Dorothy Kilgallen was one of the very few, if not the only, mainstream reporter who actively investigated the John Kennedy assassination, and she interviewed witnesses who contradicted the Warren Report. When she died in November of 1965, her JFK file went missing. Never to be recovered. In 1975, the FBI was still asking her son if he found it.
~Jim DiEugenio
Melba Christina Youngblood was born in Texas in 1923. Her only son, Michael Marcades, has now written a book about his mother, who was posthumously made famous by film director Oliver Stone in his 1991 film JFK. If one recalls, that film opens with Dwight Eisenhower making his epochal Farewell Address warning of the rise of the Military Industrial Complex. The film proper then opens with a long credit sequence. Near the end of the credits, the film crosscuts between Kennedy arriving in Dallas and a woman being thrown out of a car on a lonely highway. We then see her in a hospital. She seems hysterical with fear warning that the men who threw her out of the car are going to kill Kennedy in Dallas. The doctor mumbles that she seems high as a kite on something, therefore implying that her warning will be ignored. Which it was—until after the assassination.
The woman was named Rose Cherami in Stone’s film. This was accurate since this is the final alias that she used in her life. And that was the name through which New Orleans DA Jim Garrison discovered her. Her Cassandra-like warning had been ignored by the Dallas Police, even though they were fully aware of it. It had then laid dormant for the FBI and the Warren Commission. In the seventies, it had been pursued by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. In fact, one of their most famous reports, written by researcher Patricia Orr, incorporated some of Garrison’s information with some new work that committee had done. In the annotated screen play of JFK entitled The Book of the Film, it was revealed that the script relied on Orr’s report for their information.
It was not until the Assassination Records Review Board declassified the HSCA files that we finally got many of the records that the committee used in order to compose that report. In a handy appendix to Rose Cherami: Gathering Fallen Petals, the authors supply several of these helpful documents. But the book goes much further than that. Because Marcades was so interested in finding out more about a mother he barely knew, but had read about in several sources, he decided to spend many years doing research in order to write the first full scale biography of Melba Youngblood, who only lived to be a bit over forty years old.
For a multiplicity of reasons, this was not an easy task. First, from a forensic viewpoint, many of the important personages had passed from this world. Also, as this reviewer has mentioned previously, many of the files of the late Jim Garrison have been lost, stolen or incinerated. Third, since Youngblood led such an offbeat, itinerant, peripatetic life, there was not a lot of paper data or tangible leads to follow. But Marcades stuck it out. And with the help of two others, including journalist Norma Kirkpatrick, he has put it together in book form.
Melba Youngblood grew up on a farm in a small town called Fairfield in east Texas. Her father was named Tom Youngblood; her mother was Minnie Bell Stroud. She was the eldest of three sisters, the other two being named Mozelle and Grace. Melba’s nickname growing up was Crit. The father was a stern disciplinarian and the girls were expected to do farm chores in addition to attending school and going to church on Sunday.
From the rather young age of fourteen, Crit was unsatisfied with the simple, dirt farming rural life. At that time, she actually ran away after hitching a ride with the milkman. Her parents managed to find her in a nearby small town. The street waif had been taken in by a kindly old couple.
A couple of years later, the family moved to Aldine, which was near Houston. There, Tom managed a tenant farm for the owner. They lived in a home that was much larger and modern. The father worked a second job on construction. But even with the improved circumstances, Melba was unsatisfied. She ran away for the second time at age 16. This time, she ended up in Houston. She found work as a waitress at first. But it is at this point that she fell into a life of hard partying in both Houston and Galveston. And with the wrong people.
She met a man named Al who gave her a job in his restaurant. It was in this time period, 1941-42, that she fell into a serious heroin habit. But, even worse, she met a bartender named Johnny who now began to hire her to do illegal errands for him. This included delivering drugs, liquor and cigarettes to soldiers on military bases. Sick of this kind of life, she decided to split by stealing his car. She did not think he would call the police because of his illicit black market dealing. But he did. And what made it all the worse was that she did not contact her parents to help her once she got apprehended.
She was extradited to Shreveport, Louisiana since that is where Johnny actually lived. Since she had no independent legal counsel, she did not know how to deal with the court. For example, she could have made a deal with the prosecutor for immunity and a pardon by turning state’s witness against Johnny. She did not. And she did not contact her parents until after she was incarcerated. Since she was in northern Louisiana, she was sent to infamous Angola. There, because she was shapely and attractive she found out about being on the “cordiality detail”. This meant going up to the big house on the hill and attending parties with guests of the state. She was released after two years in 1944.
Once she was out, she visited her parents. She got a job as a switchboard operator, and was married for the first time. She stayed clean and led a normal life for two years. But she left her husband and went, first to Dallas, and then to New Orleans. She became a stripper at a club called the Blue Angel. It was here where she met a man named Edward Joseph Marcades. Eddie ended up being her second husband and the father of Michael, who was born in 1953. But again, this marriage did not last very long. Melba left her husband and took Michael to New Orleans. After not hearing from her for awhile, her parents went looking for her. She was living in such dilapidated standards that they decided to take Michael home with them. A point that his mother did not strongly dispute.
It was around this time, the late fifties, that Melba began to work as a stripper for Jack Ruby at a place called the Pink Door. As Vincent Bugliosi states in his book Reclaiming History, there is no official record of Ruby ever owning a club by this name. He ignores the possibility that Ruby could either have been a silent partner, or owned a minority share of it. Bugliosi also does not inform his readers of Ruby’s activities at this same time, the late fifties. Maybe it’s because they provide a reason for a disguised ownership. And they also match the kinds of things that Melba Christine was described as doing in this phase of her life. Ruby’s activities include the smuggling of narcotics across state lines, a call girl ring, and the transfer of pornographic films. Ruby was very serious about this and he did research on how it could be done. He went into business with a man named Jim Breen. In fact, some of the call girls actually talked to the FBI to inform them of this activity. (See Warren Commission exhibits 1761-62 in Volume 23) Ruby’s activities in this regard later evolved to include gun running. There are several FBI reports from different witnesses—for example, Blaney Mack Johnson and Ed Browder—that describe this in Volume 26 of the Commission exhibits. (See especially exhibits 3055-3066) These exhibits also include reports of businesses—hotels and bars—that Ruby had an interest in but for which there is no record of him formally owning, at least not in the Warren Commission volumes.
It was around this time period—late fifties, early sixties—that Melba Christine began to use the alias of Rose Cherami. And it was under this name, and as part of drug, guns and prostitution runs from Dallas to Miami that Cherami became involved in the incident that Stone depicted in his film, that Orr wrote a report on, and that numerous writers—including this reviewer—have exhaustively described. I won’t detail the incident at any length, since most readers are already familiar with it. I will just summarize it. At a sleazy bar called the Silver Slipper Lounge, Cherami’s two Latin cohorts began a vociferous argument with her. She was thrown out by the bartender, Mac Manual, and began hitchhiking on route 190. She was hit by a car and the driver transported her to a hospital. On two occasions, with two different witnesses, she said the two men with her had talked about killing Kennedy. Both of these declarations occurred prior to November 22nd. But no one took it seriously; they chalked it up to the ravings of a junkie in need of a fix. After the assassination, it was a different story. Louisiana State Trooper Francis Fruge, who had accompanied her to a state hospital, got permission from his superiors to turn her over to the Dallas Police. But the police did not want to hear from her. The doctor who talked to her in the hospital, while on a hunting trip revealed to a friend what she said. And it was through this friend that Jim Garrison found out about her case. But by then she had passed away.
The authors are firmly in the camp that Cherami was murdered. They believe that she was shot on one of these drug runs in 1965. That the killer then ran her over to try and disguise her death as a matter of hit and run. That the man who eventually found her body on the road, Jerry Don Moore, did not actually strike her. (The investigating police officer did not think he did either.) Further, they show that there was apparently something wrong with the hospital report on her death, i.e., the report says she was DOA, yet this is provably false. She was worked on in the ER room and then transferred to a private room and survived for about eight hours in critical condition.
Michael Marcades put together the book by interviewing several surviving family members. He also found a grocery bag full of letters that Rose wrote. And he has also read much of the source material on her case, though I was surprised he did not include Todd Elliot’s prior brief book on the subject, A Rose by Many other Names (actually a pamphlet). Elliot discovered two other witnesses who heard his mother mention the Kennedy assassination prior to it happening. This was at Moosa Hospital in Eunice prior to Fruge arriving. But Elliot’s work was not anywhere near a full-scale biography as this book is.
I would be remiss if I did not make a formal criticism of the book, as I did with Fernando Faura’s volume, The Polka Dot File. Marcades and Kirkpatrick decided to use a lot of reconstructed dialogue in the scenes they drew. Some of this is acceptable since they probably got it from family members who interacted with Rose. But some of it is hard to fathom since it’s done without any surviving witnesses, at least that I know of. Also, sometimes this extends into a stream of consciousness, where we actually read the thoughts of a character. If I had been editing the book I would have advised the authors to be less liberal with this aspect of narrative license.
The photos in the volume are extraordinary. Almost all of them have never been seen before. And the document annex, mostly made up from the ARRB declassification process is valuable. Michael Marcades wanted to find his mother, whom he had met only three times before she died. The last meeting was at a picnic at a lake. It was a time-consuming and courageous undertaking. I should also add the word honesty to that voyage. For he gives us a picture of this unfortunate woman warts and all.
In late September and October of this year, the nation will observe the 50th anniversary of the issuance of, respectively, the Warren Report and its accompanying 26 volumes of evidence. There are certain forms of commemoration already in the works. For instance, there is a book upcoming by inveterate Warren Report apologists Mel Ayton and David Von Pein. And undoubtedly, with the MSM in complete obeisance to the Warren Report, Commission attorney Howard Willens will undoubtedly be in the spotlight again.
At CTKA, since we report on the latest developments in the case, and are very interested in the discoveries of the Assassination Records Review Board, we have a much more realistic and frank view of the Warren Report. In the light of the discoveries made on the case today, the Warren Report is simply untenable. In just about every aspect. About the only fact it got right is that Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters. The Commission could not miss that since it was captured live on television. But, as we shall see, it got just about everything else related to that shooting wrong.
Today, to anyone who knows the current state of the evidence in the JFK case, the Warren Report stands as a paradigm of how not to conduct either a high profile murder investigation, or any kind of posthumous fact finding inquiry. In fact, just about every attorney who has looked at the Kennedy case since 1964 in any official capacity has had nothing but unkind words about it. This includes Jim Garrison, Gary Hart and Dave Marston of the Church Committee, the first attorneys of record for the HSCA, Richard Sprague and Robert Tanenbaum, as well as the second pair, Robert Blakey and Gary Cornwell, and finally, Jeremy Gunn, the chief counsel of the ARRB. This is a crucial point-among many others– that the MSM ignored during its (disgraceful) commemoration of the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination.
On the other hand, CTKA’s role is one of recording fact oriented history and criticism about President Kennedy’s murder. Therefore, we wish to assemble a list of reasons why, today, the Warren Report and its verdict has the forensic impact of a pillow slap.
In spite of that, we predict, come September, the MSM will carry virtually none of what is to follow. Even though everything you are about to read is factually supported and crucial as to why the Warren Report is so fatally flawed. The fact you will hear very little of the following, or perhaps none of it, tells you how dangerously schizoid America and the MSM is on the subject of the murder of President Kennedy. It also might give us a clue as to why the country has not been the same since.
