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David Lifton
David Lifton, the author of Best Evidence, has died. Read his obituary in the New York Times.
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Book Review: The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee
The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee (New York: Diversion Books, 2022), 286 pp.
The lives of Paul Gregory, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and his late father Pete, a Russian émigré from Siberia, intersected with those of Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina in 1962-63. In the summer of 1962, Marina gave lessons in the Russian language to the son Paul. Pete, the father, wrote a letter of recommendation for Lee. And, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Pete translated the words of Marina for the Secret Service in a hideaway motel. As both the son and the father conversed extensively in Russian with the Oswalds, and the father was a distinguished linguist, Paul Gregory’s new book may shed light on one of the most important questions about Lee Harvey Oswald: How did a high school dropout become so proficient in the Russian language?
Gregory’s book is written in the form of memoir. However, his experiences with the Oswalds in the summer of 1962 were not sufficient for a book-length manuscript. Consequently, the author rounded out his coverage of Oswald with a more expansive biography. For his sources, Gregory relied primarily on the Warren Report. This is revealing; it is clear that he has not probed deeply into the work of independent researchers of Oswald and the JFK assassination. The author refers to the latter body of literature as “forensics,” stating that “I cannot consider the hundreds of theories that reject Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole gunman.”[i]; “I am not going to engage in forensic analysis of an extra bullet and shots fired, directives to kill from Castro or Khrushchev, right-wing-fanatics, or deep-state cabals.”[ii] Gregory is convinced that his first-hand experience of Oswald validates the findings of the Warren Commission and is sufficient to demonstrate the lone gunman theory.
And yet when it comes to the matter of Oswald’s Russian language skills, Gregory cites my article “Oswald’s Proficiency in the Russian Language,”[iii] wherein I explore the evidence indicating that Oswald was already fluent in Russian prior to his departure for the Soviet Union in 1959. My contention was that Oswald was an asset of the United States government sent to the Soviet Union due to his ability to understand Russian, which he carefully concealed during his nearly three-year sojourn in Minsk. Gregory acknowledges that Russian is a difficult language to learn, yet he appears to dismiss my findings as conspiratorial thinking: “Some conspiracy theorists contend that Oswald’s Russian fluency constitutes proof of a conspiracy. They claim that he could not have picked up the language so quickly.”[iv] But Gregory does not explore how, when, and where Oswald did pick up the language so quickly. He only indicates that Oswald’s Russian language skills were “self-taught.”[v] But where did the self-instruction occur? It certainly was not at Arlington Heights High School in Fort Worth in which Oswald dropped out after completing the ninth grade. It was not at the Monterey Institute of Languages, as Oswald never resided in Northern California. There is a suggestion he was there, but no real proof. It did not occur during his stint in the Marines, where Oswald was observed by multiple eyewitnesses as already fully capable of reading Russian-language materials in print.
As for his spoken Russian, prior to his departure to the Soviet Union, Oswald was commended by Rosaleen Quinn, the aunt of one of Oswald’s Marine buddies, who experienced first-hand Oswald’s Russian language abilities. Quinn had been learning the language for over a year from Berlitz for a future position in the State Department. She later said to author Edward Epstein that Oswald spoke better Russian then she did. Gregory chooses to ignore the evidence that Oswald was already fluent in Russian when he left the Marines. The author simply assumes that Oswald achieved a mastery of Russian while he was in Minsk.[vi] But, during his nearly three-year stay, Oswald was not working diligently with his tutors or practicing on his own; instead, he was remembered by his friends in Minsk as constantly struggling with Russian and primarily speaking to them in English! In an interview that Gregory did with Patrick Bet David on November 22nd of this year, Gregory said that Oswald spoke Russian, but his grammar was very bad. This is not what Quinn said. She told Epstein that Oswald could string entire sentences together without much hesitation.
When Oswald returned from the Soviet Union, he and Marina received correspondence from their acquaintances in Minsk. Ernst Titovets wrote a letter in Russian addressed to both Lee and Marina, but he included a separate portion to Lee written in English.[vii] The same was true with Aleksandr (Alejandro) Zieger in a joint letter written to Marina and Lee. The undated letter was composed sometime after the Oswalds left Minsk in 1962. Mr. Zieger writes most of the letter in Russian, offering general news of the Zieger family. But at the end, he includes a personal message to “Alek” (Oswald’s nickname in Minsk) that is written in English: “Alek—my best wishes and a ton of good luck.”[viii] These letters demonstrate that his friends in the Soviet Union were under the impression that Oswald could not read Russian. Yet the correspondence was received by the Oswalds at a time when Lee visited the office of Pete Gregory in order to obtain a letter of recommendation that verified his Russian language competency. Pete gave him a test after pulling out Russian volumes from his bookshelves and asking Oswald to translate. Surprised by Oswald’s proficiency, Pete then wrote the brief letter that vouched for Oswald, whose aptitude in Russian was so good that Pete believed him “capable of being an interpreter and perhaps a translator.”[ix]
In what is revealing information contained in Gregory’s book, the linguist father Pete concluded that, based on his spoken Russian, Oswald was “from a Baltic republic or even Poland with Russian as a second language.”[x] He also speculated that “Oswald’s Russian fluency was explained by immersion in daily life rather than attendance at some sinister Russian language school for spies.”[xi] Pete’s son Paul attested that “having spent hours with Lee speaking Russian, I can confirm that his command of the everyday language was excellent. He could express anything he wanted to say.”[xii] The lapses in grammar and mistakes in gender may be partially explained by the father’s contention that Oswald originally learned Russian as a second language, “possibly from a Baltic republic or even Poland.” This description would explain how Oswald had already become proficient in Russian at the time he departed for the Soviet Union in 1959. It also must give us pause as to what was the true background of this young, bilingual man. The real Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans and raised exclusively in the United States. But Pete Gregory was referring to a young man who was likely born in Eastern Europe and was speaking both Russian and English as second languages.
Working under tremendous pressure, Pete Gregory translated the words of Marina in response to questions from the Secret Service shortly after the assassination. His translations were subsequently checked by other experts and judged “faultless without deviation.”[xiii] Previously, he had been selected to accompany President Eisenhower to Moscow to serve as translator during the summit that was eventually cancelled due to the Gary Powers U-2 spy plane incident. In describing his father as “one of the nation’s best Russian interpreters,”[xiv] Paul may not have been engaging in hyperbole. As a world-class linguist, Pete Gregory is an authority worth listening to as an eyewitness to Oswald’s Russian language skills. As it turns out, Pete’s characterization of Oswald having learned Russian as a second language somewhere in Eastern Europe, possibly “from a Baltic republic or even Poland,” merits some consideration.
How may this lend a clue to our understanding of Oswald? The answer lies in the massive work Harvey and Lee by John Armstrong, along with his articles on the harveyandlee.com website, and his digital archive documenting his research, which is accessible online from Baylor University. Because of the evidence of two Oswald boys using the same name, growing up in different households, attending different schools, and training separately in the Marines, Pete Gregory’s revelation about Oswald’s Russian language abilities could be corroborative evidence of Armstrong’s “The Oswald Project”, which sought to place a Russian speaking American in the Soviet Union as an asset.
The long-term project of planting a Russian-speaking spy in the Soviet Union must be examined in the context of the aftermath of World War II and the start of the Cold War. Immediately after the war, there was the forced relocation of enormous populations as the map was being redrawn in Eastern Europe. Thousands of “displaced persons” were interred in camps. The so-called Displaced Persons Commission made available to the CIA the names of potential assets. As a result, Eastern European refugees were brought to the United States under a program headed by Frank Wisner, the CIA’s director of clandestine operations. Wisner had become the State Department’s and the CIA’s expert on Eastern European war refugees during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Under Wisner’s program, the refugees were granted asylum in return for their cooperation in secret operations against the Soviets.
Wisner gained approval from the National Security Council for the “systematic” use of the refugees as set forth in a top-secret intelligence directive, NSCID No. 14 (March 3, 1950). Both the FBI and the CIA were authorized to jointly exploit the knowledge, experience, and talents of over 200,000 Eastern European refugees who had resettled in the United States.[xv] Under Wisner, the CIA was running hundreds of covert projects for the purpose of what the NSCID directive called the “exploitation of aliens as sources of foreign intelligence information.”[xvi] The surviving evidence suggests one of those projects merged the identities of a Russian-speaking immigrant boy, who likely came from Eastern Europe, with an American-born boy named Lee Harvey Oswald.[xvii]
Many of the Eastern European children grew up bilingual with Russian as a second language. As observed by journalist Anne Applebaum in her book Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, Eastern European children would, as a matter of course, be sent to live with another family at an early age in order to learn a second language. The idea behind this CIA project was to groom the Russian-speaking boy as a spy who, when he reached adulthood, would “defect” to the Soviet Union. Because he had assumed the name and identity of an American, the Soviets would not suspect that he spoke fluent Russian. The result was that nearly a decade later, as an undercover agent who secretly understood Russian, the Eastern European immigrant posing as a disgruntled United States Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald defected and spent nearly three years in the Soviet Union. While there, he married a Soviet woman and returned to the United States with his wife and child.
Upon his return to the United States, Oswald wrote a lengthy account of his experience working at the Minsk Radio and TV Factory, where he drew upon “his fairly wide circle of friends and acquaintances to gather the figures and descriptions of the inner workings of the Soviet system.”[xviii] In wondering how Oswald “was able to put together such an insightful picture of the Soviet enterprise,”[xix] Gregory notes that Oswald was “a surprisingly keen observer of Soviet reality.”[xx] But there should be no surprise if it had been Oswald’s principal purpose as a false defector to observe and to report on the realities of Soviet life during his stay. Dennis Offstein was a co-worker of Oswald at the graphic arts company of Jaggars, Chiles, Stovall in Dallas shortly after Oswald’s return in 1962. In his testimony to the Warren Commission, Offstein recalled that Oswald gave him a detailed account of Soviet military maneuvers during his residency. Specifically, Offstein remembered Oswald’s description of:
…the disbursement of the [Soviet] military units, saying that they didn’t intermingle their armored divisions and infantry divisions and various units the way we do in the United States, that they would have all of their aircraft in one geographical location and their tanks in another geographical location, and their infantry in another, and he mentioned that in Minsk he never saw a vapor trail, indicating the lack of aircraft in the area.[xxi]
This perceptive account of the Soviet military activities that includes being on the lookout for “vapor trails” squares with other detailed observations that Oswald brought back and recorded in detail. In the testimony of Offstein alone, there was enough cause to warrant an investigation of Oswald’s ties to intelligence and the possibility that he was sent to the Soviet Union in 1959 in the capacity of what Offstein called “an agent of the United States.”[xxii] But with the presence of Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission, Oswald’s records in the CIA were effectively pre-screened from the committee.
