of the President’s head, a glaring fact somehow missed by the official autopsy team. Over and again, Stone and the conspiracists refer us to these incongruous comments by the Dallas doctors. What they do not tell us is that these doctors changed their minds when they reviewed the X-rays and the photos taken at the autopsy for a Nova documentary on public television. The evidence in the X-rays and photos is of paramount importance. If the throat wound was an entry wound, that bullet, fired from the right front, would have torn into Kennedy’s throat and probably out of the back or side of his neck. Or it would have lodged in the body causing appropriate damage, all of which would be visible in X-rays and photos. Unless the photos and X-rays are fake, the throat wound is not a wound of entry. Every one of the by now more than 20 forensic pathologists who have examined those documents agrees there was no strike to the throat from the front. _____________ Similarly with regard to the alleged massive wound of exit in the back of Kennedy’s head—the result, according to Stone, of a bullet administered from the front right. The X-rays and photos clearly show that that massive wound of exit is on the right side of the head, not in the back, and was caused by a bullet entering in the rear of the skull where a small wound of entry was seen by the autopsy doctors. Again, this is the conclusion of every one of the prominent forensic pathologists who have studied the photos and X-rays which show the location and nature of the wounds and the pattern of fracturing. Even Dr. Cyril Wecht, one of the stars of the A&E documentary, a frenetic critic of the official version, agreed on this point after examining the X-rays and photos over a two-day period. The Dallas doctors, too, examining these documents for the Nova program, agreed that their memory of the wound location had been erroneous. Stone and the conspiracists, having spent hundreds of hours with the Zapruder film, examining it meticulously, frame by frame, must know all this. In frame 313, when Kennedy is struck in the head, and in subsequent frames, we see a large burst of pink—bone and brain matter—exploding out of the right side of his head, exactly where the X-rays and photos place it; the back of the head, clearly visible in these frames, is unruffled and completely intact. Where then is their theory of a massive rear exit? Robert Groden, one of Stone’s technical advisers, has now taken to arguing that the Zapruder films too have been doctored, along with the X-rays and photos. Well, are the X-rays and photos authentic? As to the photos, the analysis submitted to the House Assassinations Committee by a team of photographic experts found no evidence whatsoever of tampering. Far more important was the detailed report of the team of forensic anthropologists. Studying the photos of the President, fore and aft, the anthropologists meticulously measured the angle of his nasal septum, the lower third of the nose cavity, the nasal tip area, various features of his ear, the lip profile, facial creases, and the network of wrinkles across the back and side of his neck. All of them, when compared to previous, unquestionably valid photos, established that the wounded man in these photos was the dead President and no one else. The authentication of the X-rays was equally decisive. X-rays are like fingerprints. Since every person has a unique bone structure, it is quite easy for forensic anthropologists to identify the mutilated remains of persons killed in combat or plane crashes. The only thing needed are previous X-rays for comparison; of course, many were available in this instance. Thus, the deviation in Kennedy’s nasal septum was noted and compared with his other X-rays. The bony rims around his eyes, the honeycomb air cells of the mastoid bone, the saddle-shaped depressions at the base of his skull, the bony projections along the spine—all exactly matched the comparison X-rays, as did features in the X-rays of Kennedy’s lower torso. Furthermore, the damage in the photos matched the damage found in the X-rays. Let us be clear about what this means: these are X-rays and photos of the damaged President, taken the only time in his life that he was damaged in that way. If they are phony, whose body and face are in the fake X-rays and photos? The panel of experts did not argue that the government was incapable of contemplating forgery; they argued that such a forgery, even if contemplated, would be next to impossible: “There can be no doubt that they are the X-rays of John F. Kennedy, and no other person.” Why did President Kennedy lurch backward and to the left if he was struck from behind? Twice now, panels of experts examining the question—once for the Rockefeller Commission in 1972, yet again for the House Assassinations Committee—have concluded that no bullet, by itself, could have caused that physical reaction. Rather, the motion has been attributed to “a seizure-like neuromuscular reaction to major damage inflicted to nerve centers in the brain.” The House panel even assassinated some live goats to demonstrate the effect. _____________ Let us turn, finally, to the mother of all J of Stone’s and the other conspiracists’ canards, their account of the so-called “magic bullet,” a term so deeply entrenched in discussions of the assassination that routine newspaper accounts of the latest conspiracy allegations refer to it, without quotation marks, as if it were the God-given name of the bullet. I have seen Stone’s film three times and each time Kevin Costner’s derisive account of the Warren Commission’s supposed position on the subject has brought gasps of incredulous, mutinous laughter from the audience: The magic bullet enters the President’s back headed downward at an angle of 17 degrees; it then moves upward in order to leave Kennedy’s body from the front of his neck, wound number two, where it waits 1.6 seconds, presumably in mid-air, where it turns right then left [right then left, Costner repeats] and continues into Connally’s body at the rear of his right armpit, wound number three. The bullet then heads downward at an angle of 27 degrees, shattering Connally’s fifth rib, and exiting from the right side of his chest, wound number four. The bullet then turns right and reenters Connally’s body at the right wrist, wound number five, shattering the radius bone. The bullet then exits Connally’s wrist, wound number six, takes a dramatic U-turn and buries itself into Connally’s left thigh from which it later falls out and is found in almost pristine condition in a corridor of Parkland Hospital. The Warren Commission, it should be unnecessary to say, argued no such thing. It contended that Kennedy and Connally were struck by the same bullet, somewhere between frames 207 and 223 of the Zapruder film. During that one-second period, the two men disappear behind a road sign. Just before Connally disappears behind the sign, and again a little less than a second—fifteen frames—later when he reappears, his right wrist is close to his lap, directly over his left thigh. He is holding the lid of a big Texas hat, knuckles up. His head has turned to the right—Connally has remembered doing this after hearing a shot (probably the first shot, the one that missed)—and in turning, his shoulders rotate rightward slightly, bringing his body into perfect alignment to receive all five of his wounds. It is only then, when the Commission held the two men were hit, that Connally could have been struck in a way to cause the scars which he indubitably has, to this day. On three separate occasions in the last 20 years, panels of photographic experts analyzing the Zapruder frames and all the photographs have confirmed this analysis. Using the same evidence, and with the added help of wound locations established by X-rays and photographs, the panel of experts assembled by the House Committee showed that a line drawn through Connally and Kennedy’s wounds leads right back, straight as an arrow, to the window from which someone fired Oswald’s gun: no turns, no pauses. _____________ Now consider Connally’s position when Stone and other conspiracists say he was struck. (Costner: “Connally’s turning here now, frame 238, the fourth shot, it misses Kennedy and takes Connally.”) As I pointed out in COMMENTARY seventeen years ago, in that frame Connally has turned 90 degrees to the right and is facing out of the side of the car. A bullet striking Connally when the critics say he was hit would then have had to exit from the chest at a downward angle, to have taken two sharp turns upward, in midair—right and then left into the knuckle side of the wrist; and then, upon exiting on the palm side, further up in the air than the wound of entry, would have had to execute a very sharp U-turn into the thigh: plainly impossible.2 In other words, it is not the Warren Commission’s account which requires these absurd zigs and zags, it is Stone’s. And the “almost pristine” bullet found “in a corridor” at Parkland Hospital? That bullet, unquestionably fired from Oswald’s gun, was found next to Connally’s stretcher in the basement of the hospital, exactly where it would be to support the single-bullet theory. It was not pristine; it lacked lead from its core in the amount found in Connally. It was also flattened at one end, and bent at its axis. In 1978, Professor Vincent Guinn, responding to a decade of demands by critics, employed recently improved neutron-activation techniques to compare the traces of antimony, silver, and copper in the lead from the “magic bullet” with the trace amounts of those metals in the lead recovered from Connally’s wrist. He concluded that the wrist lead almost certainly came from lead missing from the “magic bullet.” Now, if the bullet found in the basement of Parkland Hospital next to Connally’s stretcher, fired from Oswald’s gun and missing the very lead found in Connally’s wrist, is not the one which struck Connally, how did it get next to his stretcher? Stone suggests that someone from Assassination Central was sent over to drop a spare bullet somewhere in the hospital. Why the basement? Why Connally’s stretcher and not Kennedy’s? How could the Conspiracy have known where Connally’s stretcher would be? How could it have known then that a bullet which had ended in the soft flesh of Connally’s thigh needed to be placed with his stretcher in order to confirm a single-bullet theory which was not developed for another two months? And if this was not the bullet that hit Connally, what happened to the bullet that did? In the film we see colonels and other gray eminences directing the autopsy like puppeteers, ordering doctors to lie about the damage to the President, to silence their curiosity about dangerous matters, and forever. But at that point the Conspiracy could not have known what directions to give. The single-bullet theory, to repeat, was not developed until months later, and only an omniscient demon could have figured out so soon what precise changes would be necessary in the autopsy report. When and how did the Conspiracy brief its agents in the autopsy room, and who did the briefing, and who briefed the briefers? It is a shame that Stone did not invent scenes dramatizing all this; they too would have been hilarious. Similar objections may be raised to the theory developed by David Lifton in a best-selling book and reiterated in the A&E documentary. Kennedy’s body, we are told, was taken to a secret laboratory after its arrival in Washington while an elaborate ruse—empty coffins, diversionary caravans—convinced the public that his body was being taken directly to the Bethesda Naval Hospital. With about 40 minutes to do their work, the agents of the Conspiracy completely altered the President’s wounds to make it look as if he had been hit by one assassin, firing from behind, disguising even the signs of their intervention from the X-rays and photos, although not from Lifton and A&E. In this version, then, the autopsy itself is honest, only the doctors are working on an altered body. But how could the Conspiracy have known what alterations to make? How could its agents be sure 40 minutes would be enough? Scores of people would need to be involved: those who prepared the alternate route, those who switched the body, those who performed the 40-minute surgical miracle, those who carefully brought the body to Bethesda through the back door, those who sent advance news of the nature of the wounds from the Parkland Hospital or the President’s plane. And all have remained silent about the matter to this day. There was, in sum, nothing magic about the “magic bullet.” And there was no need to alter the body, no need to fabricate an autopsy. The overwhelming burden of the evidence indicates that one assassin shot the President, just as the Warren Commission said. _____________ III Was Lee Harvey Oswald that single assassin? Chief Justice Earl Warren, who according to Stone was a perjurer and either a willing or a moronic accomplice to a massive coverup, said that in a lifetime as a lawyer and judge he had never seen such a clear case of guilt. Here I can only sketch the outline of the case, but even a sketch is sufficient to demonstrate the absurdity of ubiquitous charges that Oswald did not shoot the President, that he was a “patsy” set up to deflect attention from other assassins. First, there is this pivotal fact: Oswald worked in the building from which the President was shot and obtained the job there, unsuspiciously, three weeks before unsuspicious decisions were made (by Kenneth O’Donnell, Kennedy’s friend) which occasioned the President’s appearance in front of that building. Stone tells us in the film that on the day of the assassination the Conspiracy “sent” Oswald to the building. But it did not have to; he reported for work as usual. What Stone does not tell us is that Oswald carried a gun to work that morning. A coworker who drove him in (Oswald could not drive) reported that Oswald had a long object wrapped in paper which he held from below, cupped in his palm, military style. (“Curtain rods,” was Oswald’s answer to the obvious question.) Paper that had been fashioned as a gun carrier was later found on the sixth floor, near the murder window. Oswald’s fingerprints were on it, as was his palm print at the base where he would have cupped it in the manner described. Also on the bag were strands of wool from the blanket in which Oswald’s rifle had been wrapped. There were no curtain rods. The murder rifle, Oswald’s, which fired all the bullets and shells later recovered,3 was also found on the sixth floor. On it were strands of wool from Oswald’s shirt and Oswald’s palm print.4 Oswald’s finger and palm prints were also on the card boxes used as a gun prop and on the brown bag. (Stone mentions none of this.) In addition, two eyewitnesses who saw the gunman in the window identified Oswald as that gunman. According to Stone and the conspiracists, the plotters went to extraordinary lengths to link Oswald to a rifle which they also claim was not used. But why not link him to the “real” gun? Viewers may remember very brief shots of a photograph of Oswald being altered. These shots are spliced into JFK, out of context and narrative sequence, in order to set the scene for Stone’s later contention that a photograph of Oswald holding the murder rifle and pistol in his backyard was the crudest of forgeries. In that photo, the conspiracists say, two-thirds of Oswald’s face has been pasted onto the chin and body of a stand-in. A distinct line across the chin shows the intervention clearly, and anyway the shadows cast by the nose are inconsistent with the shadows cast by the stand-in body. What Stone does not tell us is that the photo was taken with Oswald’s box camera, that his wife remembers taking it, that it is one of several taken of him with gun and pistol at that time, and that after exhaustive examination photographic experts employed by the House Assassinations Committee found even the challenged photo to be entirely unexceptionable, shadows and all. It also should be noted that this photo, found among Oswald’s effects after the assassination, is superfluous to the proof that he possessed the gun: there are many other, superior, evidences of that. _____________ Stone scoffs at the rifle, “the worst military weapon in the world.” But the laugh is on him, for the neutron-activation analysis and ballistics findings prove that this supposedly defective rifle fired the bullet which deposited lead in Connally’s wrist and also the bullet which hit Kennedy in the skull.5 Someone used that rifle very effectively, and if it was not Oswald, Stone needs to explain why this brilliant Conspiracy, which used one world-class marksman, gave him the worst weapon in the world. He should also explain why, if the Conspiracy was framing Oswald, it would have wanted to link him to such a ridiculous weapon. Oswald left the building immediately after the shooting, retrieved a light-colored jacket and pistol from his rooming house, and about 45 minutes after the assassination was seen shooting a Dallas policeman named Tippit. Twelve eyewitnesses identify Oswald as Tippit’s assailant—although, to be sure, a few others, the ones presented by Stone and the A&E documentary, do not. The shells expended at the scene and the bullets in Tippit match the pistol found on Oswald when he was arrested. His jacket was found nearby. When the eyewitnesses reported the shooting to the police, using the radio in Tippit’s car, police swarmed to the area. After a phoned report to them that a man had been seen ducking into a theater without paying, they rushed to the theater and arrested Oswald, who resisted, for the murder of Tippit. On him was the murder pistol; he had ordered it by mail, ten months earlier. Astonishingly, Stone and many other conspiracists even question the contention that Oswald shot Tippit. Citing inconsistencies in eyewitness reports, which are to be expected in nearly all such reports, they imply that the bullets and shells were a plant, that the real ones were removed, that the jacket was a plant, and that the narrative by which the police traced Oswald to the theater was a contrived fiction. What may have happened, according to Stone and the others, is that the Dallas police were expecting Oswald at the theater. They would murder someone in the neighborhood, a Dallas policeman murdered with the cooperation of Dallas policemen, and they would blame it on Oswald, presumably to prove that he was a murdering sort. The reader is invited to recapitulate the planning which would need to go into this part of the Conspiracy, involving now new bullet-snatchers and -replacers in the Dallas police, the elimination of anyone who could prove that Oswald was elsewhere than next to Tippit’s car when the officer was shot, etc. Of course, all parties to this part of the Conspiracy have remained silent ever since. It is often asked why Oswald denied having killed the President, as though guilty people do not deny things all the time. The fact is that Oswald denied everything. He himself was the first to insist that the backyard photo of him with the gun was a forgery. Shown it during his interrogation, he dismissed it at a glance. He denied having hunted in this country; he denied possessing the rifle, any rifle; he denied ever using the pseudonym, “Alec Hidell,” which he had used to