The following starts a continuing series which will be added to on a regular basis until late October of this year. The series will be arranged in plaques or sets. These are composed of separate, specific points which are thematically related and will be briefly summarized after all the points in a plaque are enumerated. This first set deals with the formation of the Warren Commission. And we show just how hopelessly compromised that body was from the instant it was created. We strongly urge our readers to try and get the their local MSM outlets to cover some of these very important facts that are in evidence today, but, for the most part, were not known to the public back in 1964.
[For convenience, we have embedded the five originally separate articles into this single article. – Webmaster]
Due to the declassified records made available by the ARRB, we now know that Chief Justice Earl Warren initially declined to helm the Commission. After he did so, President Johnson summoned him to the White House. Once there, LBJ confronted him with what he said was evidence that Oswald had visited both the Cuban and Russian consulates in Mexico City. Johnson then intimated that Oswald’s previous presence there, seven weeks before the assassination, could very well indicate the communists were behind Kennedy’s murder. Therefore, this could necessitate atomic holocaust, World War III. Both Johnson and Warren later reported that this warning visibly moved the Chief Justice and he left the meeting in tears. (See James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pgs. 80-83; James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pgs. 358-59)
Due to the declassification process of the ARRB, we now have all the executive session hearings of the Commission. Because of that, we know how effective Johnson’s chilling warning to Earl Warren was. At the first meeting of the Commission, Warren made it clear that he 1.) Did not want the Commission to employs its own investigators. 2.) They were just to evaluate materials produced by the FBI and Secret Service. 3.) He did not want to hold public hearings or use the power of subpoena. 4.) He even intimated that he did not even want to call any witnesses. He thought the Commission could rely on interviews done by other agencies. He actually said the following: “Meetings where witnesses would be brought in would retard rather than help our investigation.”
As the reader can see, Johnson’s atomic warning had cowed the former DA of Alameda county California, Earl Warren. He had no desire to run a real investigation.
At the Commission’s first staff meeting, attorney Melvin Eisenberg took notes of how Warren briefed the young lawyers on the task ahead, i.e. trying to find out who killed President Kennedy. Warren told them about his reluctance to take the job. He then told them that LBJ “stated that rumors of the most exaggerated kind were circulating in this country and overseas. Some rumors went as far as attributing the assassination to a faction within the Government” that wanted to install LBJ as president. These rumors, “if not quenched, could conceivably lead the country into a war which could cost 40 million lives.” (Emphasis added, Memorandum of Eisenberg 1/20/64)
Warren then added “No one could refuse to do something which might help to prevent such a possibility. The President convinced him that this was an occasion on which actual conditions had to override general principles.” (Emphasis added) In discussing the role of the Commission, Warren asserted the “importance of quenching rumors, and precluding future speculation such as that which has surrounded the death of Lincoln.” Warren then added this, “He emphasized that the Commission had to determine the truth, whatever that might be.”
It is those 14 words that Commission staffers, like the late David Belin, would dutifully quote for The New York Times. We now know that, by leaving out the previous 166 words, Belin was distorting the message. Any group of bright young lawyers would understand that Warren was sending down orders from the White House. The last 14 words were simply technical cover for all that had come before. When Warren said, “this was an occasion on which actual conditions had to override general principles”, he could not be more clear. In fact, that phrase is so telling that, in his discussion of the memo, Vincent Bugliosi leaves it out of his massive book Reclaiming History. (See Bugliosi, p. 367, and Reclaiming Parkland by James DiEugenio, pgs. 253-54)
But there is further certification that the staffers got the message and acted on it. For in her first interview with the Church Committee, Sylvia Odio talked about her meeting with Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler. After taking her testimony in Dallas, he told Odio, “Well, you know if we do find out that this is a conspiracy you know that we have orders from Chief Justice Warren to cover this thing up.” (Odio’s Church Committee interview with Gaeton Fonzi, of 1/16/76)
On that day, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called Walter Jenkins at the White House. He said that he had spoken with assistant Attorney General Nicolas Katzenbach already, and that they both were anxious to have “something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.” (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 4)
It was on this day that Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby live on television. How could Hoover have completed an investigation of that particular murder on the day it happened? To do such an inquiry, Ruby’s entire background would have to be checked, all the people he dealt with and spoke to in the preceding weeks would have to be located and spoken to, the Dallas Police force would have to be interviewed to see if he had help entering the City Hall basement, and all films, photos and audio would have to be reviewed for evidentiary purposes. This point would be crucial: if Ruby was recruited, this would indicate a conspiracy to silence Oswald. That whole investigation was done in less than a day?
Nope. And, in fact, not only was the murder of Oswald not fully investigated at the time Hoover closed the case, but just 24 hours earlier, Hoover had told President Johnson that the case against Oswald for the JFK murder was not very good. (ibid) This all indicates that Hoover was making a political choice, not an investigatory one. It suggests everything the Bureau did from this point on would be to fulfill that (premature) decision. Which leads us to the next point.
In fact, you will not find the FBI report in the Commission’s evidentiary volumes. Even though the Commission relied on the Bureau for approximately 80% of its investigation. (Warren Report, p. xii) Why? First, Hoover never bought the Single Bullet Theory. That is, the idea that one bullet went through both President Kennedy and Governor John Connally, making seven wounds, smashing two bones, and emerging almost unscathed. The Warren Commission did end up buying into this idea, which later caused it so many problems.
But second, the FBI report sent to the Commission was inadequate even for the Commissioners. We know this from the declassified Executive Session transcript of January 22, 1964. The Commissioners were shocked about two things. First, the FBI is not supposed to come to conclusions. They are supposed to investigate and present findings for others to form conclusions. But in this case, they said Oswald killed Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit without accomplices. That Ruby killed Oswald with no accomplices or aid. And the two didn’t know each other. In other words, this report was a fulfillment of Hoover’s message to Walter Jenkins of November 24th. (See Point 4) The Commissioners, who were lawyers, saw that the FBI had not run out anywhere near all the leads available to them. As Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin exclaimed, “But they are concluding that there can’t be a conspiracy without those being run out. Now that is not my experience with the FBI.” (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 219)
In other words, in his zeal to close the case, Hoover broke with established FBI practice not once, but twice. In sum, the FBI report was so poor, the Commission decided it had to call witnesses and use subpoena power.
President Johnson relied on the CIA for his information about Oswald in Mexico City. As we saw in Point 1, he used it to intimidate Warren. As we saw in Points 2 and 3, Warren then communicated this fear to the Commission and his staff.
But what if that information was, for whatever reason, either wrong, or intentionally false? Would that not put a different interpretation on the information, its source, and Johnson’s message to Warren?
Within seven weeks of the murder, Hoover understood that such was the case. Writing in the marginalia of a memo concerning CIA operations within the USA, he wrote about the Agency, “I can’t forget the CIA withholding the French espionage activities in the USA nor the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico, only to mention two instances of their double dealings.” (The Assassinations, p. 224, emphasis added) In a phone call to Johnson, Hoover revealed that the voice on the Mexico City tape sent to him by the Agency was not Oswald’s, “In other words, it appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet Embassy down there.” (ibid) Needless to say, if Oswald was being impersonated in Mexico, this transforms the whole import of Johnson’s original message to Warren.
Knowing this, Hoover went along with what he knew was a cover-up. And he admitted this in private on at least two occasions. He told a friend, after the initial FBI report was submitted, that the case was a mess, and he had just a bunch of loose ends. In the late summer of 1964, he was asked by a close acquaintance about it. Hoover replied, “If I told you what I really know, it would be very dangerous to this country. Our political system would be disrupted.” (Reclaiming Parkland, p. 222)
As we saw in Point 4, on November 24th, Hoover had closed the case. But he had also talked to Acting Attorney General Nicolas Katzenbach that day about getting something out to convince the public Oswald was the sole killer. As we saw, Hoover did this with his makeshift FBI report.
Katzenbach also did this with the famous Katzenbach Memorandum. (Which can be read here.) As one can see, there is evidence that Hoover actually drafted the memo for Katzenbach. It says that the public must be satisfied Oswald was the lone killer and he had no confederates still at large. It does not say Oswald was the lone killer. After all, Ruby had just killed him the day before. How could there be any conclusions reached about the matter in 24 hours? Katzenbach wants to rely on an FBI report to convince the public Knowing that the previous day Hoover had told him he was closing the case already. This memo was sent to the White House, and Katzenbach would later become the Justice Department liaison with the Commission. In fact, he attended their first meeting and encouraged them to accept the FBI report. Which they did not. (Executive Session transcript of 12/5/63)
As the Commission liaison, Katzenbach appointed Justice Department lawyer Howard Willens to recruit assistant counsel to man the Commission. Willens then stayed with the Commission throughout as an administrator and Katzenbach’s eyes and ears there.
In his journal, on March 12, 1964, Willens wrote the following: “I consider the CIA representatives to be among the more competent people in government who I have ever dealt with. They articulate, they are specialists, and they seem to have a broad view of government. This may be, of course because they do not have a special axes (sic) to grind in the Commission’s investigation.”
Recall, former Director Allen Dulles sat on the Commission for ten months. He never revealed the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Richard Helms also was in direct communication with the Commission. He did not reveal the existence of the plots either.
CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton was designated by Helms to be the point person with the Commission on Oswald. Tipped off by Dulles, he rehearsed with the FBI to tell the same story about Oswald’s lack of affiliation with both agencies. (Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy, pgs. 547-48) Today, of course, many informed observers believe that Oswald was an agent provocateur for the CIA and an informant for the FBI. There is ample evidence for both. (See Destiny Betrayed, Chapters 7 and 8, and John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA.) But you will not find any of it in the Warren Report.
As noted in Point 8, Howard Willens hired most of the counselors for the Commission. Surprisingly, many of these lawyers were not criminal attorneys. They had a business background or education e.g. David Belin, Melvin Eisenberg, Wesley Liebeler. But beyond that, by the summer of 1964, many of the senior counselors started to leave. Mainly because they were losing money being away from private practice. To replace them, Willens did a rather odd thing. He began to hire newly minted law school graduates. In other words, lawyers who had no experience in any kind of practice at all. In fact, one of these men, Murray Lauchlicht, had not even graduated from law school when Willens enlisted him. (Philip Shenon, A Cruel and Shocking Act, p. 404) His field of specialty was trusts and estates. When he got to the Commissions offices, Lauchlicht was assigned to complete the biography of Jack Ruby. Another recent law school graduate who had clerked for one year was Lloyd Weinreb. The 24 year old Weinreb was given the job of completing the biography of Oswald. (ibid, p. 405)
Needless to say, these two aspects of the report, the biographies of Oswald and Ruby have come to be suspect since they leave so much pertinent material out. In fact, Burt Griffin told the House Select Committee on Assassinations, senior counsel Leon Hubert left because he did not feel he was getting any support from the Commission administrators, or the intelligence agencies, to understand who Ruby really was. (HSCA, Volume XI, pgs. 268-83) Obviously, someone who had not even graduated law school would not have those kinds of compunctions. Willens probably knew that.