It was Allen Dulles who insisted that the Warren Commission publish a detailed biography of Oswald. As a result, Chapter VII (“Lee Harvey Oswald: Background and Possible Motives”) is a fifty-page narrative replete with inaccurate details and chronological errors. That “biography” may be a mélange of the lives of two young men, and it has misled researchers for nearly sixty years, the latest of which is Paul Gregory. The major premise that undergirds Gregory’s book is that Oswald was a genuine defector. Working closely to the Warren Report, Gregory believes that Oswald was a committed Marxist, that his distribution of pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans was genuine, that his opening of a branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans was genuine (despite him being the only member), and his visits to the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City were genuine (despite the absence of concrete evidence that Oswald himself paid those visits). In paraphrasing the Warren Report, Gregory identifies Oswald’s principal motivation for the assassination not out of animosity for John F. Kennedy, but his belief, shaped by his study of Marxism, that “he was destined for a place in history.”[xxiii]
But if Oswald was not a genuine defector and was working for the United States government, the entire edifice of the Warren Report collapses like a house of cards. If Oswald really had delusions of grandeur, he had the perfect opportunity to proclaim his great deed to history as he was paraded through the halls of the Dallas police headquarters and was allowed to address the press. But instead, he protested his arrest and insisted on his innocence with the words, “I’m just a patsy!” In this crystalline moment, he may have realized that he was a mere pawn in the greater design of the Cold War.
A fatal shortcoming of Gregory’s methodology is that he has not kept up with new evidentiary discoveries in the JFK assassination, particularly the findings of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). The military historian John Newman has observed that “in the history of the KGB and the CIA, their wars are not actually shooting each other so much as trying to penetrate each other.”[xxiv] Oswald may be best understood in the context of a myriad number of CIA projects with the goal of “penetrating” the enemy, including the critical area of identifying moles from within. Newman recounts the time when one of the legendary CIA mole hunters and “probably our most celebrated and capable counterintelligence officer in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency,”[xxv] Tennent “Pete” Bagley, sat down with researcher Malcolm Blunt. Bagley and Blunt reviewed the collection of documents on Oswald from the CIA, the State Department, and Naval intelligence. As they assessed the evidence, the stunning revelation came to Bagley that Oswald “had to be witting” in his defection.[xxvi] In other words, this senior CIA officer recognized that the evidence demonstrated that “Lee Harvey Oswald was a witting false defector when he went to Moscow.”[xxvii] This revelation was made possible through the efforts of the tenacious researcher Elizabeth “Betsy” Wolf, who had prepared detailed notes during her time spent on the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the late 1970s. The implications of her notes were so explosive that they were hidden until their declassification on a time-delayed release following the termination of the ARRB in 1998. Salvaging the notes was made possible by Oliver Stone’s film JFK, which led to the JFK Records Act and the establishment of the ARRB. In turn, the indefatigable researcher Malcolm Blunt carefully assembled Wolf’s notes and assessed their implications with Bagley.
Betsy Wolf had been troubled by the fact that a “201 file” had not been prepared on Oswald by the CIA at the time of his defection in 1959. This point was not addressed by the Warren Commission which paid little, if any, real attention to Oswald’s connections to the intelligence network. According to CIA protocol, 201 files were routinely opened for persons “of active operational interest.”[xxviii] But, inexplicably, after Oswald’s so-called defection, a 201 file was not opened until over a year later on December 8, 1960.[xxix] Wolf’s breakthrough discovery was that early CIA reports on Oswald were pigeonholed in the CIA’s Office of Security (OS), rather than to the SR (Soviet Russia) division. The OS would not refer a 201 file, while SR would. As recounted by researcher Vasilios Vazakas, “in the case of Oswald, his files bypassed the General Filing System and went straight into the Office of Security and its SRS [Security Research Service] component.”[xxx] One possible explanation entertained by Vazakas was that “Oswald was a special project for [James Jesus] Angleton, one he wanted no one else to know about.”[xxxi] In a crucial interview described in Wolf’s handwritten notes and discovered by Blunt, on July, 26, 1978, Wolf spoke with Robert Gambino, at that time, the current chief of the OS. Gambino informed her that a request for the special handling of Oswald’s documents had occurred prior to Oswald’s defection. In other words, CIA documentation on Lee Harvey Oswald predated his defection. With an understanding of that chronology—and the testimony of both Bagley and Gambino– it is clear that the CIA was fully aware of the phony defection in advance of the time it occurred in late October, 1959.[xxxii]
Even Oswald’s Marine roommate in Santa Ana, California, James Botelho, recognized that Oswald was not a genuine defector when he told attorney Mark Lane that “Oswald was not a Communist or a Marxist. If he was I would have taken violent action against him and so would many of the other Marines in the unit.”[xxxiii] After Oswald’s defection was made public, Botelho told how an investigation at the Santa Ana Marine base was conducted purely for show:
It was the most casual of investigations. It was a cover-investigation so that it could be said there had been an investigation….Oswald, it was said, was the only Marine ever to defect from his country to another country, a Communist country, during peacetime. That was a major event. When the Marine Corps and American intelligence decided not to probe the reasons for the “defection,” I knew then what I know now: Oswald was on an assignment in Russia for American intelligence.[xxxiv]
Through a nearly miraculous chain of events starting with Oliver Stone’s film and leading to the ARRB’s preservation of the notes of Betsy Wolf, we have today documentary evidence supporting Botelho’s claims that Oswald was a false defector.
Instead of following through on the implications of Oswald’s language proficiency in Russian and exploring whether or not he was a genuine defector, Gregory pivots to spend a large portion of his book recounting the stormy relationship of Lee and Marina. Gregory returns to his default mode of the Warren Report to cite the Commission’s alleged motivation for the killing of the President: “The relations between Lee and Marina Oswald are of great importance in any attempt to understand Oswald’s possible motivation.”[xxxv] The fact that the Warren Commission had to look to the marital relationship of the suspected assassin for motivation for the murder of the President demonstrates how flimsy the case was against Oswald. Gregory spends countless pages describing the abuse Lee heaped upon Marina, mainly relying on secondhand information from members of the small Russian émigré community in Dallas. Gregory’s narrative resembles the plot outline of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, wherein Lee is the tyrannical overlord of Marina just as Petruchio seeks to keep Katharina on a short leash.
In what he calls his own “amateur psychoanalysis,”[xxxvi] Gregory repeats on multiple occasions the tiresome refrain of Warren Commission apologists that Oswald was seeking to impress his wife by carving out his place in history. During his time spent with Oswald in the summer of 1962, Gregory “detected none of the trademarks of a future assassin.”[xxxvii] Yet in the back-reading of his own experience through the lens of the Warren Report, Gregory concludes that he had “witnessed firsthand this small man’s attempt to prove to the world and to his young wife that he was indeed exceptional.”[xxxviii] Through a tortured logic, Gregory posits the following in response to Marina’s belittling of her husband’s politics and his substandard performance in the bedroom: “What better way for Oswald to kill two birds with one stone than by the ‘manly’ act of killing the most powerful man on earth?”[xxxix] This psychoanalytical approach completely misses the point that the killing of President Kennedy was a politically driven act at the height of the Cold War, the effect of which was a compete reversal of America’s foreign policy in the 1960s. Many of which were detailed in Oliver Stone’s four-hour film JFK: Destiny Betrayed.
In an interview given by Gregory shortly before the release of his book, the author indicated that he was motivated to write the memoir because his family was embarrassed at having an association with the alleged assassin of an American president. In Gregory’s words, it was “a black spot on the family.”[xl] The resulting book is not the impartial work of a scholar at the Hoover Institution. Rather, it is the biased opinion of an eyewitness with a personal agenda. Gregory considered Marina Oswald as a friend, as she helped him to prepare a paper on an obscure Russian play during the summer of 1962. But one looks in vain in the book for Marina’s corroboration of what Gregory has written about her and her first husband. The author sent Marina a draft of the manuscript, as well as a cordial letter. But she never replied. The last time Gregory saw Marina was on Thanksgiving Day in 1962. In a 1993 NBC interview, the feisty Marina went toe-to-toe with newscaster Tom Brokaw, as she took issue with the claims of Gerald Posner in his book Case Closed and said of her husband that “he definitely did not fire the shots.”[xli] In 1996, Marina told Oprah Winfrey that she came to the conclusion that her husband was innocent by studying the Warren Report’s supplementary volumes, which puts a damper on the entire hypothesis of Paul Gregory’s book: “And then comes the 26 volumes of the testimony, of the evidence, which does not support their conclusion.”[xlii] Drawing so heavily as he does on the Warren Report, Gregory has written a book that should take its place alongside Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s Marina and Lee, Robert Oswald’s Lee, and Jean Davison’s Oswald’s Game, all of which serve as posthumous daggers in the heart of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Appendix
The Media’s Response to The Oswalds and Reflections on the Cold War
Following the release of Paul Gregory’s book, the media’s response has fixated on the lurid elements of alleged domestic abuse and the troubled marriage of the Oswalds. Writing in the Daily Mail on November 25, 2022, Daniel Bates offers the eye-popping title of “‘He feared he would be exposed as a loser.’ Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK because he was ‘humiliated’ by wife Marina who mocked him as sexually inadequate and cheated with a businessman.”[1]
Bates’s formal review then begins with the observation that “Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy because he feared being branded a ‘loser’ by his wife who ridiculed his pretensions of being a Marxist intellectual.”[2]
Here the journalist is invoking guilt by association in an argument that goes as follows: If Oswald was belittled and shamed by his wife, it follows that he killed the President in retaliation. A Kirkus review succinctly summarized the book as “an informative view of a killer’s marriage and lethal motivations.”[3] Writing in the New York Post, Heather Robinson concludes her review by speculating that “it’s even possible that Oswald killed JFK because the young president was seen as the ultimate symbol of American masculinity and power — and because Marina liked him.”[4] Some of this “writing” resembles postmodern literary criticism.
In the alternative media, Gus Russo on Spy Talk introduces a litany of titillating incidents not even mentioned in Gregory’s book. At the same time, he completely ignores how Oswald attained a superior level of Russian language proficiency, as well as Peter Gregory’s analysis that Oswald spoke like an Eastern European who had learned Russian from daily exposure, as opposed to formal training in the classroom. As Paul’s father, Pete, testified to the Warren Commission, “I would say it would be rather unusual, rather unusual for a person who lived in the Soviet Union for 17 months that he would speak so well that a native Russian would not be sure whether he was born in that country or not.”[5] This linguist was attempting to reconcile what he had heard as the inflections of an Eastern European speaking Russian that conflicted with what he was told by Oswald about how he had learned to speak the language. Russo also makes no mention of Oswald’s “defection” in 1959 and Gregory’s blind acceptance of the Warren Commission’s profile of Oswald as a genuine Marxist.
In their rush to paint Oswald as a domestic abuser of the most despicable variety, the reviewers fail to mention a very important evidentiary point: Paul Gregory relies extensively on secondhand reporting that he heard from members of the Dallas Russian émigré community. The reviewers give readers the impression that Gregory is offering startling, new revelations. But these individuals were called before the Warren Commission and were questioned about the alleged abuse. Robert Charles-Dunne has provided a valuable collation of their testimony in “Was Oswald a Serial Wife Batterer?” that would serve as an indispensable resource alongside Gregory’s book.
In following the words of the witnesses, it is apparent that they were not really witnesses. That they too were invariably relying on second- and third- hand reporting of Oswald’s treatment of his wife. The testimony of nineteen witnesses reveals that no police report was ever filed and rarely was there an actual witness to verify Oswald’s displays of temper. Gregory himself never observed Oswald physically striking Marina during any of his forty-eight tutorial sessions. And yet, his allegations are the bedrock foundation for the motivation that Oswald killed President Kennedy.
