… and see it as a harbinger of things to come.
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Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner look back at their film JFK 25 years later
… and see it as a harbinger of things to come.
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Gerald Posner vs. Roger Stone in Coral Gables
On the 54th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, at a bookstore in Coral Gables, Florida two famous authors convened. They were Gerald Posner and Roger Stone. The subject was a debate over the circumstances of Kennedy’s assassination. Obviously, because of the orientation of their books on the subject, Posner defended the Warren Commission verdict while Stone argued for a conspiracy.
Robert Loomis Posner was trained as a lawyer. At age 23, he became one of the youngest attorneys ever employed by Cravath, Swaine and Moore, John McCloy’s old law firm. In 1980, he left that firm and opened a private practice with a partner. In 1986, he left that practice and became an author. In a relatively short period of time, he wrote three non-fiction books and one novel. In 1991, he was enlisted by Robert Loomis of Random House to write a response to Oliver Stone’s movie about the Kennedy assassination, JFK. The very plugged-in Loomis promised Posner that the CIA would cooperate with him on the project. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 369) And they did. Without their help, how else could an author gain access to high level defector Yuri Nosenko?
Harold Evans As was exposed in a later lawsuit by the late Roger Feinman, Random House put a major effort into selling Posner’s Case Closed. One that was personally supervised by Harold Evans, who was president of the publishing house at the time. According to information Feinman discovered in his lawsuit, it was Evans who personally approved the infamous NY Times ads for the book. This was a four-phase campaign. It began with two teaser ads that promised to name the guilty parties in the JFK assassination. It culminated with two more ads. These featured the faces of Oliver Stone, David Lifton, Robert Groden, Jim Marrs, Mark Lane and Jim Garrison under a title which boldly accused them of the charge: “Guilty of Misleading the American Public”. If the reader knows anything about advertising costs in major newspapers, he can guess what those four ads cost. (Click here for Feinman’s essay about his lawsuit against Random House.)
But that was not all. Apparently because Evans had previously served as a director of US News and World Report, that magazine gave Posner’s book a cover story. The book became such a cause celebre that other authors have successfully used it as a way to curry favor with the MSM, e.g., Jeff Toobin and Robert Dallek.
The problem with all this hoopla, which was designed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the assassination, is that it was completely unwarranted. There were several reviews that showed just how flawed Case Closed was: for instance, David Wrone’s. (See also this index of items on this site.) In fact, there were so many problems with Posner’s book that activist Dave Starks put together a compendium page of articles to show that, not only was Case Closed a very bad piece of scholarship, but it might have been worse than that. In his haste to do a hatchet job on the critics, Posner may have created interviews he did not actually do. For instance, Peter Scott talked to Carlos Bringuier after Case Closed came out. Contrary to the book’s claims, Bringuier said he never talked to Posner. (Author interview with Scott in San Francisco in 1994) Same with Dealey Plaza witness James Tague, who the author clearly states he talked to on two successive days. (See Posner, paperback edition, p. 546) When Gary Aguilar talked to Tague, he said he never spoke to Posner. To use another example, although the author said he interviewed JFK’s forensic pathologist Thornton Boswell, Boswell told Aguilar he never spoke to him. (Click here for Starks’ devastating page on Posner.)
David Ferrie & Lee Oswald,
Civil Air Patrol (1955)Posner also committed some outright howlers in his much-ballyhooed book. For example, in his schematic drawings of the assassin at the Texas School Book Depository window, he has him posed as firing from an extreme left to right angle. So much so that these “Posner shots” would have ended up in the railroad yards behind the picket fence. (See Appendix A of Case Closed, paperback edition.) This makes one wonder if Posner was ever in Dallas. Because to anyone who has been to the building and peered out the sixth floor window—which was possible back then—it presents a slight right to left angle. Posner also wrote that there was no evidence to connect David Ferrie with Oswald. (Posner, p. 425) This was utterly ridiculous on many counts. But to name just one, when the book came out PBS did a special which featured a photo of Oswald and Ferrie together at a Civil Air Patrol (CAP) barbecue. They found it by questioning some other members of the CAP. Which means Posner could have done the same if he had knocked on some doors in the Crescent City. Posner also writes that there was no such personage as Clay Bertrand in New Orleans. When the JFK Act declassified both the Jim Garrison files and the papers of the HSCA, Posner again ended up with custard pie on his face. Those documents reveal that the number of witnesses who stated that Clay Shaw used the alias of Clay Bertrand was in the double digits. (Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, by James DiEugenio, pp. 211, 387, 388)
Posner’s book showed us in excelsis just how schizoid America is on the murder of President Kennedy. It did not matter to the Powers That Be just how error-strewn Posner’s book was. It did not matter to them that he was more or less acting as a hired gun for Loomis and Evans. It did not matter to them that the book was obviously a rush job for the 30th anniversary. Or that the title was preposterous since the declassification process of the JFK Act had not even gone into effect yet. In other words, the book was saying the case was closed when, in fact, two million pages of documents were about to be declassified in the next four years.
Clearly, as representatives of the Anglo-American Establishment, the important thing for Loomis and Evans was this: They wanted to create a tangible cultural artifact to rally around at the 30th anniversary. Why? In order to beat back the tsunami effect of Oliver Stone’s JFK, which had blindsided them. Posner’s book was a concocted historical event. Today the book has been retired to the (rather large) ash heap of useless volumes on the JFK case. It has no intrinsic factual merit to it at all. It is simply an exemplar of a two-part cultural/historical phenomenon. I say two parts, because the second phase of this Jungian neurotic outbreak occurred four years later, with another Loomis client. This time the collective seizure was over Sy Hersh’s equally horrendous book. This one was a biography of John Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot. That bookend volume was as bad in its own way as Posner’s tome. But Oliver Stone had not just said that JFK was killed by a conspiracy. His film also stated that Kennedy was a foreign policy iconoclast who was changing things in that realm. This was true and has been proven even more accurate by recent scholarship. But that did not matter with Hersh, whose book was so bad that some critics said it should have been titled, The Dark Side of Seymour Hersh.
II
Roger Stone was born in Lewisboro, New York to a reporter mother and a father who drilled oil wells. Stone got hooked on politics when he read Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater. Although he admired Goldwater’s ideas he could not comprehend the tactics of his 1964 campaign. To put it mildly, he thought they were rather quixotic. As he told writer Matt Labash, “It’s like he was trying to lose. Going to Tennessee and coming out against the Tennessee Valley Authority? These were suicidal acts.” (Weekly Standard, November 5, 2007)
Roger Stone & Nixon Because of this, Roger Stone became more enamored with Richard Nixon as his conservative standard bearer. He deduced that Nixon was “more pragmatic, more interested in winning than proving a point.” He took a pithy aphorism from RMN: “Losers don’t legislate.” (ibid) Stone liked Nixon so much that he decided that his newly found idol had not really lost the 1960 election. He had been robbed of the presidency through electoral fraud. So he wrote Nixon a letter at his New York law firm encouraging him to run again. Nixon replied that he did not plan on doing so, but if he did, he would be in touch with young Stone. (Stone is such a Nixon fan he had his face tattooed on his back.)
Jeb Magruder testifies
during the Watergate hearingsWhile a student at George Washington University in Washington D.C., Stone invited Jeb Magruder, deputy director of the Committee to Reelect the President, to speak at the college’s Young Republican Club. After the speaking engagement Stone asked Magruder for a job with CREEP. At age 19, Stone decided to forsake his studies and joined right in with the antics of the infamous CREEP. For instance, he planted a mole in the camp of Democratic rival Hubert Humphrey. Magruder and his cohorts were obsessed with intelligence and skullduggery, and Stone had a natural affinity for them. He once wrote a check to Nixon rival Pete McCloskey from an account inscribed as the Young Socialists Alliance. Once he got the receipt he leaked it to the reactionary newspaper Manchester Union-Leader. (ibid)
Against Senator George McGovern in the general election, Stone hired another spy he termed Sedan Chair II. But according to Stone, he did not understand the mentality of CREEP. To him it did not make any sense to take the kinds of risks they were taking when the Democratic candidate, McGovern, had so little chance of winning. After Watergate, which spelled the end of Nixon’s political career, he went to work for Bob Dole, and then for the (failed) Ronald Reagan campaign of 1976. During this period, he co-founded the National Conservative Political Action committee, which was designed to execute a GOP takeover of the Senate. Which, by recruiting men like Dan Quayle and Chuck Grassley, it did. As he noted to Jeffrey Toobin, “The Democrats were weak, we were strong.” (The New Yorker, June 2, 2008)
Donald Trump & Roy Cohn 
John Anderson (Sept. 16, 1980) In 1980, he again worked for Reagan. In that election, he joined forces with the notorious attorney Roy Cohn, sworn enemy of the late Bobby Kennedy. They decided that the best way for Reagan to beat incumbent president Jimmy Carter in New York was to help Democratic congressman John Anderson get on the ballot. This way, the Democratic Party vote would be split and therefore weakened. According to Stone, Cohn told him to get in contact with a lawyer friend he had. Once in contact, he was to ask him how much it would cost to get Anderson the Liberal party nomination in New York. Stone reported back that the price was $125,000. A couple of days later, Stone was told by Cohn to pick up a suitcase and deliver it to the lawyer. He did so, and Anderson won the Liberal Party nomination. Reagan won New York with 46% of the vote. (ibid, Labash)
Reagan’s victory in 1980 allowed Stone to enter the upper stratosphere of political campaign managing and lobbying. He now set up an office with two other GOP stalwarts, Charles Black and Paul Manafort. They would later be joined by none other than the late Lee Atwater, the man usually given credit for the Willie Horton TV ads, which helped defeat Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988. The firm was lobbying on behalf of such people as Ferdinand Marcos, dictator of the Philippines, as well as conservative causes like the Nicaraguan Contras, and Angola’s UNITA rebels. And they advised several presidential candidates, even when they opposed each other.
Stone’s primacy in the higher circles of the GOP came to an end in 1996. He was serving as an unaccredited adviser to Bob Dole’s presidential campaign when scandal struck. And it struck through the National Enquirer. They billed the story as “Top Dole Aide Caught in Group-Sex Ring.” (op. cit., Toobin) He and his second wife had run ads for swinging partners to participate in bedroom games. (op. cit., Labash) The tabloids even got hold of the advertising photos. Stone tried his usual “Deny, deny, deny” tactics. But they did not succeed.
But in 2000, James Baker, who was running the GOP recount effort in Florida against Al Gore, brought Stone back to perform one last piece of political subterfuge. That act would have a momentous impact on America for decades into the future. It has come to be known as the “Brooks Brothers riot”.
When the Florida Supreme Court ruled that Gore could have a recount in four counties, Stone and Baker decided this had to be thwarted. Scores of Republican congressional aides—the Brooks Brothers suits—had been flown to Miami to simulate grass roots, Floridian protest against the recount. Stone stationed himself in a Winnebago outside the building where the Miami-Dade County recount was taking place. Outfitted with walkie-talkies and cell phones, he went to work using these aides to create the illusion of an indigenous attack on the building. He did this by having the congressional aides actually enter the building and demand the recount be halted. According to the New York Times, some people were struck or kicked. (11/23/2000) This scene inside the building was coupled with Stone inspired Spanish language radio warnings about carloads of Cuban exiles driving to the scene. (op. cit., Toobin) In its broad outlines, the operation resembled the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954. Between the Brooks Brothers demonstrators and the “imminent Cuban exile assault”, the recount was discontinued. The episode likely stopped Gore from actually taking the lead for the first time. This—plus the later Antonin Scalia order granting emergency relief due to the “irreparable damage” of counting votes—ultimately led to the US Supreme Court decision stopping the recount. And that brought us George W. Bush, perhaps the worst president in history.
III
After his work for Random House on the JFK case, in 1998 Posner wrote a book on the 30th anniversary of the Martin Luther King assassination. To no one’s surprise, Killing the Dream came to the same conclusion as Case Closed—the official story was correct. One year later of course, William Pepper demonstrated in court that Posner was wrong. The jury in a civil case brought by the King family ruled that King was killed as a result of a conspiracy.
David Marwell Because of his establishment-pleasing writings, Posner became a TV and MSM presence. And he continued to write more non-fiction books. He appeared on many TV programs and also as an editorial writer for some major newspapers. According to Doug Horne in his book Inside the ARRB, the first director of the Assassination Records Review Board, David Marwell, said he found much of value in Case Closed. Consequently, he had lunch with Posner more than once. Harold Evans’ wife, Tina Brown, hired Posner as an investigative journalist for the online magazine Daily Beast. But he was forced to step down from that position in 2010 over several accusations that demonstrated that Posner was a serial plagiarist. He not only plagiarized for his articles at Daily Beast, but also in at least three of his books, e.g., Miami Babylon. (See Slate, “The Posner Plagiarism Perplex”, 2/11/2010, also Miami New Times, March 30, 2010)
Tina Brown 
Harper Lee Three years later, the late Harper Lee filed a lawsuit claiming that her literary agent’s son-in-law had directed Posner to set up a corporation to defraud Lee of her royalties from her colossal best-seller To Kill a Mockingbird. In her court filing she said that she had faulty hearing and eyesight and these had been used by Samuel Pinkus to snooker her into signing over her book copyright. Pinkus assigned the copyright to a company incorporated by Posner. (NY Post, May 4, 2013) Four months later, Posner settled the suit and was dismissed from the legal action.
After his work for James Baker in Miami, Roger Stone tended to concentrate on two new subjects. First, there was his friendship with Donald Trump. Stone was sold on the idea of Trump making a run for the presidency on the Reform Party ticket, the party created by Ross Perot. Although Trump made some overtures to run in the 2000 election, he ultimately decided against it. Stone also began to develop an avocation as an author. To say that his output has been prolific does not do him justice. In the space of about three years, beginning in late 2013, Stone has written or co-written—at last count—seven books. At least three of them rely on his relationship with Richard Nixon, who he still holds in high regard. If one looks closely, three of them rely on his relationship with Trump, who he had worked for in Trump’s 2015-16 campaign before they (allegedly) parted ways. His book about Jeb Bush, Jeb and the Bush Crime Family, was clearly meant as a broadside against the candidate most perceived as the favorite in the GOP primary campaign. His book about the Clintons, The Clintons’ War on Women, was meant as a preemptive strike against the attacks against Trump’s philandering with females.
But Roger Stone/author first came to prominence at the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. At that time he co-wrote a book entitled The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ. That book became a New York Times bestseller. In fact, of all the books released at the 50th, it likely sold the most copies. Since then he has stayed involved in the field. In fact, his co-writers on the two previously mentioned books come from the JFK field. They are, respectively, Saint John Hunt and Robert Morrow.
Why has Stone done this? It likely does not pay him the fees he commanded as a Washington lobbyist working in a very powerful PR firm. In a profile written by Jeff Toobin for The New Yorker, some hints for this career move are tossed out—almost inadvertently. One of the reasons Stone gives for being so enamored of Nixon is his anti-elitism. He adds Nixon was class conscious. And he identified with average people who ate TV dinners and watched Lawrence Welk. To Stone, Nixon “recognized the effectiveness of anti-elitism—a staple of American campaigns even today—as a core message.” In comparing Nixon with Reagan, Stone states that although many Republicans give Reagan credit for the defections of the working class from the Democrats, it was really Nixon who started it. Stone then zeroes in on the whole polarization concept:
Nixon figured out how to win. We had a non-elitist message. We were the party of the workingman! We wanted lower taxes for everyone across the board. They were the part of the Hollywood elite. … The point that the Democrats missed was that the people who weren’t rich wanted to be rich.
There is little doubt that Nixon, with his appeals to the Silent Majority in order to expand and lengthen the Vietnam War, did use these kinds of techniques. It’s obvious from the declassified tapes at the Nixon Library that he did not mean any of it. This was amply exposed by author Ken Hughes, among others, in his fine book Fatal Politics. And this exposure helps explain why Nixon and his family fought so long and hard not to have those tapes declassified. That book reveals that Nixon knew the war was lost in 1969. But he did not want to have South Vietnam fall on his watch. Therefore, he lied to Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam to keep him in his corner while he negotiated an agreement with the north. The whole time he slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent civilians in an expanded air war over all of Indochina. The only reason for this was to announce a peace agreement on the eve of the 1972 election to make sure he had a landslide victory. This is all admitted to on these tapes in the Hughes book, and in letters he sent to Thieu in the book The Palace File.
But the relevant point for today’s scene is that this cultural anti-elite aspect was well used by both Stone and Trump during the latter’s successful presidential campaign. Trump decided to leapfrog most of the MSM, and he did this with Stone’s help. In addition to the two books mentioned above, Stone helped promote the whole mythology of Ted Cruz’s father being seen in New Orleans with Lee Oswald in the summer of 1963. Stone used the word of Judyth Baker to promote this bizarre story. And Trump went on national TV with it. (Click here for our reaction.) The Morrow/Stone book about Clinton helped Trump alleviate the impact of the compelling Access Hollywood videotape. And this whole anti-cultural-elite concept helped avoid the question of how in the heck do the interests of a billionaire real estate investor coincide with America’s shrinking middle class? With the announcement of Trump’s cabinet, we can see that, as with Nixon, the whole idea is little more than window dressing. The policies that this cabinet and the Republican Party will try to enact will gut the middle class even more.
IV
All of the above about these two men is more than relevant to their debate in Coral Gables. Because it informs us of the state of the JFK case in America today. This author would not walk across the street to see Posner speak about either the JFK or King case. Simply because he is a lawyer who is in the employ of the official story. Therefore, it does not matter if what he is saying is incomplete, dubious or just specious. This reviewer has never read any of Stone’s books for the simple reason that I have a hard time thinking that Stone could master something as complex and multi-layered as the JFK case in just a matter of 3-4 years. I am also skeptical of the case that he and others have made against Lyndon Johnson. In watching this confrontation it appears I was correct about these suspicions.
Roger Stone presented first. He led off with remarks about the avulsed rear skull wound that, for him, disappeared from the back of Kennedy’s head after he left Parkland Hospital. (This is not accurate. Gary Aguilar has shown it did not disappear, it was apparent at both the emergency room at Parkland and Bethesda Medical Center, where Kennedy’s body underwent an autopsy.) Stone later added the confusing point that the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was convened because of Oliver Stone’s film JFK. I think Roger meant the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was convened.
But he then confuses this issue even more by saying that the HSCA revealed more of Ruby’s Mafia ties, which led them to conclude organized crime involvement in the JFK case. This is not really accurate, as the HSCA did not deduce this as one of their conclusions. Chief Counsel Robert Blakey did that in his later book on the JFK case, The Plot to Kill the President (which was co-written with Dick Billings).
Stone also talked about his relationship with Senator Arlen Specter and how Specter did not have access to the autopsy materials during the Warren Commission proceedings. This needed to be qualified. As revealed by the declassified transcripts of the their executive hearings, the Warren Commission did have the autopsy materials. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 171) And as Pat Speer has shown on his web site, Specter did see at least one of the autopsy photos. (See Chapter 10, “Examining the Examinations”.)
Stone also said that the alleged rifle used by Oswald was purchased for $75.00 and that no marksman was able to duplicate what he did, that is get 2 of 3 direct hits in six seconds. The latter part of this is correct, the former sum is about three times what the rifle actually cost. Stone then concluded with the Jay Harrison/Barr McClellan sponsored Mac Wallace fingerprint found on the sixth floor. He also even mentioned one Loy Factor’s involvement with Wallace and the LBJ plot.
Posner then replied. He criticized Stone’s book for having so many footnotes to other books. He therefore termed the book outdated. This is bizarre since Posner’s book is overwhelmingly reliant on the Warren Report and the accompanying volumes of evidence. He then said there was no evidence on the autopsy x-rays and photos that revealed anyone firing from anywhere except from behind and the general vicinity of the sixth floor.