order the guns and on several identification documents; he made up an easily contradicted story that the manager of the Depository brought a rifle to the building; he denied the curtain-rod tale, saying he carried only his lunch to work that morning; he denied killing Tippit; when asked his reason for visiting his estranged wife and children on Thursday, assassination eve, rather than his usual Friday, he made up a story about a birthday party; he denied using an alias at his rooming house. He also refused to take a polygraph test. The law familiarly says that lies of this sort indicate a “consciousness of guilt” especially if they are explicable only by the hypothesis that the accused knows he is guilty. _____________ To sum up: Oswald (1) worked in the building which was the only source of shots; (2) owned and possessed the one and only murder rifle; (3) brought it to work with him the morning of the murder; (4) was at the murder window at the time the President was shot; (5) left the scene immediately after the shooting; (6) shot an officer who attempted to question him and then forcibly resisted arrest; (7) lied about crucial matters of fact when interrogated. There is an eighth reason to believe he was the killer: this was not his first assassination attempt. Among the photographs in Oswald’s effects were several of a house and adjoining driveway. Weeks after the assassination, the FBI discovered that the house in the photo was that of General Edwin Walker, a right-wing, anti-Castro, anti-civil-rights fanatic. The G-men irrefutably established the exact date the photo was taken, which turned out to be just before someone unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Walker on April 10, 1963. The photo was taken with Oswald’s camera; Oswald had a collection of news stories about the assassination attempt; bullets that had slammed into Walker’s wall were consistent with Oswald’s gun; a note written to his wife at the time, and her suspicions voiced then as well, indicate that he was Walker’s would-be assassin. In the Marines he had twice been court-martialed, once for threatening a superior officer. Needless to say, Oliver Stone tells us nothing of this. Why would Oswald try to kill a right-wing general? An obvious hypothesis, the one Stone and the critics feverishly try to silence, is that the attempt had something to do with Oswald’s intense left-wing sympathies. Stone’s campaign to transform him into a long-term right-winger, in league with Castro-hating activists, involves biographical surgery even more radical than the surgery which allegedly transformed the President’s wounds the night of the assassination. Oswald was already a left-winger at the age of thirteen when he distributed pro-Rosenberg material in New York. He defected to the Soviet Union and attempted to commit suicide when, notwithstanding his offer of radar data, the land of his dreams refused him citizenship. Disillusioned with the Soviet Union, he returned to the U.S. and transferred his fantasies to a new hero, Castro, whose picture he kept by his bed. He monitored radio broadcasts from Havana on his shortwave radio. Oswald subscribed to the Communist Daily Worker and the Trotskyist Militant; these are the newspapers he holds in the authentic photos of him with gun and pistol taken in his backyard. He formed a one-person chapter of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), handed out FPCC leaflets, which he himself printed, and spoke on the radio in its behalf. Imagining himself a Castro operative, and acting alone, as always, he briefly attempted to infiltrate an anti-Castro group in New Orleans but then immediately revealed his pro-Castro sympathies, to the group’s considerable dismay. He composed a schmaltzy and horrifically spelled “historic diary,” as he called it, and several paeans to Marxism. He visited the Cuban and Russian embassies in Mexico City in October 1963, seeking a visa to Cuba, and reacted in fury when denied his request. This recital only scratches the surface of Oswald’s left-wing record and his unstable, lone-wolf personality. But it is enough to sustain at least the possibility that the sole assassin of John F. Kennedy was a left-wing fantasist who found himself working in a building in front of which would come the President of the United States, the man whom Castro had publicly named as responsible for assassination attempts on his, Castro’s, life. The same fantasist who went to the Soviet Union expecting to be accepted as a hero (and told his Russian wife that someday he would be “president of the world”) now thought, incoherently, stupidly, that he would become a hero in Cuba as the assassin of Castro’s enemies: General Walker and President Kennedy. Character, as the Greeks said, is fate. _____________ IV If there was only one assassin and he was Lee Harvey Oswald, if there was no massive frameup or coverup, then Stone’s and every other conspiracy theory currently before the public are fatally wounded. The government’s allegedly ubiquitous hand disappears. Absent that hand, what other grand conspirators—military industrialists, mafiosi—would use so unlikely a killer, stage so unlikely a killing? For nearly 30 years, platoons of conspiracists have concertedly scavenged the record, floating their appalling and thrilling might-have-beens, unfazed by the contradictions and absurdities in their own wantonly selective accounts, often consciously, cunningly deceitful. They have refused to let go of any shred of their earliest suspicions, even when these have been demolished by decisive scientific findings. And the media have patronized them, for journalists love their thrilling insinuations and share many of their philosophical and political assumptions; and with regard to the assassination, they remain stone ignorant. Small wonder that 85 percent of the American public thinks there was a conspiracy of some sort. Recently, 13,000 copies of a new study guide, sympathetic to JFK, were sent to American high-school teachers. Our students know nothing about the case or the times; their teachers remember little, and many of them, especially the most “liberated,” 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 do not think we should rejoice that our children ask questions in this manner. I think we should weep; and scold the scurrilous. 1 One further comment on the matter of earwitness testimony. The House Assassinations Committee in 1979 concluded that a tape recording of police communications at the time of the assassination registered four, not three, shots, and specifically, three shots from the Depository and one from the knoll. Solely on the basis of that piece of evidence, the Committee decided that an unseen gunman shot an (unrecovered) bullet, and missed. In 1982 the National Academy of Science asked a blue-ribbon panel of physicists and acoustical experts to review the recording and the accompanying studies which had persuaded the House Committee that there was a gunman on the knoll. The panel concluded unanimously and vigorously that the alleged sounds on the tape could not have been made at the time of the shooting, and also scoffed at the calculations and methodology of the House consultants. 2 “Conspiracy Fever,” COMMENTARY, October 1975. 3 One wonders how the conspirators recovered and disposed of the embarrassing bullets from the other alleged guns. They could not have known where they would end up. Scores of collaborators would have been needed, at the ready, in the plaza, in the car, in the hospital, to snatch away the damning missiles without being noticed. 4 Conspiracists make a good deal of the charge that there were no other prints on the gun. The charge is untrue. The FBI report did not say there were no other prints, it said there were no other “identifiable” prints, which is not unusual. As experts testified, the rough wood stock and poor-quality metal of the gun tended to absorb moisture from the skin, making a clear print unlikely. 5 The traces of silver and antimony in the lead removed from Kennedy's brain were compared to traces in the lead found in bullet fragments, fired from Oswald's gun, which were recovered from the presidential limousine. Again, as was the case with Connally's wrist, the match was perfect. Previous Relevant Blog Posts on Jacob Cohen Conspiracy Fever by Jacob Cohen Cohen's first article on the JFK assassination. Conspiracy Fever -- Letters to the Editor Responses to Cohen's first article, and his reply.

Jacob Cohen speaking at a public event on the Brandeis campus in 1994. I posted Jacob Cohen's article "Conspiracy Fever" yesterday. Here are the letters to the editor about his article, and his response: JANUARY 1976 CULTURE & CIVILIZATION Assassination Theories by Our Readers To the Editor: I would like to comment on “Conspiracy Fever” by Jacob Cohen [October 1975], not from the point of. view of one who wishes to see the assassination laid at the doorstep of the CIA, the FBI, the KGB, or the family of Madame Nhu (that’s a different story), but from the point of view of one who is interested in guns and knows something about weapons and ballistics. First, the rifle. The 6.5 mm Carcano used by Oswald was a piece of junk when it was new (probably in the 1920’s). The rifles sold as surplus in this country were brought over disassembled as scrap in order to qualify for a lower import duty. They were then reassembled from parts, a process that did nothing to improve any inherent accuracy. The Carcano was not designed to have a scope mounted on it. Such rifles are more difficult to shoot with a scope than those which are specifically designed for scopes. This brings us to the scope. Oswald’s rifle had a very cheap scope mounted on it . . . which would not offer any promise of accuracy. When the rifle was tested by government authorities, it was found that the scope was loose and required a shim (a thin piece of metal between the mount and receiver of the rifle) in order to be used. This is crucial. If the weapon was in this condition when Oswald fired it, he could not have hit the automobile, let alone Kennedy. Now we come to Oswald’s ammunition. We know that he used a mixed bag of cartridges. Exhibit 399, the “magic bullet,” was a full-jacketed military round. The bullet which caused the head wound and which disintegrated was a soft-point sporting round. Other things being equal, different bullets in the same rifle will shoot to different points of impact. What does all this prove? It doesn’t prove a thing. It doesn’t show that Oswald was not the lone assassin. What it does show is the remarkable odds against this case. Oswald could have done it, by himself and unaided, if everything went just so. Based on my three points, however, I feel that the odds against this are fantastic. I would not be at all surprised if there was someone else shooting at the same time, not necessarily known to Oswald. Leo Sirota Baltimore, Maryland _____________ To the Editor: . . . Jacob Cohen addresses some specific points that the critics of the Warren Commission have raised and attempts to refute them with some rather labored and tortuous reasoning. His main target is the “recklessness of . . . critics of the Warren Commission and the tolerance for recklessness which has developed in this country in the last decade.” . . . But I insist that it is the defenders of the Report, not the critics, who are reckless. This can be shown by exposing the larger, overall pattern of events that the Warren Report asks us to accept; there is no need to examine the million specific items of evidence, whose details are subject to challenge and controversy. Step back from the trees and get a view of the forest. This is best achieved by looking at two different behavior patterns: Did Oswald behave the way a lone killer might be expected to? Did the police, FBI, and Secret Service behave as if they really thought the man they caught was acting alone? Note the following facts, acknowledged both by critics and defenders. Moments after the shooting, Oswald is observed casually drinking a Coca-Cola at a vending machine. Then, after leaving the murder site on foot, he takes a bus that passes the site again on its way to his home. He has made no plans to flee the country or even the city. He only wants to go home to get his second gun, with which he later shoots a policeman. Why the sudden need for another gun after he has made good his escape? Doesn’t this clearly indicate that Oswald perceived a new, unanticipated danger? Since the police were not chasing him at that point, is it reckless to conclude that someone else was? Is this the behavior of a murderer working alone (and successfully, at that), or is it the behavior of someone who feels betrayed or double-crossed? When Oswald is finally captured, what does he say? A lone assassin would either boast of his feat or he would deny involvement. Oswald did neither. In a brief exposure to the press at the Dallas police station. he said, “They are making me the patsy,” or words to that effect. Is it reckless to claim that this hints at greater complexity than a simple denial? And then, of course, Oswald was permanently silenced before he could elaborate further. He had no chance to hire a lawyer or make a statement to a court. Very convenient. Consider another aspect of Oswald’s behavior: his pre-assassination activities. It is known that he had government training in an intelligence-related field while in the Marine Corps. Afterward, when dealing with the government bureaucracy, he was able to circumvent the red tape. Whether he requested discharge from the military, or re-issuance of a passport forfeited upon defection to Russia, or entry and exits from foreign countries, he had but to ask, and it was given. The curtain of red tape that impedes the rest of us was always pulled aside to speed Oswald on his way. Since Oswald had no money, no business connections, no regular job, and no known influential friends, is it not obvious that he had to have had covert government assistance of some kind? And since he was intelligence-trained, fluent in Russian, and married to the niece of a Russian intelligence officer, is it reasonable to conclude that his travels and activities were merely the random wanderings of a lost soul? Are skeptics reckless in pointing out that this is a pattern typical of covert intelligence activities? It is not my purpose to hazard a guess as to whom Oswald was working with or for, or why he was doing whatever he was doing. But what I am sure of is that the Warren Commission was trying hard, much too hard, to convince us that Oswald was a loner, a misfit, who did everything on his own, uninvolved with others. Nonsense, utter nonsense. What about the behavior of the police? After Oswald was killed in the police station, we eagerly awaited disclosure of the results of the two-day interrogation so we could at least find out what Oswald meant when he said he was being made the “patsy.” He had been interrogated for many hours by three different law-enforcement agencies: the Dallas police, the FBI, and the Secret Service. Afterward, each agency said it had not made notes, kept no transcript; this despite the observed presence of a stenographer in the interrogation room. We were assured that Oswald said nothing of any interest, other than denials of guilt. Is the total absence of detailed notes the normal behavior of investigators who have just cracked the biggest murder case of our time? Are we really reckless in claiming that these patterns clearly show that someone is covering up something, or, more likely, that a lot of people are covering up a lot of things? . . . Lewis Lederer Rockville, Maryland _____________ To the Editor: . . . Jacob Cohen ridicules the contentions of those who are honestly, and I think understandably, concerned about the non-fatal wound in President Kennedy’s back. For example, the whole question of the back wound is complicated by the fact that the autopsy pathologists did not dissect the neck and upper back of the President. Such a procedure in a gun-shot wound incident is routine. . . . The fact that this wound was not dissected at autopsy certainly raises a question about the competence of those who performed the autopsy. At least it does raise the question of why the wound was not dissected. In a sworn statement made after the Warren Commission hearings, one of the autopsy pathologists maintained that the back wound was not dissected because a high-ranking military officer, unnamed, ordered the pathologists not to make such a dissection. Later it was learned that the high-ranking officer was not a physician and in fact had no competence in the area of forensic science. There is another problem associated with the autopsy which is not always realized. At Parkland Hospital at least four highly trained competent surgeons, of unquestionable reputation, stated that they had inserted into the President’s chest cavity special tubes which they felt would relieve pressure in the chest and aid any possible breathing that the wounded President might be attempting. Each surgeon worked together with a second surgeon to insert these tubes. There is no question about the fact that this technique was part of their treatment procedure. To be specific, they cut holes in the chest wall of the President and inserted these tubes. However, at autopsy, we are told, the chest cavity of the late President showed a completely intact wall. In other words, the autopsy pathologists denied the existence of any hole going into the chest cavity. It seems obvious that confusion has arisen about this. It is hard to accept the idea that four competent, trained surgeons would think they had put holes in a man’s chest when they actually hadn’t. This is especially true when the surgeons were working as a team. One surgeon might, in the confusion of the treatment room, miss and insert the tube in some way that did not invade the chest cavity. A miss by four trained surgeons is so improbable as to be labeled virtually impossible. How then do the pathologists report no invasion of the chest cavity? We do not know. But we also are concerned why the color photographs of the internal wall of the President’s chest cavity have been suppressed up to this time. Another matter that seems not to disturb Mr. Cohen is the fact that the Kennedy family took possession of the autopsy materials, including X-rays and photographs, and even now are exercising censorship over the use of these materials. Such a situation is unique in the history of the United States. Materials that are pertinent to a capital crime do not become the private property of the victim’s family. These materials belong to the state; they may be subject to restricted use only by the appropriate court, not by a private family. This strange arrangement with respect to the Kennedy autopsy materials is just another item in a whole mosaic of strange and unusual circumstances that lead to honest questions. I personally am bewildered by Mr. Cohen’s referring to “Dr Wecht’s species of respectable fanaticism.” . . . Dr. Wecht is widely respected in this country and around the world as a leader in forensic medicine. He is past president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. By no stretch of the imagination can one call him a fanatic. I am surprised that this kind of character assassination is permitted in COMMENTARY. I