Any instance of spousal abuse is reprehensible, and Marina Oswald has acknowledged that she was an abused wife. Yet over time, she was able to separate the abuse from the question of whether or not her husband shot the President. By the 1990s, while continuing to acknowledge Oswald’s shabby treatment of her, she still concluded that Lee had been framed…primarily from her study of the supplementary volumes of the Warren Report! Scholars who tackle this topic should have the same degree of objectivity as a victim like Marina.
In investing so much time in writing about the connection between Oswald’s treatment of his wife and the murder of President Kennedy, Gregory has given short shrift to the climate of the Cold War that impacted the lives of everyone described in his book, including his own and especially his father’s. Pete Gregory entered the pressure cooker to translate for Marina in response to questions from the Secret Service over the stressful assassination weekend. His dedication movingly comes across in the memoir. This was an instance of a law-abiding citizen being sucked into the maelstrom of a national crisis. But what was not known until recently was that Pete Gregory was later a likely employee of the CIA. As uncovered by researcher Malcolm Blunt, a set of documents indicates that, in 1965, Pete applied for work in the CIA in the JPRS (Joint Publications Research Service).[6]
The recipient of his application was the Chief Officer of the Foreign Documents Division of the CIA. It is possible that Pete may have been applying for a position of translator of sensitive multi-lingual texts at the height of the Cold War. In addition to Pete’s completed application, another document verifies his CIA security clearance through a strict process of vetting that included the administration of a polygraph. By profession, Pete was an engineer working in the petroleum industry of Texas. More work lies ahead in understanding precisely what role Pete was playing in the CIA in a Cold War connection that is never mentioned in his son’s memoir.
Indeed, discourse on the Cold War in general is conspicuously absent from Gregory’s book. Mark Kramer, who is Director of Cold War Studies at Harvard University, wrote a commendatory blurb that appears at the start of The Oswalds: “Gregory’s book offers a definitive personality sketch of Oswald and a great deal of evidence that should put an end, once and for all, to the notion that shadowy forces intent on murdering the president would have enlisted such an unreliable and tempestuous loser.” This astonishing perspective written by a scholar of the Cold War speaks volumes about what little time the so-called experts have invested in studying the JFK assassination. Historians, journalists, and bloggers should be following trails of reliable evidence and placing a historical event carefully in context. They should not be relying on hearsay, gossip, and psychoanalytical speculation. A seminal moment of the Cold War was the assassination of President Kennedy that shifted the nation’s foreign policy over the course of a weekend. The preponderance of evidence suggests that the scapegoat Lee Harvey Oswald was a creature of the Cold War and that President Kennedy’s death was the result of forces at work against his vision of peace in the period following the Cuban Missile Crisis. Both men were pawns on a chessboard that we can finally understand today if we only take the time to examine the evidence. Until that happens, our knowledge of the Cold War will remain incomplete.
[i] Paul R. Gregory, The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee (New York: Diversion Books, 2022), 36.
[ii] Gregory, 230.
[iii] James Norwood, “Oswald’s Proficiency in the Russian Language,” http://harveyandlee.net/Russian.html.
[iv] Gregory, 100.
[v] Gregory, 245.
[vi] Gregory, 88.
[vii] Gregory, 124. Gregory describes Titovets’s letter as “jocular.” But if Oswald had achieved “mastery” of Russian while in Minsk, as Gregory suggests, then why would Titovets feel compelled to write a special portion of the letter addressed expressly to Oswald in English?
[viii] Mr. Zieger’s letter was published in the Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. XVI, 156 (Exhibit 33).
[ix] John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee (Quasar, Ltd., 2003), 399.
[x] Gregory, 100.
[xi] Gregory, 100.
[xii] Gregory, 100.
[xiii] Gregory, 202.
[xiv] Gregory, 207.
[xv] The first article of the directive reads as follows: “Exploitation of aliens within the U.S. for internal security purposes shall be the responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Exploitation of aliens as sources of foreign intelligence information or for other foreign intelligence purposes shall be the responsibility of the Central Intelligence Agency. This allocation to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and to the Central Intelligence Agency of separate areas of alien exploitation responsibility does not preclude joint exploitation, which must be encouraged whenever feasible.”
NSCID No. 14: https://cryptome.org/nscids-50-55.pdf[xvi] NSCID No. 14, article 1: https://cryptome.org/nscids-50-55.pdf
[xvii] See my article “Lee Harvey Oswald: The Legend and the Truth,” which begins with discussion of the HSCA testimony of Jim Wilcott: http://harveyandlee.net/J_Norwood/Legend.html
[xviii] Gregory, 59.
[xix] Gregory, 59.
[xx] Gregory, 49.
[xxi] Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. 10, 202.
[xxii] Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. 10, 200.
[xxiii] Gregory, 36.
[xxiv] James DiEugenio and Oliver Stone, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass (New York: Skyhorse Publishing 2022), 193.
[xxv] DiEugenio and Stone, 193.
[xxvi] DiEugenio and Stone, 194.
[xxvii] DiEugenio and Stone, 194.
[xxviii] John Newman, Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2008), 47.
[xxix] For researcher Vasilios Vazakas, Betsy Wolf was puzzled because “there were two reasons to open the 201 file on Oswald over a year prior to when it happened. Neither one triggered the opening. Further, when Wolf looked at the 201 file, it only contained copies and the two Naval dispatches were gone…. What could be a more compelling reason for the counter-intelligence office opening a file on Oswald than his threatening to give secrets of the U-2 to the Soviets?” Vasilios Vazakas, “Creating the Oswald Legend—Part 4.” kennedysandking.com. August 15, 2020.
[xxx] Vazakas.
[xxxi] Vazakas.
[xxxii] Historian James DiEugenio summarizes the remarkable discovery of Betsy Wolfe as follows: “Only toward the end of her search did Betsy find out what had happened. Betsy’s notes include an interview with the former OS chief Robert Gambino. According to Malcolm, her handwritten notes are the only place anyone can find anything about this particular interview. (Wolf notes of 7/26/78) Gambino told her that CIA Mail Logistics was in charge of disseminating incoming documents. In other words, someone made this request about the weird routing of Oswald’s files from OS’s Security Research Service. (p. 324) And this was done prior to Oswald’s defection. Malcolm concludes that with what Betsy unearthed, there should now be no question that the CIA knew Oswald was going to defect before it happened.” Book review by James DiEugenio, “The Devil Is in the Details: By Malcolm Blunt with Alan Dale. kennedysandking.com. March 20, 2021: https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/the-devil-is-in-the-details-by-malcolm-blunt-with-alan-dale
[xxxiii] James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable—Why He Died and Why It Matters (Ossining, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008), 40.
[xxxiv] Douglass, 40.
[xxxv] Gregory, 230.
[xxxvi] Gregory, 229.
[xxxvii] Gregory, 16.
[xxxviii] Gregory, 240.
[xxxix] Gregory, 243.
[xl] The LBJ Library, “With the Bark Off: A Conversation with Paul Gregory About Lee Harvey Oswald” (October 27, 2022): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJ595whXpdE
[xli] Marina Porter interview, August 1993 (NBC): https://www.pinterest.com/pin/28640147609703189/
[xlii] A complete transcript of Marina’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, which includes an appearance by Oliver Stone, may be read in the following transcription made by R.J. DellaRosa: https://www.tumblr.com/novemberdays1963/37177099041/marina-oswald-porter-on-oprah-1996
[1] Daniel Bates, The Daily Mail (November 25, 2022): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11458759/Lee-Harvey-Oswald-assassinated-President-JFK-humiliated-wife-Marina.html
[2] Bates.
[3] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/paul-r-gregory/the-oswalds/
[4] Heather Robinson, “Pal Reveals Lee Harvey Oswald’s Weird, Paranoid Life One Year Before Killing JFK” New York Post (November 29, 2022): https://nypost.com/2022/11/19/pal-reveals-lee-harvey-oswalds-weird-paranoid-life-pre-jfk-killing/
[5] Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. II, 347.
[6] According to the Harvard University Library, “The United States Joint Publications Research Service is a government agency which translates foreign language books, newspapers, journals, unclassified foreign documents and research reports. Approximately 80% of the documents translated are serial publications. JPRS is the largest single producer of English language translations in the world. More than 80,000 reports have been issued since 1957, and currently JPRS produces over 300,000 pages of translations per year.” https://guides.library.harvard.edu/jprs
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James Norwood taught for twenty-six years in the humanities and the performing arts at the University of Minnesota. The curriculum that he offered included a semester course on the JFK assassination. He is the author of “Lee Harvey Oswald: The Legend and the Truth” and “Oswald’s Proficiency in the Russian Language” published at harveyandlee.com. His article “Edmund Gullion, JFK, and the Shaping of a Foreign Policy in Vietnam” was published at kennedysandking.com.
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JFK Assassination Records – A Watershed Moment?
On October 19, 2022, a lawsuit was filed by the Mary Ferrell Foundation against President Joseph R. Biden and the National Archives and Records Administration (“NARA”) to enforce the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The lawsuit seeks to compel the President and NARA to finally perform their duties under the federal law that governs the final declassification of JFK assassination records.
Some historical context is important. The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (the “JFK Records Act”) was unanimously passed by Congress in 1992. President Biden, a Senator at the time, voted in favor of the JFK Records Act. The JFK Records Act was unanimously approved by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. One can read the JFK Records Act in its entirety by searching “Public Law 102-526, 102d Congress, President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.”
The JFK Records Act is extremely favorable to the American public in terms of transparency and declassification of assassination records. On reading the JFK Records Act one does not have to go past the first page of the statute to see what Congress intended and how strong of an impact it was meant to have. For example:
Section 2(a)(2), JFK Records Act: “all Government records concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy should carry a presumption of immediate disclosure, and all records should be eventually disclosed to enable the public to become fully informed about the history surrounding the assassination.”
Section 2(a)(3), JFK Records Act: “legislation is necessary to create an enforceable, independent, and accountable process for the public disclosure of such records.”
Section 2(a)(4), JFK Records Act: “legislation is necessary because congressional records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy would not otherwise be subject to public disclosure until at least the year 2029.”
Section 2(a)(7): “most of the records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are almost 30 years old, and only in the rarest cases is there any legitimate need for continued protection of such records.”
This is what your Congress declared in 1992, 30 years ago, and with the strongest of language. Congress declared that records pertaining to the JFK assassination had already been unreasonably withheld from the public for 30 years. Even the CIA felt the JFK Records Act was a different breed of declassification law, that had the teeth to go much further than FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) or any previous effort to shed light on deep government secrets. In a 1998 internal CIA Memorandum titled JFK Records Review – Lessons Learned, the CIA stated that, “The level of evidence required by the Board [the Assassination Records Review Board or ARRB] to postpone what was generally considered protectable information was extremely high and usually required documentation of ‘current harm’. Defenses based on general principles such as official cover or sources and methods were not acceptable.”