Apparently, Posner was not aware of the ARRB interview with Tom Robinson who worked out of Gawler’s funeral parlor. He said there was a wound near the right temple of the president that he filled in with wax. He said it was so close to the hairline it was difficult to see. (Murder in Dealey Plaza, p. 250, edited by James Fetzer.) Author Don Thomas has also done good work with the autopsy photos, which makes this wound easier to discern. Posner also ignores the fact that, as many have indicated, if the autopsy doctors are correct and the entrance wound in the skull came in near the base, then there is no trajectory of bullet particles on the X-rays to match it up with.
Since Stone gave Posner an opening about only the Parkland doctors seeing the hole in the back of the skull, lawyer Posner took advantage of it. He said that since Kennedy’s body was not turned over at Parkland, they really didn’t see it. This is ridiculous on more than one count. First, as Gary Aguilar has shown, this avulsed wound did not “disappear” after Dallas. It was clearly observed at Bethesda, except the HSCA hid these interviews from the public. Therefore they were only declassified with the advent of the ARRB. (ibid, p. 199) And Posner talks about using dated information.
Secondly, Parkland nurse Diana Bowron actually saw this wound as she was aiding the entourage bringing Kennedy’s body into the emergency room, and she saw it again as she was prepping Kennedy’s corpse to depart. (ibid, pp. 60, 199) Neurosurgeon Kemp Clark examined Kennedy’s skull as the tracheotomy was being performed and he stated that he saw this wound. (ibid, p. 193) Nurse Audrey Bell told the ARRB that Malcolm Perry showed her this wound by turning Kennedy’s head slightly. (Interview of 4/1/97) Then, of course, there is the testimony of Secret Service agent Clint Hill who said he saw this wound in the limousine on the way to Parkland. (op. cit., Fetzer, pp. 198-99) Stone should have literally harpooned Posner for citing such specious information.
The bloviating Posner then added something just as dubious. He said that in order to argue conspiracy one must state that the X-rays and photos are altered. More baloney. Stone should have asked Posner on rebuttal, “How did the 6.5 mm fragment get on the X-rays if it’s not in the autopsy report and none of the autopsy doctors saw it that night?” He then should have asked the prosecutor, “What happened to the trail of fragments that lead pathologist Jim Humes wrote about in his report which goes from the bottom rear of the skull to the top? Those do not exist today. Why Gerald?” (Reclaiming Parkland, by James DiEugenio, pp. 152-54) Stone should also have asked the attorney, “Gerald, if all the shots came from the rear, including the head shot, why is there no blowout in the front of Kennedy’s face?”
Further, the brain was never sectioned. Therefore we do not know the path of the bullet through the skull, or if there was only one bullet. That would have been the best evidence of exactly what killed President Kennedy. But it was not done. Why?
Finally, the back wound was not dissected. So we do not know if this wound was a through and through wound–did it transit the body? If it did not, then the Single Bullet Theory Posner upholds is kaput. And according to pathologist Pierre Finck’s testimony at the Clay Shaw trial, the reason it was not tracked is that the doctors were prevented from doing so by the military brass at Bethesda.
These all indicate a cover up, if not a conspiracy. And they all would have been better evidence than the photos and X-rays. After all, one cannot photograph autopsy practices that were never performed.
Posner then said it is wrong to say that no marksman ever duplicated Oswald’s shooting feat. He said the Commission did, CBS did, and the HSCA did.
Concerning the first, I don’t know what Posner is talking about. Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher have discussed the rifle experiments of the Warren Commission. (Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, pp. 108-10; Lane, Rush to Judgment, pp. 126-30) The FBI tried to get off three shots in six seconds, scoring two of three direct hits in the head and shoulder area. They failed. Therefore, the Commission had three military snipers try it. These tests were rigged. They were done from about twenty feet up, not sixty, as would have been the case with Oswald. The three riflemen were given as much time as they wanted to gauge the first shot, again not the case for Oswald. Third, they were firing at stationary and not moving targets. And even at that, the targets were grouped much closer together than what the Commission said was the firing series in Dealey Plaza. Fifth, these were some of the vey best marksmen in the military. They were so good they were above the best in the Marine Corps, and could qualify for the Olympics. To put it mildly, Oswald was nowhere near this quality. But even at that only one of them got the shots off in the required time. And none were able to get two of three direct hits.
Concerning CBS, apparently Posner has not read my essay based on CBS internal memoranda adduced by their employee Roger Feinman. Unlike what Posner stated, their first marksman, a famous military sniper, using a model of the 6.5 Mannlicher Carcano, could not do what Oswald did. They then brought in a team of riflemen, and let them practice for a week—which Oswald did not do in any way, shape or form. They then set up a target that eliminated the oak tree from the sixth floor, eliminated the curve in the street, and instead set up a moving sled to fire at. This last was the most important factor. Why? Because the sled posed an enlarged target, as Feinman notes, it at least doubled the target area. In other words, CBS cheated after their first marksman failed. (Click here for that information.)
Stooping to the HSCA for evidence on this subject is really hard to understand. Even for Posner. Because the HSCA did no rifle tests during its actual duration. They did not do them until after the HSCA ceased operation. Wallace Milam sent me the full memo on this episode. It turns out that Chief Counsel Robert Blakey, his assistant Gary Cornwell, and some Washington policemen went out to a rifle range. There they tried to do what the Commission said Oswald did. In their overweening ambition, at first they decided not to use the telescopic site. Which is ridiculous since the Commission said Oswald did use it. After all, why would it be attached to the rifle if it were not used? As I can inform the reader, that scope makes a huge difference. To say Oswald did what he did without it is simply preposterous. But when the policemen used only the iron sights on the rifle, they had the same problem that the Commission did. They could not maintain accuracy within the six second time interval of the Warren Commission. So what did Blakey and Cornwell do? They used something called “point aiming”. Which means not using any site at all, just pointing the rifle. When they got off two shots in under two seconds that was enough. They then deduced it was possible to do what Oswald allegedly did even though they were only 20 feet up instead of 60 feet and their accuracy results were not recorded. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 83)
Marine sniper
Carlos HathcockStone should have replied that, yes, you can do what the Commission said Oswald did. But you have to cheat. And then not tell the public about the cheating. I would have then added that Carlos Hathcock, the greatest sniper of the Vietnam War, actually did try and duplicate accurately what the Commission said Oswald did. He told author Craig Roberts that he could not do it, even though he tried more than once.
Posner actually used the fingerprint evidence on the alleged Oswald rifle to try and convict Oswald. Without telling the public that this so-called evidence was presented only after the FBI found there were no prints found on the rifle when Sebastian LaTona examined it that night. (Meagher, op. cit., pp. 120-27) Prints only showed up about a week later, and then thirty years later for a PBS special. Stone rightly pointed out that the FBI was inexplicably at the Oswald funeral parlor trying to get fingerprints off of his corpse. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, pp. 107-09) Which is weird, since the Dallas Police already had Oswald’s fingerprints.
Posner concluded by rebutting the use of the Mac Wallace fingerprint with the work of FBI authority Robert Garrett, as is featured in Joan Mellen’s book, Faustian Bargains.
I won’t go on with my analysis since it would just be more of the same. Posner making more and more dubious claims and Stone replying with populist type experts, e.g., Judyth Baker on Cruz, and Richard Bartholomew on the Wallace print. (Yet, to my knowledge, Richard is not a fingerprint expert.) Posner actually tried to impeach Victoria Adams not seeing Oswald running down the stairs after the shooting by saying she did not see officer Marrion Baker or supervisor Roy Truly either. Again, Posner seems unaware that Miss Garner, Victoria’s supervisor, did see those two men come up the stairs after Adams and co-worker Sandy Styles went down. Further, the Warren Commission had this document in their hands, since it was dated June 2, 1964. While they were in session.
Now, obviously, if Garner saw Baker and Truly after Victoria and Sandy went down the stairs, then the two women left within seconds of the shooting, as they said they did. Yet the Warren Report says they left much later, minutes afterwards. In other words, the Commission covered up the true facts of what had occurred. Because Adams and Styles give Oswald a rock solid alibi for not being on the sixth floor when they needed him to be so. (DiEugenio, op. cit., pp. 115-20)
The most important thing that was said during this debate was that Stone would try and talk to Mr. Trump about the declassification of the final documents being held at the National Archives by the JFK Act. They are supposed to be finally disposed of in October of this year. Let us hope Mr. Stone uses his influence to see that through. It would be in keeping with his and Mr. Trump’s obeisance to conservative populism.
(The debate video is embedded below, or the reader can watch it by clicking here.)
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Gerald Posner vs. Roger Stone in Coral Gables
On the 54th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, at a bookstore in Coral Gables, Florida two famous authors convened. They were Gerald Posner and Roger Stone. The subject was a debate over the circumstances of Kennedy’s assassination. Obviously, because of the orientation of their books on the subject, Posner defended the Warren Commission verdict while Stone argued for a conspiracy.
Robert Loomis Posner was trained as a lawyer. At age 23, he became one of the youngest attorneys ever employed by Cravath, Swaine and Moore, John McCloy’s old law firm. In 1980, he left that firm and opened a private practice with a partner. In 1986, he left that practice and became an author. In a relatively short period of time, he wrote three non-fiction books and one novel. In 1991, he was enlisted by Robert Loomis of Random House to write a response to Oliver Stone’s movie about the Kennedy assassination, JFK. The very plugged-in Loomis promised Posner that the CIA would cooperate with him on the project. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 369) And they did. Without their help, how else could an author gain access to high level defector Yuri Nosenko?
Harold Evans As was exposed in a later lawsuit by the late Roger Feinman, Random House put a major effort into selling Posner’s Case Closed. One that was personally supervised by Harold Evans, who was president of the publishing house at the time. According to information Feinman discovered in his lawsuit, it was Evans who personally approved the infamous NY Times ads for the book. This was a four-phase campaign. It began with two teaser ads that promised to name the guilty parties in the JFK assassination. It culminated with two more ads. These featured the faces of Oliver Stone, David Lifton, Robert Groden, Jim Marrs, Mark Lane and Jim Garrison under a title which boldly accused them of the charge: “Guilty of Misleading the American Public”. If the reader knows anything about advertising costs in major newspapers, he can guess what those four ads cost. (Click here for Feinman’s essay about his lawsuit against Random House.)
But that was not all. Apparently because Evans had previously served as a director of US News and World Report, that magazine gave Posner’s book a cover story. The book became such a cause celebre that other authors have successfully used it as a way to curry favor with the MSM, e.g., Jeff Toobin and Robert Dallek.
The problem with all this hoopla, which was designed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the assassination, is that it was completely unwarranted. There were several reviews that showed just how flawed Case Closed was: for instance, David Wrone’s. (See also this index of items on this site.) In fact, there were so many problems with Posner’s book that activist Dave Starks put together a compendium page of articles to show that, not only was Case Closed a very bad piece of scholarship, but it might have been worse than that. In his haste to do a hatchet job on the critics, Posner may have created interviews he did not actually do. For instance, Peter Scott talked to Carlos Bringuier after Case Closed came out. Contrary to the book’s claims, Bringuier said he never talked to Posner. (Author interview with Scott in San Francisco in 1994) Same with Dealey Plaza witness James Tague, who the author clearly states he talked to on two successive days. (See Posner, paperback edition, p. 546) When Gary Aguilar talked to Tague, he said he never spoke to Posner. To use another example, although the author said he interviewed JFK’s forensic pathologist Thornton Boswell, Boswell told Aguilar he never spoke to him. (Click here for Starks’ devastating page on Posner.)
David Ferrie & Lee Oswald,
Civil Air Patrol (1955)Posner also committed some outright howlers in his much-ballyhooed book. For example, in his schematic drawings of the assassin at the Texas School Book Depository window, he has him posed as firing from an extreme left to right angle. So much so that these “Posner shots” would have ended up in the railroad yards behind the picket fence. (See Appendix A of Case Closed, paperback edition.) This makes one wonder if Posner was ever in Dallas. Because to anyone who has been to the building and peered out the sixth floor window—which was possible back then—it presents a slight right to left angle. Posner also wrote that there was no evidence to connect David Ferrie with Oswald. (Posner, p. 425) This was utterly ridiculous on many counts. But to name just one, when the book came out PBS did a special which featured a photo of Oswald and Ferrie together at a Civil Air Patrol (CAP) barbecue. They found it by questioning some other members of the CAP. Which means Posner could have done the same if he had knocked on some doors in the Crescent City. Posner also writes that there was no such personage as Clay Bertrand in New Orleans. When the JFK Act declassified both the Jim Garrison files and the papers of the HSCA, Posner again ended up with custard pie on his face. Those documents reveal that the number of witnesses who stated that Clay Shaw used the alias of Clay Bertrand was in the double digits. (Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, by James DiEugenio, pp. 211, 387, 388)
Posner’s book showed us in excelsis just how schizoid America is on the murder of President Kennedy. It did not matter to the Powers That Be just how error-strewn Posner’s book was. It did not matter to them that he was more or less acting as a hired gun for Loomis and Evans. It did not matter to them that the book was obviously a rush job for the 30th anniversary. Or that the title was preposterous since the declassification process of the JFK Act had not even gone into effect yet. In other words, the book was saying the case was closed when, in fact, two million pages of documents were about to be declassified in the next four years.
Clearly, as representatives of the Anglo-American Establishment, the important thing for Loomis and Evans was this: They wanted to create a tangible cultural artifact to rally around at the 30th anniversary. Why? In order to beat back the tsunami effect of Oliver Stone’s JFK, which had blindsided them. Posner’s book was a concocted historical event. Today the book has been retired to the (rather large) ash heap of useless volumes on the JFK case. It has no intrinsic factual merit to it at all. It is simply an exemplar of a two-part cultural/historical phenomenon. I say two parts, because the second phase of this Jungian neurotic outbreak occurred four years later, with another Loomis client. This time the collective seizure was over Sy Hersh’s equally horrendous book. This one was a biography of John Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot. That bookend volume was as bad in its own way as Posner’s tome. But Oliver Stone had not just said that JFK was killed by a conspiracy. His film also stated that Kennedy was a foreign policy iconoclast who was changing things in that realm. This was true and has been proven even more accurate by recent scholarship. But that did not matter with Hersh, whose book was so bad that some critics said it should have been titled, The Dark Side of Seymour Hersh.
II
Roger Stone was born in Lewisboro, New York to a reporter mother and a father who drilled oil wells. Stone got hooked on politics when he read Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater. Although he admired Goldwater’s ideas he could not comprehend the tactics of his 1964 campaign. To put it mildly, he thought they were rather quixotic. As he told writer Matt Labash, “It’s like he was trying to lose. Going to Tennessee and coming out against the Tennessee Valley Authority? These were suicidal acts.” (Weekly Standard, November 5, 2007)
Roger Stone & Nixon Because of this, Roger Stone became more enamored with Richard Nixon as his conservative standard bearer. He deduced that Nixon was “more pragmatic, more interested in winning than proving a point.” He took a pithy aphorism from RMN: “Losers don’t legislate.” (ibid) Stone liked Nixon so much that he decided that his newly found idol had not really lost the 1960 election. He had been robbed of the presidency through electoral fraud. So he wrote Nixon a letter at his New York law firm encouraging him to run again. Nixon replied that he did not plan on doing so, but if he did, he would be in touch with young Stone. (Stone is such a Nixon fan he had his face tattooed on his back.)
Jeb Magruder testifies
during the Watergate hearingsWhile a student at George Washington University in Washington D.C., Stone invited Jeb Magruder, deputy director of the Committee to Reelect the President, to speak at the college’s Young Republican Club. After the speaking engagement Stone asked Magruder for a job with CREEP. At age 19, Stone decided to forsake his studies and joined right in with the antics of the infamous CREEP. For instance, he planted a mole in the camp of Democratic rival Hubert Humphrey. Magruder and his cohorts were obsessed with intelligence and skullduggery, and Stone had a natural affinity for them. He once wrote a check to Nixon rival Pete McCloskey from an account inscribed as the Young Socialists Alliance. Once he got the receipt he leaked it to the reactionary newspaper Manchester Union-Leader. (ibid)
Against Senator George McGovern in the general election, Stone hired another spy he termed Sedan Chair II. But according to Stone, he did not understand the mentality of CREEP. To him it did not make any sense to take the kinds of risks they were taking when the Democratic candidate, McGovern, had so little chance of winning. After Watergate, which spelled the end of Nixon’s political career, he went to work for Bob Dole, and then for the (failed) Ronald Reagan campaign of 1976. During this period, he co-founded the National Conservative Political Action committee, which was designed to execute a GOP takeover of the Senate. Which, by recruiting men like Dan Quayle and Chuck Grassley, it did. As he noted to Jeffrey Toobin, “The Democrats were weak, we were strong.” (The New Yorker, June 2, 2008)
Donald Trump & Roy Cohn John Anderson (Sept. 16, 1980) In 1980, he again worked for Reagan. In that election, he joined forces with the notorious attorney Roy Cohn, sworn enemy of the late Bobby Kennedy. They decided that the best way for Reagan to beat incumbent president Jimmy Carter in New York was to help Democratic congressman John Anderson get on the ballot. This way, the Democratic Party vote would be split and therefore weakened. According to Stone, Cohn told him to get in contact with a lawyer friend he had. Once in contact, he was to ask him how much it would cost to get Anderson the Liberal party nomination in New York. Stone reported back that the price was $125,000. A couple of days later, Stone was told by Cohn to pick up a suitcase and deliver it to the lawyer. He did so, and Anderson won the Liberal Party nomination. Reagan won New York with 46% of the vote. (ibid, Labash)
Reagan’s victory in 1980 allowed Stone to enter the upper stratosphere of political campaign managing and lobbying. He now set up an office with two other GOP stalwarts, Charles Black and Paul Manafort. They would later be joined by none other than the late Lee Atwater, the man usually given credit for the Willie Horton TV ads, which helped defeat Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988. The firm was lobbying on behalf of such people as Ferdinand Marcos, dictator of the Philippines, as well as conservative causes like the Nicaraguan Contras, and Angola’s UNITA rebels. And they advised several presidential candidates, even when they opposed each other.
Stone’s primacy in the higher circles of the GOP came to an end in 1996. He was serving as an unaccredited adviser to Bob Dole’s presidential campaign when scandal struck. And it struck through the National Enquirer. They billed the story as “Top Dole Aide Caught in Group-Sex Ring.” (op. cit., Toobin) He and his second wife had run ads for swinging partners to participate in bedroom games. (op. cit., Labash) The tabloids even got hold of the advertising photos. Stone tried his usual “Deny, deny, deny” tactics. But they did not succeed.
But in 2000, James Baker, who was running the GOP recount effort in Florida against Al Gore, brought Stone back to perform one last piece of political subterfuge. That act would have a momentous impact on America for decades into the future. It has come to be known as the “Brooks Brothers riot”.
When the Florida Supreme Court ruled that Gore could have a recount in four counties, Stone and Baker decided this had to be thwarted. Scores of Republican congressional aides—the Brooks Brothers suits—had been flown to Miami to simulate grass roots, Floridian protest against the recount. Stone stationed himself in a Winnebago outside the building where the Miami-Dade County recount was taking place. Outfitted with walkie-talkies and cell phones, he went to work using these aides to create the illusion of an indigenous attack on the building. He did this by having the congressional aides actually enter the building and demand the recount be halted. According to the New York Times, some people were struck or kicked. (11/23/2000) This scene inside the building was coupled with Stone inspired Spanish language radio warnings about carloads of Cuban exiles driving to the scene. (op. cit., Toobin) In its broad outlines, the operation resembled the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954. Between the Brooks Brothers demonstrators and the “imminent Cuban exile assault”, the recount was discontinued. The episode likely stopped Gore from actually taking the lead for the first time. This—plus the later Antonin Scalia order granting emergency relief due to the “irreparable damage” of counting votes—ultimately led to the US Supreme Court decision stopping the recount. And that brought us George W. Bush, perhaps the worst president in history.
III
After his work for Random House on the JFK case, in 1998 Posner wrote a book on the 30th anniversary of the Martin Luther King assassination. To no one’s surprise, Killing the Dream came to the same conclusion as Case Closed—the official story was correct. One year later of course, William Pepper demonstrated in court that Posner was wrong. The jury in a civil case brought by the King family ruled that King was killed as a result of a conspiracy.