As we have seen from Points 1-3, from the moment that Johnson conjured up the vision of 40 million dead through atomic warfare, Earl Warren was largely marginalized as an investigator. He was further marginalized when he tried to appoint his own Chief Counsel, Warren Olney. He was outmaneuvered by a combination of Hoover, Dulles, Gerald Ford and John McCloy. Not only did they manage to jettison Olney, they installed their own choice, J. Lee Rankin. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, pgs.41-45)
Within this milieu, with no effective leadership, the two most active and dominant commissioners turned out to be Dulles and Ford. (Walt Brown, The Warren Omission, pgs. 83-85) Which is just about the worst thing that could have happened. As we have seen, Dulles was, to be kind, less than forthcoming about both Oswald, and the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. As has been revealed through declassified records, Ford was, from almost the outset, a Commission informant for the FBI. (Breach of Trust, pgs. 42-44)
Later on, in the editing of the final report, Ford did something unconscionable, but quite revealing. In the first draft, the report said that the first wound to Kennedy hit him in the back. Which is accurate. Ford changed this to the bullet hit Kennedy in the neck. (ibid, p. 174) Which reveals that he understood that the public would have a hard time accepting the trajectory of the Single Bullet Theory. When the HSCA made public some of the autopsy photos, it was revealed the bullet did hit Kennedy in the back. Lawyers, like Vincent Bugliosi, call an act like that “consciousness of guilt”.
One of the best kept secrets of the Commission was that all of its members were not on board with the Single Bullet Theory. In fact, as we know today, there was at least one member who was not ready to sign off on the report unless certain objections were in the record. The man who made these objections was Sen. Richard Russell. Sen. John S. Cooper and Rep. Hale Boggs quietly supported him behind the scenes. These three not only had problems with ballistics evidence, they also questioned the FBI version of just who Lee and Marina Oswald actually were. Russell was so disenchanted with the proceedings that he actually wrote a letter of resignation-which he did not send-and he commissioned his own private inquiry. (Reclaiming Parkland, p. 258)
Realizing that Russell was going to demand certain objections be entered into the record at the final meeting, Rankin and Warren did something extraordinarily deceitful. They stage-managed a presentation that featured a female secretary there; but she was not from the official stenography company, Ward and Paul. (McKnight, p. 294) She was, in essence, an actress. Therefore, there is no actual transcript of this meeting where Russell voiced his reservations.
This fact was kept from Russell until 1968. Then researcher Harold Weisberg discovered it. When he alerted Russell to this internal trickery, the senator became the first commissioner to openly break ranks with his cohorts and question what they had done. (ibid, pgs. 296-97) Russell was later joined by Boggs and Cooper. Hale Boggs was quite vocal about the cover-up instituted by Hoover. He said that “Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission.” (Reclaiming Parkland, p. 259)
One of the boldest lies in the Warren Report appears in the Foreword. There, the Commission declares that although it has not been a courtroom procedure, neither has it proceeded “as a prosecutor determined to prove a case.” (p. xiv) No one who has read the report and compared it with the 26 volumes believes this. For the simple reason that, as many critics pointed out, the evidence in the volumes is carefully picked to support the concept of Oswald’s guilt and Ruby acting alone. Sylvia’s Meagher’s masterful Accessories After the Fact, makes this point in almost every chapter. The Commission ignored evidence in its own volumes, or to which it had access, which contradicted its own predetermined prosecutorial conclusions.
A good example, previously mentioned, would be what Gerald Ford did with the back wound. (See Point 10) Another would be the fact that in the entire report–although the Zapruder film is mentioned at times–there is no description of the rapid, rearward movement of Kennedy’s entire body as he is hit at Zapruder frame 313.
Although it was helmed by a Chief Justice who had fought for the rights of the accused, the Commission reversed judicial procedure: Oswald was guilty before the first witness was called. We know this from the outline prepared by Chief Counsel Rankin. On a progress report submitted January 11, 1964, the second subhead reads, “Lee Harvey Oswald as the Assassin of President Kennedy.” The second reads, “Lee Harvey Oswald: Background and Possible Motives.” (Reclaiming Parkland pgs. 250-51) This was three weeks before the hearings began! Clearly, the Commission was arranged at this time as an adversary to Oswald. But there was no defense granted to the defendant. None at all.
This is a point that the Commission again misrepresents in its Foreword. They write that they requested Walter Craig, president of the ABA, to advise whether or not they were abiding by the basic principles of American justice. And he attended hearings and was free to express himself at all times. As Meagher pointed out, this arrangement lasted only from February 27th to March 12th. And not once did Craig make an objection in Oswald’s defense. (Meagher, p. xxix) After this, Craig and his assistants did not participate directly. They only made suggestions. Further, neither Craig nor his assistants were at any of the hearings of the 395 witnesses who did not appear before the Commission, but were deposed by Warren Commission counsel.
As more than one writer has noted, the Nazis at Nuremburg were provided more of a defense than Oswald. This fact alone makes the Warren Report a dubious enterprise.
For two reasons. First, usually, as with congressional hearings, when such a body is assembled, there is a majority and minority counsel to balance out two points of view. That did not happen here. And it was never seriously contemplated. Therefore, as we saw with Russell in Point 11, there was no check on the majority.
Second, a fact finding commission is supposed to find all the facts, or at least a good portion of them. If they do not, then their findings are greatly reduced in validity in direct proportion to what is missing from the record.
To cite what is missing from the Warren Report would take almost another 26 volumes of evidence. But in very important fields, like the medical evidence and autopsy procedures, like Oswald’s associations with American intelligence, as with Ruby’s ties to the Dallas Police and to organized crime, in all these areas, and many more, what the Warren Report left out is more important than what it printed. In fact, there have been entire books written about these subjects-respectively, William Law’s In the Eye of History, John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA, Seth Kantor’s Who was Jack Ruby?-that completely alter the depiction of the portraits drawn of those subjects in the report. And when we get to other specific subjects, like Oswald in New Orleans, or the Clinton/Jackson incident, Mexico City, or the killing of Oswald by Ruby, the Warren Report today is completely and utterly bereft of facts. Therefore, its conclusions are rudderless since they have no reliable scaffolding.
Conclusion from Plaque One: The Warren Commission was hopelessly biased against Oswald from its inception. Actually before its inception, as we have seen with he cases of Warren, Hoover and Katzenbach. And since each of those men had an integral role to play in the formation and direction of the Commission, the enterprise was doomed from the start. As a criminal investigation, as a prosecutor’s case, and as a fact finding inquiry. The Commission, in all regards, was like the Leaning Tower of Pisa: structurally unsound at its base. Therefore, all of its main tenets, as we shall see, were destined to be specious.
As we have seen in Plaque 1, since there was no internal check on it, and no rules of evidence in play, the Warren Commission was essentially a prosecution run amok. And when a prosecutor knows he can do just about anything he wants, he will fiddle with the evidence. We will now list several examples where the Commission altered, discounted, or failed to present important exculpatory evidence in the case against Oswald.
Commission counsel Specter had a difficult job. He had to camouflage the medical evidence in the JFK case to minimize the indications of a conspiracy. Sibert and O’Neill were two FBI agents assigned by Hoover to compile a report on Kennedy’s autopsy. Their report and observations would have created insurmountable problems for Specter. Among other things, they maintained that the back wound was actually in the back and not the neck, that this wound did not transit the body, and it entered at a 45-degree angle, which would make it impossible to exit the throat. Years later, when shown the back of the head photos of President Kennedy – which depict no hole, neatly combed hair, and an intact scalp – they both said this was not at all what they recalled. For example, O’Neill and Sibert both recalled a large gaping wound in the back of the skull. Which clearly suggests a shot from the front. (William Matson Law, In the Eye of History, pgs. 168, 245) Neither man was called as a witness, and their report is not in the 26 volumes of evidence appended to the Warren Report. Specter told Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin that Sibert made no contemporaneous notes and O’Neill destroyed his. These are both false. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 121) But they allowed a cover for prosecutor Specter to dispense with evidence that would have vitiated both the Single Bullet Theory and the idea that all shots came from the back.
Burkley was an important witness. Not just because he was the president’s personal physician. But because he was the one doctor who was present at both Parkland Hospital and Bethesda Medical Center. (See Roger Feinman’s online book, The Signal and the Noise, Chapter 8.) As Feinman details, Burkley was in the room before Malcolm Perry made his incision for a tracheotomy. Therefore, he likely saw the throat wound before it was slit. But further, on his death certificate, he placed the back wound at the level of the third thoracic vertebra, which would appear to make the trajectory through the throat – and the Single Bullet Theory – quite improbable. (ibid) He also signed the autopsy descriptive sheet as “verified”. This also placed the back wound low (click here). The third thoracic vertebra is about 4-6 inches below the point at which the shoulders meet the neck. As we saw in Plaque One, Gerald Ford revised a draft of the Warren Report to read that the bullet went through the neck, not the back. Burkley’s death certificate would have seriously undermined Ford’s revision.
How troublesome of a witness could Burkley have been? In 1977, his attorney contacted Richard Sprague, then Chief Counsel of the HSCA. Sprague’s March 18th memo reads that Burkley “. . . had never been interviewed and that he has information in the Kennedy assassination indicating others besides Oswald must have participated.” Later, author Henry Hurt wrote that “. . . in 1982 Dr. Burkley told the author in a telephone conversation that he believed that President Kennedy’s assassination was the result of a conspiracy.” (Hurt, Reasonable Doubt , p. 49)
This press conference was particularly troublesome for the official story. Among other things, Dr. Malcolm Perry said three times that the throat wound appeared to be an entrance wound. This would indicate a shot from the front, and therefore a second assassin. Therefore, on page 90 of the Warren Report, a description of Perry’s comments appears which is simply not honest. The report says that Perry answered a series of hypotheticals, he explained how a variety of possibilities could account for JFK’s wounds, and he demonstrated how a single bullet could have caused all of the wounds in the president. This is, at best, an exaggeration.
On the next page, quoting a newspaper account, the report states that Perry said it was “possible” the neck wound was one of entrance. Perry never said this. And the fact that the report quotes a newspaper account and not the transcript gives the game away. Clearly, the report is trying to negate Perry’s same day evidence of his work on the throat wound, since he had the best view of this wound (click here). In modern parlance, this is called after-the-fact damage control. Attorneys searching for the truth in a murder case should not be participating in such an exercise.
Considering the fact that the report is over 800 pages long, this is amazing. Why? Because most people consider Commission Exhibit (CE) 399 one of the most important – if not the most important – piece of evidence in the case. Wright was the man who handed this exhibit over to the Secret Service. This should have made him a key witness in the chain of possession of this bullet. Especially since CE 399 is the fulcrum of the Warren Report. Sometimes called the Magic Bullet, Specter said this projectile went through both Kennedy and Governor Connally making seven wounds and smashing two bones. Without this remarkable bullet path, and without this nearly intact bullet, the wounds necessitate too many bullets to accommodate Specter’s case. In other words, there was a second assassin. So Specter did all he could to try and make the wild ride of CE 399 credible.
This included eliminating Wright from the report. Why? Because Wright maintained that he did not turn over CE 399 to the Secret Service that day. While describing what he did to author Josiah Thompson, Thompson held up a photo of CE 399 for Wright to inspect. Wright immediately responded that this was not the bullet he gave to the Secret Service. CE 399 is a copper-coated, round-nosed, military jacketed projectile. Wright said that he gave the Secret Service a lead-colored, sharp-nosed, hunting round. (Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas, p. 175)
Needless to say, with that testimony, in any kind of true legal proceeding, the defense would have moved for a mistrial.
After the Warren Commission was formed, pathologists James Humes and Thornton Boswell met with Specter about 8-10 times. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 119) Specter then arranged a meeting between a young medical artist, Harold Rydberg, and the two pathologists. To this day, Rydberg does not understand why he was chosen to do the medical illustrations for the Warren Commission. (Law, In the Eye of History, p. 293) He had only been studying for about a year. There were vastly more experienced artists available in the area.