The Board closed down in 1998. In 2022, after another 30 years, and in spite of the strongest possible legislation, the President and responsible agencies are still withholding almost 15,000 records that are relevant to the JFK Assassination. Many records are still withheld in full. Others have been “released” with significant redactions. The point of this article is not to analyze which specific records have been withheld in full, which records still have significant redactions, or which records have not been turned over to NARA for inspection and preservation. The point of this article is to explain why legal action was necessary and also unfortunately for the American public, the last and only choice.
The JFK Records Act established and created the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Upon creation of the JFK Records Act, agencies and government offices were ordered to deliver all assassination records to NARA. An assassination record is defined as any record related to the assassination of President Kennedy that was “created or made available for use by, obtained by, otherwise came into the possession of” (i) the Warren Commission; (ii) the Rockefeller Commission; (iii) the Church Committee; (iv) the Pike Committee; (v) the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA); (vi) any executive agency; and (vii) and other office of the Federal Government, or any state or local law enforcement office that performed work in connection with the federal inquiry in the Kennedy assassination. For anyone looking to understand the full scope of the JFK Records Act and the work of the ARRB, the ARRB’s Final Report is essential reading.
The above-defined assassination records became known as the JFK Records Collection, or the “Collection”. It was then the job of the ARRB, an independent body, to review the Collection and make legal determinations on which records might still qualify for classification under the standards of the JFK Records Act. What are those standards? For an agency or government office to request continued classification, section 6 of the JFK Records Act put the burden of proof on the objecting agencies. The burden of proof is not on researchers and the American public to demonstrate why an assassination record(s) should be released. For agencies and government offices to make a proper legal case for continued classification and secrecy, they were required to provide the ARRB with clear and convincing evidence that:
- the threat to the military defense, intelligence operations, or conduct of foreign relations posed by the public disclosure of the assassination (record) is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest, and such public disclosure would reveal (i) an intelligence agent whose identify currently requires protection; (ii) an intelligence source or method; or (iii) any other matter currently relating to the military defense or intelligence operations, the disclosure of which would demonstrably impair national security.
- the disclosure of the record would reveal the identity of a living person who provided confidential information to the United States;
- the disclosure of the record could constitute an unwarranted invasion of privacy;
- the disclosure of the record would compromise the existence of a confidentiality agreement between a U.S. government agent and a cooperating individual or foreign government; or
- the disclosure would reveal a security or protective procedure currently utilized by the Secret Service or other agency responsible for protecting government officials.[1]
In other words, an agency still seeking classification (the CIA, FBI or Secret Service, to name a few) were required to provide the ARRB with demonstrably clear and convincing evidence based on the above standards from the JFK Records Act. If they did not, the ARRB had the legal authority to order the declassification of the assassination record. If there was some evidence warranting continued classification, the ARRB issued a final order recommending a date for final declassification. These Final Orders from the ARRB were contained in a form document called a “Final Determination Notification, under its statutory authority. These documents provided the unclassified reasons for postponement for each assassination record that disclosure was postponed in whole or in part, along with the ARRB’s recommended date or triggering event for the release of said record.
To its credit, the ARRB did a tremendous amount of work from 1994 to 1998, releasing more than 2 million pages of assassination records. In 1998, however, the ARRB’s authority had run its course according to its Congressional mandate and the ARRB was dissolved in late September of that year. NARA, and the American public, were then left with a Collection that still contained tens of thousands of classified records, totaling hundreds of thousands of pages. Agencies were required under the JFK Records Act to perform periodic review pursuant to the recommendations and Final Determinations of the ARRB in order to ensure timely declassification and release of the assassination records.
What happened after 1998? Virtually nothing. Without the independent ARRB to ensure that agencies and government offices continued their periodic review obligation, it was up to NARA to hope that agencies and government offices would finish the work on declassification. The intent of Congress is that maybe 1% (or less) of the Collection could plausibly still require classification as of 2017. Refer again to the declaration of Congress in the JFK Records Act: “most of the records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are almost 30 years old, and only in the rarest cases is there any legitimate need for continued protection of such records.” That declaration was made in 1992! Reflect on that for a moment.
October 26, 2017 was in fact the deadline for final declassification. Section 5(g)(2)(d) of the JFK Records Act required the President (Trump at the time) to take specific action to ensure that Congress’s mandate to release all assassination records by the deadline was completed. We are all aware of Trump’s tweets in which he committed to the final release of all assassination records on the eve of this deadline in 2017.
The President only has power to authorize continued classification of an assassination record if he certifies that “each” specific record continues to pose an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations, as required by the Act; and that such identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure. In other words, the President is required to make decisions with regard to each assassination record under the same constraints and authority as the ARRB. The President was therefore required to finish the ARRB’s job by October 26, 2017, or provide published unclassified reasons, based on clear and convincing evidence for each assassination record withheld under the criteria set out in section 6 of the JFK Records Act, as outlined in detail above.
What happened instead? President Trump initially issued an order Executive Memorandum on October 26, 2017 delaying the release of assassination records. Plain and simple: This order was illegal and did not comply with the clear standards of the JFK Records Act. Trump’s first order in October 2017 authorized a 6-month delay for agencies and governments to continue their review of assassination records and make recommendations to Trump by April, 2018. Then it got worse. On April 26, 2018, President Trump issued another order Executive Memorandum authorizing another delay of over three (3) years.
In October of 2021, President Biden declassified about ten per cent of the outstanding documents. He then continued the trend of his predecessor, which is extremely troubling. President Biden issued another order Executive Memorandum giving agencies and government offices until December 15, 2022 to make final decisions on the release of assassination records. Let me say that again. President Biden has now empowered agencies and government offices to make their own decisions on declassification. This is exactly the opposite of how the JFK Records Act was intended to work. Like both of President Trump’s Memoranda, President Biden’s Executive Memorandum is simply unlawful.
Congress was abundantly clear that the purpose of the JFK Records Act was to publicly disclose all records related to the assassination of President Kennedy through an enforceable process of downgrading and declassification. In all but the “rarest of cases” was any assassination record to be kept secret beyond the final deadline for release on October 26, 2017. It therefore defies both reason and Congress that two Presidents, the Archivist, NARA, and a number of executive agencies have determined that the standards for continuing postponement of the withheld assassination records have somehow become less onerous now after that deadline for release and after 60 years have passed.
There is no reasonable expectation that President Biden will take appropriate action by December 15, 2022. If anything, he has empowered agencies and government offices to act with more secrecy in regard to the withheld assassination records. Thus the necessity of the legal action.
The government continues to operate under the findings of the Warren Commission, which is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination and with no confederates. That Commission also concluded that Jack Ruby assassinated Oswald on his own and with no associates. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (“HSCA”) concluded in 1978 that there was a probable conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination and referred the matter to the U.S. Justice Department for further investigation. However, the Justice Department has done nothing to further investigate the murder of the 35th President of the United States. If Oswald did act alone, or even if he acted with other alleged “pro-Castro sympathizers”, why the continued secrecy? One can only assume that the thousands of withheld records will show a U.S. Intelligence connection to Oswald, which was covered up immediately after the assassination and is still being covered up. That is an article for another day, but it is the only logical conclusion at this time.
Only time will tell, and hopefully a Court will finally declare that there is no reasonable or legal reason to continue the sixty years of government secrecy.
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[1] The term “current” is a prevailing theme in section 6 of the JFK Records Act. It is absurd to think that, after what happened to President Kennedy in Dallas, that a current security or protective procedure utilized by the Secret Service in 1963 could be compromised by the release of assassination records. Anyone who has studied this subject is aware that the Secret Service actively destroyed its records pertaining to presidential security in 1963, despite the mandate of the ARRB.
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Mel Ayton’s The Kennedy Assassinations: A Review
The Kennedy Assassinations: JFK and Bobby Kennedy
By Mel Ayton
Say this about Mel Ayton, he will not give up. Seven years ago, Martin Hay reviewed his book Beyond Reasonable Doubt—co-written with David Von Pein. Martin left the authors without a leg to stand on and made a mockery of their bombastic title. (Click here for that review)
The subtitle of his new book is “Debunking the Conspiracy Theories.” In his preface, Ayton says that the bogus revelations in the John F. Kennedy case were put to rest by the late Vincent Bugliosi in Reclaiming History and the late John McAdams in JFK Assassination Logic.
This author spent 458 pages of analysis and evaluation in taking apart Bugliosi’s mammoth book. There is no other way to say this: Bugliosi lied in his introduction when he said he would present the critics’ arguments the way they wanted them presented. He then doubled down on this by saying “I will not knowingly omit or distort anything.” (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp XII-XIII)
What was so shocking about the former prosecutor’s initial claim was how easy it was to show it was utterly and, in fact, knowingly false. For a prime example, see how Bugliosi dealt with Jack Ruby’s polygraph. (DiEugenio, pp. 267-70) It seemed to me that, with that book, Bugliosi was simply playing to the crowd. In this case, the MSM. A perfect example of this was his treatment of Doug Horne on the paradox of Kennedy’s brain, which had disappeared. Horne tried to prove that the surviving pictures of Kennedy’s brain cannot really be his. And in Oliver Stone’s documentary, JFK: Destiny Betrayed, we proved this along three evidentiary lines. Horne was on camera elucidating one of those lines: the testimony of autopsy photographer John Stringer. (DiEugenio, pp.160-65)
The book by John McAdams was reviewed by four different authors: Pat Speer, Gary Aguilar, Frank Cassano and David Mantik. The last three were on this site. (Click here to read them.) The remarkable thing about those four critiques is that there is very little overlap between them. Which confirms there was a lot of objectionable material in the book.
II
This book is an anthology of essays Ayton has written and published, many of them updated. Before the five essays on the JFK case and six on the RFK case, Mel leads off with his Introduction, entitled “Conspiracy Thinking”. This is his way of branding any author who disagrees with him as a heretic who does not abide by the rules of evidence and logic. To any knowledgeable person, it’s quite the opposite. Let us just take a few examples.
Ayton says that the guilt of James Earl Ray in the Martin Luther King case is overwhelming (p. 8). Then why did Bill Pepper win the very accurate and detailed mock trial for Ray? Why did he also win the civil suit in Memphis against Lloyd Jowers for his culpability in the conspiracy. (The Assassinations, Edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 492-509)
He then adds this: “The post-Watergate United States became intensely susceptible to conspiracy arguments.” (p. 2) Well that would happen, if the American public was to finally see the evidence in the Zapruder film, as it was allowed to do in 1975—for the first time, after 12 years. The shocking sight of President Kennedy’s body rocketing backwards with terrific force, when Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to be behind him—well that might do the trick Mel. Especially after trusted newsman Dan Rather misrepresented what happened in the film back in 1963.
One last example: Ayton quotes historian Henry Steele Commager as saying in the new millennium, that ”There has come in recent years something that might be called a conspiracy psychology: a feeling that great events can’t be explained by ordinary processes.” (p. 11) That old Priscilla Johnson, recycled by Michael Shermer, chestnut. The idea that Oswald did not shoot Kennedy was propagated way back in 1967 by the first wave of Warren Commission critics: works by Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher, Edward Epstein, and Harold Weisberg, among others. In December of 1967, Josiah Thompson’s book, Six Seconds in Dallas, actually made the cover of a large circulation magazine, Saturday Evening Post. Lane’s book Rush To Judgment was a number one bestseller.