David Marwell Because of his establishment-pleasing writings, Posner became a TV and MSM presence. And he continued to write more non-fiction books. He appeared on many TV programs and also as an editorial writer for some major newspapers. According to Doug Horne in his book Inside the ARRB, the first director of the Assassination Records Review Board, David Marwell, said he found much of value in Case Closed. Consequently, he had lunch with Posner more than once. Harold Evans’ wife, Tina Brown, hired Posner as an investigative journalist for the online magazine Daily Beast. But he was forced to step down from that position in 2010 over several accusations that demonstrated that Posner was a serial plagiarist. He not only plagiarized for his articles at Daily Beast, but also in at least three of his books, e.g., Miami Babylon. (See Slate, “The Posner Plagiarism Perplex”, 2/11/2010, also Miami New Times, March 30, 2010)
Tina Brown Harper Lee Three years later, the late Harper Lee filed a lawsuit claiming that her literary agent’s son-in-law had directed Posner to set up a corporation to defraud Lee of her royalties from her colossal best-seller To Kill a Mockingbird. In her court filing she said that she had faulty hearing and eyesight and these had been used by Samuel Pinkus to snooker her into signing over her book copyright. Pinkus assigned the copyright to a company incorporated by Posner. (NY Post, May 4, 2013) Four months later, Posner settled the suit and was dismissed from the legal action.
After his work for James Baker in Miami, Roger Stone tended to concentrate on two new subjects. First, there was his friendship with Donald Trump. Stone was sold on the idea of Trump making a run for the presidency on the Reform Party ticket, the party created by Ross Perot. Although Trump made some overtures to run in the 2000 election, he ultimately decided against it. Stone also began to develop an avocation as an author. To say that his output has been prolific does not do him justice. In the space of about three years, beginning in late 2013, Stone has written or co-written—at last count—seven books. At least three of them rely on his relationship with Richard Nixon, who he still holds in high regard. If one looks closely, three of them rely on his relationship with Trump, who he had worked for in Trump’s 2015-16 campaign before they (allegedly) parted ways. His book about Jeb Bush, Jeb and the Bush Crime Family, was clearly meant as a broadside against the candidate most perceived as the favorite in the GOP primary campaign. His book about the Clintons, The Clintons’ War on Women, was meant as a preemptive strike against the attacks against Trump’s philandering with females.
But Roger Stone/author first came to prominence at the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. At that time he co-wrote a book entitled The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ. That book became a New York Times bestseller. In fact, of all the books released at the 50th, it likely sold the most copies. Since then he has stayed involved in the field. In fact, his co-writers on the two previously mentioned books come from the JFK field. They are, respectively, Saint John Hunt and Robert Morrow.
Why has Stone done this? It likely does not pay him the fees he commanded as a Washington lobbyist working in a very powerful PR firm. In a profile written by Jeff Toobin for The New Yorker, some hints for this career move are tossed out—almost inadvertently. One of the reasons Stone gives for being so enamored of Nixon is his anti-elitism. He adds Nixon was class conscious. And he identified with average people who ate TV dinners and watched Lawrence Welk. To Stone, Nixon “recognized the effectiveness of anti-elitism—a staple of American campaigns even today—as a core message.” In comparing Nixon with Reagan, Stone states that although many Republicans give Reagan credit for the defections of the working class from the Democrats, it was really Nixon who started it. Stone then zeroes in on the whole polarization concept:
Nixon figured out how to win. We had a non-elitist message. We were the party of the workingman! We wanted lower taxes for everyone across the board. They were the part of the Hollywood elite. … The point that the Democrats missed was that the people who weren’t rich wanted to be rich.
There is little doubt that Nixon, with his appeals to the Silent Majority in order to expand and lengthen the Vietnam War, did use these kinds of techniques. It’s obvious from the declassified tapes at the Nixon Library that he did not mean any of it. This was amply exposed by author Ken Hughes, among others, in his fine book Fatal Politics. And this exposure helps explain why Nixon and his family fought so long and hard not to have those tapes declassified. That book reveals that Nixon knew the war was lost in 1969. But he did not want to have South Vietnam fall on his watch. Therefore, he lied to Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam to keep him in his corner while he negotiated an agreement with the north. The whole time he slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent civilians in an expanded air war over all of Indochina. The only reason for this was to announce a peace agreement on the eve of the 1972 election to make sure he had a landslide victory. This is all admitted to on these tapes in the Hughes book, and in letters he sent to Thieu in the book The Palace File.
But the relevant point for today’s scene is that this cultural anti-elite aspect was well used by both Stone and Trump during the latter’s successful presidential campaign. Trump decided to leapfrog most of the MSM, and he did this with Stone’s help. In addition to the two books mentioned above, Stone helped promote the whole mythology of Ted Cruz’s father being seen in New Orleans with Lee Oswald in the summer of 1963. Stone used the word of Judyth Baker to promote this bizarre story. And Trump went on national TV with it. (Click here for our reaction.) The Morrow/Stone book about Clinton helped Trump alleviate the impact of the compelling Access Hollywood videotape. And this whole anti-cultural-elite concept helped avoid the question of how in the heck do the interests of a billionaire real estate investor coincide with America’s shrinking middle class? With the announcement of Trump’s cabinet, we can see that, as with Nixon, the whole idea is little more than window dressing. The policies that this cabinet and the Republican Party will try to enact will gut the middle class even more.
IV
All of the above about these two men is more than relevant to their debate in Coral Gables. Because it informs us of the state of the JFK case in America today. This author would not walk across the street to see Posner speak about either the JFK or King case. Simply because he is a lawyer who is in the employ of the official story. Therefore, it does not matter if what he is saying is incomplete, dubious or just specious. This reviewer has never read any of Stone’s books for the simple reason that I have a hard time thinking that Stone could master something as complex and multi-layered as the JFK case in just a matter of 3-4 years. I am also skeptical of the case that he and others have made against Lyndon Johnson. In watching this confrontation it appears I was correct about these suspicions.
Roger Stone presented first. He led off with remarks about the avulsed rear skull wound that, for him, disappeared from the back of Kennedy’s head after he left Parkland Hospital. (This is not accurate. Gary Aguilar has shown it did not disappear, it was apparent at both the emergency room at Parkland and Bethesda Medical Center, where Kennedy’s body underwent an autopsy.) Stone later added the confusing point that the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was convened because of Oliver Stone’s film JFK. I think Roger meant the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was convened.
But he then confuses this issue even more by saying that the HSCA revealed more of Ruby’s Mafia ties, which led them to conclude organized crime involvement in the JFK case. This is not really accurate, as the HSCA did not deduce this as one of their conclusions. Chief Counsel Robert Blakey did that in his later book on the JFK case, The Plot to Kill the President (which was co-written with Dick Billings).
Stone also talked about his relationship with Senator Arlen Specter and how Specter did not have access to the autopsy materials during the Warren Commission proceedings. This needed to be qualified. As revealed by the declassified transcripts of the their executive hearings, the Warren Commission did have the autopsy materials. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 171) And as Pat Speer has shown on his web site, Specter did see at least one of the autopsy photos. (See Chapter 10, “Examining the Examinations”.)
Stone also said that the alleged rifle used by Oswald was purchased for $75.00 and that no marksman was able to duplicate what he did, that is get 2 of 3 direct hits in six seconds. The latter part of this is correct, the former sum is about three times what the rifle actually cost. Stone then concluded with the Jay Harrison/Barr McClellan sponsored Mac Wallace fingerprint found on the sixth floor. He also even mentioned one Loy Factor’s involvement with Wallace and the LBJ plot.
Posner then replied. He criticized Stone’s book for having so many footnotes to other books. He therefore termed the book outdated. This is bizarre since Posner’s book is overwhelmingly reliant on the Warren Report and the accompanying volumes of evidence. He then said there was no evidence on the autopsy x-rays and photos that revealed anyone firing from anywhere except from behind and the general vicinity of the sixth floor.
Apparently, Posner was not aware of the ARRB interview with Tom Robinson who worked out of Gawler’s funeral parlor. He said there was a wound near the right temple of the president that he filled in with wax. He said it was so close to the hairline it was difficult to see. (Murder in Dealey Plaza, p. 250, edited by James Fetzer.) Author Don Thomas has also done good work with the autopsy photos, which makes this wound easier to discern. Posner also ignores the fact that, as many have indicated, if the autopsy doctors are correct and the entrance wound in the skull came in near the base, then there is no trajectory of bullet particles on the X-rays to match it up with.
Since Stone gave Posner an opening about only the Parkland doctors seeing the hole in the back of the skull, lawyer Posner took advantage of it. He said that since Kennedy’s body was not turned over at Parkland, they really didn’t see it. This is ridiculous on more than one count. First, as Gary Aguilar has shown, this avulsed wound did not “disappear” after Dallas. It was clearly observed at Bethesda, except the HSCA hid these interviews from the public. Therefore they were only declassified with the advent of the ARRB. (ibid, p. 199) And Posner talks about using dated information.
Secondly, Parkland nurse Diana Bowron actually saw this wound as she was aiding the entourage bringing Kennedy’s body into the emergency room, and she saw it again as she was prepping Kennedy’s corpse to depart. (ibid, pp. 60, 199) Neurosurgeon Kemp Clark examined Kennedy’s skull as the tracheotomy was being performed and he stated that he saw this wound. (ibid, p. 193) Nurse Audrey Bell told the ARRB that Malcolm Perry showed her this wound by turning Kennedy’s head slightly. (Interview of 4/1/97) Then, of course, there is the testimony of Secret Service agent Clint Hill who said he saw this wound in the limousine on the way to Parkland. (op. cit., Fetzer, pp. 198-99) Stone should have literally harpooned Posner for citing such specious information.
The bloviating Posner then added something just as dubious. He said that in order to argue conspiracy one must state that the X-rays and photos are altered. More baloney. Stone should have asked Posner on rebuttal, “How did the 6.5 mm fragment get on the X-rays if it’s not in the autopsy report and none of the autopsy doctors saw it that night?” He then should have asked the prosecutor, “What happened to the trail of fragments that lead pathologist Jim Humes wrote about in his report which goes from the bottom rear of the skull to the top? Those do not exist today. Why Gerald?” (Reclaiming Parkland, by James DiEugenio, pp. 152-54) Stone should also have asked the attorney, “Gerald, if all the shots came from the rear, including the head shot, why is there no blowout in the front of Kennedy’s face?”
Further, the brain was never sectioned. Therefore we do not know the path of the bullet through the skull, or if there was only one bullet. That would have been the best evidence of exactly what killed President Kennedy. But it was not done. Why?
Finally, the back wound was not dissected. So we do not know if this wound was a through and through wound–did it transit the body? If it did not, then the Single Bullet Theory Posner upholds is kaput. And according to pathologist Pierre Finck’s testimony at the Clay Shaw trial, the reason it was not tracked is that the doctors were prevented from doing so by the military brass at Bethesda.
These all indicate a cover up, if not a conspiracy. And they all would have been better evidence than the photos and X-rays. After all, one cannot photograph autopsy practices that were never performed.
Posner then said it is wrong to say that no marksman ever duplicated Oswald’s shooting feat. He said the Commission did, CBS did, and the HSCA did.
Concerning the first, I don’t know what Posner is talking about. Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher have discussed the rifle experiments of the Warren Commission. (Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, pp. 108-10; Lane, Rush to Judgment, pp. 126-30) The FBI tried to get off three shots in six seconds, scoring two of three direct hits in the head and shoulder area. They failed. Therefore, the Commission had three military snipers try it. These tests were rigged. They were done from about twenty feet up, not sixty, as would have been the case with Oswald. The three riflemen were given as much time as they wanted to gauge the first shot, again not the case for Oswald. Third, they were firing at stationary and not moving targets. And even at that, the targets were grouped much closer together than what the Commission said was the firing series in Dealey Plaza. Fifth, these were some of the vey best marksmen in the military. They were so good they were above the best in the Marine Corps, and could qualify for the Olympics. To put it mildly, Oswald was nowhere near this quality. But even at that only one of them got the shots off in the required time. And none were able to get two of three direct hits.
Concerning CBS, apparently Posner has not read my essay based on CBS internal memoranda adduced by their employee Roger Feinman. Unlike what Posner stated, their first marksman, a famous military sniper, using a model of the 6.5 Mannlicher Carcano, could not do what Oswald did. They then brought in a team of riflemen, and let them practice for a week—which Oswald did not do in any way, shape or form. They then set up a target that eliminated the oak tree from the sixth floor, eliminated the curve in the street, and instead set up a moving sled to fire at. This last was the most important factor. Why? Because the sled posed an enlarged target, as Feinman notes, it at least doubled the target area. In other words, CBS cheated after their first marksman failed. (Click here for that information.)
Stooping to the HSCA for evidence on this subject is really hard to understand. Even for Posner. Because the HSCA did no rifle tests during its actual duration. They did not do them until after the HSCA ceased operation. Wallace Milam sent me the full memo on this episode. It turns out that Chief Counsel Robert Blakey, his assistant Gary Cornwell, and some Washington policemen went out to a rifle range. There they tried to do what the Commission said Oswald did. In their overweening ambition, at first they decided not to use the telescopic site. Which is ridiculous since the Commission said Oswald did use it. After all, why would it be attached to the rifle if it were not used? As I can inform the reader, that scope makes a huge difference. To say Oswald did what he did without it is simply preposterous. But when the policemen used only the iron sights on the rifle, they had the same problem that the Commission did. They could not maintain accuracy within the six second time interval of the Warren Commission. So what did Blakey and Cornwell do? They used something called “point aiming”. Which means not using any site at all, just pointing the rifle. When they got off two shots in under two seconds that was enough. They then deduced it was possible to do what Oswald allegedly did even though they were only 20 feet up instead of 60 feet and their accuracy results were not recorded. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 83)
Marine sniper
Carlos HathcockStone should have replied that, yes, you can do what the Commission said Oswald did. But you have to cheat. And then not tell the public about the cheating. I would have then added that Carlos Hathcock, the greatest sniper of the Vietnam War, actually did try and duplicate accurately what the Commission said Oswald did. He told author Craig Roberts that he could not do it, even though he tried more than once.
Posner actually used the fingerprint evidence on the alleged Oswald rifle to try and convict Oswald. Without telling the public that this so-called evidence was presented only after the FBI found there were no prints found on the rifle when Sebastian LaTona examined it that night. (Meagher, op. cit., pp. 120-27) Prints only showed up about a week later, and then thirty years later for a PBS special. Stone rightly pointed out that the FBI was inexplicably at the Oswald funeral parlor trying to get fingerprints off of his corpse. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, pp. 107-09) Which is weird, since the Dallas Police already had Oswald’s fingerprints.
Posner concluded by rebutting the use of the Mac Wallace fingerprint with the work of FBI authority Robert Garrett, as is featured in Joan Mellen’s book, Faustian Bargains.
I won’t go on with my analysis since it would just be more of the same. Posner making more and more dubious claims and Stone replying with populist type experts, e.g., Judyth Baker on Cruz, and Richard Bartholomew on the Wallace print. (Yet, to my knowledge, Richard is not a fingerprint expert.) Posner actually tried to impeach Victoria Adams not seeing Oswald running down the stairs after the shooting by saying she did not see officer Marrion Baker or supervisor Roy Truly either. Again, Posner seems unaware that Miss Garner, Victoria’s supervisor, did see those two men come up the stairs after Adams and co-worker Sandy Styles went down. Further, the Warren Commission had this document in their hands, since it was dated June 2, 1964. While they were in session.
Now, obviously, if Garner saw Baker and Truly after Victoria and Sandy went down the stairs, then the two women left within seconds of the shooting, as they said they did. Yet the Warren Report says they left much later, minutes afterwards. In other words, the Commission covered up the true facts of what had occurred. Because Adams and Styles give Oswald a rock solid alibi for not being on the sixth floor when they needed him to be so. (DiEugenio, op. cit., pp. 115-20)
The most important thing that was said during this debate was that Stone would try and talk to Mr. Trump about the declassification of the final documents being held at the National Archives by the JFK Act. They are supposed to be finally disposed of in October of this year. Let us hope Mr. Stone uses his influence to see that through. It would be in keeping with his and Mr. Trump’s obeisance to conservative populism.
(The debate video is embedded below, or the reader can watch it by clicking here.)
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Rules Don’t Apply
For many years Warren Beatty had wanted to do a movie about Howard Hughes. According to various reports, he had dallied with the idea since the seventies. Because Beatty has produced and directed some distinguished films, most of us who heard about this project had some high expectations for it. An accomplished and intelligent Hollywood film-maker was going to take on a fascinating and complex American historical figure, about whom much mystery and fascination have existed. In fact, one could argue that Hughes was the most famous and controversial American billionaire before Donald Trump. Except he was much richer than Trump. To give one example: when Hughes Aircraft was auctioned off in 1985—about a decade after Hughes’s death—it sold for $5.2 billion.
Trump, early in his career, actually thought of going into the movie business. He then optioned for real estate. Hughes actually did go into the movie business for about a twenty-year period. After that, he became a major real estate investor in the Las Vegas area. As Trump did in Atlantic City, Hughes purchased several hotel-casinos.
CIA counterintel tsar
James AngletonBut in many ways, Hughes’ life and career is much more interesting, complex, and puzzling than Trump’s. In fact, the last part of Hughes’ life is so mysterious that, to this day—over forty years after his death—writers are still trying to figure out the last ten years of it. All one needs to know as to why the mystery exists is this little known fact: Although there is no evidence that Hughes actually met James Angleton, the legendary CIA counter-intelligence chief attended Hughes’ funeral.
Robert Maheu in Las Vegas CIA agent Robert Maheu—who ran Hughes’ Nevada holdings for four years—once said about him that Hughes wanted to “set himself into an alliance with the CIA that would protect him from investigation by government agencies.” (Playboy, September , 1976, “The Puppet and the Puppetmasters”, by Laurence Gonzales and Larry DuBois) After Maheu was unceremoniously expelled from his position as Hughes’ manager in Nevada at the end of 1970, the CIA found a way to mitigate Hughes’ fear about government inquiries. They secretly contracted out with Hughes for something called Project Jennifer. This was a top secret operation that was budgeted at about $350 million. The idea was to build a huge salvage ship that would surface a sunken Russian submarine in the Pacific about 700 miles from Hawaii. At that time, it was one of the largest contracts for a single national security item the CIA had ever extended. This, of course, allowed the Agency to plant agents inside the company.
But this was only a rather small part of the cross-pollination of Hughes companies with the CIA. On April 1, 1975, The Washington Post reported that “Hughes Aircraft had been mentioned as a potential hotbed of interrelationships with the CIA.” For the simple reason that “Hughes gravitated into areas that other people refused to go into or didn’t believe in.” (op. cit. DuBois and Gonzales) This allowed the CIA to negotiate with Hughes for many of their black budget items. Time magazine once reported that, in the last ten years of his life, the CIA had contracted out about six billion dollars worth of this kind of work to Hughes. This is why, as more than one investigator has noted, at times it was difficult to know where the Hughes empire ended and the CIA began.