But further, when Humes and Boswell showed up, they had nothing with them: no pictures, no X-rays, no official measurements. Therefore, they verbally told Rydberg about Kennedy’s wounds from memory. Rydberg later deduced that this was done so that no paper trail existed. For the drawings are not done in accordance with the evidence. First, presaging Gerald Ford, the wound in Kennedy’s back is moved up into his neck. Then a slightly downward, straight-line flight path links this fictional neck placement with the throat wound. (See WC, Vol. 16, CE 385, 388)
The head wound is also wrong. Humes and Boswell placed Kennedy’s head in a much more anteflexed position than the Zapruder film shows. In fact, Josiah Thompson exposed this as a lie when he juxtaposed the Rydberg drawing with a frame from the film. (Thompson, p. 111) Beyond that, the Rydberg drawing of the head wound shows much of the skull bone intact between the entrance, low in the rear skull, and the exit, on the right side above the ear. Yet, in Boswell’s face sheet, he described a gaping 10 by 17 cm. defect near the top of Kennedy’s skull. When Boswell testified, no one asked him why there was a difference between what he told Rydberg and what he wrote on his face sheet. (WC Vol. 2, p. 376 ff)
According to his affidavit, Temple Ford Bowley arrived at the scene of the murder of Officer Tippit when the policeman was already on the ground and appeared dead to him. The key point he makes there is that he looked at his watch and it said 1:10 PM. (Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 247)
This is important because the last known witness to see Oswald before the Tippit shooting was Earlene Roberts, his landlady. She saw him through her window. He was outside waiting for a bus – which was going the opposite direction of 10th and Patton, the scene of the Tippit murder. But she pegged the time at 1:04. (ibid, p. 244) It is simply not credible that Oswald could have walked about 9/10 of a mile in six minutes. Or less. Because Bowley told author Joe McBride that when he arrived at he scene, there were already spectators milling around Tippit’s car.
Bowley’s name is not in the index to the Warren Report, and there is no evidence that the Commission interviewed him.
Jim Garrison thought the most important witness to the murder of Tippit was Acquilla Clemons. (On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 197) She said that she saw two men at the scene. One was short and chunky and armed with a gun she saw him reload. The other man was tall and thin. They were in communication with each other, and the shorter man was directed to run the other way from the scene as the taller man. (McBride, p. 492)
Barry Ernest interviewed another woman named Mrs. Higgins. She lived a few doors down from the scene. When she heard the shots she ran out the front door to look and saw Tippit lying in the street. She caught a glimpse of a man running from the scene with a handgun. She told Barry the man was not Oswald. She also said the time was 1:06. (The Girl on the Stairs, E book version, p. 59)
Defenders of the Commission have tried to undermine Higgins by saying Tippit radioed in at 1:08. As Hasan Yusuf has pointed out, this depends on which of the radio chronologies submitted to the Warren Commission one picks to use. For in the final version of the radio log, submitted by the FBI, Tippit’s last call in appears to be at about 1:05. (CE 1974, p. 45)
How shoddy is the Warren Commission’s chronology of Tippit’s murder?
They say Tippit was killed at about 1:15 PM. (WR, p. 165) Yet this is the time he was pronounced dead— at Methodist Hospital! Realizing they had a problem, they went to a secondary FBI record. The Bureau had submitted a typed memo based on the records at Hughes Funeral Home. In that typed FBI memo, it said Tippit was pronounced dead at Methodist Hospital at 1: 25.
There is no attempt in the report to reconcile this memo with the actual hospital record. (Click here and scroll down).
One of the first things any high profile, public murder case should do is secure any and all audio or video recordings at the scene. Those exhibits should then be gone over minute by minute in order to secure any important evidence. This was not done in this case. Or if it was done, either the Warren Commission or the FBI failed to make all the results part of the record.
On the afternoon of the assassination, Channel 8 in Dallas showed a film by station photographer Ron Reiland. Taken at the scene of the Tippit murder, it depicted a policeman opening and showing a billfold to an FBI agent. That the Commission never secured this film for examination speaks reams about its performance. Because, years later, James Hosty revealed in his book Assignment Oswald that fellow FBI agent Bob Barrett told him that the wallet contained ID for Oswald and Alek Hidell! The problem with this is that the Warren Report tells us that the police confiscated Oswald’s wallet and ID in a car transporting him to city hall. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 101-102) This creates a huge problem for the official story. For it clearly suggests that the DPD deep-sixed the wallet from the Tippit scene to escape the implication that 1.) Someone planted Oswald’s ID at the Tippit scene 2.) Because–as Bowley, Clemmons, and Higgins indicate–Oswald was not there.
This is the name given to a woman in a trench coat, with a scarf over her head. She is positioned on the grass opposite the grassy knoll, near prominent witnesses Charles Brehm, Jean Hill and Mary Moorman. In other words, to Kennedy’s left. She appears in several films and photographs e.g. the Zapruder film, Muchmore film and Bronson film. The fact that she appears in all of those films and the Commission never appeared to notice her is quite puzzling. But it is made even more so by the following: She has in her hand what appears to be either a still camera or movie camera. And she was using it during the assassination. Because of her location–opposite of Abraham Zapruder–what is on that film may be of the utmost importance. Because you could have a film taken to match up with Abraham Zapruder’s from an opposite angle. It may even contain views of possible assassins atop the knoll.
There is no evidence that the Commission ever made an attempt to track this witness down through any of its investigative agencies.
Victoria Adams was employed at the Texas School Book Depository on the day of the assassination. Within seconds after hearing the shots, she ran out her office door and down the stairs. Her testimony was always immutable: she neither heard nor saw anyone on those stairs. This posed a serious problem for the Commission. Because their scenario necessitated Oswald tearing down those same stairs right after he took the shots. If Adams did not see or hear him, this clearly indicated Oswald was not on the sixth floor at the time of the shooting.
So the Commission went about trying to weaken and obfuscate her testimony. David Belin asked her to locate where she stopped on the first floor when she descended. But as Barry Ernest discovered, this exhibit, CE 496, does not include a map of the first floor. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 93) The report says she left her office within a minute of the shooting, when she actually left within a few seconds. (ibid) The Commission then failed to question her corroborating witness Sandy Styles, the girl who followed her out and down the stairs. They then buried a document written by her boss, Dorothy Garner, which further substantiated the fact that she was on the stairs within a few seconds of the shooting. (ibid)
Adams put a spear through the heart of the Commission’s case. The Commission made sure it didn’t reach that far.
There is more than one example of this. (See Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 232-33) But a vivid and memorable example is what David Belin did with sheriff’s deputy Roger Craig. Craig told author Barry Ernest that when he examined his testimony in the Commission volumes, it was altered 14 times. Craig told Barry the following:
“When Belin interrogated me – he would ask me questions and, whenever an important question would come up – he would have to know the answer beforehand. He would turn off the recorder and instruct the stenographer to stop taking notes. Then he would ask for the question, and if the answer satisfied him, he would turn the recorder back on, instruct the stenographer to start writing again, and he would ask me the same question and I would answer it.
However, while the recorder was off, if the answer did not satisfy him, he would turn the recorder back on and instruct the stenographer to start writing again and then he would ask me a completely different question.” Craig added that none of these interruptions were noted in the transcript entered in the Commission volumes. (The Girl on the Stairs, E book version, p.95)
There was no previous firearms violence in Oswald’s past to serve as behavioral precedent for the murders of Kennedy and Tippit. General Edwin Walker had been shot at in April of 1963. The case was unsolved by the Dallas Police as of November, and Oswald had never even been a suspect. In fact, his name appears to have never even been brought up. But if one turns to the Warren Report, one will see that the Commission uses the Walker incident to “indicate that in spite of the belief among those who knew him that he was apparently not dangerous, Oswald did not lack the determination and other traits required to carry out a carefully planned killing of another human being…” (WR, p. 406)
There is one major problem with this verdict (among others). If Oswald misfired at Walker, it would have to have been done with a rifle different than the one the Commission says he used in Dealey Plaza. Because the projectile recovered from the Walker home was described by the Dallas Police as being a steel-jacketed 30.06 bullet. (See Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 49 and the General Offense Report of 4/10/63 filed by officers Van Cleave and McElroy.)
There is no evidence Oswald ever had this kind of rifle. And the Warren Report never notes this discrepancy in the ammunition used in the Walker shooting versus the Kennedy murder.
This section could go on and on and on. Because the record of evidence manipulation by the Commission and its agents is so voluminous as to be book length. But what this plaque does is show that the bias demonstrated in Plaque 1 was then actively implemented by the Warren Commission. To the point that it accepted altered exhibits, allowed testimony to be censored and screened, and deep-sixed important testimony and evidence it did not want to entertain.
Therefore, the Commission can be shown to be untrustworthy in its presentation of facts and evidence. Especially revealing is that none of this seems random or careless. All of these alterations point in one direction: to incriminate Oswald. As New York Homicide chief Robert Tanenbaum once said about the Warren Commission, he was taken aback by the amount of exculpatory evidence that the Warren Report left out, and also the major problems with the breaks in the evidentiary trail. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 65) What makes this even more shocking is that every single member of the Commission was a lawyer, as was every staff member. In their almost messianic zeal to convict Oswald, they all seem to have utterly forgotten about the rules of evidence and the canon of legal ethics.
In Plaque 1, we showed the insurmountable bias the Warren Commission had against Oswald at the very start. Nor was there a minority to check the excesses of a majority fact finding function. The last did not exist because what constituted the minority; Sen. Russell, Rep. Boggs, Sen. Cooper; were completely marginalized. In fact, we now have this in writing. On his blog, Commission administrator Howard Willens, has posted his diary. In his discussion of a Secret Service matter, Willens writes the following. “Apparently at least Congressman Ford and Mr. Dulles felt that PRS is not adequate to do the job. The two remaining members of the Commission, the Chief Justice and Mr. McCloy disagreed on this issue.” (italics added) Can it be more clear? If the remaining members besides Dulles and Ford were Warren and McCloy, then for Willens, the Commission did not include Russell, Boggs and Cooper. That takes marginalization as far as it can be taken. There simply was no internal check on the majority who were hell bent on railroading Oswald.
In Plaque 2, we showed that the Commission, because of its innate bias, would then manipulate, discount or eliminate evidence. We will now show how the evidentiary record was fabricated to make Oswald into something he was not: an assassin.
The SR 71 was the fastest plane that ever flew. It achieved speeds up to, and over, Mach III. Unfortunately for the Warren Report, the post office never used this plane to carry mail from one city to another.
The Warren Report tells us that Oswald mailed his money order for a rifle on March 12, 1963. It then tells us that the money order arrived at Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago and was deposited at its bank the next day. (WR, p. 119) This is how Oswald allegedly ordered the rifle that killed Kennedy.
Chicago is about 700 miles from Dallas. Recall, 1963 was way before the advent of computer technology for the post office. It was even before the advent of zip codes. But we are to believe the following: The USPS picked up a money order from a mailbox. They then transported it to the nearest post office. There, it was sorted and shipped out to the airport. It flew to Chicago. It was picked up at the airport there and driven to the main post office. There, it was sorted, placed on a truck and driven to the regional post office. It was then given to a route carrier and he delivered it to Klein’s. After its arrival at Klein’s it was then sorted out according to four categories of origin (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 451) Klein’s then delivered it to their financial repository, the first National Bank of Chicago. There it was deposited in Klein’s account.
The Warren Report says that all of this happened in a less than 24 hour period. To which we reply with one word: Really?
This money order was made out for $21.45. Robert Wilmouth was a Vice-President of the First National Bank of Chicago. According to him, the money order should have had four separate stamps on it as it progressed through his bank and the Federal Reserve system. (ibid)
If such was the case, when one turns to look at this money order, one is surprised at its appearance. (See Volume 17, pgs. 677-78) For it bears none of the markings described by Wilmouth. The only stamp on it is the one prepared by Klein’s for initial deposit. Needless to say, Wilmouth did not testify before the Commission.