submit that there is in the entire article a flavor of the old logical fallacy known as argumentum ad hominem. . . . I would now like to discuss the so-called pristine (or stretcher) bullet which according to the Warren Commission is said to have gone through the President’s body, entering the back and coming out in the lower neck, missing all bone in its passage through the President’s body from a right to left direction. The bullet then is said to have entered the extreme right side of Governor Connally’s body, tearing out his fifth rib leaving the body and smashing through his right wrist and ending up in his right thigh. During its passage this bullet left significant amounts of lead, and other metal particles, in Connally’s body. Included in these particles is a clearly visible particle in Governor Connally’s right thigh bone. But the bullet, when carefully examined and photographed, seems virtually undeformed. There is a slight notch in the nose, where the FBI took a sample of metal for analysis. The base of the bullet is depressed in a lateral way, a condition which raises a serious question about the real possibility that this deformation occurred after the bullet was fired. Moreover, Mr. Cohen seems not to be aware of the fact that the Warren Commission impugned its own pathologists who under oath all agreed that the so-called pristine bullet could not have caused all of the injuries seen in Governor Connally. . . . I have had extensive experience with gunshot wounds, but I have yet to see a bullet, even a bullet moving at low velocity, that does not become deformed in some way when it hits bone. The idea that this pristine bullet could have smashed a rib and a wrist and shown up with no deformation is so improbable as to be impossible. Indeed, Mr. Cohen seems unaware of the fact that the Warren Commission itself was not very certain about its stand. The subjunctive mood is used so widely in the Report that if the defenders of the Commission interpret the Report carefully, the conclusion with respect to the one-bullet theory is really not a conclusion at all. It is a carefully worded possibility with the subjunctive mood used most judiciously. Present forensic scientists who are concerned about the inadequacies of the Warren Report on the death of President Kennedy do not subscribe to the theory that the head shot that killed the President came from the front. Dr. Finck, the army pathologist who was part of the autopsy team, described in some detail what was clearly an entrance wound in the back of the President’s skull. He showed an illustration of why he arrived at that conclusion. The conclusion is in line with the general principles that we all teach in our courses in forensic science. Therefore, from the autopsy material now available to us, there is no reason to question the direction from which the fatal wound to the President came. Mr. Cohen and others who have tried to maintain that the shot came from the front because of the way the President’s head moved after being shot, completely misunderstand how bullets exert their action. Bullets do not push people in any direction. Western movies and television “whodunits” tend to mislead the average person into thinking that when a bullet hits someone, that individual then is pushed over as if hit with a battering ram. This is not so. Whatever direction the President’s head moved is really not relevant to the direction of the bullet. Once a bullet enters the skull, for example, it exerts its energy in all directions; it completely puts out a functioning brain. Therefore the muscles of the body are at the mercy of any physical forces such as gravity, movement of the automobile, and so forth. The direction of the President’s head movement had nothing to do with the direction of the bullet. There seems to be at this time no evidence of the head shot resulting from a bullet coming from anywhere but behind. The same conclusion does not obtain with respect to the non-fatal wounds of the President and of Governor Connally. To refer to honest scientists who would like to see an objective evaluation of all the evidence as cranks is a personal attack on individuals who do not agree with the party line. But secrecy is always suspect. It in fact there are no deficiencies of a serious nature in the Warren Commission Report, why then is there this paranoia on the part of so many officials and so many defenders of the Report to keep the mass of information, presumably available in the National Archives, secret? Why are there so many barriers to an adequate reexamination of this material? Why was there never an adequate dissection of the brain of the late President? These are serious questions that . . . deserve an answer. In my opinion, as a forensic-scientist who has modest qualifications in the area, the John F. Kennedy murder case should be reopened; not in the form of a congressional investigation, but rather by setting up a panel of competent civilian forensic scientists. These scientists should have absolutely no connection with the federal government. They should be given complete and uninhibited access to all the materials that are still in existence related to the situation. I also urge that one or two foreign. European forensic scientists be asked to join this panel. These individuals should then reexamine all the material without interference from any governmental agency, and come up with their final evaluation. . . . Until such a project is undertaken, there will be a continuing lack of belief in government pronouncements coming from Washington. . . . Previous panels that examined the situation were not free of government interference. They were appointed by specific government officials and were under the thumb of these officials. May I end by suggesting that if anyone should have the finger of shame pointed at him, it is Mr. Cohen for his immoderate and inappropriate personal attacks on many concerned and qualified technical experts who would like to see this sad case finally and objectively evaluated. Charles G. Wilber Director and Deputy County CoronerLarimer County, Colorado _____________ To the Editor: . . . In the conflict over the location of President Kennedy’s back wound, Jacob Cohen sides with the Warren Commission and puts this wound at the base of the neck. . . . But he passes over an FBI report by agents who attended the autopsy who describe the hole as “below the shoulders,” photographs of the President’s shirt and jacket which show the hole to be some four inches below the base of the neck, and a sketch made by a doctor at the autopsy. To Mr. Cohen these are “human errors” and the supposition is that the President’s shirt and coat hunched up his neck as he waved to the crowd. But Mr. Cohen is apparently unaware of a document that virtually pinpoints the back wound. Admiral George G. Burkley’s death certificate describes this wound “in the posterior back” as being at about “the level of the third thoracic vertabra,” or three or four inches below the shoulder. With the body before him, Commander Boswell diagrammed the wound in the same place as Burkley’s description. But this is not news. However, the original diagram contains the notation, “verified by G. Burkley.” The Warren Commission published this document with Dr. Burkley’s verification missing. Add to this the rather extraordinary contemporaneous notes taken by a Secret Service agent riding in a car following the President. Agent Bennett wrote that he saw a bullet strike the President “about four inches down from the right shoulder.” Which of these two versions is more believable? A photograph, the descriptions of two FBI agents, the sketch of an autopsy doctor, and the eyewitness account of a Secret Service agent, or the Warren Commission’s reconstruction based on a single measurement scribbled in the margin of the diagram? On November 24, 1963, autopsy surgeon Commander James J. Humes certified that he had “destroyed by burning certain preliminary draft notes relating” to this autopsy. Why? The Commission didn’t ask. The original certificate contained a handwritten note, “accepted and approved this date. George G. Burkley. Rear Adm. M.C.U.S.N., Physician to the President.” Burkley was Humes’s superior and it would appear that Humes was following orders. Whose? Nobody asks. Again, Burkley’s authorization is absent from the published document. That’s not all. Commander Humes’s handwritten (undated) autopsy report contains corrections with the marginal initials of Admiral Burkley beside them. These initials have been removed from the published exhibit, thus making it appear that Commander Humes corrected his own report, when in fact the White House medical officer did. If Lyndon Johnson, through Admiral Burkley, was correcting, supervising, and authorizing (ordering?) the destruction of certain preliminary draft notes, one might properly ask why. In any political murder is it wise to allow the beneficiaries, no matter their virtue, to supervise the autopsy of the victim? Was it necessary to omit these White House authorizations and verifications from the official record? Mr. Cohen attacks the critics for suggesting that a bullet was planted at Parkland Hospital. If this were a function of a plot, he asks, then how would this “bullet messenger” know where to plant it or even if it would be necessary to plant a bullet? Good point. Mr. Cohen is assuming the assassins were outside the motorcade. What if they were within the presidential party? In this case, wouldn’t they have the run of Parkland hospital, know that a bullet was needed—perhaps to replace one of theirs? It was not the critics, as Mr. Cohen suggests, but a Secret Service agent who rode in the President’s car who first advanced the theory, in the autopsy room, that the bullet that struck Kennedy in the back “worked itself out,” and onto a stretcher where it was ultimately recovered by another Secret Service agent, who carried it to Washington. When police pass along evidence they are trained to inscribe it to establish a chain of possession. However, in the case of the Parkland bullet, this procedure was ignored. The only inscription on CE399 came from two FBI agents who received it from Secret Service Chief Rowley that evening. About the only conclusion consistent with this chain of possession is that Oswald fired a bullet in Dallas and hit the Washington headquarters of the FBI. Fred T. Newcomb Perry Adams Van Nuys, California _____________ To the Editor: According to Jacob Cohen, Dr. Cyril Wecht, one of the world’s most renowned forensic pathologists, is a kind of “respectable fanatic.” The epithets he reserves for other critics of the Warren Commission (including myself) are more pungent: we are “reckless,” “conscious liars,” guilty of “conscious deceit.” And why are we all these awful things? Because, it turns out, we disagree with Mr. Cohen. Take, for example, Mr. Cohen’s claim that I am “dishonest” because I don’t acknowledge any problem with the contention that Governor Connally was hit through the chest and forearm (two inches up from the wrist) between Zapruder frames 237 and 238. In the six hundredths of a second between these two frames we observe (even according to Mr. Cohen) dramatic changes in Governor Connally. Fourteen frames earlier, at Zapruder frame 224, President Kennedy is already reacting to a bullet hit. Over the intervening fourteen frames Connally gives no indication of having been struck by a bullet. Then, suddenly, between frames 237 and 238 dramatic changes occur: his right shoulder is driven down by 20 degrees, his cheeks puff with air, his hair is dislodged. Mr. Cohen acknowledges these effects and then accuses me of being “dishonest.” Why? Because I won’t agree with him that at this point Connally’s wrist/forearm is not in a position to have incurred the wound his doctors describe. Mr. Cohen’s view may hold some plausibility for a reader who has not seen the relevant photographs. It probably does little good to point out that to me and most others who have looked at these photographs Connally’s wrist/forearm does appear to be in the right position to have been hit at this point. Yet if my own opinion on this point cannot be taken as authoritative, perhaps the opinion of the doctor who operated on Connally’s arm might be seen as more authoritative than the opinions of either Mr. Cohen or myself. Dr. Charles Gregory testified before the Warren Commission as to his treatment of Governor Connally. Just before testifying he was shown individual frames from the Zapruder film with a view to determining when the Governor was hit. In response to a question from Commission Counsel Arlen Specter, Dr. Gregory remarked: It seemed to me in frames marked 234, 235, and 236 Governor Connally was in a position such that a single missile entered his back, could have passed through his chest, through his right forearm, and struck his thigh. I find it amusing that the very doctor who worked on Connally’s arm should pick out just those frames where Mr. Cohen states an alignment is impossible as the most likely point where an alignment occurs. Nor should one neglect the testimony of Dr. Robert Shaw, who operated on Governor Connally’s chest: Dr. Shaw: . . . And in trying to place this actual frame that these frames are numbered when the Governor was hit, my opinion was that it was frame number, let’s see, I think it was No. 36. Mr. Specter: 236? Dr. Shaw: 236, give or take 1 or 2 frames. It was right in 35, 36, 37, perhaps. So much for Mr. Cohen’s opinion as to the position of Governor Connally’s arm at Zapruder frame 237. There is, however, powerful additional evidence that Connally’s wrist was hit at this point. At Zapruder frame 230 he can be seen quite clearly sitting composed, holding his Stetson in his extended right arm. The following frames are a bit blurred, but the wrist appears undamaged up until frames 239 and 240 where it begins to droop downward. By the mid-240’s his right hand and wrist have collapsed even further. By frame 249 his wrist can be seen dangling nearly straight down as he falls backward into Mrs. Connally’s arms. Everything we see on the Zapruder film suggests that Connally’s wrist was hit between frames 237 and 238—the very point where Mr. Cohen alleges it could not have been hit. The other, less original points in Mr. Cohen’s polemic may be rebutted in a similar fashion. For my part I would not want to call him “dishonest” just because he disagrees with me, or because he did not mention Drs. Shaw and Gregory’s testimony or what the Zapruder film shows concerning Connally’s wrist injury. I suspect he was unaware of it. Pressed to fling an insult back at Mr. Cohen, the most I could muster would be the observation that he is probably not very well-informed about many of these matters. Josiah Thompson Haverford, Pennsylvania _____________ To the Editor: Jacob Cohen’s carefully documented article effectively refutes the conspiratorial theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination and the Rosenberg and Hiss cases. However, Mr. Cohen does not address himself to the issue of why such theories arise so frequently and achieve such great popularity and acceptance. No doubt there are some proponents of conspiracy theories whose interests are primarily self-serving—to sell a book or achieve personal notoriety—but it seems doubtful that this is the primary motivation of all the conspiracy advocates, and in no way does it apply to those who simply accept these ideas without publicizing them. I believe that the underlying motivation in the advocacy and acceptance of conspiracy theories is the fundamental human need to deal with the anxiety aroused by uncertainty and irrationality. To find a conspiracy gives one control over a situation; a conspiracy may be evil, but it is comprehensible, it can be fought against, it can be defeated. How much more comforting to believe this than to think that the murder of the most powerful man on earth was the irrational act of a deluded mind—a circumstance over which we can have no control because we can neither comprehend nor predict it. The need to master the uncertain universe through making it rational finds its expression in both science and religion. Both are systems which offer explanations for the turbulent events governing our lives, and both offer methods to control these events—the one through natural means, the other through appeals to supernatural forces. The relief of anxiety that comes from the establishment of certainty finds its clinical expression in the familiar observation that the decompensating and frightened schizophrenic patient actually experiences relief when he forms a delusion explaining his (up to then) incomprehensible anxiety. For him, too, there are no coincidences; the footsteps outside the doors are his persecutors, the car horn outside the window is a signal. Although frightening in and of themselves, the delusions permit the patient to “understand” what is happening to him and to do something about it, at the very least to hide in his room. Thus it is with conspiracy theories. In a turbulent, confused, and often irrational world, it is comforting to realize that there are, after all, people plotting all these events, and, if we can just find them out, we can stop them, or, at the very least, we can hide in our rooms. Itamar Salamon Department of Psychiatry Albert Einstein College of Medicine New York City _____________ To the Editor: Referring to my book, The Assassination Tapes, Jacob Cohen writes: “A writer like George O’Toole . . . rehearses lines of argument which he admits are far-fetched. . . .” I don’t know what Mr. Cohen has in mind in this perhaps intentionally vague passage, but he creates the impression that I have half-heartedly offered improbable objections to the official government theories of the assassination of President Kennedy. In fact, my book was written in earnest and every assertion and allegation is thoroughly supported by the documentary and tape-recorded evidence I have cited in the text. Furthermore, in the months since the first publication of The Assassination Tapes, not one of the witnesses I interviewed has come forward to say I misquoted him or to explain the serious discrepancies between his version of the events of November 22, 1963 and the facts as established elsewhere. Mr. Cohen notes that The Assassination Tapes “received a big play in the sex magazines,” apparently referring to the fact that two chapters of my book were published in Penthouse magazine. I don’t know how to respond to this kind of McCarthyism except to point out that Tad Szulc, Harrison Salisbury, Karl Hess, Jeff Gerth, and other outstanding journalists have recently contributed to the pages of Penthouse. But Mr. Cohen refers to “sex magazines,” implying through his use of the plural that my book received “a big play” in several such publications. Apparently Mr. Cohen’s familiarity with sex magazines is more extensive than my own, so I cannot refute his charge. In his next paragraph Mr. Cohen charges that “many” of the critics of the Warren Report are “conscious liars.” It is regrettable that COMMENTARY chose to print this cowardly libel, which defames a whole group of people without offering any of them the chance to reply. If Mr. Cohen had the courage to name those he finds guilty of lying, he would have the opportunity to present his evidence for