This problem did not just exist with Hughes Aircraft, but also with Hughes Tool Company, whose chief asset was an oil drill bit which cracked through rock in record time. This device was invented by Hughes’ father, but he refused to market it, preferring to patent and then lease it. It was a sensational success, both nationally and internationally. As one source revealed, the information garnered from these leases became an important part of the Hughes/CIA relationship because of the Agency’s interest in resource-recovery information. Other countries could not keep the true value of their petroleum resources secret anymore. (ibid)
Bebe Rebozo with Nixon Even Hughes Medical Institute was not immune to this melding of interests. HMI was originally set up in 1953 in Florida with much fanfare. Hughes announced it would be a great research institute that would benefit all mankind. In reality, it was a tax dodge scheme. Much of the profits from Hughes Aircraft were funneled through HMI. Now Hughes would not have to pay taxes on them since HMI was designed as a tax exempt charity, with Hughes as the sole trustee. But by the late sixties, as Hughes became more eccentric, incapacitated, and cut off from the outside world, and as his interests became entwined with the Agency, there were reports that HMI became a CIA front. One Pentagon official told Time words to that effect. When, on instructions from Hughes, employee John Meier went on a visit to HMI in 1969, he learned the same thing from HMI president Ken Wright. He also learned that Wright was siphoning off money to Richard Nixon’s close friend Bebe Rebozo. (Lisa Pease, “Howard Hughes, John Meier, Don Nixon and the CIA”, Probe Magazine, January-February 1996) All these instances, and more, explain why Angleton was quite appreciative of the opportunities Hughes gave the Agency to extend its reach and power. In fact, the role of Hughes with the Agency was joked about in the halls of Langley. There, they referred to Hughes as “The Stockholder”. (Jim Hougan, Spooks, p. 259)
We should add one more notable point about this particular issue. Most commentators seem to agree that a central crossroads in Hughes’ life and career was a mysterious journey that he made to Boston in 1966. While in Boston, he stayed at the Ritz-Carlton. But he also visited a hospital whose physician in chief was George Thorn, a director of Hughes Medical Institute. (Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness, by Donald Bartlett and James Steele, p. 276) To this day, no one knows the purpose of this trip, why Hughes was in the hospital, or what was done to him there. But in addition to Thorn’s presence, the security for the Boston journey was arranged by CIA agent Robert Maheu. (ibid, p. 275) It was after this that Hughes made the decision to move his empire to Nevada, and he also went into a state of near hibernation. He moved into the top floor of the Desert Inn hotel and began to inject himself with large liquid doses of codeine and Valium.
Hughes parade after his
around-the-world flight (1938)In addition to all the above intrigue, Hughes was a movie producer and director for a period of about twenty years. After he lost interest in films, he still ran the RKO studio as a kind of absentee owner until the fifties, when he sold it. He was a record-breaking airplane pilot. In 1935, piloting a plane he himself commissioned, he easily smashed the prevailing air speed record. In 1936 and 1937, he set four consecutive records for transcontinental flight times. (Bartlett and Steele, pp. 82-87) In 1938 Hughes cut Charles Lindbergh’s flight time from New York to Paris in half. That same year, as part of the same flight, Hughes did the same with the late Wally Post’s round the world flight. (ibid, pp. 94-97) For that achievement Hughes and his four-man crew received a ticker tape parade down Broadway that rivaled Lindbergh’s.
Donald Nixon’s diner Then there was Hughes’ relationship with Richard Nixon. The Internal Revenue Service recognized that Hughes had set up a tax scam with HMI, and refused to give the so-called medical center the necessary tax exemption. So Hughes did what he became famous for: he found a way to grease a politician’s palm. Except, in this case, it was the politician’s brother. Donald Nixon was having problems with a business enterprise called Nixonburgers—a combination fast food venture and shopping center. He was tendered a loan for over two hundred thousand dollars—well over a million today. The loan came from Hughes. It was extended in December of 1956, a month after the presidential election in which President Dwight Eisenhower and Vice-President Richard Nixon were re-elected. The loan was secured by a plot of land in Whittier, California—except the lot was worth, at most, about $50,000. Once the transaction was completed, Hughes headquarters in Hollywood notified the Vice-President all was in place for his brother Donald. (ibid, p. 204) That phone call was made in February of 1957. On March 1st, the IRS reversed its decision about Hughes Medical Center: the tax dodge scheme was now made legal.
Actress Jean Peters 
Hughes & Noah Dietrich In the late fifties, Hughes began to struggle with his personal demons and galloping eccentricities. One of America’s richest and most powerful men called an old friend in Texas and told him he had ruined his life beyond repair. (ibid, p. 225) For instance, his marriage to actress Jean Peters in 1957 seems to have been a marriage of convenience. Hughes thought that his long time employee, Noah Dietrich, was plotting to have him declared incompetent so as to appoint a conservator over his affairs. Once married, this could not be done unless Peters approved it. (Beatty refers to this aspect more than once in his film) So, after 32 years, Hughes ended up firing Dietrich. There was reason for Hughes to fear such a coup. For example, when once facing a financial crisis with TWA, he lived and worked out of a screening room in West Hollywood for months. (ibid, p. 231) Unlike the depiction in the Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio film, The Aviator, it appears it was at this time that he began to act bizarrely: walking around nude, spending hours in the bathroom, refusing to touch doorknobs etc. He also became addicted to drugs, e.g., painkillers like codeine and sedatives like Valium.
The TWA Constellation,
which Hughes requested
Lockheed to buildAfter losing control of TWA in 1965, Hughes decided to sell his stock in that company. That transaction, worth well over a half billion dollars, was one of the largest single stock sales in history up to that time. To lower his taxes, he then decided to move to Las Vegas. He promptly purchased both the Desert Inn and the Sands hotel casinos in 1967. Shortly after, he purchased the Castaways, the Landmark, and the Frontier hotels plus the Silver Slipper casino. He also bought a local TV station. As with his Nixon bribe, he then assigned a lawyer on his staff to run envelopes full of cash to scores of politicians in the state, both Democrats and Republicans. (ibid, p. 344) Hughes had designs on buying every major hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip, and then extending his empire north to Reno and Lake Tahoe. For all intents and purposes, he was going to own Nevada.
The Desert Inn (1967) He made one mistake. He had moved too far too fast. He had Nevada pretty much sewn up; even Governor Paul Laxalt was in his corner. (ibid, p. 307) But after the TWA stock sale he was now billed as the richest man in America. And he now seemed intent on using that money to buy Las Vegas. When word leaked out he was going to buy the Stardust, the Justice Department stepped in: If that sale was announced they would file suit on anti-monopoly grounds. This was anathema to Hughes, because it would necessitate him appearing in court—which he would never do.
Once his plans to take over the state were neutralized, Hughes’ life entered its final, almost surreal chapter. It is so strange, so fantastic, that it has generated a surfeit of controversy. In 1970, Jean Peters began divorce proceedings against Hughes. His behavior now began to get even more bizarre: for instance, he began to urinate into glass bottles and then cap them. (ibid, p. 426) Rumors of a palace coup based on declaring Hughes incompetent again began to swirl. This time they were spread by Maheu about Bill Gay, the head of Hughes operations in Los Angeles. Hughes now moved out of his penthouse at the Desert Inn and, for no apparent reason, relocated to Paradise Island in the Bahamas. He then moved from the Bahamas to Nicaragua, to London, to Vancouver, to Acapulco. Hughes reportedly passed away in Mexico and his body was flown to his hometown of Houston in April of 1976.
With the size, scope and drama of this kind of life and career, the subject of Hughes has provoked dozens of essays, books, and even novels; for example, Harold Robbins’ pulp novel, The Carpetbaggers, which was later made into a movie. Much of this output was generated after he passed away. In addition to more than one full length biography, there have been books devoted solely to Hughes’ actions in Hollywood, or in Las Vegas. There have been four films I know of that have dealt with Hughes either as the major character or a supporting figure. Jonathan Demme’s 1980 film Melvin and Howard deals with the much questioned incident between Hughes and one Melvin Dummar, who claimed to have picked up Hughes on a highway in Nevada and driven him to the Desert Inn. Years later, a Hughes will was discovered in a Mormon church in Salt Lake City. It left Dummar $150 million. But in 1978, a jury declared that the will was invalid.
To my knowledge, there have been two films made strictly about Hughes. In 1977 Tommy Lee Jones starred in a four-hour television mini-series entitled The Amazing Howard Hughes, which was based upon Noah Dietrich’s 1972 book. This is the only film I know that tries to trace the entire arc of Hughes’ adult life. In 2004, Martin Scorsese directed The Aviator starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes. This film was a hundred million dollar super production that concentrated on Hughes in Hollywood. It made liberal use of dramatic license. Especially near the end where it portrayed the extreme symptoms of Hughes’ dementia about ten years earlier than they actually occurred—and impacting events they did not impact.
The Hoax (2006) 
In 2006, Lasse Hallstrom directed Richard Gere as author Clifford Irving in The Hoax. That film depicts the episode where Irving attempts to pass off a manuscript he wrote about Hughes as being based upon hundreds of hours of private interviews he did with the reclusive billionaire. Irving sold the book to McGraw-Hill for over $700,000. The publisher did not go far enough in testing Irving or the manuscript, for Irving had never even met Hughes, let alone interviewed him. He had procured the manuscript of the Dietrich book and used that for much of his work. The caper later unraveled when it was discovered that Irving’s wife had deposited checks the publisher made out for Hughes into her personal bank account in Switzerland.
Warren Beatty’s current Hughes film begins with a fictionalized version of the Irving affair. In reality, Hughes made his famous phone call contesting the book from the Bahamas to a Hollywood sound stage at Universal Studios. The much ballyhooed event was televised live. Hughes had issued a press release saying he had nothing to do with the Irving manuscript, which had generated significant publicity well before it was printed. Therefore seven reporters had gathered on stage, along with an eighth person who was a Hughes PR official. The reporters—like James Bacon and Vernon Scott—had all covered Hughes extensively. They were there to hear the man’s voice and ask him questions about his past that he should have been able to recall. And they would use these to see if it was really Hughes on the line and to measure his denials about the book. Considering the fact he was under the high dosages of Valium and codeine injected into his body via syringe, Hughes did fairly well. But there were still certain questions that he could not answer, and these left malingering questions about the book. Those were later dashed by the discovery of the spouse’s foreign bank deposits.
Beatty’s film, entitled Rules Don’t Apply, fictionalizes the phone call. It treats it as a complete triumph. It subtitles the scene as taking place in 1964 and the call being from Acapulco. Also, the purported autobiography has now become a novel which claims Hughes has amnesia and cannot recall the last five years of his life. From here, the film flashes backwards in time to the very end of Hughes’ film career to pick up the main body of the story. Towards the end of that part of his life—and for a few years after—Hughes had a curious habit. He had made stars out of relative unknowns Jean Harlow and Jane Russell in, respectively, Hell’s Angels and The Outlaw. From these promotions Hughes apparently thought he had the Midas touch with young starlets. For even though he was not really active in the movie business, he would send employees of his, like Maheu, out as talent scouts to say, a Miss America contest. They would sign up one or two young ladies and Hughes would pay for certain dancing, singing, and drama classes.
This was a very minor part of Hughes’ career, and most serious biographers deal with it in, perhaps, a page or so. But Beatty has made it the fulcrum of his film. After the movie’s prelude, with Hughes preparing for the live phone call about the ersatz book, he begins the film proper with a mother and daughter arriving in Los Angeles after being signed by a Hughes agent. The mother gets tired of waiting around and tells the daughter Hughes is playing around with her. The mother (played by Beatty’s wife Annette Bening) then leaves.
Gail Ganley The girl that the story concentrates on is named Maria Mabrey. I assume, because of the use of alliteration in the name, that this character was based upon a woman named Gail Ganley. Ganley was a promising singer who was signed by Hughes, given acting classes, and told to keep her deal with Hughes a secret. She was promised $450 a week, plus expenses, and a future contract with Hughes. A driver transported her to her lessons each day in a Hughes auto. She was to keep the arrangement secret from everyone except those in her immediate family. And she was also to hold herself ready for a meeting with Hughes about her career. But as weeks dragged into months, none of what she was promised—the weekly salary, or the Hughes contract—actually materialized. When she complained about the delay she was put off by being told that Hughes was simply too busy at this time to deal with her—but he would in the future. She finally raised such a ruckus that she was told to drive to the Hughes headquarters at 7000 Romaine in Hollywood. She did and, as instructed, she honked her horn three times. On cue, a window flew open from the second floor. A man lowered an envelope with money in it by a string. This action was repeated a couple of times, but Ganley never got her contract. She later sued and received an out of court settlement. This weird ritual then ended. (Bartlett and Steele, pp. 243-44)
The “Spruce Goose” The story progresses through a relationship developed between Mabrey (played by Lily Collins) and her driver, a character named Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich). Like Ganley, Mabrey begins to complain about the lack of progress with her career. Frank tells her about a plot of land he wants to develop with another Hughes employee named Levar Mathis (Matthew Broderick). Frank , who is engaged, begins to lose interest in his fiancée and gets entangled emotionally with Mabrey. Frank hopes to interest Hughes in his land deal. One night he drives Hughes to see the infamous Spruce Goose in Long Beach. On the way Hughes reminds him that his employees should not be having relationships with each other (hence the film’s title).
Noah Dietrich (Martin Sheen) tells Hughes that he is beginning to act eccentrically—he is forgetful and repeating phrases. Hughes suspects Dietrich is plotting against him in order to have him declared incompetent. So he fires him and promotes Forbes. Mabrey then meets with Hughes, and in a rather odd scene, she starts crying and drinking, and he then proposes to her. The two get carried away and have sex. This happens while a Wall Street banker is calling Hughes, trying to see him about saving his investment in TWA.
Mabrey gets pregnant and tells Hughes, who does not believe her and thinks she is out for his money. She and Frank have an argument about Hughes with her saying that her mother was right about him using people. Hughes then says he wants to travel the world, so the film actually does a flash-forward. We see Hughes with Frank and Levar in Nicaragua, and then London—where Hughes pilots a plane. (This really happened and is one of the very last times anyone in the outside world saw Hughes.) While in Nicaragua, Hughes is informed the U.S. government is suing him for $645 million. He is then advised by one of his attorneys that he must sell Hughes Tool Company—founded by his father—to pay for it.
The film then returns to the phone call. Maria arrives with her son, who wanders around the suite and into Hughes’ bedroom. Hughes does not recognize him. On the phone he tells the reporters he has never met or seen the author of the book. Frank now decides to quit his job. He runs after Maria and the two, including Hughes’ son, leave the eccentric billionaire forever.
As noted previously, Beatty had contemplated doing a film about Hughes for a long time. Because of that, plus the fact that Beatty has made some distinguished historical films, many had high hopes for this film. Consider his track record in this regard. In 1967 he produced and acted in Bonnie and Clyde, which is both a classic and a milestone in American film history. In 1981 he produced, co-wrote, starred in and directed Reds, a moving chronicle about the life of American journalist John Reed. In 1991, he co-produced and starred in Bugsy, an entertaining and well-acted film about gangster Benjamin Siegel and the creation of Las Vegas. He also starred in The Parallax View in 1974, a tense, taut thriller about the assassinations of the sixties.
But in the last thirty years, Beatty has only appeared in six films prior to Rules Don’t Apply. And excepting Bugsy, those films have been, at best, non-distinctive—Dick Tracy, Love Affair, Bulworth; at worst, disasters—Ishtar, Town and Country. That record makes one wonder just how interested Beatty is, at age 79, in making films at this stage in his life. Because Rules Don’t Apply seems to me to be rather uninspired for a film that Beatty has contemplated doing for so long. One can excuse all of the rather excessive use of dramatic license if it adds up to something justifiable on its own. But the best one can say about the film’s meaning is that it shows us how two young people finally see that Howard Hughes is an irresponsible scoundrel who, for all his money, is someone they would be better off without. Which is the same message one can get from, say, the film of The Devil Wears Prada.
As a film, the best one can say is that it is competently made. There was one memorable shot in it. At night, Hughes and Frank are having hamburgers at the Long Beach airport, the camera at a high angle looking down on them. We then reverse the angle and see that they are staring at the colossal Spruce Goose in its hangar. But that’s about it as far as visual creativity and drama go. And I hate to say it, but that lack of creativity extends to Beatty’s performance. Twelve years ago I was not enamored with Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance as Hughes in The Aviator, but at least he tried for the basic outline and design of the man. In Rules Don’t Apply, Hughes does not appear until about twenty minutes into the film. But from the outset, this reviewer was surprised at how superficial Beatty’s acting was. There are several films that survive of Hughes today. Watching those films would be a starting point for any actor. But there seems to me to be very little effort by Beatty to capture any of the vocal inflections or speech patterns of Hughes. And beyond that, there was even less attempt to delineate any of the inner turmoil within the man that finally broke out into dementia in the latter part of the sixties. For me it was a pallid, barely subcutaneous performance from a talented actor who was both vivid and memorable in Bonnie and Clyde, Reds and Bugsy.
As I said, Beatty has been quite liberal in his use of dramatic license in this film. Even in the past, he has had a tendency to romanticize and glamourize his main characters. As Hughes is waiting for his opening phone call, the subtitle appears that this is taking place in 1964. As I said, the actual phone call took place in 1972. But as I walked out of the theater contemplating the mystery of Beatty’s lackluster performance, I wondered if the date of the call had something to do with his acting. For if Beatty had not fictionalized the call or its timing, then he would have had to present Hughes in a much more extreme state of dementia and emaciation. Evidently, as actor-star, he didn’t want to do that. I can’t really blame him for it. Except for someone as dedicated and meticulous as Robert DeNiro, most major American stars don’t like to present themselves as being that distasteful and unattractive.
And that seems to me to be a major problem with the film. As outlined above, there are all sorts of intriguing angles about Hughes’ career that can be explored without using dramatic license. With the grand scope of his life, one could actually make a case that Hughes was a tragic character who, as he himself said, screwed up his life at a rather early age. Rules Don’t Apply avoids virtually all those aspects and turns Hughes into your weird Uncle Willie, the relative who got shoved off into a separate room at Christmas. And his film is really a light romantic comedy.
As I have outlined above, Hughes was a heck of a lot more than that. And the nightmare he lived—touching on the movie business, air travel, the growth of Las Vegas, and the CIA—was a large and fascinating canvas to draw on. Perhaps such a story could only be told through the auspices of a cable channel like HBO, which would give the tale its full airing. Beatty probably should have gone that route. Then he would not have had to reduce this large-scale saga to the status of a fairy tale for adults.
-
Rules Don’t Apply
For many years Warren Beatty had wanted to do a movie about Howard Hughes. According to various reports, he had dallied with the idea since the seventies. Because Beatty has produced and directed some distinguished films, most of us who heard about this project had some high expectations for it. An accomplished and intelligent Hollywood film-maker was going to take on a fascinating and complex American historical figure, about whom much mystery and fascination have existed. In fact, one could argue that Hughes was the most famous and controversial American billionaire before Donald Trump. Except he was much richer than Trump. To give one example: when Hughes Aircraft was auctioned off in 1985—about a decade after Hughes’s death—it sold for $5.2 billion.
Trump, early in his career, actually thought of going into the movie business. He then optioned for real estate. Hughes actually did go into the movie business for about a twenty-year period. After that, he became a major real estate investor in the Las Vegas area. As Trump did in Atlantic City, Hughes purchased several hotel-casinos.
CIA counterintel tsar
James AngletonBut in many ways, Hughes’ life and career is much more interesting, complex, and puzzling than Trump’s. In fact, the last part of Hughes’ life is so mysterious that, to this day—over forty years after his death—writers are still trying to figure out the last ten years of it. All one needs to know as to why the mystery exists is this little known fact: Although there is no evidence that Hughes actually met James Angleton, the legendary CIA counter-intelligence chief attended Hughes’ funeral.
Robert Maheu in Las Vegas CIA agent Robert Maheu—who ran Hughes’ Nevada holdings for four years—once said about him that Hughes wanted to “set himself into an alliance with the CIA that would protect him from investigation by government agencies.” (Playboy, September , 1976, “The Puppet and the Puppetmasters”, by Laurence Gonzales and Larry DuBois) After Maheu was unceremoniously expelled from his position as Hughes’ manager in Nevada at the end of 1970, the CIA found a way to mitigate Hughes’ fear about government inquiries. They secretly contracted out with Hughes for something called Project Jennifer. This was a top secret operation that was budgeted at about $350 million. The idea was to build a huge salvage ship that would surface a sunken Russian submarine in the Pacific about 700 miles from Hawaii. At that time, it was one of the largest contracts for a single national security item the CIA had ever extended. This, of course, allowed the Agency to plant agents inside the company.