But further, if one looks in the Commission volumes for other checks deposited by Oswald, e.g. from Leslie Welding, Reily Coffee, and Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, one will see that these are properly stamped. (See, for example, Vol. 24 pgs. 886-90)
From the markings on the envelope, the money order was mailed prior to 10:30 AM on March 12, 1963. The problem is that Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, where Oswald was working at the time, recorded each assignment an employee did during the day. They also recorded how much time he spent on each assignment. When one checks on his assignment sheet for March 12th, one will see that Oswald was continually busy from 8:00 AM until 12:15 PM. (Commission Exhibit 1855, Vol. 23, p. 605) Further, as Gil Jesus has discovered, the HSCA inquiry said the post office where Oswald bought the money order from opened at 8:00 AM. (Box 50, HSCA Segregated CIA files.)
So when did Oswald mail the money order? Even though Oswald’s time sheet is in the volumes, the Warren Report does not point out this discrepancy. Let alone explain it.
It’s hard to believe but it appears to be true. In its ten-month investigation, the Warren Commission, the FBI, the Secret Service, and the post office could never produce a single postal employee who gave, or even witnessed the transfer of the rifle to Oswald. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 62, Armstrong, p. 477) In fact, there is no evidence that Oswald ever actually picked up this rifle at the post office. For instance we don’t even know the day on which the rifle was retrieved.
Maybe that is because the transaction should not have occurred the way the Commission says it did. The rifle was ordered in the name of A. Hidell. But the post office box it arrived at was in the name of Lee Oswald. (ibid) Postal regulations at the time dictated that if a piece of merchandise addressed to one person arrived at a different person’s box; which was the case here; it was to be returned to the sender. Therefore, this rifle should have never gotten to Oswald’s box.
The Commission had an ingenious way to get around this problem. They wrote that the portion of the postal application Oswald made out listing others who could pick up merchandise at his box was thrown out after the box was closed in May. (WR, p. 121) The report says this was done in accordance with postal rules. Yet, if this was so, why did the post office not discard his application for his New Orleans box?
Because the Commission was lying. Stewart Galanor wrote the post office in 1966 and asked how long post office box applications were kept in 1963. The answer was for two years after the box was closed.
This one is shocking even for the Warren Commission. The Commission says that Oswald ordered a 36-inch, 5.5 pound Mannlicher Carcano carbine rifle. But this is not the rifle entered into evidence by the Dallas Police. That rifle is a 40.2 inch, 7.5 pound Mannlicher Carcano short rifle. Again, this discrepancy is never noted by the Commission nor is it in the Warren Report. (Armstrong, p. 477)
This issue is so disturbing for Commission defenders that they now say that Klein’s shipped Oswald the wrong rifle because they were out of the 36 inch carbine. To which the reply must be: And they never advised him of this first? When a mail order house is out of a product, they usually tell the customer that, and ask him if he wishes to change the order. At least that is this writer’s experience. There is no evidence or testimony in the record that any such thing happened in this case. Even in interviews of the executives from Klein’s.
There is evidence the Warren Commission knew this was a serious problem. This is why they entered into the record an irrelevant page from the November, 1963 issue of Field and Stream. This issue did carry an ad for the 40 inch rifle. But the magazine the commission decided Oswald ordered the rifle from was the February 1963 issue of American Rifleman. (Armstrong, p. 477, WC Vol. 20, p. 174)
As we showed in Plaque 2, O. P. Wright’s name is not in the Warren Report. But Arlen Specter did question Darrell Tomlinson. He was the hospital employee who recovered CE 399 and gave it to Wright. In the reports of the questioning of Tomlinson, and in his Warren Commission testimony, there is no evidence that Specter ever showed Tomlinson CE 399. (WC Vol. 6, pgs. 128-34)
To say this is highly irregular is soft-pedaling it. Wright and Tomlinson are the two men who recovered CE 399 and started it on its journey to the Secret Service and then the FBI lab that night. To not ask the two men who began the chain of possession; in fact, to totally ignore one of them; to certify their exhibit is more than stunning. It invites suspicion. The next point illustrates why.
This was a mistake of the first order. Because it was later discovered that the FBI fabricated evidence to cover up the falsification of CE 399. As Gary Aguilar and Josiah Thompson later discovered, the man who the FBI said got identifications of CE 399 from Wright and Tomlinson was agent Bardwell Odum. According to Commission Exhibit 2011, when Odum showed the bullet to these two hospital employees, their reply was it “appears to be the same one” but they could not “positively identify it.” (The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 282)
That in itself was a nebulous reply to an important question. But it turned out that it concealed something even worse. For when Aguilar and Thompson visited Odum and asked him about this identification, he denied it ever happened. He said he never showed any bullet to any hospital employees concerning the Kennedy assassination. And if he did he would have recalled it. Because he knew Wright and he also would have filed his own report on it. Which he did not. (ibid, p. 284)
There was another lie Hoover told about CE 399. He said that agent Elmer Lee Todd initialed the bullet. (WC Vol 24, p. 412) This turned out to be false. The Commission never examined the exhibit to see if Todd’s initials are on the bullet. Many years later, researcher John Hunt did so. He found they were not there (click here).
But beyond that, Hunt’s work with Frazier’s records revealed something perhaps even more disturbing. Todd wrote that he got the bullet from Secret Service Chief Jim Rowley at 8:50 PM. He then drove it to Frazier at the FBI lab. But Frazier’s work records say that he received the “stretcher bullet” at 7:30. How could he have done so if Todd was not there yet? (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 227)
From this evidence, either CE 399 was substituted or there were two bullets delivered, and one was made to disappear. Either way, the Commission fell for a phony story by Hoover (click here).
The Commission tells us that there were three shells found near the sixth floor window, the so-called “sniper’s nest.” But one of these shells, CE 543, could not have been fired that day. As ballistics expert Howard Donahue has noted, this shell could not have been used to fire a rifle that day. For the rifle would not have worked properly. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 69) It also contains three sets of identifying marks which reveal it had been loaded and extracted three times before. It also has marks on it from the magazine follower. But the magazine follower only marks the last cartridge in a clip. Which this was not. (Thompson, p. 145)
Historian Michael Kurtz consulted with forensic pathologist Forest Chapman about this exhibit. He then wrote that the shell “lacks the characteristic indentation on the side made by the firing chamber of Oswald’s rifle.” (Kurtz, Crime of the Century, second edition, p. 51) Chapman concluded that CE 543 was probably dry loaded. The pathologist noted “CE 543 had a deeper and more concave indentation on its base…where the firing pin strikes the case. Only empty cases exhibit such characteristics.” (ibid, p. 52)
This was certified through experimentation by British researcher Chris Mills. He purchased a Mannlicher Carcano and then experimented repeatedly. The only way he achieved a similar denting effect was by using empty shells. And then the effect only appeared infrequently. Mills concluded this denting effect could only occur with an empty case that had been previously fired, and then only on occasion. (op cit. DiEugenio, p. 69)
The Commission tells us that Oswald carried a rifle to work the day of the assassination in a long brown bag. Wesley Frazier and his sister said the bag was carried by Oswald under his arm. The problems with this story are manifold. For instance, there is no photo of this bag in situ taken by the Dallas Police. The eventual paper bag produced by the police had no traces of oil or grease on it even though the rifle had been soaked in a lubricant called Cosmoline for storage purposes.(DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 177) Though the rifle had to be dissembled to fit under Oswald’s armpit, the FBI found no bulges or creases in the paper.
Further, after a long and detailed analysis by Pat Speer, it appears that the bag in evidence did not match the Depository paper samples. (ibid, p. 179) Further, the police did not officially photograph the alleged gun sack until November 26th!
All this strongly indicates that the bag the police brought outside the depository is not the same one in evidence today. (Click here for proof).
It was now necessary to place Oswald on the sixth floor in proximity to the southeast window. The Commission’s agents therefore got several people to alter their testimony. For instance, Harold Norman was on the fifth floor that day. He said nothing about hearing shells drop above him in his first FBI interview. Coaxed along by Secret Service agent Elmer Moore, he now vividly recalled shell casings dropping for a convenient three times.(DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 30-31.)
In his first DPD and FBI interviews, Depository worker Charles Givens said he had seen Oswald on the first floor lunchroom at about 11:50 AM, after he had sent up an elevator for him while they were working on the sixth floor. But when he testified before the Commission, Givens now added something completely new. Now he said that he forgot his cigarettes and went up to the sixth floor for them. There he conveniently saw Oswald near the southeast window. As many researchers, including Sylvia Meagher and Pat Speer have shown, it’s pretty clear that the Dallas Police, specifically, Lt. Revill got Givens to change his story. The Commission, which was aware of the switch, accepted the revised version. (ibid, p. 98).
Carolyn Arnold was a secretary working in the depository. She was interviewed by the FBI after the assassination. She told them she saw Oswald on the first floor at about 12:25. Years later, reporter Earl Golz showed her what the FBI had written about her. She was shocked. They had altered her statement to read that she saw him “a few minutes before 12:15 PM.” (ibid, p. 96)
With Oswald now transported up to the sixth floor, there was only Marina Oswald left. In her first Secret Service interviews, she had told the agents she had never seen a rifle with a scope. In fact, she did not even know such rifles existed. Which created a problem. Because the weapon in question did have a scope. Threatened with deportation, when she arrived for her Warren Commission testimony she was confronted with the scoped rifle. She now proclaimed “This is the fateful rifle of Lee Oswald.” (ibid, pgs.62- 63)
This weapon was shipped through the Railroad Express Agency. REA was a forerunner to private mail companies like Federal Express. When one looks at the evidence exhibits in the Warren Report one will see something strange. There is no evidence that Oswald ever picked up this revolver. In fact, the evidence trail stops right there. That is, at the point one would report to REA, show some ID, pay for the weapon, sign off on a receipt, and get a matching one. (WR, p. 173)
In fact, from the evidence adduced in the report, it does not even appear that the FBI visited REA. Which would be unfathomable. It is more likely they did visit and encountered the same situation there as at the post office with the rifle: No receipts, or witnesses, to attest to the pick-up.
As many have noted, including Jim Garrison, the Dallas Police could not get the bullets expended in the Tippit case to match the alleged handgun used. (Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 199) They only sent one bullet to Washington, even though four were fired at Tippit. Further, on the day of the murder, Dallas police made out an inventory of evidence at the scene. That inventory did not include cartridge cases of any kind. (ibid, p. 200) These were not added until six days after the police got a report that he FBI could not match the bullets to the weapon.
Just as odd: the shell casings do not match the bullets. Three of the bullets were copper coated and made by Winchester. One bullet was lead colored and made by Remington. But two of the cartridges were from Winchester and two were made by Remington. (ibid, p. 201)
There is evidence that the shells found at the scene are not those in evidence. Sgt. Gerald Hill allegedly instructed Officer J. M. Poe to mark two of the shells. When Poe examined them for the Commission, he could not detect his markings on the shells. (ibid)
As Garrison suggested, this sorry trail indicates that once the police could not get a match for the bullets, they then fired the handgun to make sure they had a match for the shells. Even if they were not the same ones found at the scene. The Commission accepted this.
The Warren Commission misrepresented its own evidence. As we saw in Plaque 1, from its inception, the Commission had an overwhelming bias against Lee Oswald. And since Oswald was given no defense, and there were no restraints placed upon its bias, the Commission became a runaway prosecution. One which altered testimony and evidence, and accepted the most outlandish proclamations without crosschecking them.