such a charge in a court of law. That compendium of lies and absurdities known as the Warren Commission Report can make but one tenuous claim to credibility: the reputations of the seven men who signed their names to it. Perhaps it should not be surprising, then, that the frequent tactic of defenders of the Warren Report is to defame those who dare to dissent from its conclusions. George O’Toole Gaithersburg, Maryland _____________ Jacob Cohen writes: I shall comment on the letters one at a time and in order. The points raised by Leo Sirota are entirely academic. The best proof that a gunman could have hit the President using Oswald’s rifle, is that one did. The rifle, indubitably Oswald’s, was found shortly after the assassination on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository building, where several witnesses saw a gun or gunman just before the assassination. Ballistics tests conducted the next day by the FBI established that the nearly intact bullet and two large fragments which were recovered had been fired from that rifle to the exclusion of all others. Later, outside experts confirmed these conclusions; there is not even a hint of a second gun in the ballistics reports or discussion of those reports. When pressed, the critics claim that the bullets from an alleged second and, for some, third gun have mysteriously disappeared. I don’t know where Mr. Sirota came up with his “soft-point” bullet: the bullet and bullet fragments recovered were of the same “full-jacketed” sort and many subsequent tests have shown that they were fully capable of causing the head wound. If Mr. Sirota is interested in pursuing the academic point, I direct him to the article of Dr. John K. Lattimer, et al., in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine (April 1972) or to an account of the 1968 CBS News documentary by Stephen White, Should We Now Believe the Warren Report? (Macmillan), which should convince the convincible that Oswald’s rifle was accurate enough and powerful enough, and the ammunition he used reliable enough, to have done all the Warren Commission said it did. While I did not go into questions of Oswald’s guilt or alleged evidences of a prior conspiracy in my article, Lewis Lederer is correct in guessing that I support the Warren Commission’s contention that Oswald was the lone assassin and would support, with a slight qualification, the Commission’s conclusion that there is no evidence of a prior conspiracy. In answer to Mr. Lederer’s first question, I would say Oswald acted exactly the way a killer would have acted: he fled the scene of the crime, he killed a policeman soon thereafter and then fled that scene, he resisted when arrested, the murder pistol in his possession, and, if you can believe his several interrogators, he lied several times during extensive questioning for which, alas, we have no transcript. Beyond that, the evidence implicating him in the assassination and placing him at the scene is simply immense, i.e., it was his gun, he had brought it that morning, his palm and finger prints were found on the cardboard boxes below and next to the window through which shots came. I do not find his protestations of innocence, or his claim that he is a patsy, exculpatory. Many guilty men have said the same. To be sure, the street witnesses who say they saw him on the sixth floor are shaky, and no one has placed him at the source of the assassination at the precise moment of the shooting. But then no one has placed him elsewhere either. The Warren Commission could only go on the evidence it had, which is very winning, if not a million per cent conclusive. I have often wondered why the mysterious forces which allegedly were framing and/or betraying Oswald and which have supposedly persuaded hundreds of people to lie or remain silent, could not have gotten someone to place him at the scene of the shooting. As for the possibility of a prior conspiracy of some sort involving Oswald with the CIA or FBI or KGB, I cannot prove a negative, I cannot prove that there was not such a conspiracy, I can only say that I have seen no evidence establishing one or which would even give rise to plausible suspicions. I think I am aware of every line of insinuation taken by the critics and the evidence which, they say, provokes their suspicion. I have also studied the history of witch hunts, purge trials, and the rampaging accusations of persecutors and would-be persecutors like Senator Joseph McCarthy and District Attorney Jim Garrison and know how easily innocent coincidence can be made to seem sinister. For me, Oswald’s peregrinations to and from Russia are given plausible explanation in the Warren Report. Unlike Mr. Lederer, I find him to be a quintessential misfit and loner, and, I might say, a most unlikely spy. But let me add this qualification: like most citizens I have been startled by recent FBI and CIA revelations. When Senator Schweiker announced in late October that in one week he would “blow the top off the Warren Report” with revelations about important materials kept from the Commission by the FBI and CIA, I was acutely interested in what he might reveal. I still am. I turn now to the muddled communication of Charles G. Wilber, whose reputation for close reading must suffer a bit in light of his accusation that I think there was an assassin to the right front of the President. I refuted this contention at great length and am delighted to add Dr. Wilber to the long list of forensic pathologists which I gave in my article who ridicule this major contention of the Warren Report critics. Like many forensic pathologists, including, most prominently, Dr. Wecht, Dr. Wilber questions the competency, in forensic pathology, of the autopsy team. But the whole point of my article was that we need no longer rely on the original autopsy because its findings with regard to the pivotal questions of the assassination have been sustained by some thirteen doctors, including seven forensic pathologists, who, since 1968, have examined the X-rays and photographs and other autopsy material. Since Dr. Wilber is partial to presidents of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, let me add that since my article appeared the president-elect of that organization, Dr. James Weston, has reported on CBS that his week-long review of autopsy materials confirms the autopsy findings with regard to the single-assassin theory. Every doctor, including Dr. Wecht, who has seen that material agrees (1) that there was no hit from the right front, and (2) that the bullet which struck Kennedy in the back passed through his body at a downward angle and out his throat. Of all these, only Dr. Wecht still dissents from the Warren Commission’s conclusions, but not for the same reasons he did before he saw the autopsy materials. Why is Dr. Wilber’s letter silent with regard to these findings and opinions of his colleagues? What does he mean at the end of his letter when he says that “previous panels that examined the situation were not free of governmental interference”? Are the professional judgments of the doctors on the Clark panel, and of the doctors who have seen the materials since, suspect? No scholar can oppose the reopening of any case, and I do not oppose the reopening of this one, but the fact is that with regard to the autopsy findings the case has been reopened and the Warren Commission sustained, and yet respectable fanatics press on. A final word to Dr. Wilber. Far from being unaware of the Kennedy family’s selfish and provocative role in keeping medical material from the Warren Commission and the general public, I was the first writer to delineate that role, as I pointed out in my article. I think the Kennedys have acted selfishly and unwisely in the matter, but I find nothing sinister in the possibility that they did not wish to share the President’s broken body or some details of his health with the general public. Fred T. Newcomb and Perry Adams also fail to comment on the expert analysis and reanalysis of X-rays and photographs which have taken place over the years since the appearance of the Warren Report, decisively resolving earlier ambiguities. I did not question the honesty of the mistakes made by what I termed the first-generation critics, though I find the conspiracy implicit in the earliest allegations beyond rational belief. But what of those second- and third-generation writers and lecturers, trained scholars, lawyers, doctors, who would discuss questions like the location of the back wound and never even mention to their audiences that others have reviewed the autopsy materials and confirmed the original autopsy report? That’s called covering up, and the appearance of such activity by critics deserves the same plain characterization as its appearance in government. Two other points. With regard to the bullet plant, even a Secret Service agent would not have known on November 22, 1963 that a bullet was needed on Connally’s stretcher because the necessity of such a bullet for a single-assassin theory was not clear for months afterward. Second, Commander Humes has said that he destroyed the notes because he didn’t want to leave those blood-spattered remains of the President he loved to posterity. I think he erred, but consider this: if he burned them to cover up a lie, would he have left a note saying he had burned them? Josiah Thompson, like Dr. Wilber, protests my characterization of Dr. Wecht, but I’m afraid that what his letter says and does not say lends further substance to my other characterizations. In his book, Six Seconds in Dallas, Mr. Thompson defends three primary hypotheses about the assassination: (1) On the basis of his close analysis of the Zapruder frames 313 et seq., which show Kennedy’s head and body moving and turning sharply to the left, he claims that the President was struck sharply from a source to the right and perhaps slightly in front of him. (2) He claims that the bullet which struck Kennedy high in the back did not exit from his throat and therefore could not have hit Connally. The throat wound, he suggests, was caused by a sliver of bone set flying by the bullets which struck the President’s skull. (3) Again, on the basis of his close analysis of the Zapruder film, he argues that Governor Connally’s motions prove he was struck in frame 238 by a second bullet, and, since it is so soon after the Kennedy hit, by a second gunman. Now as it happens, and as I pointed out in my article, even the world-renowned Dr. Wecht abandoned the first two of these contentions after spending two days with the autopsy material. Here is what I wrote: Whole portions of Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas must be discarded as worthless, for in matters of factual truth, momentary ingenuity and (apparently) passionate sincerity count for nothing. Professor Thompson, who worked closely with Dr. Wecht in preparing his book, has known for nearly three years that major portions of it must be discarded as baseless gossip, and so too has every student of the assassination. One recalls no public concessions of error. And still there is no concession of error, even on the points on which Dr. Wecht has reversed himself. In a television debate with me in November, Mr. Thompson continued to argue for the frontal hit, which, as Dr. Wilber points out, has been abandoned by everyone who has seen the autopsy photographs and X-rays. It is inconceivable that the sharp hit from the right postulated by Mr. Thompson could have left no trace. But even more remarkable than Mr. Thompson’s silence on these salient points is his response to my argument that Governor Connally’s position in frame 238 makes it impossible for him to have received all his five wounds at that point whereas Connally’s position just after the Warren Commission says he was hit (as he emerges from behind the famous sign) is in consistent alignment. I am glad to have reaffirmation on this point from the Itek Corporation as reported by the CBS News Special on the assassination in late November, but a perusal of the relevant frames shows that the photographic expertise of that company was not needed. And this is not just a matter of me disagreeing with Mr. Thompson or him with me, that’s a debating trick; it is a question of which of our versions agrees with historical reality. As I wrote: A bullet striking Connally when the critics say he was hit . . . would have had to exit from the chest [next to the right nipple, moving at a downward angle of 25 degrees in a right to left direction] . . . taken at least two sharp turns upward in mid-air—right and then left into the knuckle side of the wrist; and then, upon exiting on the palm side, further up in the air than the wound of entry, would have had to execute a very sharp U-turn [avoiding Connally’s hat] into the thigh: plainly impossible. To this Mr. Thompson replies only that he and others see it differently. The reader should not be misled into thinking that we are Hamlet and Polonius disagreeing over whether a cloud looks like a camel or a whale. The differences between us are not at all subtle. Does Mr. Thompson mean to suggest that in frame 238 Connally’s arm is below the right nipple and over his left thigh? In what precise respects is my account of the impossible path a bullet would have to follow in frame 238 incorrect? Before such questions, which were all raised in my article, Mr. Thompson, who in his book counters medical testimony with painstaking analysis of the Zapruder film, remains mute, passing swiftly on to Doctors Shaw and Gregory. Both testified in 1964 that Connally could have received his wounds in 238. Neither had studied the Zapruder films closely, and in my view both were wrong. Mr. Thompson quotes from Volume IV; one longs for his comment on Dr. Gregory’s testimony in Volume VI, where he gives the bulk of his testimony on the Governor’s position when struck. On page 101 we see Commission counsel, Arlen Specter, showing Dr. Gregory a diagram (No. 5) from the so-called Gregory Exhibit No. 1. Mr. Specter: Now, Dr. Gregory, I turn to Diagram No. 5 which depicts a seated man and what does Diagram No. 5 depict to your eye with respect to what action is described on the seated man? Dr. Gregory: Well, I should say that this composite has aligned the several parts of the body demonstrated in such a way that a single missile following a constant trajectory could have accounted for all of the wounds which are shown. The seated man in Diagram No. 5 has his arm across his chest, the forearm below the right nipple and over the left thigh and is not at all like Governor Connally’s position in frame 238. Errors are human, and so too is the stubborn refusal to admit error or even to acknowledge difficulties in one’s argument when they are demonstrated. But the latter qualities are less defensible in a scholar. Mr. Thompson is a civil man, and, as I learned, a most courteous debater. Perhaps my characterizations, applied to him, are too harsh. Still, on this performance I must say of him what I said of Dr. Wecht: “Anyone who has seen speculation after speculation about the assassination refuted and continues to proclaim his vast distrust of the Warren Commission’s conclusions while hanging from this narrow thread is receiving inspiration from a source outside of this world and its evidences.” Itamar Salamon comments on what may be some of the psychological sources of such inspiration. He sees a need to deal with uncertainty and irrationality. I see that too (I shall quote from Mr. O’Toole in a moment), but add another need clearly perceptible in some cases: a need to create uncertainty and the appearance of irrationality. Othello may have been paranoid, Dr. Salamon, but Iago was not. I am sorry that he took my remarks to mean that I charged the critics with a desire to sell books or achieve personal notoriety. I am saying something quite different. I see political (and cultural) motives, as indeed I see political motives in Oswald, who also should not be reduced to his sub-psyche. History is filled with instances of deliberate distortions aiming at discrediting regimes; why is it so outrageous to suggest that this may be, in part, such an instance? The interested reader is directed to Fritz Tobias’s account of the Communist party’s outright fabrications in connection with the Reichstag fire, and instances could be cited from the Right as well. We have seen so much government deceit and cover-up in recent times, and we have called it by its true name—why then does it seem uncivil when someone suggests that the adversary culture has shown some of the same characteristics as its quarry? I agree with the critics who say we should not use psychological reductions to explain away assassins. I only add that we should not use the same reductions to explain away the critics or even part of their audience. Finally, there is George O’Toole’s high and mighty fury. I called Mr. O’Toole “fanciful” and said that in his book, The Assassination Tapes (Penthouse Press), he “rehearses lines of argument which he admits are far-fetched, as if to say: any event which can generate such heated comment, even plainly absurd comment, can’t be completely clean.” He challenges me to provide examples. Here is one. On pages 12-13 Mr. O’Toole recites a “seemingly endless chain of coincidences binding the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy.” Both men were shot in the back of the head in the presence of their wives, on Friday, shortly after referring to the possibility of assassination. Neither man ever regained consciousness. Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln, and Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy. . . . Commenting on these coincidences, Mr. O’Toole writes: While the coincidences between the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations can have no deeper meaning, except perhaps that the laws of probability were suspended in favor of some strange example of Jungian synchronicity, there are other unlikely juxtapositions of events surrounding the Dallas shooting, and these have given rise to dark suspicions. He then mentions one George de Mohrenschildt, Russian-born, who was perhaps Oswald’s closest friend after he returned from Russia. De Mohrenschildt, it seems, was in Guatemala on an alleged hiking trip with his wife during the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and later gave a report on his trip to the U.S. government. “This probably means CIA,” says O’Toole. Then the clincher: Such coincidences may seem implausible or suspicious, but consider this: Shortly after George de Mohrenschildt emigrated to the United States, he made the acquaintance of a family named Bouvier and their small daughter Jacqueline. A quarter of a century before he befriended the accused presidential assassin, de Mohrenschildt met John F. Kennedy’s future wife and in-laws! That such circumstances are coincidental is almost beyond belief, but how else, in sanity, can they be explained? I find this and most of the rest of Mr. O’Toole’s book slightly moonstruck. I also find much of the criticism of the Warren Commission to be a form of intellectual pornography, creating cheap thrills with little real payoff. Perhaps I should not have bullied Mr. O’Toole with his appearance in Penthouse to make that point. But I hold to my general analysis and to my characterization of the criticism.