But this was only a rather small part of the cross-pollination of Hughes companies with the CIA. On April 1, 1975, The Washington Post reported that “Hughes Aircraft had been mentioned as a potential hotbed of interrelationships with the CIA.” For the simple reason that “Hughes gravitated into areas that other people refused to go into or didn’t believe in.” (op. cit. DuBois and Gonzales) This allowed the CIA to negotiate with Hughes for many of their black budget items. Time magazine once reported that, in the last ten years of his life, the CIA had contracted out about six billion dollars worth of this kind of work to Hughes. This is why, as more than one investigator has noted, at times it was difficult to know where the Hughes empire ended and the CIA began.
This problem did not just exist with Hughes Aircraft, but also with Hughes Tool Company, whose chief asset was an oil drill bit which cracked through rock in record time. This device was invented by Hughes’ father, but he refused to market it, preferring to patent and then lease it. It was a sensational success, both nationally and internationally. As one source revealed, the information garnered from these leases became an important part of the Hughes/CIA relationship because of the Agency’s interest in resource-recovery information. Other countries could not keep the true value of their petroleum resources secret anymore. (ibid)
Bebe Rebozo with Nixon Even Hughes Medical Institute was not immune to this melding of interests. HMI was originally set up in 1953 in Florida with much fanfare. Hughes announced it would be a great research institute that would benefit all mankind. In reality, it was a tax dodge scheme. Much of the profits from Hughes Aircraft were funneled through HMI. Now Hughes would not have to pay taxes on them since HMI was designed as a tax exempt charity, with Hughes as the sole trustee. But by the late sixties, as Hughes became more eccentric, incapacitated, and cut off from the outside world, and as his interests became entwined with the Agency, there were reports that HMI became a CIA front. One Pentagon official told Time words to that effect. When, on instructions from Hughes, employee John Meier went on a visit to HMI in 1969, he learned the same thing from HMI president Ken Wright. He also learned that Wright was siphoning off money to Richard Nixon’s close friend Bebe Rebozo. (Lisa Pease, “Howard Hughes, John Meier, Don Nixon and the CIA”, Probe Magazine, January-February 1996) All these instances, and more, explain why Angleton was quite appreciative of the opportunities Hughes gave the Agency to extend its reach and power. In fact, the role of Hughes with the Agency was joked about in the halls of Langley. There, they referred to Hughes as “The Stockholder”. (Jim Hougan, Spooks, p. 259)
We should add one more notable point about this particular issue. Most commentators seem to agree that a central crossroads in Hughes’ life and career was a mysterious journey that he made to Boston in 1966. While in Boston, he stayed at the Ritz-Carlton. But he also visited a hospital whose physician in chief was George Thorn, a director of Hughes Medical Institute. (Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness, by Donald Bartlett and James Steele, p. 276) To this day, no one knows the purpose of this trip, why Hughes was in the hospital, or what was done to him there. But in addition to Thorn’s presence, the security for the Boston journey was arranged by CIA agent Robert Maheu. (ibid, p. 275) It was after this that Hughes made the decision to move his empire to Nevada, and he also went into a state of near hibernation. He moved into the top floor of the Desert Inn hotel and began to inject himself with large liquid doses of codeine and Valium.
Hughes parade after his
around-the-world flight (1938)In addition to all the above intrigue, Hughes was a movie producer and director for a period of about twenty years. After he lost interest in films, he still ran the RKO studio as a kind of absentee owner until the fifties, when he sold it. He was a record-breaking airplane pilot. In 1935, piloting a plane he himself commissioned, he easily smashed the prevailing air speed record. In 1936 and 1937, he set four consecutive records for transcontinental flight times. (Bartlett and Steele, pp. 82-87) In 1938 Hughes cut Charles Lindbergh’s flight time from New York to Paris in half. That same year, as part of the same flight, Hughes did the same with the late Wally Post’s round the world flight. (ibid, pp. 94-97) For that achievement Hughes and his four-man crew received a ticker tape parade down Broadway that rivaled Lindbergh’s.
Donald Nixon’s diner Then there was Hughes’ relationship with Richard Nixon. The Internal Revenue Service recognized that Hughes had set up a tax scam with HMI, and refused to give the so-called medical center the necessary tax exemption. So Hughes did what he became famous for: he found a way to grease a politician’s palm. Except, in this case, it was the politician’s brother. Donald Nixon was having problems with a business enterprise called Nixonburgers—a combination fast food venture and shopping center. He was tendered a loan for over two hundred thousand dollars—well over a million today. The loan came from Hughes. It was extended in December of 1956, a month after the presidential election in which President Dwight Eisenhower and Vice-President Richard Nixon were re-elected. The loan was secured by a plot of land in Whittier, California—except the lot was worth, at most, about $50,000. Once the transaction was completed, Hughes headquarters in Hollywood notified the Vice-President all was in place for his brother Donald. (ibid, p. 204) That phone call was made in February of 1957. On March 1st, the IRS reversed its decision about Hughes Medical Center: the tax dodge scheme was now made legal.
Actress Jean Peters Hughes & Noah Dietrich In the late fifties, Hughes began to struggle with his personal demons and galloping eccentricities. One of America’s richest and most powerful men called an old friend in Texas and told him he had ruined his life beyond repair. (ibid, p. 225) For instance, his marriage to actress Jean Peters in 1957 seems to have been a marriage of convenience. Hughes thought that his long time employee, Noah Dietrich, was plotting to have him declared incompetent so as to appoint a conservator over his affairs. Once married, this could not be done unless Peters approved it. (Beatty refers to this aspect more than once in his film) So, after 32 years, Hughes ended up firing Dietrich. There was reason for Hughes to fear such a coup. For example, when once facing a financial crisis with TWA, he lived and worked out of a screening room in West Hollywood for months. (ibid, p. 231) Unlike the depiction in the Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio film, The Aviator, it appears it was at this time that he began to act bizarrely: walking around nude, spending hours in the bathroom, refusing to touch doorknobs etc. He also became addicted to drugs, e.g., painkillers like codeine and sedatives like Valium.
The TWA Constellation,
which Hughes requested
Lockheed to buildAfter losing control of TWA in 1965, Hughes decided to sell his stock in that company. That transaction, worth well over a half billion dollars, was one of the largest single stock sales in history up to that time. To lower his taxes, he then decided to move to Las Vegas. He promptly purchased both the Desert Inn and the Sands hotel casinos in 1967. Shortly after, he purchased the Castaways, the Landmark, and the Frontier hotels plus the Silver Slipper casino. He also bought a local TV station. As with his Nixon bribe, he then assigned a lawyer on his staff to run envelopes full of cash to scores of politicians in the state, both Democrats and Republicans. (ibid, p. 344) Hughes had designs on buying every major hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip, and then extending his empire north to Reno and Lake Tahoe. For all intents and purposes, he was going to own Nevada.
The Desert Inn (1967) He made one mistake. He had moved too far too fast. He had Nevada pretty much sewn up; even Governor Paul Laxalt was in his corner. (ibid, p. 307) But after the TWA stock sale he was now billed as the richest man in America. And he now seemed intent on using that money to buy Las Vegas. When word leaked out he was going to buy the Stardust, the Justice Department stepped in: If that sale was announced they would file suit on anti-monopoly grounds. This was anathema to Hughes, because it would necessitate him appearing in court—which he would never do.
Once his plans to take over the state were neutralized, Hughes’ life entered its final, almost surreal chapter. It is so strange, so fantastic, that it has generated a surfeit of controversy. In 1970, Jean Peters began divorce proceedings against Hughes. His behavior now began to get even more bizarre: for instance, he began to urinate into glass bottles and then cap them. (ibid, p. 426) Rumors of a palace coup based on declaring Hughes incompetent again began to swirl. This time they were spread by Maheu about Bill Gay, the head of Hughes operations in Los Angeles. Hughes now moved out of his penthouse at the Desert Inn and, for no apparent reason, relocated to Paradise Island in the Bahamas. He then moved from the Bahamas to Nicaragua, to London, to Vancouver, to Acapulco. Hughes reportedly passed away in Mexico and his body was flown to his hometown of Houston in April of 1976.
With the size, scope and drama of this kind of life and career, the subject of Hughes has provoked dozens of essays, books, and even novels; for example, Harold Robbins’ pulp novel, The Carpetbaggers, which was later made into a movie. Much of this output was generated after he passed away. In addition to more than one full length biography, there have been books devoted solely to Hughes’ actions in Hollywood, or in Las Vegas. There have been four films I know of that have dealt with Hughes either as the major character or a supporting figure. Jonathan Demme’s 1980 film Melvin and Howard deals with the much questioned incident between Hughes and one Melvin Dummar, who claimed to have picked up Hughes on a highway in Nevada and driven him to the Desert Inn. Years later, a Hughes will was discovered in a Mormon church in Salt Lake City. It left Dummar $150 million. But in 1978, a jury declared that the will was invalid.
To my knowledge, there have been two films made strictly about Hughes. In 1977 Tommy Lee Jones starred in a four-hour television mini-series entitled The Amazing Howard Hughes, which was based upon Noah Dietrich’s 1972 book. This is the only film I know that tries to trace the entire arc of Hughes’ adult life. In 2004, Martin Scorsese directed The Aviator starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes. This film was a hundred million dollar super production that concentrated on Hughes in Hollywood. It made liberal use of dramatic license. Especially near the end where it portrayed the extreme symptoms of Hughes’ dementia about ten years earlier than they actually occurred—and impacting events they did not impact.
The Hoax (2006) In 2006, Lasse Hallstrom directed Richard Gere as author Clifford Irving in The Hoax. That film depicts the episode where Irving attempts to pass off a manuscript he wrote about Hughes as being based upon hundreds of hours of private interviews he did with the reclusive billionaire. Irving sold the book to McGraw-Hill for over $700,000. The publisher did not go far enough in testing Irving or the manuscript, for Irving had never even met Hughes, let alone interviewed him. He had procured the manuscript of the Dietrich book and used that for much of his work. The caper later unraveled when it was discovered that Irving’s wife had deposited checks the publisher made out for Hughes into her personal bank account in Switzerland.
Warren Beatty’s current Hughes film begins with a fictionalized version of the Irving affair. In reality, Hughes made his famous phone call contesting the book from the Bahamas to a Hollywood sound stage at Universal Studios. The much ballyhooed event was televised live. Hughes had issued a press release saying he had nothing to do with the Irving manuscript, which had generated significant publicity well before it was printed. Therefore seven reporters had gathered on stage, along with an eighth person who was a Hughes PR official. The reporters—like James Bacon and Vernon Scott—had all covered Hughes extensively. They were there to hear the man’s voice and ask him questions about his past that he should have been able to recall. And they would use these to see if it was really Hughes on the line and to measure his denials about the book. Considering the fact he was under the high dosages of Valium and codeine injected into his body via syringe, Hughes did fairly well. But there were still certain questions that he could not answer, and these left malingering questions about the book. Those were later dashed by the discovery of the spouse’s foreign bank deposits.
Beatty’s film, entitled Rules Don’t Apply, fictionalizes the phone call. It treats it as a complete triumph. It subtitles the scene as taking place in 1964 and the call being from Acapulco. Also, the purported autobiography has now become a novel which claims Hughes has amnesia and cannot recall the last five years of his life. From here, the film flashes backwards in time to the very end of Hughes’ film career to pick up the main body of the story. Towards the end of that part of his life—and for a few years after—Hughes had a curious habit. He had made stars out of relative unknowns Jean Harlow and Jane Russell in, respectively, Hell’s Angels and The Outlaw. From these promotions Hughes apparently thought he had the Midas touch with young starlets. For even though he was not really active in the movie business, he would send employees of his, like Maheu, out as talent scouts to say, a Miss America contest. They would sign up one or two young ladies and Hughes would pay for certain dancing, singing, and drama classes.
This was a very minor part of Hughes’ career, and most serious biographers deal with it in, perhaps, a page or so. But Beatty has made it the fulcrum of his film. After the movie’s prelude, with Hughes preparing for the live phone call about the ersatz book, he begins the film proper with a mother and daughter arriving in Los Angeles after being signed by a Hughes agent. The mother gets tired of waiting around and tells the daughter Hughes is playing around with her. The mother (played by Beatty’s wife Annette Bening) then leaves.
Gail Ganley The girl that the story concentrates on is named Maria Mabrey. I assume, because of the use of alliteration in the name, that this character was based upon a woman named Gail Ganley. Ganley was a promising singer who was signed by Hughes, given acting classes, and told to keep her deal with Hughes a secret. She was promised $450 a week, plus expenses, and a future contract with Hughes. A driver transported her to her lessons each day in a Hughes auto. She was to keep the arrangement secret from everyone except those in her immediate family. And she was also to hold herself ready for a meeting with Hughes about her career. But as weeks dragged into months, none of what she was promised—the weekly salary, or the Hughes contract—actually materialized. When she complained about the delay she was put off by being told that Hughes was simply too busy at this time to deal with her—but he would in the future. She finally raised such a ruckus that she was told to drive to the Hughes headquarters at 7000 Romaine in Hollywood. She did and, as instructed, she honked her horn three times. On cue, a window flew open from the second floor. A man lowered an envelope with money in it by a string. This action was repeated a couple of times, but Ganley never got her contract. She later sued and received an out of court settlement. This weird ritual then ended. (Bartlett and Steele, pp. 243-44)
The “Spruce Goose” The story progresses through a relationship developed between Mabrey (played by Lily Collins) and her driver, a character named Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich). Like Ganley, Mabrey begins to complain about the lack of progress with her career. Frank tells her about a plot of land he wants to develop with another Hughes employee named Levar Mathis (Matthew Broderick). Frank , who is engaged, begins to lose interest in his fiancée and gets entangled emotionally with Mabrey. Frank hopes to interest Hughes in his land deal. One night he drives Hughes to see the infamous Spruce Goose in Long Beach. On the way Hughes reminds him that his employees should not be having relationships with each other (hence the film’s title).
Noah Dietrich (Martin Sheen) tells Hughes that he is beginning to act eccentrically—he is forgetful and repeating phrases. Hughes suspects Dietrich is plotting against him in order to have him declared incompetent. So he fires him and promotes Forbes. Mabrey then meets with Hughes, and in a rather odd scene, she starts crying and drinking, and he then proposes to her. The two get carried away and have sex. This happens while a Wall Street banker is calling Hughes, trying to see him about saving his investment in TWA.
Mabrey gets pregnant and tells Hughes, who does not believe her and thinks she is out for his money. She and Frank have an argument about Hughes with her saying that her mother was right about him using people. Hughes then says he wants to travel the world, so the film actually does a flash-forward. We see Hughes with Frank and Levar in Nicaragua, and then London—where Hughes pilots a plane. (This really happened and is one of the very last times anyone in the outside world saw Hughes.) While in Nicaragua, Hughes is informed the U.S. government is suing him for $645 million. He is then advised by one of his attorneys that he must sell Hughes Tool Company—founded by his father—to pay for it.
The film then returns to the phone call. Maria arrives with her son, who wanders around the suite and into Hughes’ bedroom. Hughes does not recognize him. On the phone he tells the reporters he has never met or seen the author of the book. Frank now decides to quit his job. He runs after Maria and the two, including Hughes’ son, leave the eccentric billionaire forever.
As noted previously, Beatty had contemplated doing a film about Hughes for a long time. Because of that, plus the fact that Beatty has made some distinguished historical films, many had high hopes for this film. Consider his track record in this regard. In 1967 he produced and acted in Bonnie and Clyde, which is both a classic and a milestone in American film history. In 1981 he produced, co-wrote, starred in and directed Reds, a moving chronicle about the life of American journalist John Reed. In 1991, he co-produced and starred in Bugsy, an entertaining and well-acted film about gangster Benjamin Siegel and the creation of Las Vegas. He also starred in The Parallax View in 1974, a tense, taut thriller about the assassinations of the sixties.
But in the last thirty years, Beatty has only appeared in six films prior to Rules Don’t Apply. And excepting Bugsy, those films have been, at best, non-distinctive—Dick Tracy, Love Affair, Bulworth; at worst, disasters—Ishtar, Town and Country. That record makes one wonder just how interested Beatty is, at age 79, in making films at this stage in his life. Because Rules Don’t Apply seems to me to be rather uninspired for a film that Beatty has contemplated doing for so long. One can excuse all of the rather excessive use of dramatic license if it adds up to something justifiable on its own. But the best one can say about the film’s meaning is that it shows us how two young people finally see that Howard Hughes is an irresponsible scoundrel who, for all his money, is someone they would be better off without. Which is the same message one can get from, say, the film of The Devil Wears Prada.
As a film, the best one can say is that it is competently made. There was one memorable shot in it. At night, Hughes and Frank are having hamburgers at the Long Beach airport, the camera at a high angle looking down on them. We then reverse the angle and see that they are staring at the colossal Spruce Goose in its hangar. But that’s about it as far as visual creativity and drama go. And I hate to say it, but that lack of creativity extends to Beatty’s performance. Twelve years ago I was not enamored with Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance as Hughes in The Aviator, but at least he tried for the basic outline and design of the man. In Rules Don’t Apply, Hughes does not appear until about twenty minutes into the film. But from the outset, this reviewer was surprised at how superficial Beatty’s acting was. There are several films that survive of Hughes today. Watching those films would be a starting point for any actor. But there seems to me to be very little effort by Beatty to capture any of the vocal inflections or speech patterns of Hughes. And beyond that, there was even less attempt to delineate any of the inner turmoil within the man that finally broke out into dementia in the latter part of the sixties. For me it was a pallid, barely subcutaneous performance from a talented actor who was both vivid and memorable in Bonnie and Clyde, Reds and Bugsy.
As I said, Beatty has been quite liberal in his use of dramatic license in this film. Even in the past, he has had a tendency to romanticize and glamourize his main characters. As Hughes is waiting for his opening phone call, the subtitle appears that this is taking place in 1964. As I said, the actual phone call took place in 1972. But as I walked out of the theater contemplating the mystery of Beatty’s lackluster performance, I wondered if the date of the call had something to do with his acting. For if Beatty had not fictionalized the call or its timing, then he would have had to present Hughes in a much more extreme state of dementia and emaciation. Evidently, as actor-star, he didn’t want to do that. I can’t really blame him for it. Except for someone as dedicated and meticulous as Robert DeNiro, most major American stars don’t like to present themselves as being that distasteful and unattractive.
And that seems to me to be a major problem with the film. As outlined above, there are all sorts of intriguing angles about Hughes’ career that can be explored without using dramatic license. With the grand scope of his life, one could actually make a case that Hughes was a tragic character who, as he himself said, screwed up his life at a rather early age. Rules Don’t Apply avoids virtually all those aspects and turns Hughes into your weird Uncle Willie, the relative who got shoved off into a separate room at Christmas. And his film is really a light romantic comedy.
As I have outlined above, Hughes was a heck of a lot more than that. And the nightmare he lived—touching on the movie business, air travel, the growth of Las Vegas, and the CIA—was a large and fascinating canvas to draw on. Perhaps such a story could only be told through the auspices of a cable channel like HBO, which would give the tale its full airing. Beatty probably should have gone that route. Then he would not have had to reduce this large-scale saga to the status of a fairy tale for adults.
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A Coup in Camelot
Considering the large number of films and TV specials about the assassination of President Kennedy that have appeared over the last ten or fifteen years, genuinely worthwhile documentaries on the subject are sadly few and far between. The likes of Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgement and Chip Selby’s Reasonable Doubt were fine for their day but given the wealth of information and technological tools that have become available in the time since those films were produced they appear more than a little outdated now. Sadly, the majority of well budgeted, slickly produced documentaries of the 21st century have been created solely to push the delusory mythology of the Warren Commission. Aside from Shane O’Sullivan’s mostly worthwhile Killing Oswald there has been very little of note that has even attempted to counter the MSM’s seemingly endless deluge of propaganda with reliable evidence and solid reasoning. A Coup in Camelot clearly aims to fill that void. Unfortunately, however, it falls considerably short of the mark because it consistently confuses theory with fact.