There is actually internal documentary evidence to prove this point. In late April of 1964, staff administrator Norman Redlich wrote a memo to Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin. Discovered by researcher David Josephs, it is a startling letter, one which shows that the Commission literally made up its case as it went along. In discussing the three shot scenario, Redlich is still maintaining that all three shots hit targets: the first into Kennedy, the second into Gov. Connally, and the last into Kennedy’s skull. Yet, this will not be what the Warren Report concludes.
But Redlich also writes that “As our investigation now stands, however, we have not shown that these events could possibly have occurred in the manner suggested above.” He also writes that the first shot was probably fired at Zapruder frame 190. This was also changed in the final report since it would have necessitated firing through the branches of an oak tree. He concludes with this: “I should add that the facts which we now have in our possession, submitted to us in separate reports from the FBI and Secret Service are totally incorrect, and if left uncorrected will present a completely misleading picture.”
The problem is this: the FBI and Secret Service were the two prime sources of information for the Commission. (WR, p. xii) Responsible for about 90% of the raw material they had. If these were “incorrect,” then what would the Commission do to “correct” them?
This memo can be read here.
With what is known about the medical evidence in the JFK case today, looking back at what the Warren Commission did with it in 1964 is almost staggering. Today, with the work of writers like Gary Aguilar, David Mantik, Milicent Cranor, William Law, Pat Speer, and Cyril Wecht, no objective person can deny that something went seriously wrong at the Kennedy autopsy in Bethesda, Maryland. In light of that, the work that the Commission did with this evidence in ’64 needs to be analyzed to appreciate just how careful Arlen Specter was in navigating a minefield.
This fact is unbelievable. In any high profile homicide case in which the victim is killed by a bullet wound, it is standard procedure to track the trajectory of the fatal wound through the body. This has to be done in order to trace the bullet path, to test if the wound is a transiting one, and to note where it entered and exited. All of this information would be crucial as forensic evidence during a legal proceeding.
The problem is that the Warren Commission was not at all forensic, nor was it a legal proceeding. It was not even a respectable fact finding commission. Shockingly, outside of printing some primary documents, the medical aspects of this case are dealt with in just seven pages in the Warren Report. (pgs. 85-92) In that section, it is not revealed why the head wound was not sectioned. In fact, the report does not even admit there was no sectioning of the brain. In Volume II of the Commission evidence, Arlen Specter never brings up the lack of sectioning of the brain in his examination of James Humes.
And to add further to the incredulity, the supplemental report to the autopsy, which deals with the skull wound, also does not admit there was no sectioning. (See WR pgs. 544-45)
In that supplemental report, it says that after formalin fixation, Kennedy’s brain weighed 1500 grams. (WR, p. 544) There is no comment on this in the 800 pages of the Warren Report. There should have been much comment about it. Why? Because the average weight of a brain for a 40-49 year old man is 1350 grams. Even allowing for the formalin fixing, Kennedy’s brain weight has more volume than it should.
Which is surprising considering the reports on the condition of the brain. FBI agent Frank O’Neill said half the brain was gone and a significant portion was missing from the rear. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 137) Dr. Thornton Boswell, Humes’ fellow pathologist, said about a third of the brain was missing. Humes himself said about 2/3 of the cerebrum was gone. (ibid) Floyd Reibe, a photographic assistant, said only about half the brain was left when he saw it removed. Jim Sibert, O’Neill’s fellow FBI agent at the autopsy said, “you look at a picture, an anatomical picture of a brain and it’s all there; there was nothing like that.” (ibid) The list of witnesses to how disrupted the brain was could go on and on.
The point is, given all this testimony, plus what we see happening in the Zapruder film–a terrific head explosion, with matter ejecting high into the air; how could the volume of the brain be what it is reported as? That is, larger than normal.
If you can believe it, and you can by now, in the entire examination of James Humes, Arlen Specter never even surfaced the issue of the extraordinary weight of the brain. (WC Vol. II, pgs. 348-376) Neither did it come up in the examinations of assistants Thornton Boswell or Pierre Finck. (ibid, pgs. 376-84) Since it was in the record for all concerned to see, that fact clearly suggests deliberate avoidance.
As noted in point 41, Kennedy’s fatal skull wound was not sectioned. Neither was the other wound the Commission says he sustained, the wound to his back. (Which as we saw, Gerald Ford transferred to his neck.) Again, this has to be the first, perhaps only, high profile murder case by gunfire, in which neither wound sustained by the victim was tracked.
In the examinations of Humes, Boswell, and Pierre Finck, this question is never brought up by Specter. That is: Why did none of the doctors dissect the track of this back wound. Again, this was crucial in determining directionality, if the wound was a transiting one, and if it was, points of entrance and exit. Because there has been so much debate about the nature of this wound, in retrospect, this was a key failing of an autopsy procedure which many have called, one of the worst ever. And that includes Dr. Michael Baden of the HSCA. (DiEugenio, op. cit, p. 114)
The reason Specter never asked why finally surfaced in 1969 at the trial of Clay Shaw in New Orleans. Called as a witness by Shaw’s defense team, under cross-examination by assistant DA Al Oser, Finck exposed much of the secrecy and subterfuge around the autopsy.
Finck revealed that the three autopsy doctors were not really in charge. He said that there were a number of military officers there; a fact which Humes covered up in his Commission testimony; and they actually limited what the doctors were doing. (See James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 300) To the point that a frustrated Humes asked, “Who is in charge here?” An Army General then replied, “I am.” (ibid)
When Oser tried to get Finck to answer the question Specter had deliberately ignored–namely why was the back wound not tracked–Finck clearly did not want to answer the question. Oser had to pose the query eight times. He even had to ask the judge to direct the witness to reply. Finck finally said, “As I recall I was told not to but I don’t remember by whom.” (ibid, p. 302) One can imagine the impact that confession would have had if it had been printed in the Warren Report. The obvious question then would have been: Why did certain people in the autopsy room not want the back wound dissected? Specter was sure to avoid that Pandora’s Box.
As Walt Brown notes in his book, The Warren Omission, Specter asked Boswell a total of 14 questions. When one subtracts the formalities, like tracing his education, that number is reduced to 8. (WC, Vol. II, p. 377)
Which is shocking. Because, for instance, of the controversy surrounding the face sheet which he allegedly prepared. That sheet places the posterior back wound well down into the back. In fact, in a place which corresponds to the evidence of the blood and holes in Kennedy’s back and shirt. It also allows for a rather large wound in the skull. This wound is not visible in either the autopsy photos or x-rays.
To ask such a key witness, who had such crucial information, just 8 relevant questions tells us what we need to know about Arlen Specter and his intentions as attorney for the Warren Commission. He was on a mission to conceal, not reveal.
In Volume II of the Commission volumes, James Humes made some puzzling and disturbing comments.
In responding to comments by Sen. John Cooper about determining the angle of the bullets from the Texas School Book Depository for the head shot, he said that this could not be done with accuracy, since the exit hole was too broad. But yet, this was not the question. The question was if he could determine the angle from the position Kennedy was in when he was struck. (p. 360) According to the Commission, they knew where this shot was fired from, and Humes indicated where it struck on the rear of the skull. (See Vol. 2, p. 351)
When Allen Dulles then tried to nail the location down by asking if the bullet was inconsistent with a shot from either behind or from the side, Humes made a reply that is mysterious to this day. He said, “Scientifically, sir, it is impossible for it to have been fired from other than behind. Or to have exited from other than behind.” (ibid, italics added) If the bullet exited from behind it was fired from the front. Stunningly, no one asked him to clarify what he meant by this. In fact, the next question, from John McCloy, was if he thought the head wound was a lethal one. Recall, the Commission had seen the Zapruder film several times.
As some have said, you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.
James Humes originally stated that the reason he burned the first draft of his autopsy report was because he did not want the blood stained report to come into the possession of some cheap souvenir hunter. (WC, Vol. II p. 373)
Over three decades later, in 1996, under questioning by Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn of the Assassination Records Review Board, this story fell apart. Because Gunn honed in on the fact that the report was written in the privacy of his own home. It is hard to believe that Humes did not wash up before he left the morgue. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 165)
But further, it was revealed that Humes also burned his unsoiled notes along with the first draft. Deeply agitated, and now outside the friendly patty cake of Specter’s cooperation, Humes began to come unglued. He offered up the startling excuse that, “it was my own materials.” (ibid)
This leaves two problems. First, what was the real reason Humes burned his report? Second, if he burned his notes, then how does one compare what is in the report with what it is supposed to be based upon?
On January 21, 1964, Commissioner John McCloy asked J. Lee Rankin if the Commission had all the autopsy materials, including color photographs, in their offices. Rankin replied that yes they did. (See p. 36 of transcript) But according to Warren Commission historian Gerald McKnight, this information was kept hidden from most all of the Commission staff. (McKnight, p.171) The exception being Specter who was shown a photo by Secret Service agent Elmer Moore, Earl Warren’s “bodyguard.” (Specter alluded to this at Cyril Wecht’s Duquesne Symposium in 2003)
Rankin’s reply to McCloy is disturbing. Because at almost every opportunity in the intervening decades, the Commissioners and counsel had denied they had the materials. But further, they tried to say they did not have them because the Kennedy family denied them access. This was simply not possible. Because these materials, including photos and x-rays, were in the possession–and under the control–of the Secret Service at that time. Which is how Moore had them. So the Commission had to have gotten them from the Secret Service.
The Harper fragment is a crucial piece of forensic evidence. It was named after Billy Harper, the person who found this piece of bone in Dealey Plaza while taking photos on the 23rd. He brought it to his uncle, Dr. Jack Harper, who took it to Dr. A. B. Cairns, chief of pathology at Methodist Hospital in Dallas. Cairns determined it was occipital bone, from the rear of JFK’s head. He also had quality color slides made of both sides of the fragment. This is fortunate, since this piece of evidence has now disappeared.
Among the important points to remember about the Harper fragment is that, if it is occipital, then it strongly suggests a shot from the front. Secondly, when the House Select Committee tried to place the Harper fragment in their own reconstruction, situated to the front right side of the skull, it did not fit. And the HSCA tried to then ditch the evidence proving it did not. (See Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, by Michael Benson, p. 173; John Hunt, “A Demonstrable Impossibility” at History Matters website)
For the Commission to try and determine the nature of Kennedy’s head wounds without even noting this piece of evidence is irresponsible.
Under examination by Specter, Humes said the neck wound measured a few millimeters in diameter. (See WC, Vol. II, p. 362) Since this wound was slit at Parkland Hospital in Dallas for purposes of a tracheotomy, Humes could not have garnered this information on his own. It turns out he got it from Dr. Malcolm Perry, the man who did the tracheotomy. But when one looks at the notation made about this information, it does not say a few millimeters. It says 3-5 mm. (See James Rinnovatore and Allan Eaglesham, The JFK Assassination Revisited, p. 26 for the note)
The probable reason Humes fudged his testimony was that he had testified that the posterior back wound was 7 x 4 mm. (WC Vol. II, p. 351) This would have meant the entrance wound was larger than the exit wound. Something that could only happen in the solipsistic world of the Warren Commission.