Jacob "Jerry" Cohen Jacob Cohen wrote three excellent articles on the JFK assassination for Commentary Magazine. He died in 2023 at the age of 89. Here is his first article. Stay tuned. I will also be posting his other two articles. October 1975 Conspiracy Fever How can one explain the extraordinary degree of political distrust and, beyond that, the pervasive taste for mystery and conspiracy… by Jacob Cohen How can one explain the extraordinary degree of political distrust and, beyond that, the pervasive taste for mystery and conspiracy which is everywhere so conspicuous in America today? Old conspiracy theories (concerning Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and the assassination of President Kennedy) are out of the dustbin and enjoying new life; there seem to be more than enough readers for five different treatments of that laughable non-mystery, the Bermuda Triangle; the flying-saucer faithful are riding high; and a new species of high-class monster movie (The Conversation, Chinatown, Night Moves, The Parallax View) ends with the monster alive and still menacing. The message in these movies seems to be that we are surrounded by unconquerably complex and sinister forces; withdrawal and resignation are offered as appropriate responses. The customary explanation is that recent revelations concerning Watergate, Vietnam, the CIA and FBI, et al., have caused and perhaps justify the present mood of distrust and that truthfulness and rectitude on high will one day dispel it. However, close examination of the cultural scene reveals that this is only part of the explanation and perhaps not the most important part. I believe we are dealing with habits of mind in the very center of our life and times which positively revel in mystification, which do not wish to know the truth and perhaps could not recognize it if they saw it. Let me illustrate by reciting a few representative tales from our times. They concern certain facts in dispute with regard to the assassination of President Kennedy, though I shall also want to refer in passing to aspects of the Rosenberg and Hiss cases. I offer them not to dispose of the mystery which attaches to these cases (to me there is no mystery, the truth of all three matters being quite clear) but as an example of how powerful feelings of distrust arise and breed upon themselves, powerfully resisting any efforts to dispel them. _____________ I As all assassination buffs know, one of the first and most pivotal disputes to arise out of the Warren Commission Report concerned the exact location of the small, neat wound of entry in President Kennedy's back and whether or not that wound could be connected to another small, neat wound in the President's throat. The Commission, following the autopsy report, placed the back wound quite high up, in the musculature between the shoulder and neck, and argued that that “single bullet,” the famous exhibit 399, then exited from Kennedy's throat and went on to hit Governor Connally, causing all of his five separate wounds. All students of the assassination, pro and con the Report, agree that this sequence and every one of its constituent details are indispensable to the conclusion that there was a single assassin. Now, it may be thought that it would be the easiest thing in the world to establish the location of a small, neat wound in the back and the evidence of its passage through the body toward the throat, especially since photographs and X-rays were taken of the President the night of the assassination, before and during the autopsy examination. Either the wound was here or it was there; there is only one truth in the matter. Either it left signs of its passage through the body, or it did not. If things happened otherwise, there must be other signs pointing to another singular reality. However, if reality is always and ever singular, the evidence pointing to that reality is often ambiguous, especially evidence arising out of human observation. There is no scandal in this if we remember that reality is one, even if the evidence of it is sometimes murky. As it happens, several signs pointed to the possibility of a wound considerably lower in the back, one, therefore, unconnected with the throat wound. Beginning in 1965, critics of the Warren Report began to point out that the holes in the President's shirt and jacket seemed to align with a considerably lower back hit (though the clothing may have hunched up his neck as he waved to the crowd). They pointed to a small hole drawn on a silhouette by one of the doctors during the autopsy examination (exhibit 397) which seems to place the wound quite far down (though precise measurements recorded in the margin of the same document point to the higher location). Then there were the FBI documents which revealed that for more than a month after the shooting the FBI (or, more precisely, the authors of the documents) worked on the assumption that the bullet which hit the President in the back had only entered a short distance and then somehow worked itself out; in other words, that it was unconnected to the throat wound. At this point, critics would remind readers and listeners that the doctors who treated the President in Dallas, immediately after the shooting, at first called the small, neat wound in his throat an entry wound, not a wound of exit. Finally, and perhaps most provocative, it became clear early in 1966 that the X-rays and photographs taken of the President the night of the assassination, which could have cleared up the dispute in a moment, were never seen by the Commission or its staff, who were refused access to them, never seen by the autopsy doctors after the night of the assassination, and were unavailable to independent investigators (at the behest of the Kennedy family which retained them).1 What a fever these ambiguities raised, suggesting as they did not only the possibility of a second assassin but deeper, darker perfidies. Consider: no innocent error could have led the autopsy doctors to be off by inches in locating a back wound. Further, if the bullet did not pass through the body and exit from the throat, then the internal evidence of that passage cited by the autopsy doctors—a bruise on the dome of the right parietal pleura, an adjacent bruise at the upper end of the right lung, both of them in line with a passage from back to throat wound—was fabricated. The tiny traces of air in the tissues along the bullet track, allegedly visible in the X-rays, are not there. The doctors must have lied. And they must also have covered up the damage done by the bullet which caused the indubitable throat wound (was it a frontal hit, as Mark Lane suggests?). Bullets do not tear into a neck leaving no internal trace or ultimate point of exit.2 The point cannot be overstressed: the facts in precise dispute in this matter were not at all subtle. The possibility of simple error on the part of the autopsy doctors is ruled out. If the doctors lied and covered up, they probably began to do so the weekend of the assassination when the autopsy report was completed and submitted (and before it was clear what lies needed to be told!). That means they were told to lie, and those who told them were told to tell them. When one pieces together methodically the effort which would be necessary to plug all possible leaks likely in the telling of a lie of this magnitude, the scope of the necessary conspiracy is staggering (far larger, I might say, than anything revealed about Watergate). Were the morticians at the Lawson Funeral Home checked out to make sure that they did not spill the beans about a lower back wound? Were all the thirty or so people who were in and out of the autopsy room and might have heard a discussion of wounds radically different from those reported by the autopsy doctors, checked out as well? Why are all those implicated or who have knowledge of the conspiracy remaining silent? From fear, no doubt. What do they have to fear? What do we all have to fear? Thus a single, unresolved question of fact was capable of generating nightmares. Not every writer at the time—I speak now of 1966-68—drew out the full conspiratorial implications of the material, though those implications were inescapable. Thus in a work like Edward Jay Epstein's Inquest (1966), which is widely respected for its moderate tone, nearly all the suspense is supplied by his discussion of anomalies arising out of the evidence concerning the back and throat wound, but he himself does not charge a massive conspiracy. Other writers were not so cautious. Books, articles, records, lectures came forth in profusion. The autopsy drawing, the FBI reports, the measurements of the holes in the shirt and jacket were replicated a million-fold. There was endless talk on the talk shows, gossip generating gossip. Simultaneously, there came an outcry for clarification and resolution (on to the X-rays and photographs!) so that the burden of the ambiguity and its dreadful implications might be lifted. And when the outcry was not heeded, for almost three years, until 1968, that was further provocation to the suspicious. At that time an immense emotional history was forged, constituted by people's accurate memory of their own terror, anxiety, anger, doubt, or worry (temperaments vary) when they contemplated the arguments and behavior of the critics of the Warren Report, and maintained by the natural human propensity to believe that the external provocation of our deepest emotions is not a chimera. _____________ One would think that such tension would welcome the relief of decisive resolution. And if ever a question of fact has been resolved it is this one. Late in 1966, the Kennedy family relinquished the autopsy materials to the National Archives, placing strict restrictions on access to them. In February 1968, a panel of four prominent physicians, three forensic pathologists, and a radiologist, each nominated by a prominent person outside of government,3 was convened by Attorney General Ramsey Clark to review that material and the panel unanimously confirmed every conclusion of the autopsy including the location of the back wound and the evidence of its passage to the throat. They found evidence of no other wounds except those which could have been caused by a gunman above and behind the President. Four years later two other forensic pathologists examined the material, including Dr. Cyril Wecht, a professor at the Duquesne University School of Law and chief medical examiner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania,4 who had been and remains one of the major critics of the single-assassin theory. We shall want to consider Dr. Wecht's species of respectable fanaticism a little later, but it should be understood that with regard to the question of the back wound and its relation to the throat, he confirmed the Commission's findings of three years before, refuting some of his own earlier speculations into the bargain.5 Of course, all these doctors could be lying, ordered to, afraid not to, even Wecht, who cunningly would continue to criticize the single-assassin theory on other grounds, to maintain credibility. Or perhaps the X-rays and photographs produced for these distinguished doctors are all fake, the real materials having been destroyed or hidden, though the job of fabrication and erasure necessary for that is so staggeringly complex,6 the number of accomplices (all silent) so numerous, that a sane and serious person soon ceases dallying with the possibility. Therefore one must simply conclude that the holes in the jacket and shirt, the autopsy drawing, the testimony of the Dallas doctors concerning a possible frontal hit, the FBI summary of autopsy findings, all point to exactly nothing except everyday and most unthreatening human errors or coincidences. After the definitive reexamination of the autopsy material, they have interest only as psychological episodes with no essential connection to the truth of the assassination. They are like a prankster's fins in the water, not a shark at all; a mirage caused by the morning light, not a flying saucer;7 an unpleasant, nonconforming hag, but not a witch who flies on a broomstick, eats children, and copulates with the devil. Anyone caring about the truth of the assassination would need to erase the memory of the great public perturbation caused by these fantasies as he moves on to other areas in dispute. _____________ II What of those areas? Are they so majestically disposed of? I shall touch only the familiar bases. Consider the well-known concerns raised by frames 313-317 of the Zapruder film, the pivotal material in the controversy over the President's head wound. By now millions have seen the ghastly episode played and replayed on television and in movie theaters; seen the head and body snap sharply to the left within a third of a second; seen the splay of brain matter backward out of the open-top car. How, the critics ask, could a hit from behind and above have caused this violent motion to the left and backward? Isn't a hit from the front-right (at last, the grassy knoll) more likely, especially since many people thought the shots came from there and photographs indicate the presence of a gun or gunman? Again, the autopsy findings should have silenced this line of speculation from the beginning, and if the autopsy doctors were not to be trusted, those who subsequently examined the autopsy materials, including the skeptical Dr. Wecht, must be. As with the back and throat wound, the point in dispute involves no subtle distinctions which could give rise to honest differences of expert opinion. The autopsy doctors found a small wound of entry above the hairline in the back of the skull and a large wound of exit in the right rear portion of the President's head. All the fracturing described was of a wound sprung open from within. The critics, on the other hand, posit a direct hit from the right-front capable of driving the head and body violently leftward and backward, which would have produced results almost directly opposite to those reported by the autopsy team. It is simply impossible that the many X-rays and photographs of the body would fail to show evidences of such a decisive hit. This is why so many of the critics, like Professor Josiah Thompson of Haverford and Dr. Wecht, eagerly awaited the availability of the X-rays and photographs, and others, like Vincent Salandria, predicted early on that the X-rays and photographs finally given the public would be doctored. Dr. Wecht summarized the unanimous opinion of every doctor who has seen the autopsy materials in an article written after he had spent two days with the X-rays and photographs: The available evidence, assuming it to be valid, gives no support to theories which postulate gunmen to the front or right-front of the presidential car. The wound in the President's head can only have been fired from somewhere to the rear of the President.8 If that doesn't put the matter to rest, a careful perusal of Chapter 19 of the Rockefeller Report on CIA activities should. Ordered to check out rumors of a CIA assassination plot, the Commission staff9 assembled a group of five experts10 with expertise in forensic pathology, neuropathology, radiology, gunshot wounds, and accident reconstruction, and asked them to review the films of the assassination (Zapruder, Nix, and Much-more), the autopsy materials, the President's clothing and back brace, and the bullet and bullet fragments recovered, to determine whether there was any evidence of a hit from the front, the front-right, or from both the rear and front-right. Their reports, submitted separately, completely confirmed the Warren Commission's conclusions: there was no evidence of a hit from the right; the violent motions of the President's body could not be attributed to a bullet from any source, but rather to “a seizure-like neuromuscular reaction to major damage inflicted to nerve centers in the brain.” In testimony before the commission Dr. Wecht agreed that such a reaction could have happened within a tenth of a second. As for the slight movement of the head backward immediately after the hit, the panel explained that the explosion of tissue out of the exit wound would have produced a “jet effect,” causing the head to move back in the direction from which the bullet came, almost instantly. I would add that the testimony of motorcycle policemen riding fore and aft the President's car indicates that a strong wind from a direction in front of the car may have blown the tissue backward. One witness before the Rockefeller Commission directed its attention to frame 413 of the Zapruder film in which, he argued, one could plainly see an assassin in a German army helmet, or perhaps some form of rain hat, and a gun. A photograph of that frame has appeared in several of the underground newspapers which spread the rumors germinated by conspiracy detectors around the land. Since the assassin is not present in frame 411 or 415, the Commission concluded that it was unlikely that he had appeared and disappeared in a sixth of a second. Also, because the tree he was allegedly hiding behind was only inches wide, just five feet in front of Zapruder, and right out in the open for hundreds to see, it seems unlikely that he would have gone unperceived. Calculating distances from Zapruder's camera, the Commission concluded that the assassin's head with or without helmet would have been the size of a large lemon, if head there momentarily was. As for the gun, it turns out to be as much a figment of light and shadow as the assassin who is supposedly holding it. Two final items may help convince the convincible that all the massive speculation about a gunman to the right based on the Zapruder films is utterly baseless, however persuasive such speculation may have once seemed. First, a bullet fired from the front-right striking the President in the rear portion of the skull on the right side of the head would cause the head to turn right, not left. Only a strike in the front of the head would have caused the leftward head-snap so obsessively dwelled upon by critics of the Commission. Second, with regard to the earwitness testimony about shots from the grassy knoll, many people obviously did think they heard shots coming from the knoll; others heard shots coming from the Book Depository. But to anyone interested in the singular reality of the assassination, the question to ask of earwitnesses should be: how