These books did what the MSM did not do. As Barry Ernest says in Oliver Stone’s documentary, they compared the Commission’s 26 volumes of evidence and testimony with the original 888 page Warren Report. They found, quite often, the evidence did not line up with the conclusions in that report. The Commisioners were banking on the premise that no one would ever read those 26 volumes. Not only did some intelligent people read them, they were so outraged they felt compelled to write about the difference, at length.
But in spite of that, Ayton titles his first essay, originally published in 2004, “The Warren Commission Report: 40 Years later, it Still Stands Up.” Could anyone truly think such was the case? One of his opening sentences is that Oswald was a self-appointed champion of Castro. (p. 18) If there is one thing we know about Oswald today is that he was not in any way under the influence of Castro. As Jeff Morley has shown, that was simply the first cover story put out by the Cuban exiles in New Orleans, and paid for by the CIA. (Click here for more.) Ayton does not mention this important essay at any point in his book.
On the next page, Ayton writes something even worse. He says that if the FBI and CIA had been more forthcoming with the HSCA, some of the mysteries about Oswald would have been cleared up. (p. 19) This is ridiculous. It was the CIA that would not allow the HSCA’s report on Oswald in Mexico City to be released to the public back in 1979. Commonly called the Lopez Report, Mr. Ed Lopez—a co-author–told this writer that the CIA made so many objections to the report that it took them 6 hours to get through the first two pages. That report strongly suggests that someone impersonated Oswald in Mexico City. (DiEugenio, pp.284-300) Also, the HSCA did not include, and the ARRB did not declassify during their active years, the work of Betsy Wolf. That work indicates that someone at CIA rigged Oswald’s file from the time he defected to Moscow in 1959.(Read more.) Why would that happen? And why would Oswald be impersonated in Mexico City? And did the Warren Commission report on these events? No, they did not. Further, as Jeff Morley has written-and stated in Oliver Stone’s film JFK Revisited— HSCA Chief Counsel Bob Blakey did not know the CIA lied to him about what George Johannides was doing in 1963 with the Cuban exiles in New Orleans. Blakey did not know that Johannides was supervising those exiles before he accepted him as a liaison to the committee. Why did the CIA lie about this?
III
His next essay tries to say that the mystery of the assassination can be solved by exploring the life of Lee Oswald. It would have been a breath of fresh air if Ayton had written something outside of the Warren Commission tripe. Nope. According to Mel, nothing new has been discovered about Oswald since 1964. He was a misfit, embraced by radical ideology and he took a shot at General Edwin Walker.
I hate to tell Mel, but Oswald did not take a shot at Walker. (DiEugenio, pp. 100-102) Not unless bullets can change their color and caliber. And if Oswald wanted to be an important political figure, why did he never take credit for killing Kennedy? (Ayton, p. 43)
Next up is an essay on Jack Ruby. More of the same. In this chapter there is no mention of Dr. Louis J. West and his treatment of Ruby in prison. If you don’t mention West then you do not have to reveal he worked for the CIA in their MK/Ultra program. (Tom O’Neill, Chaos, pp. 377-88)
He also writes that Ruby left his apartment at 11 AM on Sunday morning and walked down the Main Street ramp. (Ayton, pp. 48-49) First, there is plentiful evidence that Ruby left his apartment earlier that morning and was seen at the DPD headquarters. In fact, he asked three witnesses, “Has Oswald been brought down yet?” (DiEugenio, p. 224) In addition a church minister said he was on an elevator with Ruby at 9:30 AM. Further, when his cleaning lady called Ruby early that morning, she did not think it was him who answered the phone. (Ibid)
As per Ruby walking down the Main Street ramp as the Warren Commission held, that was seriously vitiated by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Sgt. Don Flusche did not testify before the Commission. But he told the HSCA that he was in perfect position to view the ramp at that time. Because he had parked his car diagonally across the street and was leaning on it. Flusche knew Ruby and watched the entire episode; before and after the shooting. He said, “There was no doubt in his mind that Ruby did not walk down the ramp; and further, did not walk down Main Street anywhere near the ramp.” (DiEugenio, pp. 227-28). This is one of the reasons why the HSCA differed on this point with the Warren Commission. They thought it was more likely that Ruby came in through an unsecured door thought an alley. (HSCA Vol. 9, p. 139)
Now that he has—unjustifiably– denied any kind of plot through Ruby, he goes after Mark Lane and the possibility of a CIA conspiracy. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone like Ayton says that the reason Lane prospered was because the public could not accept a misfit like Oswald could change the course of history alone. (Ayton, p. 66)
Utter nonsense. The reason Lane was successful was because he mounted powerful arguments in his book Rush to Judgment, debated his opponents in public venues, and secured both radio and TV time since he was a cogent speaker who worked tirelessly to get his message out. (Click here for more.)
Incredibly, in discussing Lane’s trial against Howard Hunt in Florida, he does not mention the Hunt memorandum. (Ayton, pp. 72-73) This was a document written by James Angleton which reporter Joseph Trento saw. Its intent was to provide a cover story for Hunt being in Dallas on the day JFK was assassinated. It was shown to Trento by Angleton himself. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 195) Ayton implies that the whole story began with someone thinking Hunt was one of the 3 tramps. The legal proceedings began when former CIA officer Victor Marchetti wrote about the document, but he had not seen it, just heard of it. Angleton told Trento that Hunt was in Dallas that day. But further, Trento came to understand the following: “Angleton was trying to protect his own connections to Hunt’s being in Dallas.” And further, that, “It was Angleton himself who sent Hunt to Dallas because he didn’t want to use anybody from his own shop. Hunt was still considered a hand-holder for the Cuban exiles, sort of [Richard] Helms’ ‘unbroken pet.’” (ibid, p. 196). Can one imagine leaving all of the above out in any discussion of that civil trial?
His last chapter in the JFK section is entitled, “Did Castro Kill JFK?” The premise is so goofy, its not worth reviewing this part. But I must point out a school boy whopper by Ayton. He writes that Joan Mellen relies on the testimony of Madeleine Brown in her book A Farewell to Justice. (Ayton, p. 77) If one checks the detailed index of Mellen’s book, Brown’s name does not appear. How can a writer rely on a witness that he or she does not mention?
IV
As bad as Ayton’s work on JFK is, his section on the Bobby Kennedy case might be worse. What can one say about a man who writes over 100 pages on that case and somehow leaves out the name of Dr. Thomas Noguchi? A man who, in those hundred pages, mentions the name of DeWayne Wolfer only in passing–and that is while he is quoting someone else. An author who does not describe the discoveries of Judge Robert Wenke’s Panel, which almost broke open the case. To anyone who knows the case, this is all simply inexcusable. There is no logical or evidentiary reason for these kinds of scholarly lacunae. Because those two men and that proceeding are central to the RFK case.
What does Ayton give us instead? He uses authors like Godfrey Jansen, Robert Blair Kaiser, Ron Kessler, and men like Michael McCowan and LAPD Detective Chief Bob Houghton to both smear Sirhan’s character and simplistically skew the facts of the shooting. Back in 1970, Jansen wrote a book called Why Robert Kennedy was Killed: The Story of Two Victims. Anyone who picks up the book, as I did many years ago, can easily see what kind of volume it is. It is not in any way a study or examination of the assassination. It is, plain and simple, a political tract. Jansen had lived for years in the Middle East. He was pro-Arab and anti-Israel and he built the book around those two poles. Even the New York Times could not stomach the book. The late Anthony Lukas concluded that Jansen had turned “Sirhan’s act into an object lesson in Middle East politics. Perhaps that makes good politics; it makes a bad book.” (NY Times, May 2, 1971.) If an official story book will not pass muster for the NY Times, who will it satisfy? Well, maybe Mel Ayton?
I thought no author in the RFK field would ever use McCowan again after I wrote a long review of Dan Moldea’s RFK book in the anthology The Assassinations. (Edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 610-31) Moldea did not inform the reader of very much about McCowan, except he was a member of Sirhan’s defense team. To describe that team as inept, does not begin to describe how bad they were. Suffice it to say that they never considered the possibility that their client was innocent. Which, in light of Noguchi’s autopsy—which we will get to later–is almost incredible. And for Moldea and Ayton to not sketch in the background of McCowen is, again, inexcusable.
McCowan had been drawn up on charges of theft and mail fraud. According to a girlfriend of his, he was also possibly dealing in the black market of arms. Because of all this, he was suspended from LAPD. At the time of his entrance into the case he was on probation and had appealed his sentence. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 629) A bit fishy perhaps? Important for the reader to know? Obviously.
Then there was the fact that he offered to work without compensation. Plus the distinct possibility he had recruited an informant into the camp of leftist writer Don Freed when he was entrapped by the police on a phony explosives charge. (ibid) He tried once to categorize Sirhan as a communist. He told Sirhan he had to follow his lawyers’ disastrous trial strategy, or he was finished. This is the same McCowan who wrote a memo discouraging his legal team from calling Sandy Serrano as a witness for the defense. Serrano had seen a young woman and man running down the exterior stairs after the shooting; and the girl was shouting “We shot him! We shot him!” When asked by Serrano who they shot, the girl replied, “We shot Senator Kennedy.” (ibid, p. 586) Is this not a bit exculpatory? But McCowan’s reports were pretty much like this one: reliant on LAPD spin and lacking in insight and context. Despite all this, Moldea–and now Ayton—refuse to even consider the fact the man could have been a plant. And they do not want the reader to suspect that, so they dim the lights around him.
It is easy to see why. Moldea wrote that SIrhan confessed to McCowan. He told him that as he was looking right at him, RFK turned his head. And that is when he shot him. Neither Moldea nor Ayton explain the problems with this scenario. Noguchi’s autopsy report states that all the projectiles that hit RFK came in at close range, from behind, and at extreme upward angles. The witness reports say that Sirhan’s arm was extended horizontally. Did Sirhan stoop down and then jump forward to shoot RFK? No one saw that. Also, what about the bullets that hit RFK in the back? After shooting him in the head, did Sirhan run around the senator and then fire his Iver Johnson 3 times into Robert Kennedy’s back? No one saw that either.
V
In backing McCowan and Moldea, Ayton does not disclose that Moldea broke an agreement which he prints in his book. He said that he would give everyone a chance to see what he would print about them beforehand. The McCowan exchange was not tendered to either Sirhan or his late brother Adel prior to publication. (ibid, p. 630) Ayton does not inform the reader about that important piece of information. Or that Moldea wrote a letter to RFK investigator Lynn Mangan saying he would take that quote out of the paperback version due to this problem. But he didn’t. Nor does he disclose that Sirhan vehemently denies the exchange ever took place. Or that the story McCowan told to Moldea about the shooting was at odds with what Moldea had earlier said in his book was his solution to how the crime actually happened. (ibid, p. 631) How and why Ayton could not detect this—it was quite obvious—is a bit surprising. And why, without revealing any of this, he would want to introduce new materials by McCowan, praised by Moldea, is a bit startling.
Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy of Robert Kennedy has been praised by no less than Dr. Cyril Wecht as one of the finest medicolegal examinations he has read. As authors like Philip Melanson have written, that study states that all the bullets that came into Kennedy entered from behind, at very close range, and came in at rather extreme upward angles. Since Sirhan was in front of Kennedy, this has led witnesses like maître d Karl Uecker to declare that “There’s no way that the shots described in the autopsy could have come from Sirhan’s gun…Sirhan never got close enough for a point bank shot. Never!” (Philip Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination, p. 33; see also Lisa Pease, A Lie too Big to Fail, pp. 275-76) In fact, before the grand jury, Noguchi said the fatal shot, behind the right ear, was at most no more than 2-3 inches from the skull. (Pease, p. 68)
This creates a problem for Ayton, in both distance and direction. So he employs Vince DiPierro to say that, yes I saw Sirhan and he was that close to RFK. As this writer discovered years ago, there was pressure placed on DiPierro to amend his story. If one compares Vince’s early statements to those which Ayton uses, one can make that argument. (Pease,p. 49, pp. 72-74) Before the grand jury, Vince had said that Sirhan was somewhere between 4-6 feet in front of Kennedy. And he was behind Uecker, who was a large, thick man. Ayton also tries to use photographer Boris Yaro to deny this spatial fact. But as Pease wrote years earlier, Yaro was looking through a camera viewfinder in a foreshortened sightline, and told the FBI that Sirhan and Kennedy were “little more than silhouettes.” (LAPD Case Summary, p. 25).
There are two other evidentiary arguments which Ayton either slights or simply avoids. Those deal with the number of bullet holes in the walls and ceiling of the Ambassador Hotel pantry—the crime scene—and the chain of custody issues dealing with both the handgun allegedly used and the bullets in evidence today. Concerning the former, Pease did a sterling job illustrating this serious problem, and she did it with documents and photos. She concluded there were 13 bullet holes. (Pease, pp. 257-64) As per DeWayne Wolfer’s handling of the gun and the projectiles, well the fact that, in 100 pages, Ayton pretty much avoids the man and this issue tells you all you need to know about Wolfer’s actions. (For the prurient reader I suggest Pease’s book pp. 81-84 and 91-97)
Ayton goes beyond the norm in trying to discredit the idea of Sirhan as a programmed Manchurian Candidate. Yet he leaves out the name of Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas. Kallas was one of Sirhan’s psychologists while imprisoned. He came to the conclusion that Sirhan was not mentally afflicted, but that he may have been hypnotized into committing the crime. And he attacked Sirhan’s defense team for their pleadings on this issue. He also criticized them by saying it was not possible for a person to hypnotize himself into such a deep trance. There must have been an external programmer. He was so disgusted with Sirhan’s defense that he called it the “psychiatric blunder of the century.” (Pease pp. 381-82)
Ayton also tries to neutralize the famous Bjorn Neilson/Palle Hardrup Danish Manchurian Candidate case by saying that Hardrup later said that when the police suggested he may have been hypnotized, he used that excuse as a way of escaping liability for his crimes. (Ayton, p. 165) Again, this is dubious. Because all one has to do is read Wikipedia to see that Hardrup told several witnesses that Neilson hypnotized him several times in prison, before the crimes had been committed. (See also Pease, p. 392) Secondly, Lisa Pease traces a case in her book from Sebenico, Yugoslavia in 1923. A hypnotist placed a policeman in a trance and gave him a block of wood. He told him to fire into the crowd. Once the wood did not work, the cop pulled out his gun. He killed three people. The hypnotist was jailed, the policeman was placed in an asylum. (Pease, p. 394)
In his endless attempt to discredit Sirhan, Ayton even uses Carmen Falzone. And he bills him as a friend of Sirhan’s at California’s Soledad Prison. (Ayton, pp. 196). Falzone said that Sirhan was in a waking state during the shooting of RFK and he killed Bobby Kennedy for the Arab cause. This one is really beyond the pale. As Lisa Pease and myself wrote, Falzone was first an informant on Sirhan and then was used by the DA’s office to spy on Sirhan’s family. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 630) He was supposed to implicate Sirhan and his family in a plot that was allegedly being run by Muammar Qaddafi of Libya. But Falzone got details of his story screwed up, like the hand which SIrhan used to fire the gun. (For the whole tawdry episode about Falzone, see Melanson, pp. 116-26)
This is an aspect of the story that Ayton wants to avoid. That is the extent which the authorities went to in order to smear, manipulate and convict Sirhan. For example, he leaves out the roles of Hank Hernandez and Manny Pena on the initial Special Unit Senator inquiry into the RFK murder. What Hernandez did to witness Sandy Serrano has become infamous in the RFK literature. She saw the Girl in the Polka Dot Dress running down the stairs after the shooting. DiPierro had seen that girl inside the pantry next to Sirhan. Serrano had to be negated since she told her story on TV with newsman Sandy Vanocur. I should not have to tell the reader how Hernandez broke every protocol in the book in conducting Serrano’s polygraph examination. (Pease, pp. 104-16). And as hostile as Hernandez was to witnesses who tended to exonerate SIrhan, he played softball with those people who should have been suspects in the case e.g. Michael Wayne. When Hernandez asked if he had been arrested, Wayne said yes. Hernandez said he could say not since he was a youth at the time.
As I have seen for myself, Pena actually wrote on lead sheets about the Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, “Do not follow.” In my opinion, there was no more important lead to follow in the RFK case. The fact that it was not shows us that LAPD was not interested in solving the case. That this goes unreported and uncommented on in this book tells us all we need to know about it.
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Worse Than I Thought: A Mother In History
The literature on the JFK assassination is rife with dishonest books that endorse, defend, and/or excuse the findings of the Warren Commission. Nothing new about that: this has been true since publication of the Warren Report in 1964, and has carried on through a long line of apologist nonsense.
One Commissioner and several WC attorneys cashed in on their experiences. A host of lesser, pseudo-serious WC advocates have contributed to this worthless tripe, and profitably. At the time of the assassination’s fiftieth anniversary, Vince Salandria called it a mountain of trash. All of this propaganda is meant to bury the obvious.
Jean Stafford’s A Mother in History (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1966) was an early entry into this disgraceful body of work. I have written about it before, most recently on this Kennedys and King site. What more could I possibly have to say? Do I have an unhealthy preoccupation with this slender book, ostensibly an unbiased profile of the mother of the alleged presidential assassin?
If you Google “Jean Stafford A Mother In History” you are likely to find available copies on used book sites, along with reviews and reader opinions. Most of the opinions I found are favorable. All of them, it is safe to assume, are based solely on reading Jean Stafford’s published text. Almost certainly, none of the writers of these favorable judgments had access to some of the book’s raw material, in particular the tape-recorded Stafford-Oswald interviews. I did. Once it has been appraised, and contrasted with the published work, it is difficult to see A Mother in History as anything but a hatchet job intended to destroy Marguerite Oswald.
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The raw material to which I refer is in the Jean Stafford collection at the University of Colorado (CU) in Boulder, part of the Norlin Library’s Rare and Distinctive Collections.
Stafford, who was from Boulder, left her papers to CU. Since she primarily wrote fiction, the source material for A Mother in History is only a small portion of that archive. This small portion includes typescripts, notes, and an interview transcript, all of which reside in one small box. Not included in the box are the interview tape recordings, which have long since been digitized.
A Mother In History was published in three sections, simply titled I, II, and III (plus an Epilogue and appendices). A breathless jacket blurb touts Stafford’s “three incredible days” with Marguerite Oswald. That, and other indicators, clearly imply each of those three book sections correspond to one day of conversation between the author and her subject.
There may have been three days of interviews, incredible or otherwise, but I am highly suspicious of the published chronology. An exchange on the book’s p. 36, as that purported first-day section nears its end, first got my attention. Here Stafford writes that she asked Mrs. Oswald if it would be okay to bring a tape recorder the next day. Marguerite agreed. Stafford does not say so explicitly, but the clear message is that the first day was not tape recorded.
The audio at CU consists of six undated .mp3 files. A CU archivist told me last summer that the original reel-to-reel tapes were transferred to audio cassette in the 1970s. They were digitized sometime in the 1980s, or perhaps a little later.
Nowhere, in the .mp3 audio, does Stafford say the day, date, or subject of her interviews. Interviewers often do; it could even be considered a best practice. It creates a record, and helps keep things in order.
The .mp3 files at CU may be undated, but they do have sequential filenames. The first is stafford-interview-with-mrs.-oswald_-part-1-a.mp3. This particular audio begins with Stafford asking, “Tell me about your early life, Mrs. Oswald. You were born in New Orleans, weren’t you?” The transcript begins the same way. It’s an amiable first question, a likely starting point, and I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest this was, in fact, the very first of the interviews: that is, the first day, which Stafford implied was not recorded.
As I described in my previous article, I had grown curious about a quote in the first section of the book – an unrecorded first day, readers are led to believe. Lee Harvey Oswald, Marguerite said, “spoke Russian, he wrote Russian, and he read Russian. Why? Because my boy was being trained as an agent, that’s why.”
In Stafford’s book there was no follow-up question. This baffled me. Even an amateur journalist, like Stafford, should have enough sense to explore such an explosive statement. Surely the audio would clarify things. Instead, it revealed that Marguerite Oswald didn’t say what Stafford quoted her as saying. It is a manufactured quote.
It’s a little complicated, so bear with me. Most of the words in that quote were, in fact, spoken by Marguerite Oswald. They were also tape recorded; I have heard the audio. But it’s a false quote, because Stafford pieced together several phrases – some of them separated by as much as three minutes. Placing it all within quotation marks implies it is verbatim – but it is not, and is thus a deception.
I can only speculate on Stafford’s motives. That false quote does not support the lone gunman thesis. Given the magnitude of surrounding events, I cannot believe creating it was innocent. I think Stafford floated the idea of Oswald-as-agent – not a common view at the time – to characterize Marguerite Oswald as paranoid, and out of her mind.
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There are other false and manufactured quotes in A Mother In History. I have not itemized them all and don’t intend to; it would be a huge undertaking. The more I studied the source material, the more dishonesty I found.
On page 23 of A Mother In History is the following statement, attributed to Marguerite:
Lee purely loved animals! With his very first pay he bought a bird and a cage, and I have a picture of it. He bought this bird with a cage that had a planter for ivy, and he took care of that bird and he made the ivy grow. Now, you see, there could be many nice things written about this boy. But, oh, no, no, this boy is supposed to be the assassin of the President of the United States, so he has to be a louse. Sometimes I am very sad.
This is a rather inconsequential matter, but it is still false. Marguerite Oswald didn’t really say it. Here is what she did say, in answer to Stafford’s question, “Did he ever have any pets?”
Oh yes, Lee had a dog, and with his first pay he bought a bird and a cage – I have pictures of it, with ivy in it and all the food for the bird. Yes, sir. With his first pay. He had a collie shepherd dog that I had gotten for him when it was a little [bitty] puppy. And he had it all those years until we went to New York. And that dog had puppies. He gave one to his school teacher. She wrote a nice article for the newspaper saying Lee loving animals and giving her a pet.
True, the published quote roughly parallels what she really said. But it is still false. “Lee purely loved animals” does not appear in any of the audio. There is no mention of dogs in the published quote, let alone puppies, or giving one to a school teacher.