Under questioning by Specter, Humes said that the bullet holes in Kennedy’s jacket and shirt line up well with Commission Exhibit 385. (WC, Vol II, p. 366) The bullet holes in those two clothing exhibits both depict the wound to have entered in JFK’s back about six inches below the collar. Which Humes admits to. Anyone can see that CE 385 depicts that wound much further up, near where the neck meets the back. (Click here)
So how do Specter and Humes explain this deliberate misrepresentation? They say Kennedy was heavily muscled and waving at the crowd. (WC, op. cit) Kennedy was not heavily muscled. He was about 6′ 1″ and 175 pounds. Anyone who has seen photos of him in a swimsuit or at autopsy will tell you he was rather slender. And there is no way in the world that the very mild wave Kennedy performs before he goes behind the freeway sign could account for the raising of that six inch differential. In fact, when Kennedy starts waving, his elbow is on the car door. (Click here)
These misrepresentations are deliberately designed to cover up the fraud of CE 385. And, in turn, to make the wild fantasy of the Single Bullet Theory palatable.
Arlen Specter clearly understood that there were serious problems with the evidence of the autopsy in the JFK case. Which is why, as previously noted, he deep-sixed the Sibert-O’Neill report made by the FBI.
The questioning of the three pathologists by Specter was a masterpiece of avoidance. Or, in plain language, a cover up. The true facts of this horrendous autopsy did not begin to be exposed until the trial of Clay Shaw–five years later in New Orleans. There, under a real examination, Pierre Finck first revealed that the doctors were not running the autopsy. The scores of officers in the room were. This explains why the back wound was not dissected and the brain not sectioned. Without those two practices, we do not know the direction of the bullets through the skull, throat and back; nor do we know how many bullets struck; nor do we know if all the wounds were transiting.
Because of Specter, we also did not discover the real circumstances of Dr. Humes burning his first autopsy draft and notes. And because of Specter and Humes cooperation on a deception, the true nature of Kennedy’s back wound, and the problems in connecting it with the throat wound, were camouflaged. All of these dodges, and more, were meant to disguise evidence of more than three shots. And therefore, more than one assassin.
If the Commission had been a true legal proceeding, Specter’s actions would have been just cause to begin a disbarment case against him.
In this final series, we will center on information that most certainly indicated a plot, or at least suggested a conspiratorial set of associations in the JFK case. Almost all the material discussed here was available back in 1964. The problem was that the agencies that the Commission relied upon were not forthcoming in forwarding the facts to the Commission. In other words, the Commission was more or less at the mercy of men like J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, James Rowley and Elmer Moore at the Secret Service, and Richard Helms and James Angleton at the CIA. Since those three agencies provided the overwhelming majority of information to the Commission, the investigation was doomed from the start.
After Jim Garrison turned Ferrie over to the FBI, Oswald’s longtime friend and CAP colleague lied his head off to the Bureau. He said he never owned a telescopic rifle, or used one, and he would not even know how to use one. Considering his activities as a CIA trainer for the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose, these were clear deceptions.
He also said he never knew Oswald and that Oswald was not a member of a CAP squadron in New Orleans.
He then said he did not know Sergio Arcacha Smith from 544 Camp Street, and he had no association with any Cuban exile group since 1961. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 177)
Every one of these statements was a lie. Further, it is a crime to perjure yourself to an FBI agent in an investigation. (ibid) That Hoover did not indict Ferrie, shows that 1.) He did not give a damn about Kennedy’s murder and 2.) The Commission was at his mercy.
What makes Point 51 above even worse is that the Bureau had the evidence to prove Ferrie was lying to them. After the assassination, CAP member Chuck Francis was interviewed by the Bureau. Francis took the now famous CAP photo depicting Ferrie with Oswald at a picnic. (ibid, p. 233) How could Ferrie have denied that evidence? In fact, he was worried about it. Since in the days following the assassination, he called various CAP members to see if they had any pictures of him with Oswald. The FBI knew about these frantic calls also. (ibid) As Vincent Bugliosi would say, the perjury by Ferrie plus his attempt at obstruction of justice would indicate a “consciousness of guilt.”
Through the work of Joan Mellen, we know that the Bureau had a report by Reeves Morgan that Oswald had been in the Clinton/Jackson area that summer with two men who fit the description of Ferrie and Clay Shaw. The FBI then visited the hospital personnel office where Oswald went to apply for a job. (ibid)
There is no evidence that Hoover forwarded any of this important information to the Commission.
At the 20th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, Commission counsel David Belin was one of the featured guests on a Nightline segment. During the telecast he made an astonishing declaration: He proclaimed he had seen every CIA document on the Kennedy case. If he was telling the truth, then why did he not say that the Agency, as well as the Bureau, had counter-intelligence programs arrayed against the FPCC in 1963, and that David Phillips headed the CIA operation? (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 236)
This would seem to most to be of extreme evidentiary importance. Because Oswald formed his own one-man operation for the FPCC in New Orleans while working out of Guy Banister’s office. In fact, he even put Banister’s address on some of his FPCC flyers. And the FBI knew that also. (Destiny Betrayed, p. 102) Needless to say, this would all seem to suggest that perhaps Oswald was not really a communist; but at work, through Banister’s office, for Phillips’ anti-FPCC campaign.
Which leads us to an amazing fact.
In retrospect, this is startling. Why? Because today Phillips is seen as one of the chief mid-level suspects in the Kennedy case. Oswald was seen with Phillips at the Southland Building in Dallas in late summer of 1963. Phillips occupied the Cuban desk in Mexico City while Oswald was allegedly there in late September and early October, 1963. And if Oswald was an agent provocateur for the CIA infiltrating the FPCC, then Phillips had to have known about his activities in New Orleans that summer. Since he was in charge of coordinating them.
In other words, Phillips seems to have been in direct proximity to Oswald throughout 1963. In fact, he told his brother James before he died that he was in Dallas the day JFK was killed. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 364)
After Gordon Novel first met Sergio Arcacha Smith, Arcacha invited him to a meeting in Guy Banister’s office. The subject was arranging a telethon in New Orleans to support the anti-Castro cause. Joining the trio was a fourth man, a Mr. Phillips. In a sworn deposition, Novel’s description of Mr. Phillips closely aligns with David Phillips. (See William Davy, Let Justice be Done, pgs. 22-24)
Secondly, in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs disaster, the CIA made a report on the Belle Chasse training camp south of New Orleans. Ferrie and Arcacha Smith were both heavily involved in this camp’s activities. (ibid, p. 30) That report is detailed in all aspects of the history of the camp including when it opened, who was trained there, how many were trained, and what they were trained in. Only someone with firsthand knowledge of its activities could have written the memo. At the end, the memo reads, “the training camp was entirely Agency controlled and the training was conducted by Agency personnel.” The memo was signed by Phillips. (ibid, p. 31)
Third, during the preparations for Operation Mongoose, another camp was opened across Lake Pontchartrain. Ferrie was a drill instructor at this camp also. (ibid, p. 30) When Bob Tanenbaum was Deputy Chief Counsel of the HSCA, he saw a film that was probably from this camp. He brought in witnesses to view it to get positive identifications. Three of the identified men were Oswald, Banister and Phillips. (ibid, p. 30)
As the reader can see, we now have evidence linking the people on the ground around Oswald in the summer of 1963, with a man one or two steps upward in the CIA’s chain of command. This would be an important development if one were seeking out a conspiracy.
Along with Sylvia Odio, this trio forms perhaps the most important evidence of a conspiracy before the fact. In fact, Jim Garrison once wrote that Nagell was the most important witness there was. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 94) Nagell was a CIA operative who was hired out of Mexico City by the KGB. They heard there was a plot brewing to kill Kennedy. They thought they would be implicated in it. They hired Nagell to track it down. (ibid, pgs. 95-96) By the fall of 1963, Nagell was hot on the trail of David Ferrie, Sergio Arcacha Smith, and Carlos Quiroga. He was convinced that Oswald, who the KGB had given him a photo of at the start, was being set up by these men. (ibid, p. 97)
Rose Cheramie predicted the assassination in advance. She had been abandoned by two men who were talking about the plot as the trio was enacting a drug deal. After she was abandoned, she was having withdrawal symptoms. But she predicted to the officer who picked her up and drove her to a state hospital that Kennedy would be killed in Dallas shortly. (ibid, p. 78) When this turned out to be true, the officer returned to her and got more details.
There is no evidence the Commission ever investigated Cheramie. But Jim Garrison did. He got identifications of Cheramie’s companions. They turned out to be Sergio Arcacha Smith and CIA operative Emilio Santana.
Declassified in 1996, this was called the Slawson-Coleman report, named after staff attorneys David Slawson and William Coleman. The man who coordinated with the Commission about their visit to Mexico City was CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 1, p. 14) Helms advised that every step they took in Mexico that Slawson and Coleman deal “on the spot with the CIA representative.” (ibid) Consequently, this 37-page report does not mention Anne Goodpasture, or the Tarasoffs. Goodpasture has become an incredibly important figure today. Because she controlled the tapes and photo surveillance files from the Cuban and Russian consulates for suspect David Phillips. The Tarasoffs were the married couple that did the Russian translations from the surveillance tapes. Further, the Commission never interviewed Silvia Duran, the receptionist in the Cuban embassy who actually spent the most time with Oswald; or whoever this person was.
Why do I say that? Because the Slawson/Coleman report never reveals the following information: 1.) Duran talked to an “Oswald” who was short and blonde, not the real Oswald (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 349) 2.) The record says Oswald visited the embassies a total of five times. There should be ten pictures the CIA took of him entering and exiting the buildings. There are none. 3.) The FBI heard tapes the CIA said were of Oswald. The agents interviewing Oswald in detention said the man they talked to was not the man on the tapes. (ibid, p. 357) Which poses the question: was Oswald in Mexico City?
Maybe, but maybe not. Either way, it is doubtful he did the things the Commission said he did. In fact, the HSCA prepared two perjury indictments for the Justice Department to serve on this issue. One was for Phillips and one for Goodpasture. The Mexico City report issued by the HSCA, authored by Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez; which was 400 pages long– enumerates numerous lies told to the Committee by those two. And it strongly indicates someone was manipulating the surveillance record. If that is so, then one has to wonder if it was a coincidence that this was done to the man who would be accused of killing Kennedy in advance of the assassination.
As Walt Brown notes in his book, The Warren Omission, the Paines were in the witness chair on a combined nine days. In total, they were asked well over 6,000 questions. In fact, Ruth was asked the most questions of any single witness. (See Brown, pgs. 262-63) Yet, except for Senator Richard Russell, not one commissioner ever posed any queries as to who they really were, what they did in this case, and why the Commission used them so extensively. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 195) But there is a telltale piece of evidence about all that. It appears that Allen Dulles solicited old friends of his from the Eastern Establishment to give the couple public endorsements as early as December of 1963; which was well before any witnesses were called, Or the Commission’s case took shape. (ibid)
But Dulles went even further about this connection. In private, he commented that the JFK researchers “would have had a field day if they had known…he had actually been in Dallas three weeks before the murder…and that one of Mary Bancroft’s childhood friends had turned out to be a landlady for Marina Oswald.” (ibid, p. 198) The Mary Bancroft Dulles was referring to had been an OSS agent he had run during World War II. Mary was a lifelong friend with Ruth Forbes, Michael Paine’s mother.