The film begins strongly enough with a ten minute introduction that briefly discusses Kennedy’s intention to withdraw American troops from Vietnam then outlines the reasons for his trip to Dallas and explains how, within hours of the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald was fingered as the lone nut assassin. From there A Coup in Camelot moves swiftly into one of its strongest segments, featuring respected author and researcher Vince Palamara as its main talking head. Over the years, through his diligent hard work in locating and interviewing members of the Secret Service, Palamara has made himself the go-to expert on the subject of President Kennedy’s protection―or lack thereof―in Dallas. I must admit that I have never been convinced the Secret Service was actively involved in the assassination. Yet Palamara’s work most certainly gives reason to at least consider the idea that JFK’s protection on November 22, 1963, was intentionally compromised.
Secret Service authority
Vince PalamaraPalamara details just how many of the Secret Service’s usual practices were not followed that day. For example, it was standard procedure during an open motorcade for agents to be walking or jogging alongside the Presidential limousine. In fact there were two hand rails in place for agents to hold onto as they stood on the rear running boards of the car. As Palamara points out, “Secret Service agents are powerless to really do much of anything if they’re not close to the President.” And yet there were no agents on or near the limousine in Dallas. Defenders of the official mythology have long claimed that Kennedy himself had ordered the agents off the back of the car because he wanted the public to get a good look at him. But when Palamara spoke with Gerald Behn, the Special Agent in charge of the White House detail, Behn told him in no uncertain terms that he had never heard any such request from the President. Palamara then contacted numerous other Secret Service agents and White House aides and each one of them told him the same thing: Kennedy had not ordered the agents off of the car.
Lone nut mythologists also tend to blame Kennedy for the fact that the limousine’s plexiglass bubble top was not used that day. Although the bubble top was not bullet proof or resistant it was, as Palamara notes, “a psychological deterrent because most people assumed it was bullet proof…The bottom line what the bubble top would have done is it would have obscured an assassin’s view via the sun’s glare.” To discover whether or not Kennedy really had ordered its removal, Palamara spoke with Special Agent Sam Kinney who was the driver of the Secret Service follow-up car. “Sam Kinney adamantly on three different occasions told me that President Kennedy had nothing to do with it; it was solely his responsibility.”
Houston, 11/21/63 Another procedure not followed in Dallas involved the additional protection customarily provided by local law enforcement. Whenever and wherever there was to be a motorcade, the Secret Service would usually work hand in hand with local police who would provide a motorcycle escort of six to nine officers that would ride in a wedge formation in front of and beside the Presidential limousine. This formation had been in place on all of the previous stops along Kennedy’s Texas trip. Yet in Dallas the escort was reduced to just four motorcycle officers who ended up riding behind the limo instead of beside it. As Palamara notes, “The formation was meaningless. It offered no protection at all…They left Kennedy a sitting duck.”
II
Having detailed these and many other irregularities in JFK’s protection, A Coup in Camelot moves on to a discussion of the “Blood, Bullets & Ballistics”, focusing largely on the conclusions of retired crime scene investigator, Sherry Fiester. It is Fiester’s contention that the massive spray of blood seen in frame 313 of the Zapruder film represents “back spatter” from a frontal shot. She further asserts that, despite numerous witnesses believing they heard shots or saw smoke coming from behind the fence on top of the “grassy knoll”, her own trajectory analysis excludes it as the source of the head shot. The actual source of the shot, she claims, was on the other side of Elm Street at the southern end of the triple overpass. But despite her impressive credentials and her 30 years experience with the Dallas police, Fiester’s conclusions fail to convince.
Medical, scientific and ballistics experts such as Dr. Cyril Wecht, Dr. Gary Aguilar, Dr. Donald Thomas, and Larry Sturdivan agree that, by itself, the explosion of blood, bone and brain matter seen in the Zapruder film actually tells us very little about the direction in which the projectile was travelling. That is because it does not occur at the point of entrance or exit but near the mid-point of the bullet’s trajectory. Rifle wounds of the skull can be a very different matter than gunshot wounds to other parts of the body. The skull is a closed vessel containing fluid contents that cannot be compressed. The energy and momentum imparted to the skull by the passage of the bullet creates a temporary cavity. The result of cavitation in an enclosed skull containing blood and brain is a hydraulic pressure applied to the cranium causing it to burst open. As Aguilar and Wecht explain, the resultant “spew” of blood and tissue is “radial to the bullet’s path and is separate from the inshoot and outshoot splatter.” (Aguilar & Wecht, Letter to the Editor, AFTE Journal, Volume 48 Number 2, p. 76) This is what is known as the “Krönleinschuss” effect―named for the German ballistics expert who first demonstrated it using skulls filled with clay.
This type of effect was demonstrated during filmed simulations performed in the Biophysics laboratory at Edgewood Arsenal in 1964 when rifle bullets were fired into numerous skulls filled with ballistic gelatin. Describing a typical example Sturdivan writes, “The bullet entered the back of the skull and exited in a small spray at the front in the space of one frame of the high-speed movie. Only after the bullet was far down-range did the internal pressure generated by its passage split open the skull and relieve the pressure inside by spewing the contents through the cracks. A similar type explosion would have taken place if the bullet had gone through in the opposite direction. The only way to distinguish the direction of travel of the bullet is to examine the cratering effect on the inside of the skull on entrance and on the outside of the skull at exit.” (Sturdivan, The JFK Myths, p. 171)
The empirical evidence, therefore, demonstrates that Fiester is mistaken in believing the explosive spray of matter we see in the Zapruder film is back spatter. In fact, forward spatter and back spatter are not seen in the film; probably because of the limitations of Zapruder’s camera. The film of the Edgewood simulation shows little to no back spatter and only a very small amount of forward matter which, as Sturdivan explains, was only visible “because of the strong lighting, a close-up view, and (especially) a very high framing rate…over 200 times the framing speed of the Zapruder movie…” (ibid. p. 174)
Sherry Fiester Fiester’s trajectory analysis is also deeply flawed because it assumes something there is no reason to assume. Namely, that the bullet followed a straight path through the skull. In 1978, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) hired a NASA scientist to perform the same type of backward projection analysis, the committee’s forensic pathology panel cautioned against placing too much faith in it. The panel noted that, in their experience, “if a missile strikes an object capable of creating a shearing force, such as the skull, the bullet’s pathway in the body might be significantly different from the line of its trajectory prior to impact.” (7HSCA168) In other words, a bullet striking a dense, resistant skull bone is likely to become deformed and be deflected. Sturdivan writes that “The path of a deformed bullet through a body is never straight…Of the thousands of examples of yawed, deformed, and broken rifle bullets fired into gelatin tissue simulant at the Biophysics Division lab and other similar facilities, none had a perfectly straight trajectory. Few were even close.” (ibid. p. 208) So drawing a line between the presumed entrance and exit points in JFK’s skull will not tell us where the gunman was located no matter how far that line is extended into Dealey Plaza.
Far from being excluded as Fiester asserts, the grassy knoll remains the most likely location for a frontal shooter. Not only because it was the location to which numerous witnesses pointed, but also because two teams of America’s top acoustical scientists agreed that the Dallas Police dictabelt recording they analyzed on behalf of the HSCA contained the acoustic fingerprint of a gunshot fired from the knoll. And the dictabelt recording synchronizes perfectly with the Zapruder film when―and only when―the knoll shot is aligned with frame 313.
Featured alongside Fiester’s theories in this segment of A Coup in Camelot is the claim that President Kennedy was shot in the throat from the front. Yet aside from a brief reference to the way the wound was “described by doctors at Parkland Hospital”, no detail is provided to substantiate this assertion. As most readers will no doubt be aware, the Parkland physicians were indeed under the initial impression that the wound might have been an entrance; describing it as small, round, clean cut, and measuring little more than 5 mm in diameter. But those who hold these descriptions up as proof that a bullet entered the throat need to deal with the fact that studies have shown emergency room doctors to be frequently wrong in their assessment of bullet wounds. This is precisely why the premiere textbook for trauma room physicians, Rosen’s Emergency Medicine, cautions that “Clinicians should not describe wounds as ‘entrance’ or ‘exit’ but should document, using appropriate forensic terminology, a detailed description of the wound, including its appearance, characteristics, and location without attempting to interpret the wound type or bullet caliber. Exit wounds are not always larger than entrance wounds, and wound size does not consistently correspond to bullet caliber.” (Rosen’s Emergency Medicine: Concepts and Clinical Practice, p. 828)
Those who propose that a bullet entered the throat must also deal with the fact that said bullet would have had to have disappeared entirely almost immediately after piercing the skin. Because not only was there no exit in the rear and no bullet found anywhere in the body, there was also no damage to the spine as there would almost certainly have had to have been had a missile entered Kennedy’s throat near the midline. It is for these reasons that, despite its appearance, the wound is extremely unlikely to have been one of entrance.
III
A Coup in Camelot moves from Dallas to Bethesda for a lengthy discussion of JFK’s autopsy, centred largely around the highly controversial theories of Douglas Horne. In a nutshell, Horne believes that Kennedy’s gunshot wounds were altered to hide evidence of a frontal shooter. This, of course, is not a new idea. It was first popularized by author David Lifton in his 36-year-old book, Best Evidence. But whereas Lifton postulated that unknown conspirators had hijacked the President’s body en route to Bethesda and altered his wounds to fool the autopsy surgeons, Horne suggests that the prosectors themselves altered the head wound during a secret “pre-autopsy” at the Navy morgue. For what purpose and to fool whom is never really made clear.
Doug Horne At the very heart of Horne’s hypothesis is a comment made by Tom Robinson―an embalmer who was present for most of the autopsy―during a 1996 interview for the Assassination Records Review Board. When shown a photo displaying a large defect in the top of Kennedy’s head Robinson recalled that this was “what the doctors did”. He then explained that the autopsy surgeons had cut the scalp open and “reflected it back in order to remove bullet fragments.” (ARRB MD180) He also recalled seeing that “some sawing was done to remove some bone before the brain could be removed.” (ibid) What Robinson described is, of course, a perfectly normal part of an autopsy and he himself called what he saw a “normal craniotomy procedure.” (ibid) Yet somehow Horne construes Robinson’s remarks as evidence of some clandestine pre-autopsy activity. Why?
The reason, according to Horne, is that “Dr. Humes always denied having to saw the skull open, he always maintained that the wound was so big that he just removed the brain with a minimum of cutting of the scalp; he never had to cut any bone.” However, as this passage from Hume’s sworn deposition for the ARRB demonstrates, Horne is entirely mistaken :
GUNN: But just let me start out first: Where was the first incision made?
HUMES: I believe, of course, the top of the skull to remove the skull plate of the brain. To remove what remained of the calvarium and to approach the removal of the brain.
GUNN: And was that incision simply of the scalp, or did you need to cut –
HUMES: No, we had to cut some bone as well. [my emphasis]
* * *
GUNN: Where did you cut the bone?
HUMES: I find that–it’s hard to recall. Once we got the scalp laid back, some of those pieces could just be removed, you know, by picking them up, picking them up because they were just not held together very well, other than by the dura, I suppose. So other than that, we probably made it like we normally do, in a circumferential fashion from books, like right above the ear around. But it was a real problem because it was all falling apart, the skull. And I can’t recall the details of exactly how we managed to maneuver that, because it was a problem. (ARRB Deposition of James J. Humes, pgs. 101-102)
As the reader can see, not only did Humes not deny having to saw the skull, he specifically testified to doing so. But Horne does not quote Humes himself and instead refers to a report written in 1965 by autopsy surgeon Dr. Pierre Finck―who did not arrive at Bethesda until after the brain had already been removed―in which Finck recalled being told that “no sawing of the skull was necessary”. What this means, therefore, is that the basis of Horne’s claim that “Humes always denied having to saw the skull open” is not any direct quotation from Humes himself, but the hearsay claim of a man who wasn’t even present when the brain was removed. This type of methodology is extremely difficult to defend. And what makes it all the more confounding is that Horne himself was actually present for the deposition during which Humes specifically swore to cutting the skull bone.
Sadly, this is not the only instance in A Coup in Camelot in which Humes’ words are misconstrued in support of pre-autopsy surgery. The film’s co-writer, Art Van Kampen, suggests that “Something had to have happened to that body before the photos were taken”, and in the case of some photos that is indeed true. But Van Kampen claims that “Dr. Humes is very clear that no autopsy work had been done on the President’s skull before either photos or X-rays were taken.” This, again, is a clear misinterpretation of what Humes actually said. When asked during his ARRB deposition whether or not any incisions were made before the photographs were taken, Humes responded, “Well, depending on which photographs you’re talking about. We didn’t photograph the wound in the occiput until the brain was removed, you know. Sure, we had to make an incision to remove the brain and so forth, but no, generally speaking, no, we didn’t make any incisions at all [my emphasis].” (ibid. p. 95) Humes was then shown the photographs of the top of the head and asked whether or not, before the photo was taken, he had pulled the scalp back “in order to be able to have a better look at the injury” to which he responded “Yes, I probably did.” (ibid. p. 162) So, as should be perfectly clear, Humes confirmed that “generally speaking” most of the photographs were taken before any incisions took place but that some were indeed taken during the course of the autopsy. He also said essentially the same thing as Tom Robinson, which is that the photographs of the top of the head were taken after the scalp had been manipulated. There is, then, no meaningful discrepancy between what the autopsy pictures show and what Humes testified to.
There has been confusion over Kennedy’s head wounds ever since the Warren Commission issued its findings. In large part this is due to there being two entirely different descriptions of the wounds on record. By and large the doctors at Parkland Hospital recalled seeing one fairly large hole that was located near the right rear of the head. Yet the autopsy report describes a massive defect involving almost the entire right side of the cranium. It was to explain this discrepancy that the body alteration hypothesis was first offered. However, as Dr. Aguilar has noted, “that the wound was described as larger at autopsy than noted by emergency personnel is not proof that it was surgically enlarged. Wounds picked apart during an autopsy are often found to be larger than they first appeared to emergency personnel.” (Murder in Dealey Plaza, p. 187)
There is a simpler, far more reasonable explanation than clandestine alteration. One that, ironically enough, is touched upon in A Coup in Camelot. Shortly before discussion of the autopsy begins, the film’s narrator correctly informs viewers that “In the Zapruder film, a flap of skull can be seen opening up after the head strike. During the frantic ride to Parkland Hospital the flap had been folded back into place where the blood acted like glue and sealed the wound.” Indeed, Jackie Kennedy later testified to trying to hold her husband’s skull together on the way to the hospital. As Dr. Aguilar writes, “It is not hard to imagine the possibility that during the time it took the Presidential limousine to get to Parkland Hospital, clot had formed gluing a portion of disrupted scalp down making JFK’s skull defect appear smaller to treating surgeons than it later would to autopsy surgeons.” (ibid) In other words, because the flap had been closed up, the emergency room staff only saw the rearmost portion of the wound.
IV
The idea that something out of the ordinary occurred at Bethesda is buttressed by stories of multiple coffins being brought into the morgue on the night of the autopsy. At Parkland Hospital, Kennedy’s body had been placed into an ornamental bronze casket. However, in A Coup in Camelot it is alleged that the body actually arrived at Bethesda in an aluminium shipping casket at around 6:35 pm. This means that when the bronze casket was brought into the morgue at 7:17 pm it was, unbeknownst to the FBI agents who accompanied it, completely empty. Or so we are told. Horne further alleges that for some reason the Dallas casket then “made a second entry that night…at 20:00 hours military time.”
Once again the evidence does not support the theory. As presented in the film, the idea that Kennedy’s body arrived in an aluminium shipping casket is based on the recollection of Naval petty officer, Dennis David, who recalled helping carry one into morgue. Yet, as the summary of his ARRB interview states, David “emphasized that he had no direct knowledge, by observation, that President Kennedy was in the gray shipping casket…” (ARRB MD177) The reality is that, being as Bethesda was a morgue, there is no reason to believe that Kennedy’s body was the only one to be brought there that night. In fact, FBI agent Francis O’Neill specifically recalled being told that one of the four drawers in the anteroom adjacent to the autopsy room contained the body of a child “that had died that day.” (O’Neill ARRB deposition, p. 57)
Perhaps more importantly, the claim that the bronze casket was empty when brought into the mortuary is belied by the testimony of both O’Neill and his FBI colleague, James Sibert. These two agents who helped unload the casket from the ambulance swore that they stayed with it until it was opened and saw with their own eyes the President’s body taken out. O’Neill stated without hesitation during his ARRB deposition that there was “no time” from the time he first saw the casket “until the time it was opened and the body taken out that the casket was not in my view…” (ibid. p. 59) Similarly, when asked whether or not there had been any time between being unloaded from the ambulance and being opened that the casket had been out of his sight, Sibert responded, “I was there until it was opened.” (Sibert ARRB deposition, p. 45) There is, therefore, no basis for claiming that the casket was “certainly empty” as Horne does.
Finally, the supposed 20:00 re-entry of the casket is based on a time notation which appears in an unsigned, undated document titled “The Joint Casket Bearer Team.” This document describes the activities of a group containing one officer and seven enlisted men “from each branch of the Armed Forces” who were “trained to carry the casket to and from the ceremony sites and to fold the flag which draped the casket following the internment service.” (ARRB MD163) This team, as A Coup in Camelot correctly informs, was also known as the “honor guard”. It appears quite apparent that, far from being proof of a second entry for the bronze casket, the 20:00 hours time notation on this document is nothing more than a mistake. Why? Because despite the film’s claim that Sibert and O’Neill had carried the casket into the morgue at 7:17 pm alongside Secret Service agents Roy Kellerman and William Greer, O’Neill explained in his ARRB deposition that, in actual fact, it was the honor guard who had physically lifted the coffin at that time. (O’Neill deposition, p. 57) So unless anyone wants to believe that the honor guard carried it in twice, they are going to have to accept that the unknown writer of the document was in error and there was only one entry for the bronze casket.
A coup in Camelot intermingles these stories of casket-swapping and wound tampering with claims that the autopsy X-rays and photographs have also been altered. This, once again, is not a new theory. In fact it has been a commonly held belief amongst students of the assassination for decades. And yet nothing approaching proof of alteration has ever emerged. The most commonly cited reason for believing the photos have been tampered with, the one repeated in A Coup in Camelot, is that the pictures appear to show the back of the head completely intact. This is, of course, at odds with the testimony of the Parkland physicians who recalled seeing a large wound in the right rear. But as autopsy surgeon J. Thornton Boswell explained to both the HSCA and the ARRB, the reason the rear skull damage is not seen in the photographs is because the scalp is being held up and “pulled forward up over the forehead, toward the forehead.” (Boswell ARRB deposition, p. 150) This has the effect of hiding the wound underneath.
Those who choose to ignore Boswell’s words are still stuck with the reality that the autopsy photographer, John Stringer, authenticated the photographs during his own ARRB deposition, repeatedly stating that he had no reason to believe the existing photographs were anything other than the ones that he himself took on the night of the autopsy. The same is true of the X-rays. The technician responsible for taking them, Jerrol Custer, repeatedly swore to the accuracy and authenticity of the existing X-rays for the ARRB. For example, when shown the anterior/posterior view:
GUNN: Is there any question in your mind whether the X-ray that’s in front of you right now is the original X-ray taken at the autopsy?
CUSTER: No question.
GUNN: And the answer is––
CUSTER: It is the original film. (p. 122-123)
And when shown the right lateral skull X-ray:
GUNN: … Mr. Custer, can you identify the film that is in front of you right now as having been taken by you on the night of the autopsy of President Kennedy?
CUSTER: Correct. Yes, I do, sir.
GUNN: And how are you able to identify that as being––
CUSTER: My marker in the lower mandibular joint. (p. 124)
With the men who took them―and all three autopsy doctors―swearing to their authenticity, there seems little doubt that the autopsy photographs and X-rays would have been admitted into evidence were there to be a trial in the Kennedy case. And with questions of validity settled, a more important question would be asked: What do the skull X-rays actually show? The answer to that, as a number of experts including neuroscientist Dr. Joseph Riley and radiologist Dr. Randy Robertson have attested, is that the official theory of a single shot from the rear simply cannot be true.