Nor does Marguerite say, “Sometimes I am very sad.” In fact, elsewhere in the recorded interviews, she said quite the opposite: “I’m not unhappy, Jean. You can see I’m not.”
As I write these words, I feel like I’m in attack mode. I have listened to all the audio that is available. Can I be certain that every last recorded word from the Stafford-Oswald interviews wound up in the CU archive? Of course not. All that CU has is what Stafford gave them. She also wrote, in her book, that when Mrs. Oswald agreed to be tape recorded, she stipulated that there be two recorders so she could have a copy.
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The example about animals and pets is minor, compared to a false quote on pages 12-13 of A Mother In History. This one is presented as dialogue between interviewer and interviewee, and Jean Stafford goes in for the kill. It is intended, I am convinced, to make Marguerite Oswald appear nuts – to use a non-clinical term.
Marguerite spoke first:
“And as we all know, President Kennedy was a dying man. So I say it is possible that my son was chosen to shoot him in a mercy killing for the security of the country. And if this is true, it was a fine thing to do and my son is a hero.”
“I had not heard that President Kennedy was dying,” I said, staggered by this cluster of fictions stated as irrefutable fact. Some mercy killing! The methods used in this instance must surely be unique in the annals of euthanasia.
This exchange is not found anywhere in the interview audio or the transcript. Marguerite does not make the statement, and Jean Stafford does not make that stunned reply.
There is something similar to this in the interviews. Unfortunately, the digitized version of the tape recording at CU ends partway through the quote. Did the original tape end there, too? No, because the corresponding transcript, which I have found to be consistently accurate, continues for several more pages. It is convoluted, but this is what Marguerite Oswald really said.
That President Kennedy was killed by – a mercy killing – by some of his own men that thought it was the thing to do and this is not impossible and since I blame the secret service from what I saw and what I thought it could have been that my son and the secret service were all involved in a mercy killing.
A minute or so before her “mercy killing” remark, Marguerite did say “a dying President,” but “As we all know” is an invention. She says JFK was dying because he had Addison’s disease, which he did. She also called it a kidney disorder, which it is not. Addison’s can be life-threatening, but Stafford correctly points out that it is a manageable adrenal condition. And Kennedy managed his.
But Stafford can’t let this go without having some fun, falsely quoting Marguerite calling it Atkinson’s disease. In the audio, there is no doubt: Marguerite says Addison’s. It is rendered as Atkinson’s in the transcript. Maybe Stafford didn’t remember what Mrs. Oswald actually said, and later on trusted the error of the unknown transcriber. While accurate overall, the transcript does, in fact, garble certain words here and there; in places it reminds me of the sometimes-strange voicemail transcripts my Smartphone makes. The ethical thing would have been double-checking Marguerite’s presumed mistake, before putting it to print.
But the point is that Marguerite Oswald did not say her son was chosen to shoot a terminally ill JFK in a mercy killing. Jean Stafford created that illusion.
According to biographer David Roberts (Jean Stafford: A Biography, 1988) Jean Stafford later “held parties at which she played the Oswald tapes for her friends.” Roberts cites Stafford’s “fascination” with Marguerite Oswald’s voice.
It sounds more like arrogance to me. One imagines a bunch of cocktail-quaffing intelligentsia howling with laughter over Marguerite’s unschooled chatter. But maybe not. Maybe Stafford just wanted to give some of her pals a front-row seat to history. Whatever: the image this conjures is, to me, thoroughly repulsive.
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The Stafford-Oswald interviews took place in May 1965. This is approximately ten months after Marguerite met with Harold Feldman and Vince Salandria, after which Feldman wrote “The Unsinkable Marguerite Oswald,” published in September 1964 (available online).
If Jean Stafford had done her homework, she might have answered a question she puzzled over in her book’s Appendix III. How, she wondered, was an undereducated Marguerite Oswald able to paraphrase an obscure quote from Sigmund Freud? “Without persecution,” she told Stafford, “there would not be a persecution complex.”
In his article Harold Feldman, a lay psychologist, said that the media consistently portrayed Marguerite Oswald “as a self-centered, domineering, paranoiac showoff with frequent delusions of persecution. It reminds me of Freud’s remark that there would be no such thing as a persecution complex if there were not real persecution.”
Feldman, whose writing often appeared in psychoanalytic journals, wrote about Marguerite with the deference and sympathy Jean Stafford failed to summon. He observed:
She has devoted every day since November 22, 1963, to uncovering what she believes and millions believe is a real conspiracy in which her youngest son was the fall guy. As a result, she is held up to scorn as a bitter old woman who sees snares and plots everywhere.
And he added: “… if Ibsen is right and the strongest is the one who stands alone for integrity and honor, then Marguerite Oswald is the strongest woman in America.”
Marguerite Oswald was an ordinary woman thrust, quite against her will, into extraordinary circumstances. In spite of tremendous obstacles, she defended her son against the Warren Commission and the mainstream media. She had few allies. Even family members, she told Jean Stafford, distanced themselves from her. “I’m alone in my fight, with no help.”
Marguerite Oswald may have struck Stafford as eccentric, but who doesn’t have personality quirks? Jean Stafford exploited Marguerite’s to the hilt, and did so ruthlessly, in exchange for money. I could cite many more examples of the dishonesty in A Mother In History, but life is too short.
Stafford shuffled the truth like a deck of cards, manufacturing quotes and manipulating chronology, all to create the false impression – the lie – that her subject was divorced from reality. Suffice it to say A Mother In History is even worse than I imagined when I visited the Jean Stafford archive at CU.
But it’s been more than fifty years since publication, so the damage is done.
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Dale Myers and his World of Illusion
Dale Myers has made a career out of giving the MSM what it wants concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This includes proffering a truly dubious witness, Jack Tatum, to incriminate Lee Oswald as the murderer of J. D. Tippit. Jack Myers exposed the man Myers foisted on the public via PBS in 1993. (Click here for details).
But that was not enough for Myers. Not by a long shot. On the 40th anniversary of JFK’s murder ABC’s Peter Jennings wanted to do a program supporting the Warren Report. Somehow, he knew where to go. Jennings hired Myers’ buddy Gus Russo as lead reporter. Russo turned to his PBS chum Dale. Myers went to work on two main areas. These were the acoustics evidence, and his Rube Goldberg “computer simulation” of the Zapruder film: an animation that is supposed to reveal the forensic truth about the last few seconds of Kennedy’s life as it was extinguished in Dealey Plaza.
The problem with both of these is that they turned out to be about as reliable as Myers’ PBS work on the murder of Tippit. Concerning the acoustics evidence, Myers tried to proffer that by relating the movement of the DPD motorcycle driven by H. B McLain in the Hughes film, and then drawing a parallel with the same rider in the famous Zapruder film, he could discredit the acoustics evidence as being inaccurate about the shot sequence in Dealey Plaza. Myers attested that by his mathematical comparison, McLain would have had to have been riding at 200 mph to be in the correct spot to capture the sounds of the bullets in Dealey Plaza on his radio. (Donald Thomas, Hear No Evil, p. 676).
The problem with Myer’s statement was that the general public only saw the computations it was based on three years later. When informed people finally did, it turned out that Dale had done some MSM like slicing and dicing in order to come out with that 200 mph number, e. g. the timing of the first shot, assuming the grassy knoll shot missed, the placement of Robert Hughes etc. (Thomas, pp 677-680). After a long and detailed analysis, Don Thomas concluded that not only was Myers wrong, but “The ABC documentary’s “concrete evidence” had feet of clay. The producers had relied on an expert whose only credential was a bias against conspiracy theories.” (ibid, p. 684; we will go into the Myers “simulation” shortly.)
On July 24th, Myers wrote a piece that was his way of getting back at Oliver Stone’s two new documentaries JFK Revisited and JFK: Destiny Betrayed. He bases this critique on his viewing of the two films in the DVD package plus the release of the accompanying book JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, which contains the annotated scripts, and interview excerpts.
He starts off on the wrong foot by saying the DVD package contains almost ten hours of material. Since the long version of the film is four hours and the short version is two hours, and there is overlap between the two, I guess we will have to wait about another three years to figure out how Dale came to that number. (Even if one throws in the commentary track version, it is not ten hours.)
Myers now slips up again. He wants to criticize the film for something that it does not include. Namely the murder of Tippit. He then acknowledges that some might think this is not fair, but he brushes this off with another of his patently bombastic pronouncements: “I think this is the heart of why the film comes off like a stacked-deck.”
This is the guy who used Jack Tatum as his chief witness in the Tippit case, and who then based his 200 mph motorcycle speed on invisible calculations. He now works his way into the mind of Oliver Stone and his screenwriter—namely me—and says imperiously, ”Oliver Stone and James DiEugenio won’t deal with the Tippit murder because it is the snare that entrapped Lee Harvey Oswald. It was Tippit’s murder that made Oswald a prime suspect in the JFK assassination.” Now that is a rhetorical trick worthy of a card sharp. For the simple matter that the film shows that Oswald not only did not shoot Kennedy, he could not have shot Kennedy. Therefore why would he be involved in the Tippit murder? As Bob Tanenbaum, who Stone and I met with numerous times while planning the film, says on screen: With the Warren Report’s evidence you could not convict Oswald in any court in the country. As an Assistant New York County District Attorney in Manhattan Tanenbaum never lost a murder case in seven years. I think those credentials outdo Myers’. Don’t you?
The book accompanying the DVD contains annotated scripts to both films: the short and long version. It also has excerpts from interviews that largely did not make it into the film due to time issues. Myers refers to that over four hundred page book as being “semi-annotated”. In reality, the pages dealing with the film scripts contain over 500 footnotes. Every statement of factual evidence is sourced.
Interestingly, Stone’s lawyer actually started that process when, upon seeing the rough cut of the film, she wanted us to prove the things we were saying about the pathologists in the film. She thought they were quite startling and might be hard to comprehend to a general audience. Much of that evidence was produced by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), and this is why we enlisted three members of the Board to appear on the program. The reader may want to ask Myers if, in any of the shows he has worked on, he talked about the existence of that body or revealed any of the new or declassified results of its work. One example: that autopsy photographer John Stringer denied he took the pictures of Kennedy’s brain in the National Archives. After all, JFK Revisited has ARRB employee Doug Horne relating this evidence. He was in the room when Stringer said it under oath. That disturbing testimony leaves us with these questions:
- Who did take the pictures?
- Why did someone else have to shoot them?
This evidence, as presented in the film, is the kind of material that one could have taken into a court room to adjudicate an acquittal for Oswald. Because the presentation of fraudulent evidence in a felony case can be grounds for having the proceeding thrown out. Stone’s film actually has a practicing neurologist, Michael Chesser, talking about this evidentiary issue.
JFK Revisited, the film and the book, attempted to gather professionals in the field of legal procedure and forensics. I have named two, Tanenbaum and Chesser, and I wish to introduce a third, namely Dr. Henry Lee. Why? Because Myers said that our film included an animated reconstruction of the shooting. No it does not. If we had done so, we would have had to include scale models of the figures in the car, close ups of where the bullets struck the two bodies, and some kind of time sequence also. We chose not to do that. And this is where Dr. Lee comes in to play.