many heard shots coming from two different directions? In other words, of some 190 earwitnesses whose reactions are recorded, how many heard the shooting in the single way the critics imply it happened? The answer is: one.10A _____________ How does one add up the sum of emotions Americans have expended on what are now revealed as utterly illusory speculations arising out of the Zapruder film and the head-snap? Whole portions of respected books must be discarded as worthless (one thinks of Professor Josiah Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas), for in matters of factual truth, momentary ingenuity and (apparently) passionate sincerity count for nothing. Professor Thompson, who worked closely with Dr. Wecht in preparing his book, has known for nearly three years that major portions of it must be discarded as baseless gossip, and so too has every student of the assassination. One recalls no public concessions of error. Indeed in the spate of articles now appearing in the wake of Watergate, one hears the same ground gone over again and again. Mark Lane is back on the college lecture circuit rehashing old mischief, most of which has even been discarded by other critics. A writer like George O'Toole, whose fanciful book, The Assassination Tapes (Penthouse Press), has received a big play in the sex magazines, rehearses lines of argument which he admits are far-fetched, as if to say: any event which can generate such heated comment, even plainly absurd comment, can't be completely clean. And here is the staid old Saturday Evening Post, September 1975, with a Norman Rockwell portrait of Kennedy on the cover, and within, sandwiched between the familiar homespun nostalgia, a section on the “unsolved murder mystery,” featuring decade-old speculation about the back and neck wound and pictures of the leading critics of the Warren Commission: the new culture heroes. Hannah Arendt has written that the opposite of a fact is a lie. There will come a time when many of the writers and lecturers who have gained celebrity by raising doubts about the assassination will be known for what they occasionally were: conscious liars. But in explaining the grip these writers have on audiences and readers (and editors), one must invoke a public psychology quite familiar to the historian of witch crazes and other paranoid enthusiasms in which even proven fantasies retain lingering reputation. When it comes to the Kennedy assassination or, for some, the Rosenberg or Hiss cases, normally rational people display the sweet madness of the flying-saucer freak or the Bermuda Triangle buff who makes no effort to hide his assumption that a palpably mistaken identification of a flying object or ocean mishap is an identification of some sort which retains status as evidence.11 Characteristically, the assassination critic will move swiftly from one critical riff to another, never pausing long enough to permit reader or listener to test the validity of each separate provocation. Over the past ten years one has seen one after another of these riffs dissolve as completely as must any speculation about the head and back wounds, though that has not dissuaded cunning writers and orators from rearranging them in new improvisations. Thus, the photograph of Oswald, rifle in hand, is not a fabrication, but a picture taken on his camera by his wife seven months before the Kennedy assassination—the shadow under Oswald's nose notwithstanding. Any jury in the world, except perhaps one made up of assassination critics, would have found Oswald guilty of shooting officer Tippit, which is not to say that the defense attorney in the case would have been at a loss for words. The picture of two derelicts arrested after the shooting does not reveal the faces of E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis: the derelict Hunt is shorter, older, and fatter than the real one; the derelict Sturgis much taller and lighter than his alleged look-alike. And the several photographs allegedly showing another gun or gunman have, after years of the most intense scrutiny, one by one, proved to be mirages.12 It is usually the case in public discourse that revelations of major errors invalidate the accompanying case. When the graduate student admits faking test results, the professor is expected to denounce the conclusions resting on those results. With the assassination very different rules of discourse seem to prevail: as soon as a new line of speculation appears and remains temporarily unrefined, all the rest take on new life. Reviewing Mark Lane's Rush to judgment (1967) soon after it appeared, Norman Mailer, who has often claimed he is able to recapitulate the deepest currents and emotions of the times, wrote, in the Village Voice, that if just one-tenth of what Mark Lane was charging was true, there was serious mischief afoot in the land. A less contemporary judgment would hold that if nine-tenths of what Lane said was nonsense, the chances of the rest containing much sense are very slim. _____________ III It is impossible to soothe every doubt generated by this veritable religion of suspicion, but before moving on to some general reflections on the meaning of these assassination tales and their relation to other clusters of doubt—the Rosenbergs and Hiss—let me try to deal with two lines of argument which for many are the redeeming 10 per cent. One concerns the timing of the shot which struck Governor Connally, and the other concerns the famous bullet, exhibit 399. Together they comprise the last stands of Dr. Wecht and others. By now all agree that the single-assassin theory requires that one bullet strike Kennedy high in the back, exit from his throat, and then hit Governor Connally, causing all of his five wounds and broken bones: (1) an entry wound in the back near the right armpit; (2) a shattered fifth rib and an exit wound below the right nipple and twenty-five degrees below the back wound; (3) an entry wound on the knuckle side of the right wrist about two inches up from the wrist joint and a broken wrist bone; (4) an exit wound on the palm side three-fourths of an inch above the wrist crease; and (5) a shallow puncture of the left thigh about five inches above the knee. Connally was seated on the jump-seat directly in front and slightly to the left of Kennedy; it is difficult to see how a bullet exiting from the President's throat could miss him (which is one reason the first-generation critics strove so mightily to keep that bullet from coming through). If the bullet did miss Connally, it could not have missed the interior of the open car, and the absence of any damage to the car caused by a high-speed bullet, barely slowed by its passage through the President's neck, argues strongly that the bullet in fact struck Connally. The car was thoroughly examined by the FBI within forty-eight hours of the assassination; one doubts that the FBI covered up evidence of bullet damage, not because that agency is incapable of fibbing but because the FBI could not have known what lies to tell that early. It seems logical to conclude that the bullet struck Connally in the back and precisely in the place he was actually hit. The ambiguity fastened on by the critics arises because the Zapruder film seems to show Connally being hit well after Kennedy but too soon after to allow for the possibility that he was struck by a second shot from the same rifle. During frames 207-225 of the film, which was running at 18.3 frames a second, Kennedy is out of view, blocked by a sign. As he reemerges to view in frame 225 it is clear that he has already been hit: both hands are clutching at his throat (which, according to the critics, has not yet been wounded) . However, Connally's reaction is not dramatically visible until frame 237, perhaps a second after Kennedy was struck. Professor Thompson, whose book deserves a graphics award, has dwelled lovingly on that and the ensuing three frames, directing the reader's attention to the sudden slump of Connally's right shoulder between frames 237-38 and the puff in his left cheek. Connally himself, reviewing the films frame by frame, thought he was hit somewhere between 231-34. He does not remember ever being aware of wounds to his wrists and thigh. Both men, let it be stressed, were hit from above and behind, not from the knoll. The question is, was it by one or two assassins? Delayed reactions to a bullet hit are not uncommon; by dwelling on the Zapruder film frame by frame the critics distort the time values in the case. If, as to me seems obvious, Connally was struck by the same bullet as Kennedy, a reaction a second later does not present a major challenge to the credibility of the Commission's reconstruction of the shooting. But there is one set of facts in the case—apart from the fact that the bullet which exited from Kennedy's throat could not have missed Connally or the car—which proves beyond honest doubt that they were hit by the same bullet, and that has to do with Governor Connally's wrist wounds. No critic has ever disputed these basic facts or interpretations of fact: (1) that the wound of entry in Connally's wrist was on the knuckle (dorsal) side an inch and a quarter further up the arm than the exit wound on the palm (volar) side; (2) that the bullet which struck Connally's wrist had already struck something else, blunting its impact; (3) that Connally had a shallow puncture wound in his left thigh caused by a large missile whose force was almost dissipated by the time it struck. As Howard Roffman, a third-generation critic who has shaken-down and shaped-up a decade of criticism puts it: “It is probable that one bullet caused all of Connally's injuries.”13 A careful perusal of the Zapruder film reveals that in frame 225, as Kennedy reemerges into view from behind the sign, Connally's torso is turned slightly to the right and his head is turned far to the right, perhaps executing the look backward the Governor vividly recalls making after the first shot. His right arm is over his lap, the wrist over the left thigh; his right hand, knuckles up, is grasping a wide-brimmed hat. At that point, a split second after Kennedy was hit, he is in perfect alignment to receive all his wounds. Assuming he was in something like this posture a moment before, that would be the only moment when the double hit was plausible: but then that is the only moment when the Warren Commission says it happened. By frame 230, however, before the critics say he was struck, Connally has begun to turn to his right; he has raised his right hand, which is still clutching the hat; his knuckles are just above and facing his right shoulder, his elbow is at his side. All during the 230's, as he continues his turn to the right, Connally's knuckles are at least shoulder high, his elbow at his side. By frame 240, slightly more than a second after Kennedy was struck, he has turned 90 degrees to the right and is facing out the side of the car. A bullet striking Connally when the critics say he was hit then would have had to exit from the chest at a downward angle; to have taken at least two sharp turns upward, in midair—right and then left into the knuckle side of the wrist; and then, upon exiting on the palm side, further up in the air than the wound of entry, would have had to execute a very sharp U-turn into the thigh:14 plainly impossible. Indeed in order for a gunman to have wounded Connally in the wrist during those frames, he would have to have been firing from the floor of the car. But no gunman was noticed there. _____________ To affirm the Commission's version of the shooting, then, one need only live with the possibility that the Governor accurately remembers his own thoughts and reactions at the time but that his reactions were slightly delayed. His failure to remember ever being hit in the wrist or thigh confirms that he is not the best witness to what happened, however well he remembers what he thought happened. As for the sudden slump of the right shoulder and the puff in the left cheek, they are clearly there in frames 237-38, but viewed in the context of the moving film are part of an earlier motion commencing in frame 230, when Connally begins a rapid turn to the right which is completed a little more than half a second later in frame 240. Living with these slight ambiguities should not prove an impossible burden for a citizen to carry through life as compared with the manifest impossibilities demanded by the critics' version of the shooting. But significantly, the critics have no difficulty with the impossibilities of their own theories. One of the reasons I have dwelled on this matter in such detail is to demonstrate the utter recklessness of men who are respected as the most responsible critics of the Warren Commission and the tolerance for recklessness which has developed in this country in the last decade. The critics don't care to reconstruct a singular reality, preferring a strategy of pure attack, from contradictory points of view. Testifying before the Rockefeller Commission, Dr. Wecht has the audacity to argue that the fact that Connally still held his hat in frame 237 proves that he hasn't been struck in the wrist yet, when Wecht must know that if Connally had not yet been struck in the wrist, then he never was, for the wrist will never again be in a position to receive its wounds from any plausible source. I know of no critical work on the assassination which even acknowledges Connally's wrist as a problem for an alternative version of the shooting. And not because these writers are unaware of the problem; no one who has lived with these movable jigsaw-puzzle parts as long as they have can fail to know exactly where the parts refuse to fit together. Professors are taught in graduate school that a complete critical argument must include frank acknowledgment of the difficulties in one's position, a rhetorical figure known as prolepsis, and one which I am obviously fond of. Scholarship which avoids facing the obvious problems carries the scent of dishonesty. _____________ All of which brings us finally to the famous “magic bullet,” as it has been dubbed by the critics, exhibit 399, which, in my view, presents the only serious challenge to the Warren Commission's case; how serious, the reader can judge. The bullet was found on the ground floor of the Parkland Hospital in Dallas, within an hour of the shooting, by Darrell C. Tomlinson, the hospital's senior engineer. Kennedy and Connally had been taken on stretchers to two different emergency rooms. The President remained on his stretcher until he was declared dead, but the Governor was immediately transferred to an operating table. Whereupon: a nurse, Jane C. Webster, rolled the bloody sheets on his stretcher into a small bundle; an orderly, R. J. Jimison, placed it on an elevator; and Tomlinson removed the stretcher from the elevator, where it had been for perhaps ten minutes, and placed it in a corridor on the ground floor of the hospital alongside another stretcher unconnected with the care of either man. Somewhat later, Tomlinson shoved one of the stretchers against the wall and a bullet rolled out. He is not sure from which of the two stretchers. The bullet he found was a 6.5 millimeter, copper-jacketed, Mannlicher Carcano, almost perfectly formed save for a slight distortion in its lead base. It weighed 158.6 grains, about 2.5 less than the average bullet of its type, apparently the result of the lead missing from its base. Ballistic tests performed in the next twenty-four hours established that that bullet had been fired from the rifle, Oswald's, which was found miles away in the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository. The last of Connally's wounds was a shallow puncture of the left thigh, caused by a large missile whose energy was almost entirely expended. Since no other large missile was recovered which could be related to Connally's wounds, and this one was found in conjunction with Connally's stretcher, the Warren Commission concluded that it was the bullet which had caused all of Connally's wounds after having passed unobstructed through Kennedy's neck. Through the years the critics took several lines of attack on the bullet. For a while they tried to associate it with Kennedy's stretcher, implying it was the bullet which hit Kennedy in the back and worked itself out.15 That proved unproductive as it became clear that the bullet which struck Kennedy in the back did not work itself out, and furthermore, that Kennedy's stretcher was nowhere near the place where the bullet was recovered. Then the critics tried to argue that the metallic fragments recovered from Connally, plus those remaining in him and Kennedy, exceeded the amount of metal missing from the bullet, which if true would leave the Commission's case in a shambles. But that too failed to pan out: the weight of the bullet is no longer considered a problem for the single-assassin theory. Then, for years, there were heated demands that the FBI release its spectrographic analysis of the bullet, which, critics promised, would prove that the metal recovered from the bodies was copper and/ or from a different bullet. The recent release of that report should stymie this line of investigation, momentarily. Still, a problem remains and it is a considerable one. Save for a slight distortion in the base, the bullet is nearly pristine. How, the critics ask, could a bullet which caused seven wounds and shattered two bones, Connally's rib and wrist, have emerged so unscathed? The Warren Commission never conducted tests to ascertain the plausibility of the bullet's shape, but other tests, on bullet velocity, left test bullets considerably more distorted than exhibit 399. Several experts testifying before the Commission were clearly shaken by the bullet's pristine shape and unruffled copper surface, and the Commission's own account of the bullet shows the strain of advocacy.16 A fair summary of the expert testimony on the bullet is that its shape is improbable, highly improbable to some, but not impossible. Reality, I have said, happens only one way, but that one way does not always follow the laws of maximum probability. Strange things happen, though never impossible things, and accounts of strange happenings must sound strange. However, if acceptance of exhibit 399 as the bullet which struck Connally implicates one in an improbability of a high order, consider the implications of the critics' version of what