As Dr. Humes explained in his Warren Commission testimony, the pathologists found an entrance wound that was 2.5 cm to the right, and “slightly above” the external occipital protuberance―a small bump located very low down in the rear of the skull―and “a huge defect over the right side” involving “both the scalp and the underlying skull…” After a “careful examination of the margins of the large bone defect” on the right side, the doctors were unable to find a point of exit, which Humes put down to the fact that they “did not have the bone.” However, the pathologists concluded that a single bullet was responsible for all the damage, having entered the rear and exited the right side. In support of this contention, Humes implied that the path of the bullet was laid out by a trail of metallic fragments that could be seen on the X-rays “traversing a line from the wound in the occiput to just above the right eye…” (Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. II, p. 351-353)
Unfortunately for Dr. Humes, the X-rays do not show what he claimed. The entrance wound in the lower rear of the skull is indeed visible. So too is the trail of bullet fragments. But the two are in no way related. In fact, the trail lies along the very top of the skull, several inches above the entrance site. Therefore, those fragments could not have been left behind by a bullet which entered near the external occipital protuberance. As Aguilar and Wecht have noted, “…the fragment trail alone almost completely eliminates the official theory JFK was struck from above and behind by a single bullet that entered his skull low…” (Aguilar & Wecht, Op. cit. p. 78) Dr. Joseph Riley, who has a Ph.D in neuroscience and specializes in neuroanatomy and experimental neuropathology, noted decades ago that the medical evidence as it stands is only compatible with two separate bullet strikes. It is for that very reason that I see little logic in suggesting that the X-rays have been altered to support the official story.
V
These largely specious claims about the medical evidence form the centrepiece of A Coup in Camelot and, clocking in at nearly 40 minutes, comprise well over a third of the film’s running time. For those who are familiar with the facts that are being misinterpreted and/or overlooked, this time will not pass quickly. Things do pick up, however, for the final 20 minutes of the film which deals partially with the enigmatic Lee Harvey Oswald. Whether or not Oswald was on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository with a rifle in his hands at the time of the assassination has never been conclusively established. But A Coup in Camelot demonstrates, through the pioneering research of former investigative reporter Barry Ernest, that in all likelihood Oswald was where he claimed to be when the shots were fired; on the first floor of the building eating lunch.
Barry Ernest Ernest centred his research on an often overlooked witness named Victoria Adams who had viewed the assassination from a fourth floor window of the depository building. As most students of the case know, Oswald was seen by his boss Roy Truly and police officer Marion Baker in the second floor lunch room approximately 90 seconds after the shots were fired. Baker was on his way to the roof where he believed the gunman might be located but, upon spotting Oswald alone in the lunch room, he halted his ascent and demanded Oswald identify himself. Truly quickly informed Baker that Oswald was an employee and the pair then continued their dash up the stairs. Oswald later told police that he had gone from the first floor to the second in order to purchase a Coke. But, of course, the Warren Commission claimed that he had actually rushed down from the sixth floor immediately after shooting the President.
In that regard, Victoria Adams was a problematic witness for the Commission. After watching the motorcade pass by with three co-workers, she had stayed at the fourth floor window for what she said was around 15 to 30 seconds and then quickly made her way down to the first floor. What this means, as Ernest explains, is that “she would have been on the stairs at the same time Oswald was descending from the sixth floor.” The problem is “…she did not see or hear anyone on the stairs during that period.” The Commission’s handling of her story typified its approach to the investigation. It did not bother to question any of those who had stood at the window with her to watch the motorcade―not even Sandra Styles who had accompanied Adams down the stairs―and instead suggested that she was simply mistaken about the time she left the fourth floor window.
Victoria Adams In support of this contention, the Commission alleged that Adams had testified to seeing two other employees of the building, William Shelley and Billy Lovelady, when she arrived on the first floor. And because Shelley and Lovelady had testified to being outside on the depository steps during the shooting and not re-entering the building until several minutes later, the Commission claimed that Adams’ “…estimate of the time when she descended from the fourth floor is incorrect, and she actually came down the stairs several minutes after Oswald and after Truly and Baker as well.” (Warren Report, p. 154) The problem with the Commission’s argument is that when Ernest tracked Adams down she “flat-out denied” ever saying she had seen Shelley and Lovelady on the first floor. In order to confirm or refute her assertions, Ernest searched the National Archives for the stenographic tape of Adams’ testimony. Not surprisingly, however, he soon discovered that there is no record of her April 7, 1964, testimony and the stenographic tape has gone mysteriously “missing.”
But in 1999 Ernest discovered a bombshell document in the Archives in the form of a June 2, 1964, letter written by Assistant United States Attorney, Martha Joe Stroud, to Warren Commission Chief counsel, J. Lee Rankin. This letter contains the only known reference in the Commission’s files to an interview with Dorothy Garner, who was Adams’ supervisor and one of those with whom she had stood at the fourth floor window. The letter notes matter-of-factly that “Miss Garner…stated this morning that after Miss Adams went downstairs she (Miss Garner) saw Mr. Truly and the policeman come up.” Thus Garner provided complete corroboration for Adams’ testimony. Just as she swore, Adams had indeed descended those old wooden steps at the same time Oswald was supposed to have been on them. And the corroboration of this fact was completely ignored by the Commission who made no mention of Garner’s interview whatsoever.
As Ernest details in his indispensable book, The Girl on the Stairs, he went on to locate and interview Garner for himself. He asked her about her own activities following the assassination and Garner explained to him that as Adams and Styles made their way downstairs, she herself went to a storage area by the stairway. It was from there that she was able to see Baker and Truly ascend the stairs. Garner said that she was “right behind” Adams and Styles in leaving the window and although she didn’t actually see them enter the stairway, she heard them “after they started down” because “the stairs were very noisy.” (The Girl on the Stairs, p. 268) Garner, it appears, had arrived on the fourth floor landing area only seconds after Adams and was there long enough to see Baker and Truly. Quite obviously, then, if Oswald had descended from the sixth floor during that time as he would have had to have done in order to make it to his second floor encounter with Baker, then Garner was in a position to see him. Yet, as she told Ernest, “I don’t remember seeing him at all that day…except on TV.” (ibid)
It is impossible to overstate how damaging all of this is to the case against Oswald. It is clear that he could not have made it down to the second floor ahead of Adams because he did not have the time. This means he would have had to have descended long enough after Adams for her not to have heard his footsteps. Yet if he was 10 or 15 seconds behind her on the stairwell, it seems highly unlikely that he would not have been spotted by Garner who did not see or hear him on the noisy old stairs, even though she stayed on the fourth floor landing area long enough to see Truly and Baker. The most logical conclusion to be drawn is that when Oswald arrived at his second floor meeting with Baker, he had not come from the sixth floor but from the first, just as he said he had. And that would mean that, whatever else he did that day, Oswald did not shoot President Kennedy.
VI
A Coup in Camelot finishes with a brief discussion of how Kennedy’s plans to pull American military personnel out of Vietnam were reversed after his death and how private US contractors profited from the all-out war that followed. However none of this is explored in any detail and no attempt is made to show how it can be directly connected to the assassination. Had the writers and producers chosen to focus more heavily on these areas they may well have created a more valuable and compelling film than this one.
It is clear that the filmmakers wanted to offer forensic proof of a conspiracy and, in fact, at the end of the film it is claimed they have done just that. “We have proven through modern forensics”, narrator Peter Coyote says, “that a shot or shots were fired from the front.” Yet, as I have demonstrated above, proof of such is not offered in A Coup in Camelot. What is provided instead is a bloodspatter theory that, whilst plausible on the surface, is entirely contradicted by empirical evidence. Instead of relying on the opinions of one individual, the filmmakers should have consulted with other, perhaps better qualified experts to ensure that what was being proposed had really been put to the test. How else can one claim to have proven something? There are numerous medical and scientific professionals who are well-versed in the facts of the assassination―such as Doctors Wecht, Aguilar, Robertson, and Thomas―who, I am sure, would have been more than happy to share their expertise.
As I see it, this is the fatal flaw of A Coup in Camelot. Theory is all too readily accepted and promoted by the filmmakers without any independent verification or even basic fact-checking. How difficult would it have been to have had somebody actually read Dr. Humes’ various testimonies to see if he really had “always denied having to saw the skull open”? Or to have studied the deposition of Francis O’Neill to discover who had physically carried the casket into the morgue at 7:17 pm? A clearer understanding of these two points alone would have been enough to call into serious question the highly dubious claims of multiple casket entries and wound tampering at Bethesda.
Theories about the Kennedy assassination―many of them nutty―have been promulgated for far too long and they are not convincing anyone outside of the so-called “research community”. When you attempt to counter the ballistics experiments and slickly-produced computer simulations featured in mainstream lone gunman documentaries with something as bizarre-sounding and ill-founded as the body alteration hypothesis you are not likely to win many converts amongst the general population. What is needed is real expert opinion and cold, hard evidence presented in a compelling manner. A Coup in Camelot is skilfully produced on what appears to have been a reasonable budget and if the filmmakers had consulted the right individuals and doubled down on their facts they could well have produced something of real value. For that reason the film strikes me as a wasted opportunity.
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A Coup in Camelot
Considering the large number of films and TV specials about the assassination of President Kennedy that have appeared over the last ten or fifteen years, genuinely worthwhile documentaries on the subject are sadly few and far between. The likes of Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgement and Chip Selby’s Reasonable Doubt were fine for their day but given the wealth of information and technological tools that have become available in the time since those films were produced they appear more than a little outdated now. Sadly, the majority of well budgeted, slickly produced documentaries of the 21st century have been created solely to push the delusory mythology of the Warren Commission. Aside from Shane O’Sullivan’s mostly worthwhile Killing Oswald there has been very little of note that has even attempted to counter the MSM’s seemingly endless deluge of propaganda with reliable evidence and solid reasoning. A Coup in Camelot clearly aims to fill that void. Unfortunately, however, it falls considerably short of the mark because it consistently confuses theory with fact.
The film begins strongly enough with a ten minute introduction that briefly discusses Kennedy’s intention to withdraw American troops from Vietnam then outlines the reasons for his trip to Dallas and explains how, within hours of the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald was fingered as the lone nut assassin. From there A Coup in Camelot moves swiftly into one of its strongest segments, featuring respected author and researcher Vince Palamara as its main talking head. Over the years, through his diligent hard work in locating and interviewing members of the Secret Service, Palamara has made himself the go-to expert on the subject of President Kennedy’s protection―or lack thereof―in Dallas. I must admit that I have never been convinced the Secret Service was actively involved in the assassination. Yet Palamara’s work most certainly gives reason to at least consider the idea that JFK’s protection on November 22, 1963, was intentionally compromised.
Secret Service authority
Vince PalamaraPalamara details just how many of the Secret Service’s usual practices were not followed that day. For example, it was standard procedure during an open motorcade for agents to be walking or jogging alongside the Presidential limousine. In fact there were two hand rails in place for agents to hold onto as they stood on the rear running boards of the car. As Palamara points out, “Secret Service agents are powerless to really do much of anything if they’re not close to the President.” And yet there were no agents on or near the limousine in Dallas. Defenders of the official mythology have long claimed that Kennedy himself had ordered the agents off the back of the car because he wanted the public to get a good look at him. But when Palamara spoke with Gerald Behn, the Special Agent in charge of the White House detail, Behn told him in no uncertain terms that he had never heard any such request from the President. Palamara then contacted numerous other Secret Service agents and White House aides and each one of them told him the same thing: Kennedy had not ordered the agents off of the car.
Lone nut mythologists also tend to blame Kennedy for the fact that the limousine’s plexiglass bubble top was not used that day. Although the bubble top was not bullet proof or resistant it was, as Palamara notes, “a psychological deterrent because most people assumed it was bullet proof…The bottom line what the bubble top would have done is it would have obscured an assassin’s view via the sun’s glare.” To discover whether or not Kennedy really had ordered its removal, Palamara spoke with Special Agent Sam Kinney who was the driver of the Secret Service follow-up car. “Sam Kinney adamantly on three different occasions told me that President Kennedy had nothing to do with it; it was solely his responsibility.”
Houston, 11/21/63 Another procedure not followed in Dallas involved the additional protection customarily provided by local law enforcement. Whenever and wherever there was to be a motorcade, the Secret Service would usually work hand in hand with local police who would provide a motorcycle escort of six to nine officers that would ride in a wedge formation in front of and beside the Presidential limousine. This formation had been in place on all of the previous stops along Kennedy’s Texas trip. Yet in Dallas the escort was reduced to just four motorcycle officers who ended up riding behind the limo instead of beside it. As Palamara notes, “The formation was meaningless. It offered no protection at all…They left Kennedy a sitting duck.”
II
Having detailed these and many other irregularities in JFK’s protection, A Coup in Camelot moves on to a discussion of the “Blood, Bullets & Ballistics”, focusing largely on the conclusions of retired crime scene investigator, Sherry Fiester. It is Fiester’s contention that the massive spray of blood seen in frame 313 of the Zapruder film represents “back spatter” from a frontal shot. She further asserts that, despite numerous witnesses believing they heard shots or saw smoke coming from behind the fence on top of the “grassy knoll”, her own trajectory analysis excludes it as the source of the head shot. The actual source of the shot, she claims, was on the other side of Elm Street at the southern end of the triple overpass. But despite her impressive credentials and her 30 years experience with the Dallas police, Fiester’s conclusions fail to convince.
Medical, scientific and ballistics experts such as Dr. Cyril Wecht, Dr. Gary Aguilar, Dr. Donald Thomas, and Larry Sturdivan agree that, by itself, the explosion of blood, bone and brain matter seen in the Zapruder film actually tells us very little about the direction in which the projectile was travelling. That is because it does not occur at the point of entrance or exit but near the mid-point of the bullet’s trajectory. Rifle wounds of the skull can be a very different matter than gunshot wounds to other parts of the body. The skull is a closed vessel containing fluid contents that cannot be compressed. The energy and momentum imparted to the skull by the passage of the bullet creates a temporary cavity. The result of cavitation in an enclosed skull containing blood and brain is a hydraulic pressure applied to the cranium causing it to burst open. As Aguilar and Wecht explain, the resultant “spew” of blood and tissue is “radial to the bullet’s path and is separate from the inshoot and outshoot splatter.” (Aguilar & Wecht, Letter to the Editor, AFTE Journal, Volume 48 Number 2, p. 76) This is what is known as the “Krönleinschuss” effect―named for the German ballistics expert who first demonstrated it using skulls filled with clay.
This type of effect was demonstrated during filmed simulations performed in the Biophysics laboratory at Edgewood Arsenal in 1964 when rifle bullets were fired into numerous skulls filled with ballistic gelatin. Describing a typical example Sturdivan writes, “The bullet entered the back of the skull and exited in a small spray at the front in the space of one frame of the high-speed movie. Only after the bullet was far down-range did the internal pressure generated by its passage split open the skull and relieve the pressure inside by spewing the contents through the cracks. A similar type explosion would have taken place if the bullet had gone through in the opposite direction. The only way to distinguish the direction of travel of the bullet is to examine the cratering effect on the inside of the skull on entrance and on the outside of the skull at exit.” (Sturdivan, The JFK Myths, p. 171)
The empirical evidence, therefore, demonstrates that Fiester is mistaken in believing the explosive spray of matter we see in the Zapruder film is back spatter. In fact, forward spatter and back spatter are not seen in the film; probably because of the limitations of Zapruder’s camera. The film of the Edgewood simulation shows little to no back spatter and only a very small amount of forward matter which, as Sturdivan explains, was only visible “because of the strong lighting, a close-up view, and (especially) a very high framing rate…over 200 times the framing speed of the Zapruder movie…” (ibid. p. 174)
Sherry Fiester Fiester’s trajectory analysis is also deeply flawed because it assumes something there is no reason to assume. Namely, that the bullet followed a straight path through the skull. In 1978, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) hired a NASA scientist to perform the same type of backward projection analysis, the committee’s forensic pathology panel cautioned against placing too much faith in it. The panel noted that, in their experience, “if a missile strikes an object capable of creating a shearing force, such as the skull, the bullet’s pathway in the body might be significantly different from the line of its trajectory prior to impact.” (7HSCA168) In other words, a bullet striking a dense, resistant skull bone is likely to become deformed and be deflected. Sturdivan writes that “The path of a deformed bullet through a body is never straight…Of the thousands of examples of yawed, deformed, and broken rifle bullets fired into gelatin tissue simulant at the Biophysics Division lab and other similar facilities, none had a perfectly straight trajectory. Few were even close.” (ibid. p. 208) So drawing a line between the presumed entrance and exit points in JFK’s skull will not tell us where the gunman was located no matter how far that line is extended into Dealey Plaza.
Far from being excluded as Fiester asserts, the grassy knoll remains the most likely location for a frontal shooter. Not only because it was the location to which numerous witnesses pointed, but also because two teams of America’s top acoustical scientists agreed that the Dallas Police dictabelt recording they analyzed on behalf of the HSCA contained the acoustic fingerprint of a gunshot fired from the knoll. And the dictabelt recording synchronizes perfectly with the Zapruder film when―and only when―the knoll shot is aligned with frame 313.
Featured alongside Fiester’s theories in this segment of A Coup in Camelot is the claim that President Kennedy was shot in the throat from the front. Yet aside from a brief reference to the way the wound was “described by doctors at Parkland Hospital”, no detail is provided to substantiate this assertion. As most readers will no doubt be aware, the Parkland physicians were indeed under the initial impression that the wound might have been an entrance; describing it as small, round, clean cut, and measuring little more than 5 mm in diameter. But those who hold these descriptions up as proof that a bullet entered the throat need to deal with the fact that studies have shown emergency room doctors to be frequently wrong in their assessment of bullet wounds. This is precisely why the premiere textbook for trauma room physicians, Rosen’s Emergency Medicine, cautions that “Clinicians should not describe wounds as ‘entrance’ or ‘exit’ but should document, using appropriate forensic terminology, a detailed description of the wound, including its appearance, characteristics, and location without attempting to interpret the wound type or bullet caliber. Exit wounds are not always larger than entrance wounds, and wound size does not consistently correspond to bullet caliber.” (Rosen’s Emergency Medicine: Concepts and Clinical Practice, p. 828)
Those who propose that a bullet entered the throat must also deal with the fact that said bullet would have had to have disappeared entirely almost immediately after piercing the skin. Because not only was there no exit in the rear and no bullet found anywhere in the body, there was also no damage to the spine as there would almost certainly have had to have been had a missile entered Kennedy’s throat near the midline. It is for these reasons that, despite its appearance, the wound is extremely unlikely to have been one of entrance.
III
A Coup in Camelot moves from Dallas to Bethesda for a lengthy discussion of JFK’s autopsy, centred largely around the highly controversial theories of Douglas Horne. In a nutshell, Horne believes that Kennedy’s gunshot wounds were altered to hide evidence of a frontal shooter. This, of course, is not a new idea. It was first popularized by author David Lifton in his 36-year-old book, Best Evidence. But whereas Lifton postulated that unknown conspirators had hijacked the President’s body en route to Bethesda and altered his wounds to fool the autopsy surgeons, Horne suggests that the prosectors themselves altered the head wound during a secret “pre-autopsy” at the Navy morgue. For what purpose and to fool whom is never really made clear.
Doug Horne At the very heart of Horne’s hypothesis is a comment made by Tom Robinson―an embalmer who was present for most of the autopsy―during a 1996 interview for the Assassination Records Review Board. When shown a photo displaying a large defect in the top of Kennedy’s head Robinson recalled that this was “what the doctors did”. He then explained that the autopsy surgeons had cut the scalp open and “reflected it back in order to remove bullet fragments.” (ARRB MD180) He also recalled seeing that “some sawing was done to remove some bone before the brain could be removed.” (ibid) What Robinson described is, of course, a perfectly normal part of an autopsy and he himself called what he saw a “normal craniotomy procedure.” (ibid) Yet somehow Horne construes Robinson’s remarks as evidence of some clandestine pre-autopsy activity. Why?