As screenwriter, I did a pre-interview with Lee when he was in Los Angeles testifying in a case. I asked him about this whole issue of doing computer reconstructions for trajectory analysis purposes in the JFK case. He said simply and pointedly: You cannot do that in the Kennedy case. He added that this is due to the basic reason that neither wound in the president was dissected. Therefore, any trajectory analysis amounts to guesswork. Unless a wound track is dissected, you cannot present a trajectory with any real authority. This from the man who many consider the best crime scene reconstruction professional in the business. I decided he was, in all probability, correct and we did not do that sort of thing.
Why did I conclude that? Because Lee has worked on 8,000 felony cases, and about 1,000 of them have been death by gunshot. He has written over 30 books about true crime cases and some of those are used as textbooks in forensic science classes. He has been approved to testify in almost every state of the union, and also 42 countries. As with Bob Tanenbaum, I would like to ask Mr. Myers: “How many states have you been approved in to testify as a forensic crime scene reconstruction expert? How many countries?”
Concerning Lee’s statement, in Myers’ ABC “simulation’ I don’t recall him telling the audience that there was no dissection of the back wound in President Kennedy. Or explaining why. He surely has to know that Kennedy pathologist Pierre Finck admitted under oath at the Clay Shaw trial that there was military brass in the morgue that night and they would not allow the wound to be tracked. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 302). This was rather important information. But I don’t think that Russo or Jennings would have allowed that in the show; for obvious reasons.
Myers tries to neutralize the attacks on his “computer simulation” by saying the critiques I named of it, that somehow, he had crushed them all. This really makes me wonder about good ole Dale. According to Bob Harris, Myers asked You Tube to remove his critique of Myers’ simulation. To my knowledge, he never replied to Milicent Cranor. Myers said he called David Mantik, but Dave said he never got the call or any message. As for Pat Speer’s, well the reader can see how this exchange turned out himself.
Anyone who watches JFK Revisited can see that what we did was to present evidence that 1.) It is highly unlikely that a bullet could do the damage that CE 399 did and emerge in such intact condition. 2.) The chain of custody of this bullet is rather suspect. For the former we had forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht on camera along with battlefield surgeon Dr. Joseph Dolce, who worked for the Warren Commission. For the latter we had Dr. Gary Aguilar, Dr. Henry Lee, and former police investigator Brian Edwards as witnesses. In the film, Aguilar proved that the FBI lied when they wrote that Bardwell Odum showed CE 399 to original Parkland identification witnesses O. P. Wright and Darrell Tomlinson. Odum said he never did any such thing. (The Assassinations, edited by James DIEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp.282-84) To repeat: this is the kind of fraud that can get a case thrown out of court. Again, I do not recall Myers discussing this for his ABC “reconstruction”. I think it would be relevant to that presentation. After all, if the bullet was not CE 399, what bullet trajectory was Dale “simulating”?
Myers objects to my references to the Tippit case in the book, JFK Revisited. He says the essay I wrote and reference is a mélange of work by Bill Simpich, Farris Rookstool and John Armstrong. Anyone who reads that piece can see that there are about 7 references to those three in that profusely annotated work. (Click here.) The two most often used sources are, by far, the Warren Commission volumes and the book by Joe McBride, Into the Nightmare. Myers does not want to acknowledge this, perhaps because it indicates 1.) There is material in the volumes he chose not to use and 2.) McBride’s book showed that Myers’ work on the Tippit case was, to be kind, not as comprehensive as he tried to advertise it.
For instance, it turns out that– in all the decades he says he worked on the Tippit case–he never interviewed the murdered policeman’s father. If Joe McBride found him, why couldn’t Dale? When McBride quoted Edgar Lee Tippit as stating things that would contradict the Myers/Warren Report version of the Tippit shooting, Dale did a funny thing. He now wrote that Edgar Lee was somehow mentally afflicted. As McBride points out, that information was garnered from a sister of J. D. ten days after Myers ordered McBride’s book. In other words, Myers somehow could not locate the man in some 35 years, but now—oh so conveniently– he finds out it did not matter.
Anyone can read McBride’s reply to Myers. (Click here.) Myers wants to belatedly discredit Edgar because he brings out evidence that indicates Tippit, and another officer, “Had been assigned by the police to hunt down Oswald in Oak Cliff.” Edgar then added that the other policeman did not make it to the scene since he stopped for an accident. As McBride also reveals, former DA Henry Wade seemed to corroborate Edgar. He told Joe: “Somebody reported to me that the police already knew who he [Oswald] was, and they were looking for him.” McBride goes further and states, with convincing evidence, that the other officer, who did not get to the scene, was William Duane Mentzel.
In sum, if Oliver Stone had decided to explore the Tippit case, I would have scripted that also. And I would have brought in the work of McBride, as well as authors like Henry Hurt, Jack Myers and myself. I would have chosen what I thought was the best from each of these sources and arranged it as astutely as I could. To put it mildly, it would not have comported with the Warren Report version.
Myers closes his diatribe by making some of his usual sociologically absurd comments. He first says that there is a movement to silence in America. Really Dale? In the age of Donald Trump? He then gets to his point: Somehow Oliver Stone and myself were ignoring and obfuscating what happened on the day Kennedy was killed. No we were not. We were doing what he never did. We were analyzing the newest evidence in the case with persons who are, unlike him, credentialed professionals. That is why we used people like Dr. Cyril Wecht, criminalist Henry Lee, Dr. Gary Aguilar, physicist David Mantik, neurologist Mike Chesser, former police investigator Brian Edwards, journalist Barry Ernest, ARRB investigator Douglas Horne, surgeon Donald Miller and radiologist Randy Robertson. We easily had more accredited professionals on screen than appeared in all of the programs Myers has worked on combined. In fact, the comparison is so one sided as to be kind of laughable.
This unprecedented gathering of authorities gave the public some new, evidence-backed insights into the actual circumstances concerning what happened to President Kennedy in Dallas. One example: Chesser, Mantik and Aguilar proffered a case– with House Select Committee on Assassinations advisor Larry Sturdivan’s own evidence—that a shot came from the front. Those same three, plus Horne, also showed that the brain photos, accepted by the HSCA as President Kennedy’s, cannot be his. And, as anyone can see—except Dale Myers—they did this on three evidentiary grounds. I could go on in this vein e.g. about demonstrating Oswald’s alibi, but the point is made. Questions like: What does the autopsy reveal about the true circumstances and the actual cause of death? Does the defendant have an alibi? These are what a criminal investigation of a gunshot homicide are about.
But that is what Myers, Russo, the late PBS producer Mike Sullivan, and Peter Jennings, were not going to do. It was they who were the masters of silence about really happened to JFK. And this new work helps show Dale Myers for what he was and is: a designer of sand castles in the air.
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RFK Assassination Witness Dies at 97
Paul Schrade, a union leader and eyewitness to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, has died.
Follow this link for details.
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The Interesting History Behind Jackie Kennedy’s Infamous Pink Suit
The assassination of John F. Kennedy has been prodded at, picked apart, dissembled, and reassembled. It has been analyzed down the last stitches of clothing worn by the occupants of that ill-fated motorcade. Find everything that has been disclosed thus far here.
Today, we bring you the fascinating story behind the pink suit that Jackie Kennedy wore on that Friday, November 22nd, 1963.
The Pink Chanel Suit
In the ’60s, the first ladies followed a tradition established in the 1800s. When 23rd first lady Caroline Lavinia Scott Harrison bolstered the America first policy by revealing her dress was made locally, she made it an unspoken rule for her contemporaries.
Due to this tradition, the 35th first lady wore a pink suit from Coco Chanel’s 1961 Fall/Winter line-up on what would turn out to be her husband’s final day. Her ensemble featured:
- A pink bouclé coat with round gold buttons and a navy-blue lapel
- A matching pink bouclé skirt
- A similar pillbox hat
- White gloves
- A few pearl necklaces
Lady Bird Recounts the Assassination
When President Kennedy was assassinated, Jackie was sitting beside him. Meanwhile, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson occupied a different vehicle with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson. The latter reported that, as soon as the first shots were fired, she saw “a bundle of pink” in the car’s backseat, which she believes was Jackie covering her husband’s body.
From Pink Suit to Bloody Symbol
As Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson took over as the 36th US President, Jackie Kennedy was featured on national television boarding Air Force One wearing the same pink suit, now stained with her husband’s blood—she did this on purpose.
After arriving at the hospital, she refused to take off the skirt-suit so that her husband’s killers and everyone else could “see what they’ve done.” It reportedly stayed on her person until the morning after.
The Suit’s Whereabouts
Those who didn’t see Jackie Kennedy in the flesh that day didn’t know the exact shade of the pink suit until November 29th, 1963, when Life Magazine published colorized images in a memorial issue.
We may never know the whereabouts of the pillbox hat and white gloves, but the forever-stained skirt-suit, stockings, shoes, and handbag that Jackie wore that day were preserved in the National Archives in the 1960s. They likely won’t see the light of day until 2103 due to a deed of gift condition by Jackie’s daughter Caroline.
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4 Things that Make Bobby Kennedy an Inspiration
Robert F. Kennedy, also known as Bobby or RFK, assumed the position of US Attorney General from 1961 to 1964. In 1965, he became a US Senator, a position he held until his assassination in 1968. Click here for James DiEugenio’s take on the incident.
Let’s set aside the mystery surrounding his death for two minutes and celebrate this American icon’s inspiring yet sadly short life.
1. The Ambition to Succeed
RFK’s ambition to succeed is perhaps best described in his own words. While describing himself as the “seventh of nine children,” he revealed that he had to struggle to survive that far down the order.
We wouldn’t say he just survived. We appreciate the pressure a young Bobby would’ve felt. Where most would’ve resigned themselves to the role of black sheep, Kennedy continued to fight his way to the top and was eventually successful in his political ambitions.
2. The Unwillingness to Compromise
Bobby’s fight to the top wasn’t smooth-sailing. He probably had to choose between his morals and ambitions multiple times. Let us recount one incident we know of when RFK eschewed his ambitions for something that went against his principles.
One could say Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy capitalized on the Cold War hysteria swirling to abuse his privilege to the extent that wouldn’t go unpunished today. As chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), McCarthy took Robert, a budding lawyer at the time, under his wing.
Despite the pressure to prove himself, Kennedy left McCarthy’s side because he disagreed with his “ways” of gaining intelligence from suspected and self-proclaimed communists.
3. The Struggle to Reduce the Wage Gap
RFK was deeply disturbed and shocked by the living conditions during his visits to urban slums throughout the US. He attempted to draw attention to their plight. He used his position to influence lawmakers to bridge the wage and job opportunity gap, something civil rights activist Martin Luther King had advocated for during the final years of his life.
Like MLK, RFK focused on self-reliance, so he launched Bedford-Stuyvesant, a project geared towards restoring businesses and creating job opportunities within impoverished communities.
4. The Fight Against Organized Crime
Robert Kennedy created a precedent as the 64th US Attorney General by directly prosecuting and exposing organized crime at its peak.
He almost single-handedly took down organized crime, which had an iron grip on businesses, unions, gambling establishments, and politics, probably inspiring his contemporaries to do the same.
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