happened. Clearly, exhibit 399 had to have been planted by the real conspirators. No other conclusion is possible. Let us try to imagine how that might have happened. Immediately after the shooting news comes to Conspiracy Central that the President has been taken to the Parkland Hospital; a messenger is sent over to the hospital with a spare bullet fired from Oswald's gun, missing a little lead from the base, though not more than was found in the body. He drops it somewhere, next to Connally's stretcher, as it happens. One wonders, did he inquire, “Where is Connally's stretcher?” (And why not Kennedy's while he was at it?) Months later it becomes clear that this bullet fits neatly into a single-assassin theory. All this effort, recall, is part of a massive scheme to hide the existence of a conspiracy from the authorities, when obviously the chances at the time were overwhelming that a bullet from Oswald's gun dropped randomly and irrationally in the hospital would point directly at the existence of other conspirators. Also, this version necessitates that the bullet which really hit Connally, resting finally in the flesh of his left thigh, is missing or was intentionally hidden, and if hidden, hidden before anyone could have known that would be necessary. All official parties to the deceit, of course, have remained silent for more than twelve years. Readers who suspect me of constructing an evadable reductio ad absurdum are invited to construct a more believable scenario. I submit that anyone, like Dr. Wecht, who has seen speculation after speculation about the assassination refuted, and continues to proclaim his vast distrust of the Warren Commission's conclusions while hanging from this narrow thread, is receiving inspiration from a source outside this world and its evidences. _____________ IV One frequently hears the opinion that if there is nothing fishy about the assassination, then at least the Warren Commission was seriously culpable in not forestalling the enormous controversy which the Report has provoked. But I think careful study of the history of the controversy would show that there is nothing the Commission could have done to silence the more extreme critics or discourage the media and the public's tolerance for their antic accusations. Not that the Commission is beyond reproach: Chief Justice Warren should have forced the Kennedy family to release the photographs and X-rays to the Commission, and even today, one wishes to press the Kennedy family to provide an explanation of why President Kennedy's brain, removed by the autopsy doctors for laboratory examination, was not sent to the national archives along with the other autopsy materials. But to argue that these and other errors provoked the controversy is to commit the fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc. In analyzing the specific debate, as we have done, it is clear that the extreme criticisms of the Report rested on demonological assumptions which no rational arguments could have forestalled. There was no reason, for example, for the Commission's lawyers to have anticipated the discussion of the back wound because the autopsy had already established the absurdity of that whole line of argument. Most human events leave a trail of ambiguous evidence, as every lawyer knows. The lawyers on the Commission had seen those ambiguities dissolve like soap bubbles as the singular reality of the shooting emerged from the burden of evidence; they could not have imagined that a kind of criticism would arise oblivious to the methodology by which events are usually reconstructed. I have charged some of the critics with conscious deceit because I cannot think how else to characterize writers and orators who continue to rehearse lines of argument which they know are incorrect, who disguise difficulties they know to exist in their own theses, and who argue from palpably contradictory or fantastic premises. If one must begin to assign responsibility for the distracting public debate over the assassination, one must begin with these critics who—well before Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and CIA revelations, et al.—created a controversy whole out of the flimsiest cloth; after that one should go on to the keepers of the media gates, editors and producers, who have sought and sponsored the critics, grateful for the distracting thrills they could provide. Those who predict that future government honesty will be sufficient to dispel public distrust must ponder how tiny was the impact of the Clark panel in 1968, which reexamined the X-rays and photographs, and thereby demolished significant portions of the critics' major arguments. Seven years later the debate goes on as if the Clark panel's findings were simply news among news, like the latest sighting of the Loch Ness monster. Meanwhile, the Saturday Evening Post is lionizing the principal critics of the Warren Commission, and the Commission's Report is no longer available in paperback.17 _____________ The public, for its part, can only be a spectator to all this, as Walter Lippmann said long ago, in The Phantom Public. It never judges issues on their merits—having neither the time, inclination, opportunity, nor ability—but rather forms its conclusions from the sound and style of the debate and its brute sense of the plausible. When the Gallup poll finds, as it has consistently since late 1966, that two-thirds and more of the American public doubt the essential conclusions of the Warren Commission, that only means that many people have heard an ill-mannered debate raging and concluded that such passionate and apparently well-informed dissent must signify something. After all, where there is smoke there is fire. But the smoke in this case is only the smoke of verbal battle, a green, chemically produced mist not at all like the black billows which arise from real flames. What is alarming is that the public seems incapable of detecting the difference because its sense of the plausible has come to include incredible charges of government wrong-doing. The Kennedy assassination, of course, is not the only occasion for the leveling of these charges. Now the debate over the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss is beginning anew, and in the “proofs” of the innocence of these three, one sees some of the same arts of insinuation practiced by the Warren critics. “What about the hotel registration?” asks a student who has seen a stunning TV documentary, “The Unquiet Death of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.” During their trial the FBI produced a hotel registration to help prove that Harry Gold had indeed been in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on June 3, 1945, the day he says he received atomic information from David Greenglass. Greenglass seconded Gold's story and said that the Rosenbergs put him up to it. However, Walter and Miriam Schneir (Invitation to an Inquest) have studied the photocopy of the hotel registration at the Hilton Hotel where Gold allegedly registered the day of June 3, 1945. On the front, in Gold's hand, is his name and address, and the date, 6-3-45, allegedly written by the desk clerk. But on the back is stamped “June 4, 12:30 P.M.” The Schneirs conclude that the card is a forgery, that the meeting did not take place, and that Gold was not even in Albuquerque, at the time. Imagine: the FBI has forged a card with Gold's collaboration, to prove he was where he wasn't and somehow gotten the date wrong on the back. The government then makes the card available to private investigators like the Schneirs, confident that the mistake won't be noticed. But that is only part of the absurdity. By denying that a meeting took place in Albuquerque that day, the Schneirs attempt to buttress their contention that Greenglass never gave atomic secrets to Gold—despite both their confessions. In their trial, even the Rosenberg defense conceded that Greenglass was guilty, arguing only that his accusations against the Rosenbergs were false. If Greenglass is lying about himself as well as Rosenberg, if the entire episode of atomic spying was concocted with Gold and Greenglass's collaboration, the government plot against the Rosenbergs becomes much larger by a considerable factor and its ability to carry it off rendered even more implausible. “But what about the serial number and altered type face?” the student will ask, having heard Hiss or one of his defenders attack the authenticity of the typewriter which helped—but was not needed—to convict him.18 Belief that the typewriter was forged involves the believer in the contention that a conspiracy to frame Hiss had been going on for a number of years, probably as early as 1938. Having forged documents which seemed to prove that secret papers in Whittaker Chambers's possession had been typed on Hiss's typewriter in 1938, the government then planted a fake typewriter for Hiss's lawyers to find and bring into court to convict him, and then gave the fake typewriter to Hiss's lawyers enabling them to discover the marks of forgery and reveal the plot. Those who know the case know that Chambers only produced the Hiss documents on the provocation of a libel suit by Hiss, and therefore the FBI, or whoever, must have quickly forged the documents, and prepared the fake typewriter, all at a time when forgery by typewriter was thought to be impossible. As usual, all parties to what upon close analysis turns out to be a very wide conspiracy with many contributing participants have remained silent for at least twenty-seven years. As for the serial number and the allegedly altered type-face, they turn out to be dubious proofs of forgery indeed. The defense has never definitely established that the serial number of the machine precludes its being Hiss's, though it has some arresting arguments to make; and while there are some letters whose type-face has been worked on, as might happen to a machine first built in 1928, the letters altered were not the same as those offered for comparison by those experts who testified that the machine in question had typed the documents. Actually, what these students are asking when they raise these questions is this: “How can honest men who argue so urgently about points of fact in what seems obviously to be a good cause, not have something serious to say? Why hasn't twenty-five years of debate silenced them?” Part of the answer is this: some of them are mistaken, others are zealots, and others, those who hide from their readers and auditors the complete extent of the conspiracy they are implying, are not so honest. All of which does not mean that there were no Watergate or CIA revelations, no lying in connection with Vietnam. Nor are the bureaucratic, political, and plainly immoral tendencies associated with those events absent from the government's handling of the assassination or the prosecution of Hiss and the Rosenbergs. There is already evidence, for example, that the FBI, fearing that the agency would be blamed for not providing better protection for the President, hid evidence that it knew of Oswald's violent tendencies before the shooting. Nor is some future revelation that Oswald worked in some capacity for the CIA or FBI precluded, though that would not in itself tie those agencies to a plot to kill the President. I would guess that HUAC and the Justice Department's pursuit and prosecution of Hiss and the Rosenbergs were often unscrupulous and excessive, as documents now being released in those cases will probably show. Obviously such wrongdoing cannot be blinked at; indeed, a little paranoia is probably healthy in keeping the scoundrels in line. However, the evil forces conjured by the assassination critics and their like are of an entirely different order. In their hands the system is simply unrecognizable. Among the lessons of Watergate, after all, is that in a free society it is very hard to hide conspiracies for very long, even conspiracies which, in the case of Watergate, are considerably more modest than those implied by the assassination critics. But to those critics the government is capable of anything. We are beset by demons. The delirium and confusion they tend to provoke turns citizens into metaphysical spectators ill-equipped for the hard, realistic vigilance which is necessary to preserve liberty. Of course, there is no Civil Liberties Union to protect our institutions from slander and rampant paranoia. And I am not calling for an inquisition. I just wish more people, everyone, would shake their fingers at these cranks and say: “For shame!” _____________ 1 The present writer was one of the first to point out that the X-rays and photographs were missing, and the first to establish that the Kennedy family was responsible. A benign explanation of their behavior is offered in “The Vital Documents,” Nation, July 3, 1966. 2 Not even the most ingenious of the critics of the Warren Report has suggested that a bullet entering the throat could be connected with the back wound. The angles make it impossible, and, in any case, an analysis of the fabric of shirt and jacket make it certain that the President was struck from behind. 3 William H. Carries, M.D., professor of Pathology at the University of Utah, nominated by the President of Stanford University, Russel S. Fisher, M.D., professor of Forensic Pathology, University of Maryland, nominated by the President of the College of American Pathologists; Russel H. Morgan, M.D., professor of Radiology, The Johns Hopkins University, nominated by the President of The Johns Hopkins University; Alan R. Moritz, M.D., professor of Pathology, Case Western Reserve University, nominated by the President of Michigan State. 4 The other doctor was Dr. John K. Lattimer of Columbia, whose summary of the medical evidence provides the most brilliant confirmation of the autopsy findings in the written literature. See “Further Information About the Autopsy of President John F. Kennedy,” The Forensic Science Gazette, September 1973, pp. 3-9. Dr. E. Forrest Chapman of Michigan also reviewed the medical evidence and endorsed the autopsy conclusions. 5 See “The Medical Evidence in the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” ibid., pp. 9-19. 6 Writes Dr. Wecht: “The X-rays and photographic materials give every indication of being authentic . . . and the facial features, where they can be seen, are consistent with the . . . author's recollections of the President,” ibid., p. 14. 7 Those with lingering affection for the flying-saucer cause are directed to the masterful debunking in Philip J. Klass, UFO's Explained (Random House). 8 Forensic Science Gazette, September 1973, p. 18. 9 Critics have pointed ominously to the fact that attorney David W. Belin, executive director of the Rockefeller Commission staff, was a lawyer on the Warren Commission. In fact, for that reason, he did not participate in the preparation of Chapter 19, turning the Kennedy assassination investigation over to senior counsel Robert B. Olsen. 10 Lieutenant Colonel Robert R. McMeekin, chief of the Division of Aerospace Pathology of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology; Dr. Richard Lindenberg, director of Neuropathology and Legal Medicine in the Maryland Department of Mental Health; Dr. Werner U. Spitz, Chief Medical Examiner Wayne County, Detroit, Michigan; Dr. Fred J. Hodges III, professor of Radiology at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine; and Dr. Alfred G. Olivier, director of the Biomedical Laboratories at the Edgewood Arsenal. Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland. 10A A. J. Milliken, but he also thought there were eight shots where most people heard the three alleged by the Warren Commission. Warren Report, Vol. 19-H, p. 486. 11 The spoil-sport in the Bermuda Triangle brouhaha is Lawrence David Kusche, The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved (Harper & Row). 12 For a fascinating account of a twelve-year effort to find something in the pictures, which turned up nothing, see Maurice W. Schonfeld, “The Shadow of a Gunman,” Columbia Journalism Review, July-August 1975, pp. 46-50. 13 Presumed Guilty (Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1975), p. 132. 14 Also to avoid hitting the hat, which would have been struck if the bullet came straight out the palm side. 15 Wecht's summary of the matter is extremely misleading: “The bullet was reportedly found under a stretcher in a remote part of the hospital in the afternoon of the assassination. It was never conclusively determined whether the President or the Governor (or neither) had occupied the stretcher,” op. cit., p. 11. 16 The Rockefeller Commission, so eager to take on the critics on other counts, avoids a discussion of Exhibit 399. 17 The best presentation of the Warren Commission's case, however, is available in hardcover. It is by a Warren Commission lawyer and the chief of staff of the Rockefeller Commission, David Belin, November 22, 1963: You Are the Jury (Quadrangle, 1973). 18 See “Was Alger Hiss Guilty?” by Irving Younger, COMMENTARY, August 1975.

Here is an excerpt from a letter Mary Ferrell sent to Sylvia Meagher: Roger Craig had mental health issues. You can read more about this here. Here is an excerpt of a letter that Sylvia Meagher wrote in April 1968 to a person who had inquired about some of her research: Note Meagher's comment about Penn Jones: "Penn Jones is a dear and good and brave man; he is governed largely by his feelings about the case -- feelings which I share to a considerable degree -- but he is not a researcher or a scholar, in the true sense, and he accepts quite indiscriminately rumor, allegation, and revision that has the merit of supporting his basic views if no other merit. I am deeply sorry that he has compromised himself by sponsoring Roger Craig, who is a flagrant liar." Previous Relevant Blog Posts on Roger Craig Mark Lane Interviews Roger Craig Craig told Lane some really crazy stuff. Marina Oswald's Doctor was a Homosexual! Roger Craig wrote a memo to Jim Garrison about Marina Oswald's doctor. Jim Garrison Finds Another JFK Assassination Conspirator! Garrison charges Edgar Eugene Bradley with conspiracy to kill JFK, and Roger Craig says that Bradley was the Secret Service man he encountered outside the TSBD. Was Edgar Eugene Bradley One of the Three Tramps? Some conspiracy theorists believe that Bradley was one of the three tramps. A few letters in this post mention Roger Craig.