The reason, according to Horne, is that “Dr. Humes always denied having to saw the skull open, he always maintained that the wound was so big that he just removed the brain with a minimum of cutting of the scalp; he never had to cut any bone.” However, as this passage from Hume’s sworn deposition for the ARRB demonstrates, Horne is entirely mistaken :
GUNN: But just let me start out first: Where was the first incision made?
HUMES: I believe, of course, the top of the skull to remove the skull plate of the brain. To remove what remained of the calvarium and to approach the removal of the brain.
GUNN: And was that incision simply of the scalp, or did you need to cut –
HUMES: No, we had to cut some bone as well. [my emphasis]
* * *
GUNN: Where did you cut the bone?
HUMES: I find that–it’s hard to recall. Once we got the scalp laid back, some of those pieces could just be removed, you know, by picking them up, picking them up because they were just not held together very well, other than by the dura, I suppose. So other than that, we probably made it like we normally do, in a circumferential fashion from books, like right above the ear around. But it was a real problem because it was all falling apart, the skull. And I can’t recall the details of exactly how we managed to maneuver that, because it was a problem. (ARRB Deposition of James J. Humes, pgs. 101-102)
As the reader can see, not only did Humes not deny having to saw the skull, he specifically testified to doing so. But Horne does not quote Humes himself and instead refers to a report written in 1965 by autopsy surgeon Dr. Pierre Finck―who did not arrive at Bethesda until after the brain had already been removed―in which Finck recalled being told that “no sawing of the skull was necessary”. What this means, therefore, is that the basis of Horne’s claim that “Humes always denied having to saw the skull open” is not any direct quotation from Humes himself, but the hearsay claim of a man who wasn’t even present when the brain was removed. This type of methodology is extremely difficult to defend. And what makes it all the more confounding is that Horne himself was actually present for the deposition during which Humes specifically swore to cutting the skull bone.
Sadly, this is not the only instance in A Coup in Camelot in which Humes’ words are misconstrued in support of pre-autopsy surgery. The film’s co-writer, Art Van Kampen, suggests that “Something had to have happened to that body before the photos were taken”, and in the case of some photos that is indeed true. But Van Kampen claims that “Dr. Humes is very clear that no autopsy work had been done on the President’s skull before either photos or X-rays were taken.” This, again, is a clear misinterpretation of what Humes actually said. When asked during his ARRB deposition whether or not any incisions were made before the photographs were taken, Humes responded, “Well, depending on which photographs you’re talking about. We didn’t photograph the wound in the occiput until the brain was removed, you know. Sure, we had to make an incision to remove the brain and so forth, but no, generally speaking, no, we didn’t make any incisions at all [my emphasis].” (ibid. p. 95) Humes was then shown the photographs of the top of the head and asked whether or not, before the photo was taken, he had pulled the scalp back “in order to be able to have a better look at the injury” to which he responded “Yes, I probably did.” (ibid. p. 162) So, as should be perfectly clear, Humes confirmed that “generally speaking” most of the photographs were taken before any incisions took place but that some were indeed taken during the course of the autopsy. He also said essentially the same thing as Tom Robinson, which is that the photographs of the top of the head were taken after the scalp had been manipulated. There is, then, no meaningful discrepancy between what the autopsy pictures show and what Humes testified to.
There has been confusion over Kennedy’s head wounds ever since the Warren Commission issued its findings. In large part this is due to there being two entirely different descriptions of the wounds on record. By and large the doctors at Parkland Hospital recalled seeing one fairly large hole that was located near the right rear of the head. Yet the autopsy report describes a massive defect involving almost the entire right side of the cranium. It was to explain this discrepancy that the body alteration hypothesis was first offered. However, as Dr. Aguilar has noted, “that the wound was described as larger at autopsy than noted by emergency personnel is not proof that it was surgically enlarged. Wounds picked apart during an autopsy are often found to be larger than they first appeared to emergency personnel.” (Murder in Dealey Plaza, p. 187)
There is a simpler, far more reasonable explanation than clandestine alteration. One that, ironically enough, is touched upon in A Coup in Camelot. Shortly before discussion of the autopsy begins, the film’s narrator correctly informs viewers that “In the Zapruder film, a flap of skull can be seen opening up after the head strike. During the frantic ride to Parkland Hospital the flap had been folded back into place where the blood acted like glue and sealed the wound.” Indeed, Jackie Kennedy later testified to trying to hold her husband’s skull together on the way to the hospital. As Dr. Aguilar writes, “It is not hard to imagine the possibility that during the time it took the Presidential limousine to get to Parkland Hospital, clot had formed gluing a portion of disrupted scalp down making JFK’s skull defect appear smaller to treating surgeons than it later would to autopsy surgeons.” (ibid) In other words, because the flap had been closed up, the emergency room staff only saw the rearmost portion of the wound.
IV
The idea that something out of the ordinary occurred at Bethesda is buttressed by stories of multiple coffins being brought into the morgue on the night of the autopsy. At Parkland Hospital, Kennedy’s body had been placed into an ornamental bronze casket. However, in A Coup in Camelot it is alleged that the body actually arrived at Bethesda in an aluminium shipping casket at around 6:35 pm. This means that when the bronze casket was brought into the morgue at 7:17 pm it was, unbeknownst to the FBI agents who accompanied it, completely empty. Or so we are told. Horne further alleges that for some reason the Dallas casket then “made a second entry that night…at 20:00 hours military time.”
Once again the evidence does not support the theory. As presented in the film, the idea that Kennedy’s body arrived in an aluminium shipping casket is based on the recollection of Naval petty officer, Dennis David, who recalled helping carry one into morgue. Yet, as the summary of his ARRB interview states, David “emphasized that he had no direct knowledge, by observation, that President Kennedy was in the gray shipping casket…” (ARRB MD177) The reality is that, being as Bethesda was a morgue, there is no reason to believe that Kennedy’s body was the only one to be brought there that night. In fact, FBI agent Francis O’Neill specifically recalled being told that one of the four drawers in the anteroom adjacent to the autopsy room contained the body of a child “that had died that day.” (O’Neill ARRB deposition, p. 57)
Perhaps more importantly, the claim that the bronze casket was empty when brought into the mortuary is belied by the testimony of both O’Neill and his FBI colleague, James Sibert. These two agents who helped unload the casket from the ambulance swore that they stayed with it until it was opened and saw with their own eyes the President’s body taken out. O’Neill stated without hesitation during his ARRB deposition that there was “no time” from the time he first saw the casket “until the time it was opened and the body taken out that the casket was not in my view…” (ibid. p. 59) Similarly, when asked whether or not there had been any time between being unloaded from the ambulance and being opened that the casket had been out of his sight, Sibert responded, “I was there until it was opened.” (Sibert ARRB deposition, p. 45) There is, therefore, no basis for claiming that the casket was “certainly empty” as Horne does.
Finally, the supposed 20:00 re-entry of the casket is based on a time notation which appears in an unsigned, undated document titled “The Joint Casket Bearer Team.” This document describes the activities of a group containing one officer and seven enlisted men “from each branch of the Armed Forces” who were “trained to carry the casket to and from the ceremony sites and to fold the flag which draped the casket following the internment service.” (ARRB MD163) This team, as A Coup in Camelot correctly informs, was also known as the “honor guard”. It appears quite apparent that, far from being proof of a second entry for the bronze casket, the 20:00 hours time notation on this document is nothing more than a mistake. Why? Because despite the film’s claim that Sibert and O’Neill had carried the casket into the morgue at 7:17 pm alongside Secret Service agents Roy Kellerman and William Greer, O’Neill explained in his ARRB deposition that, in actual fact, it was the honor guard who had physically lifted the coffin at that time. (O’Neill deposition, p. 57) So unless anyone wants to believe that the honor guard carried it in twice, they are going to have to accept that the unknown writer of the document was in error and there was only one entry for the bronze casket.
A coup in Camelot intermingles these stories of casket-swapping and wound tampering with claims that the autopsy X-rays and photographs have also been altered. This, once again, is not a new theory. In fact it has been a commonly held belief amongst students of the assassination for decades. And yet nothing approaching proof of alteration has ever emerged. The most commonly cited reason for believing the photos have been tampered with, the one repeated in A Coup in Camelot, is that the pictures appear to show the back of the head completely intact. This is, of course, at odds with the testimony of the Parkland physicians who recalled seeing a large wound in the right rear. But as autopsy surgeon J. Thornton Boswell explained to both the HSCA and the ARRB, the reason the rear skull damage is not seen in the photographs is because the scalp is being held up and “pulled forward up over the forehead, toward the forehead.” (Boswell ARRB deposition, p. 150) This has the effect of hiding the wound underneath.
Those who choose to ignore Boswell’s words are still stuck with the reality that the autopsy photographer, John Stringer, authenticated the photographs during his own ARRB deposition, repeatedly stating that he had no reason to believe the existing photographs were anything other than the ones that he himself took on the night of the autopsy. The same is true of the X-rays. The technician responsible for taking them, Jerrol Custer, repeatedly swore to the accuracy and authenticity of the existing X-rays for the ARRB. For example, when shown the anterior/posterior view:
GUNN: Is there any question in your mind whether the X-ray that’s in front of you right now is the original X-ray taken at the autopsy?
CUSTER: No question.
GUNN: And the answer is––
CUSTER: It is the original film. (p. 122-123)
And when shown the right lateral skull X-ray:
GUNN: … Mr. Custer, can you identify the film that is in front of you right now as having been taken by you on the night of the autopsy of President Kennedy?
CUSTER: Correct. Yes, I do, sir.
GUNN: And how are you able to identify that as being––
CUSTER: My marker in the lower mandibular joint. (p. 124)
With the men who took them―and all three autopsy doctors―swearing to their authenticity, there seems little doubt that the autopsy photographs and X-rays would have been admitted into evidence were there to be a trial in the Kennedy case. And with questions of validity settled, a more important question would be asked: What do the skull X-rays actually show? The answer to that, as a number of experts including neuroscientist Dr. Joseph Riley and radiologist Dr. Randy Robertson have attested, is that the official theory of a single shot from the rear simply cannot be true.
As Dr. Humes explained in his Warren Commission testimony, the pathologists found an entrance wound that was 2.5 cm to the right, and “slightly above” the external occipital protuberance―a small bump located very low down in the rear of the skull―and “a huge defect over the right side” involving “both the scalp and the underlying skull…” After a “careful examination of the margins of the large bone defect” on the right side, the doctors were unable to find a point of exit, which Humes put down to the fact that they “did not have the bone.” However, the pathologists concluded that a single bullet was responsible for all the damage, having entered the rear and exited the right side. In support of this contention, Humes implied that the path of the bullet was laid out by a trail of metallic fragments that could be seen on the X-rays “traversing a line from the wound in the occiput to just above the right eye…” (Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. II, p. 351-353)
Unfortunately for Dr. Humes, the X-rays do not show what he claimed. The entrance wound in the lower rear of the skull is indeed visible. So too is the trail of bullet fragments. But the two are in no way related. In fact, the trail lies along the very top of the skull, several inches above the entrance site. Therefore, those fragments could not have been left behind by a bullet which entered near the external occipital protuberance. As Aguilar and Wecht have noted, “…the fragment trail alone almost completely eliminates the official theory JFK was struck from above and behind by a single bullet that entered his skull low…” (Aguilar & Wecht, Op. cit. p. 78) Dr. Joseph Riley, who has a Ph.D in neuroscience and specializes in neuroanatomy and experimental neuropathology, noted decades ago that the medical evidence as it stands is only compatible with two separate bullet strikes. It is for that very reason that I see little logic in suggesting that the X-rays have been altered to support the official story.
V
These largely specious claims about the medical evidence form the centrepiece of A Coup in Camelot and, clocking in at nearly 40 minutes, comprise well over a third of the film’s running time. For those who are familiar with the facts that are being misinterpreted and/or overlooked, this time will not pass quickly. Things do pick up, however, for the final 20 minutes of the film which deals partially with the enigmatic Lee Harvey Oswald. Whether or not Oswald was on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository with a rifle in his hands at the time of the assassination has never been conclusively established. But A Coup in Camelot demonstrates, through the pioneering research of former investigative reporter Barry Ernest, that in all likelihood Oswald was where he claimed to be when the shots were fired; on the first floor of the building eating lunch.
Barry Ernest Ernest centred his research on an often overlooked witness named Victoria Adams who had viewed the assassination from a fourth floor window of the depository building. As most students of the case know, Oswald was seen by his boss Roy Truly and police officer Marion Baker in the second floor lunch room approximately 90 seconds after the shots were fired. Baker was on his way to the roof where he believed the gunman might be located but, upon spotting Oswald alone in the lunch room, he halted his ascent and demanded Oswald identify himself. Truly quickly informed Baker that Oswald was an employee and the pair then continued their dash up the stairs. Oswald later told police that he had gone from the first floor to the second in order to purchase a Coke. But, of course, the Warren Commission claimed that he had actually rushed down from the sixth floor immediately after shooting the President.
In that regard, Victoria Adams was a problematic witness for the Commission. After watching the motorcade pass by with three co-workers, she had stayed at the fourth floor window for what she said was around 15 to 30 seconds and then quickly made her way down to the first floor. What this means, as Ernest explains, is that “she would have been on the stairs at the same time Oswald was descending from the sixth floor.” The problem is “…she did not see or hear anyone on the stairs during that period.” The Commission’s handling of her story typified its approach to the investigation. It did not bother to question any of those who had stood at the window with her to watch the motorcade―not even Sandra Styles who had accompanied Adams down the stairs―and instead suggested that she was simply mistaken about the time she left the fourth floor window.
Victoria Adams In support of this contention, the Commission alleged that Adams had testified to seeing two other employees of the building, William Shelley and Billy Lovelady, when she arrived on the first floor. And because Shelley and Lovelady had testified to being outside on the depository steps during the shooting and not re-entering the building until several minutes later, the Commission claimed that Adams’ “…estimate of the time when she descended from the fourth floor is incorrect, and she actually came down the stairs several minutes after Oswald and after Truly and Baker as well.” (Warren Report, p. 154) The problem with the Commission’s argument is that when Ernest tracked Adams down she “flat-out denied” ever saying she had seen Shelley and Lovelady on the first floor. In order to confirm or refute her assertions, Ernest searched the National Archives for the stenographic tape of Adams’ testimony. Not surprisingly, however, he soon discovered that there is no record of her April 7, 1964, testimony and the stenographic tape has gone mysteriously “missing.”
But in 1999 Ernest discovered a bombshell document in the Archives in the form of a June 2, 1964, letter written by Assistant United States Attorney, Martha Joe Stroud, to Warren Commission Chief counsel, J. Lee Rankin. This letter contains the only known reference in the Commission’s files to an interview with Dorothy Garner, who was Adams’ supervisor and one of those with whom she had stood at the fourth floor window. The letter notes matter-of-factly that “Miss Garner…stated this morning that after Miss Adams went downstairs she (Miss Garner) saw Mr. Truly and the policeman come up.” Thus Garner provided complete corroboration for Adams’ testimony. Just as she swore, Adams had indeed descended those old wooden steps at the same time Oswald was supposed to have been on them. And the corroboration of this fact was completely ignored by the Commission who made no mention of Garner’s interview whatsoever.
As Ernest details in his indispensable book, The Girl on the Stairs, he went on to locate and interview Garner for himself. He asked her about her own activities following the assassination and Garner explained to him that as Adams and Styles made their way downstairs, she herself went to a storage area by the stairway. It was from there that she was able to see Baker and Truly ascend the stairs. Garner said that she was “right behind” Adams and Styles in leaving the window and although she didn’t actually see them enter the stairway, she heard them “after they started down” because “the stairs were very noisy.” (The Girl on the Stairs, p. 268) Garner, it appears, had arrived on the fourth floor landing area only seconds after Adams and was there long enough to see Baker and Truly. Quite obviously, then, if Oswald had descended from the sixth floor during that time as he would have had to have done in order to make it to his second floor encounter with Baker, then Garner was in a position to see him. Yet, as she told Ernest, “I don’t remember seeing him at all that day…except on TV.” (ibid)
It is impossible to overstate how damaging all of this is to the case against Oswald. It is clear that he could not have made it down to the second floor ahead of Adams because he did not have the time. This means he would have had to have descended long enough after Adams for her not to have heard his footsteps. Yet if he was 10 or 15 seconds behind her on the stairwell, it seems highly unlikely that he would not have been spotted by Garner who did not see or hear him on the noisy old stairs, even though she stayed on the fourth floor landing area long enough to see Truly and Baker. The most logical conclusion to be drawn is that when Oswald arrived at his second floor meeting with Baker, he had not come from the sixth floor but from the first, just as he said he had. And that would mean that, whatever else he did that day, Oswald did not shoot President Kennedy.
VI
A Coup in Camelot finishes with a brief discussion of how Kennedy’s plans to pull American military personnel out of Vietnam were reversed after his death and how private US contractors profited from the all-out war that followed. However none of this is explored in any detail and no attempt is made to show how it can be directly connected to the assassination. Had the writers and producers chosen to focus more heavily on these areas they may well have created a more valuable and compelling film than this one.
It is clear that the filmmakers wanted to offer forensic proof of a conspiracy and, in fact, at the end of the film it is claimed they have done just that. “We have proven through modern forensics”, narrator Peter Coyote says, “that a shot or shots were fired from the front.” Yet, as I have demonstrated above, proof of such is not offered in A Coup in Camelot. What is provided instead is a bloodspatter theory that, whilst plausible on the surface, is entirely contradicted by empirical evidence. Instead of relying on the opinions of one individual, the filmmakers should have consulted with other, perhaps better qualified experts to ensure that what was being proposed had really been put to the test. How else can one claim to have proven something? There are numerous medical and scientific professionals who are well-versed in the facts of the assassination―such as Doctors Wecht, Aguilar, Robertson, and Thomas―who, I am sure, would have been more than happy to share their expertise.
As I see it, this is the fatal flaw of A Coup in Camelot. Theory is all too readily accepted and promoted by the filmmakers without any independent verification or even basic fact-checking. How difficult would it have been to have had somebody actually read Dr. Humes’ various testimonies to see if he really had “always denied having to saw the skull open”? Or to have studied the deposition of Francis O’Neill to discover who had physically carried the casket into the morgue at 7:17 pm? A clearer understanding of these two points alone would have been enough to call into serious question the highly dubious claims of multiple casket entries and wound tampering at Bethesda.
Theories about the Kennedy assassination―many of them nutty―have been promulgated for far too long and they are not convincing anyone outside of the so-called “research community”. When you attempt to counter the ballistics experiments and slickly-produced computer simulations featured in mainstream lone gunman documentaries with something as bizarre-sounding and ill-founded as the body alteration hypothesis you are not likely to win many converts amongst the general population. What is needed is real expert opinion and cold, hard evidence presented in a compelling manner. A Coup in Camelot is skilfully produced on what appears to have been a reasonable budget and if the filmmakers had consulted the right individuals and doubled down on their facts they could well have produced something of real value. For that reason the film strikes me as a wasted opportunity.
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National Enquirer working for Trump?
One has to wonder whether the relationship between President Elect Trump and National Enquirer CEO David Pecker is the genesis for this cover story blaming the murder of JFK on Castro. Recall Trump and Pecker tried to tar Ted Cruz’ father with the Oswald brush by misidentifying Cruz as being with Oswald in the summer of 1963 in New Orleans.
~Jim DiEugenio
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National Enquirer working for Trump?
One has to wonder whether the relationship between President Elect Trump and National Enquirer CEO David Pecker is the genesis for this cover story blaming the murder of JFK on Castro. Recall Trump and Pecker tried to tar Ted Cruz’ father with the Oswald brush by misidentifying Cruz as being with Oswald in the summer of 1963 in New Orleans.
~Jim DiEugenio