After my post yesterday on Francis Fruge and the Rose Cherami story, I was challenged on Facebook by a conspiracy theorist. He believed that Cherami did have foreknowledge of the JFK assassination, and during the course of our argument, he mentioned Dr. Victor Weiss as the person who heard her talk about the assassination. But did Dr. Weiss actually say he heard Cherami talk about the JFK assassination before it happened? Here is how the whole Cherami business started: This story was dormant until February 1967 when Garrison’s investigation was announced. Mr. A. H. Magruder called up Garrison’s office and provided a statement about what he had heard back in Christmas of 1963. He had just returned from a hunting trip with Dr. Victor Weiss who was then Clinical Director of the East Louisiana State Hospital in Jackson. Weiss told him that prior to the JFK assassination, state police had picked up a woman on highway 190 near Eunice, Louisiana who had apparently been thrown out of a car. The police thought she was psycho, and they brought her to the hospital where she was examined by Dr. Weiss. Magruder said that Weiss determined that Cherami was having withdrawal symptoms. She told him she was a “dope runner” for Jack Ruby. She claimed she was forced to pick up a shipment of dope in Florida to take to Dallas. Her young child was being held by some people to ensure she brought the heroin. Along the way she got into a fight with one of her male companions and he threw her out of the car. According to Magruder, Cherami also told Weiss that JFK and “other Texas officials” were going to be killed in Dallas. Weiss paid little attention to her ramblings until JFK was killed in Dallas. He told Magruder that the FBI came two days later to pick her up. Magruder gave Garrison investigator Frank Meloche Dr. Weiss’s contact information. Garrison knew that he had to find Rose Cherami. He put Meloche on the case, and he seconded Lt. Francis Fruge from the Louisiana State Police and Anne Dischler, an investigator for the State Sovereignty Commission, to help with the investigation. Dischler called Cherami’s mother who told her that she had died in 1965. Dischler also called Dr. Weiss who told her that a Dr. Don Bowers was the one who had talked to Cherami. She then called Bowers who denied talking to her. Right from the start there was confusion over what she actually said and when she said it. Here is a page from Anne Dischler's notepad. She notes towards the bottom that the info from Weiss is that Bowers talked to Cherami. Bowers then denied talking to her. Here is a report from Garrison investigator Frank Meloche on Cherami: Weiss told Meloche that "he doesn't recall whether this was told to him before or after the assassination." Here is the HSCA Outside Contact Report with Dr. Weiss: As you can see from this report, Weiss is now more definitive, saying that he talked to Cherami after the assassination, and that he "learned she had worked for Jack Ruby." Weiss said he heard from Dr. Don Bowers that she had made a statement prior to the assassination that JFK was going to be killed. After talking with Cherami, Weiss felt that "she did not have any specific details of a particular assassination plot." Here is one of the few video clips of Dr. Victor Weiss: Listen closely -- Weiss says that others heard Rose Cherami talk about the assassination. At no point does he say that he heard her talk about the assassination before it happened. As for Dr. Don Bowers, he released a statement for a JFK Lancer conference in which he denied talking to Cherami: Letter from Robert Dorff regarding Rose Cherami. This page is from Michael Marcades book, Rose Cherami: Gathering Fallen Petals. Marcades is her son. In 2017, researcher Anthony Summers sent out this email: I had not until now seen Dave [Reitzes]'s take on the Cherami matter, and am very impressed by it. As I wrote a couple of days ago [in another email], my misgivings on the subject were sufficient to drop it from the 2013 edition of my book on the case -- it had previously been only a footnote. My continuing interest in the episode had been sustained especially by Dr. Weiss' comment as to what Dr. Bowers had told him. Absent any interview with Bowers -- that I knew of - what Weiss said seemed to sustain the possibility that there was something to the overall story. Now that we have Bowers' account, that possibility seems to evaporate. I now lean towards the likelihood that - though Francis Frugé appeared forthright during his conversations with me -- he too may have fabricated or at least garbled. I think the Cherami episode should now be consigned to the junkpile - as a red herring that one could well do without. Of course, Fruge fabricated. To sum up, both Dr. Weiss and Dr. Bowers deny that Cherami said anything to them about the assassination before it happened. Previous Relevant Blog Posts Was Rose Cherami Murdered? The medical evidence is clear that Cherami was not murdered. An Important New Find Regarding Rose Cherami An article from 1957 relates to her credibility. Did Dr. Wayne Owens Hear Rose Cherami Predict the JFK Assassination? No. Dr. Owens did not corroborate the Cherami story in any way, shape, form, or manner. Did Rose Cherami Ever Work For Jack Ruby? There is no evidence she ever worked for Jack Ruby Did Rose Cherami Watch the Dallas Motorcade on Television? Joan Mellen claims Cherami was watching the motorcade on television. This is ridiculous. Francis Fruge's Conversations with Rose Cherami about the JFK Assassination He claims she told him she was going to kill JFK. Did Anybody Hear Rose Cherami Predict the JFK Assassination? There is no firm evidence that she predicted the assassination. Did Rose Cherami Provide Valuable Information on Dope Smuggling? No, her information was useless. Jim Garrison (and Others) on Rose Cherami Some conspiracy theorists are admitting the Rose Cherami story is nonsense. Was Sergio Arcacha Smith with Rose Cherami in November 1963? It is doubtful Arcacha Smith was with Cherami.

Philippe Labro was a French journalist who covered the JFK Assassination for France-Soir. He encountered Jack Ruby on November 23, 1963: Here is a letter that Meagher wrote Labro in May of 1967: Meagher references the "so-called code." Garrison believed he was a cryptologist and he thought he had found a coded link between Lee Harvey Oswald and Clay Shaw. You can see a list of links about the code below. Here is a letter that Meagher wrote Labro in May of 1968: Meagher discusses Garrison's fascination with Kerry Thornley. Click here for all of my posts on Kerry Thornley. The David mentioned above is David Lifton. The story about Mark Lane and Garrison's files was told by Tom Bethell (see his diary entry for November 4, 1967) The first two paragraphs above on Lane and the other critics are important. Here is a good case study of how Mark Lane's shtick about a redacted document continued even after critic Paul Hoch informed him of what was redacted. Here is an undated short note from Labro to Meagher: He writes: Dear Sylvia: Thanks for your latest letters. I am afraid we fully agree on one thing: The disappointment over Garrison's failure and fraud. In fact, the whole thing has been such a blow -- after the hope I had in him, having seen him and having been "charmed" -- that this whole affair fades away in my mind, memory, and interest. I have a dark feeling the truth will not be known and, worse, that nobody cares anymore. By the way, Philippe Labro wrote the preface to François Carlier's new book on the JFK Assassination, L’assassinat de Kennedy expliqué: Bilan définitif, après 60 ans. Previous Relevant Links about Garrison's Code Jim Garrison's Code and Sylvia Meagher A complete history of Garrison's code with all the relevant documents. Jim Garrison, the Cryptologist Garrison's codes and a nice spoof on Garrison. Was Oswald's Alias a Code for a Jack Ruby Stripper? An hilarious look at another Garrison code, one which was ridiculed by Sylvia Meagher. Jim Garrison wasn't the only master decoder A spoof of Garrison's silly beliefs on codes. Penn Jones' Phone Call with Sylvia Meagher Meagher discusses Garrison's code with Penn Jones. Previous Relevant Blog Posts regarding Sylvia Meagher and Jim Garrison Sylvia Meagher writes Bud Fensterwald Fensterwald invites Meagher to join his organization. She refuses because of Jim Garrison. Sylvia Meagher's Review of "The Kennedy Conspiracy" by Paris Flammonde A scathing review of Flammonde's book about the Garrison investigation. Mary Ferrell and Sylvia Meagher Discuss Jim Garrison An exchange of letters about Jim Garrison. Jim Garrison's Code and Sylvia Meagher Garrison comes up with a crazy code and Sylvia Meagher calls him out. Sylvia Meagher's Ode to the District Attorney of New Orleans Meagher also wrote poetry. Sylvia Meagher Writes Clay Shaw with an Idea Meagher's very good idea shows that Garrison didn't care to learn the truth. Kerry Thornley Writes Sylvia Meagher in 1970 Thornley tells Meagher about an article illustrating Garrison's pre-occupation with the JFK assassination. Tom Bethell Writes Sylvia Meagher about the Shaw Trial Bethell wrote Meagher about Charles Spiesel and his ridiculous testimony at the Clay Shaw trial. Sylvia Meagher's Letter to Look Magazine Sylvia Meagher's terrific letter to Look Magazine in response to their article "The Persecution of Clay Shaw." Sylvia Meagher Congratulates Clay Shaw On His Acquittal She was very pleased with his acquittal. Sylvia Meagher and Jim Garrison, Part One Meagher writes Clay Shaw a letter and his response is just terrific. Sylvia Meagher and Dr. Cyril Wecht Discuss Jim Garrison Dr. Wecht didn't think too much of Garrison, either. Mike Farrell, of M*A*S*H fame, and Sylvia Meagher Meagher educates Farrell on Jim Garrison. When will Oliver Stone Admit he was Wrong about Clay Shaw? A plea to Oliver Stone with a compilation of Meagher's writings about Jim Garrison. Sylvia Meagher on the Clay Shaw Case Howard Roffman writes a letter to Harold Weisberg about Sylvia Meagher. Penn Jones' Phone Call with Sylvia Meagher This phone call broke their relationship. Sylvia Meagher and Jim Garrison, Part Two An unpublished Meagher memo on the trial of Clay Shaw. Sylvia Meagher and Jim Garrison, Part Three - a never before published article by Meagher Another unpublished Meagher memo on the Garrison investigation and Warren Report critics. Garrison's Playboy Interview - What Couldn't Be Printed Sylvia Meagher's letter to the Editor regarding Garrison's interview in Playboy Magazine. Sylvia Meagher's Reaction to the Verdict in the Shaw Trial Meagher writes Harold Weisberg with her comments on the verdict. Two Letters to Jim Garrison about "A Heritage of Stone" James Phelan and Sylvia Meagher write Garrison letters about his book. Kerry Thornley writes Sylvia Meagher An exchange of letters between Thornley and Meagher. Did RFK Tell Garrison that there were guns between him and the White House? Meagher writes Thornley about Lane's comment on RFK. Was Jim Garrison Napoleon or Rasputin? Meagher writes Thornley with an opinion. M. S. Arnoni and Sylvia Meagher Take On Jim Garrison... Exchange of letters between Meagher, Arnoni and Garrison. Jim Garrison Blows His Top Meagher writes Weisberg about the damage Garrison is doing to critics of the Warren Report. James Phelan Writes to Richard Popkin Meagher replies to the New York Review of Books regarding Popkin's article on Garrison. Sylvia Meagher Replies to Richard Popkin An exchange of letters between Popkin and Meagher.

Glen Pinchback called Garrison's office several times with important information about a letter of confession from David Ferrie. Is this the key to the assassination? Mr, Pinchback kept on calling. This memo was found in the Bill Boxley files at the National Archives. Many of these memos have their headers removed, so I don't have the exact date. Note the Garrison notation at the bottom: "Note: Baragona is important." In one of the farewell letters that Ferrie left in his apartment, he mentions flying Baragona in his Beech airplane: Of course, the text of this letter was published in newspapers after Ferrie's death. Mr. Pinchback called again. I guess Mr. Pinchback wasn't happy with the service he was receiving from the D.A.'s office, and so he went to the press: Yes, Confidential Magazine thought this was an important article, right up there with "V.D Increases Sex Potency. Here is the article: Pinchback's allegation was so far out that he is not even mentioned in Joan Mellen's book, A Farewell to Justice.

I want to thank François Carlier for interviewing me. It was a lot of fun.

Jefferson Morley's latest Substack post about six assassination files caught my attention. There is an awful lot to unpack in Morley's article and it will require more than one blog post. So, here's the first. Morley said this about an Operations Northwoods document: Several paragraphs blacked out in the plans for the Pentagon’s notorious Operation Northwoods detail a “false flag” scheme, approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in May 1963. The Northwoods plan, implemented by “the most trusted covert personnel,” called for staging a spectacular violent attack on a U.S. target and arranging for the blame to fall on Cuba. Northwoods, says Reiner, was the “template” for the Dallas ambush which was immediately blamed by CIA assets on a Castro supporter. I have already posted twice about Operation Northwoods, pointing out that it came out of Operation Mongoose. The Kennedy administration wanted and encouraged departments to think of ways to get rid of, and harass, Fidel Castro. Surprise, surprise, some people came up with some crazy ideas. The Truth about Operation Northwoods Operation Northwoods can only understood as being part of the Kennedys' war against Cuba and Operation Mongoose. A Reply to Jefferson Morley regarding Operation Northwoods Morley responded to my article "The Truth about Operation Northwoods." Here is my reply. Let's review the redactions in the Northwoods document linked to by Morley. Here's the first redaction, on page 13 of the 201-page document: The unredacted text is in the 2018 release of the same document: Here is a redaction on page 11: Go to page 100 of a different copy of the same document and you can see the unredacted text: There are more redactions on page 21: This document contains the unredacted text: So, there are no redactions in the Northwoods document. Previous Relevant Blog Posts on Jefferson Morley 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.

Don't miss this important interview. Robert Reynolds is an expert on the JFK assassination files. Here is a link to Robert's blog in which you can download his PowerPoint presentation.

Two days ago, I posted the first episode of my new podcast series, On the Trail of Delusion., featuring Robert Reynolds, an expert on the JFK assassination files. On Facebook, Matt Douthit had this to say about our video: Of course, we never said that all the files were online. In fact, towards the end of our interview we talked about NARA's project of putting the entire JFK assassination collection online -- they seem to be way behind schedule. You have to love some of the Facebook comments: Matt also left this comment on our YouTube interview: Here is Robert's excellent reply: First, I find Douthit’s description of the records unclear. What does it mean to say “XX pages still classified”? Three possible meanings one might infer: 1) “The whole record is XX pages long and no text from it is available for public inspection.” This is certainly wrong. As I said in the interview, and elsewhere on this blog, there are no “withheld in full” CIA records left in the ARC. 2) “There are XX pages from a record, or records, concerning this person, in which the whole page is redacted.” I can’t find any records about these people which have that many whole page redactions, so again this is wrong. If Douthit has references for records which do have that many whole page redactions, I would like very much to see them. 3) “There are records on these people that are XX pages long, and within those pages there are still some redactions.” If this is what Douthit means, it’s a very misleading description. If he is referring to a 61 page doc on Dave Morales where only one or two words are redacted, he should not write that “61 pages” are “still classified.” There's more to Robert's reply at his website. I should add that I have posted repeatedly that the ARRB had gone through the Joannides personnel file, knowing full well exactly who he was, and they declassified the pages that they thought were relevant.

Episode 1 of my new podcast series, On the Trail of Delusion, is now available for viewing on YouTube. My first guest was Robert Reynolds who is an expert on the JFK assassination files. Don't miss his important website.