To make a long story short, both Ruth and Michael Paine came from family backgrounds that are intertwined with the power elite and the CIA. For instance, Ruth’s sister, Sylvia Hoke worked for the Agency in 1963, a fact the CIA and Ruth tried to keep from Jim Garrison. Sylvia’s husband worked for the Agency for International Development, which was closely affiliated with the Agency. Later in life, Ruth admitted to a friend her father worked for the CIA also. And during the Contra war in Nicaragua, many American Sandinista sympathizers on the scene saw Ruth’s activities there as being CIA sponsored. (ibid, pgs. 197, 199) There is also evidence that a man fitting the description of Michael Paine was at a restaurant adjacent to SMU trying to sniff out students who were sympathetic to Castro. Further, there were early reports that Dallas deputy Sheriff Buddy Walthers, in his search of the Paine household, discovered several “metal filing cabinets full of letter, maps, records, and index cards, with names of pro-Castro sympathizers.” (ibid, p. 198) There is also evidence that the Paines played a role in manufacturing the case against Oswald. For instance, they claimed the Minox spy camera found in Oswald’s belongings really belonged to Michael. (ibid, p. 207.) For a survey of the case against the Paines see, James DiEugenio’s Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pgs. 155-56, 194-208. (Also, click here for a visual essay). This declassified record makes the Paines appear fishier than an aquarium.
Carl Mather and his wife were good friends with Officer Tippit and his wife Marie. In fact, they went over to the Tippit home to console Marie at about 3:30 PM. (Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 527) What makes that so interesting is what happened about 2 hours earlier.
In Oak Cliff, on Davis Street horns were blaring and police cars moving within an hour of the assassination due to the murder of Tippit in that area. A veteran auto mechanic named T. F. White saw a man in a car looking suspicious, like he was trying to hide himself. This was in the parking lot of the El Chico Restaurant across the street from his auto garage. Which was about six blocks from the scene of the Tippit murder. White went over to the car and got a better look at the man and took down the license plate. When he got home that night and watched TV, he told his wife that the man in the car was Oswald. (ibid, p. 526)
When reporter Wes Wise heard about the story, he got the license plate number checked out. It belonged to Carl Mather. Thus began the mystery of how either Oswald, or a double, got in a car after the assassination with a license plate belonging to Tippit’s friend Mather. To make it worse, Mather worked for a CIA related company called Collins Radio. Collins did work for the White House, had contracts in Vietnam and worked with Cuban exiles on ships used in raids on Castro’s Cuba. (ibid, pgs. 527-28)
That the Warren Report does not mention this pregnant lead is incredible.
Since they did not know about the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro, maybe the Commission did not think Santo Trafficante was significant. But Trafficante was one of the three mobsters the CIA contacted in order to do away with Fidel Castro (the other two were John Roselli and Sam Giancana.) There were reliable reports, from more than one source, that Ruby visited Trafficante while he was imprisoned by Castro at Tresconia prison in late 1959. One eyewitness even said that he saw Ruby serving the mobster a meal. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, pgs. 455-56)
Another witness said that on this trip to Cuba, Ruby was also seen with Lewis McWillie. McWillie was a former manager of Trafficante’s gambling casinos in Havana. Ruby actually shipped handguns to McWillie in Cuba. By all accounts Ruby idolized McWillie; and would do almost anything for him. (ibid, p. 272)
Dean was in charge of security for the transfer of Oswald that day. He told Burt Griffin of the Commission that Ruby would have needed a key to get into a door that ran along the alleyway behind the building. Griffin suspected Dean was lying about this point. Griffin wrote a memo saying he had reason to think that Ruby did not come down the Main Street ramp. But Dean was urging Ruby to say this as a part of a cover up. Commission Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin would not back Griffin on this and succumbed to pressure out of Dallas, especially from DA Henry Wade. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 205-06)
It turned out that Dean was lying on this point. When the HSCA investigated this issue they found out that Ruby did not need a key to enter that door. They further found out that Dean flunked his polygraph test administered by the Dallas Police; even though he wrote his own questions! When the HSCA went looking for this test, it was nowhere to be found. (ibid, p. 205)
The HSCA appointed a panel of polygraph experts to examine the records of Jack Ruby’s lie detector test for the Warren Commission. This was done by an FBI expert named Bell Herndon. The Commission accepted Herndon’s verdict that Ruby had passed the test. The HSCA panel did not. In fact, they exposed the test as being so faulty as to be about worthless. The panel said that Herndon violated at least ten basic protocols of polygraph technique. These ranged from having too many people in the room; which would cause diversions and false readings; to asking way too many questions. There were over 100; which is about six times as many as there should have been. (ibid, p. 244)
This was crucial. Because as the panel explained, liars become immune to showing physiological stimuli if questioned for too long. In other words, the subject could lie and get away with it. Herndon also confused the types of questions; relevant, irrelevant, and control questions; so that it was hard to arrange a chart based on accurate readings. (ibid)
Finally, Herndon completely altered the proper methods of using the Galvanic Skin Response machine (GSR). He started it at a low point of only 25% capacity, and then lowered it. The panel said the machine should never have been set that low. But it should have been raised, not lowered, later. (ibid, p. 245) This is interesting because when Ruby was asked, “Did you assist Oswald in the assassination?”; to which he replied in the negative; it registered the largest GSR reaction in the first test series. (ibid, pgs. 245-46)
Sgt. Don Flusche was never examined by the Warren Commission. There are indications that the DPD did not want the Commission to know about him. (ibid, p, 204) Flusche was in a perfect position to watch the ramp from Main Street. He had parked his car across the street and was leaning on it during the entire episode of Ruby shooting Oswald. Further, he knew Ruby. He told HSCA investigator Jack Moriarty that “There was no doubt in his mind that Ruby did not walk down the ramp and further did not walk down Main Street anywhere near the Ramp.” (ibid, p. 203)
Much of the above evidence was kept from the Commission. Which shows how weak and controlled the whole exercise was. Without independent investigators, the Commission was reliant on the good will of bodies like the FBI and Dallas Police; who both had much to hide in regards to the murders of Kennedy, Tippit and Oswald.
But the clear outlines of a conspiratorial design is obvious in the evidence above. One in which Oswald is unconsciously manipulated by those around him in New Orleans and Mexico City e.g. Ferrie and Phillips. He then returns to Dallas where he and his wife are in the clutches of their false friends, Ruth and Michael Paine. Kennedy is killed, and the CIA brings in its old ally the Mafia. McWillie and Trafficante find the perfect man, one with prolific ties to the police, to polish off Oswald before he can talk.
Is this what happened? We don’t know that for sure since this scenario was never investigated at the time. But we know today that it is perfectly plausible; much more so than the wild fantasy proposed in the Warren Report.
We will stop at 63 pieces of evidence, for two reasons. First that is ten more than Vincent Bugliosi brought up in Reclaiming History to indict Oswald. And ours are much more solid and convincing than his. Second, it’s the year Kennedy was killed. And as many studies have shown e.g. Larry Sabato’s in The Kennedy Half Century; the vast majority of Americans felt that something went awry with America after Kennedy’s murder.
We agree. So although we could easily go to one hundred, 63 is a good number to stop at.
When I first heard that Jim DiEugenio would be turning his ten part review of Vincent Bugliosi’s overblown tome, Reclaiming History, into a book, I was happy to endorse him. Ever since I first discovered DiEugenio’s website CTKA.net, I knew that he was a devoted and honest researcher. Prior to his writing Reclaiming Parkland, DiEugenio completely rewrote the first edition of his 1992 book, Destiny Betrayed. In this reviewer’s opinion, Destiny Betrayed (the second edition) was an exceptionally well written and sourced book. This reviewer can honestly state that after reading Reclaiming Parkland, it is in the same league with DiEugenio’s previous book. However, Reclaiming Parkland. isn’t just a review of Bugliosi’s book. The book is divided into three sections. In section one, the author discusses Bugliosi’s past, from his childhood and career as assistant district attorney of Los Angeles County, to his participation in the utterly shoddy mock trial of Oswald in London. Section two of the book is the author’s very long review of Reclaiming History. In section three of the book, the author mainly discusses the failure of Hollywood heavyweight, Tom Hanks as a true historian, and how much influence the CIA and the Pentagon have today on how Hollywood produces films, and therefore what the American public sees on their movie and TV screens.
The author begins his book by telling the reader that Bugliosi was once a subscriber to the excellent Probe magazine, which the author edited along with the esteemed Lisa Pease back in the nineties. The author then moves onto explaining how the mainstream media in the United States have praised Bugliosi’s book without reservation,or as the author put it directly in his book;
Any book that supports the original Warren Commission verdict of Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin of JFK is not going to be roundly criticized in the mainstream media (hereafter referred to as the MSM). (DiEugenio, Introduction).
One such review which the author uses as an example to demonstrate this point is the review of Reclaiming History, in The Wall Street Journal by journalist Max Holland. As the author explains to the reader, Holland is a vehement defender of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin (ibid). Readers of this review may already be aware of the fact that DiEugenio provided a critical review of Holland’s deceptive documentary on the assassination, The Lost Bullet, on his website (read that review). The author reveals that in the year 2001, Holland became the first author outside of the Government to be given the Studies in Intelligence award by the CIA (ibid).
On the issue of why he decided to write such a long review of Reclaiming History, the author more or less explains that it was because the negative reviews of the book which he had read were narrow in focus (ibid). In other words, the previous reviews were not based on the entire book. How the author could undertake such a feat, is in this reviewer’s opinion, is a testament to his commitment to exposing the lies and the omissions of facts. Traits which all too common amongst Warren Commission defenders.
One of the most truly ridiculous claims that any researcher of the JFK assassination could make, is that the Kennedy murder is a simple case. Yet, this is precisely what Bugliosi told the author in an interview with him (ibid). To demonstrate the absurdity of this statement, the author provides several examples of complex issues pertaining to the assassination. The author begins by explaining how the seven investigations into the President’s murder, from 1963 to 1998, differed in opinions on various pieces of evidence, such as whether or not the single bullet theory was true, and how the Church Committee in the 1970’s came to the conclusion that the FBI and the CIA had withheld important documents from the Warren Commission (ibid). Although Bugliosi has nothing but scorn for the critics of the Warren Commission, he is on record for believing that Senator Robert Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy. As the author writes, Bugliosi said the following during a civil trial of the RFK assassination:
We are talking about a conspiracy to commit murder … a conspiracy the prodigious dimensions of which would make Watergate look like a one-roach marijuana case. (ibid).
In the introduction to Reclaiming History, Bugliosi gave his readers the pledge that he would not knowingly omit or distort anything about President Kennedy’s assassination, and that he would set forth the arguments of the Warren Commission critics the way they would want them set forth, and not the way Bugliosi wanted (ibid). However, as DiEugenio demonstrates throughout his nine chapter long review of Reclaiming History, this was not the case. Not by a long shot. (The nine chapters include one which was excised.) The author concludes the introduction to his book by briefly explaining the purchase of the film rights to Reclaiming History. by the Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman owned production company, Playtone (ibid). As mentioned previously, what the reader will learn by reading this book is that, contrary to what he likes to proclaim, Tom Hanks is not in any way a true historian.
Aptly titled The Prosecutor, this first chapter explores Vincent Bugliosi’s career as assistant DA of Los Angeles County, where he shot to fame for his prosecution of Charles Manson and several of his followers for the August, 1969, Tate/LaBianca murders (ibid). The reader will also read about Bugliosi’s indictment for perjury following the Manson gang convictions, his two attempts to become the District attorney of Los Angeles County, and his run for the Attorney General of California. The Author begins the Chapter with the following quote by Bugliosi during an interview with Playboy magazine in 1997:
“People say I’m an extremely opinionated person. If opinionated means that when I think I’m right I try to shove it down everyone’s throat, they are correct … As for arrogant, I am arrogant and I’ m kind of caustic … The great majority of people I deal with are hopelessly incompetent, so there’s an air of superiority about me.” (DiEugenio, Chapter 1).
As anyone who reads Reclaiming Parkland. will understand, Bugliosi was being candid when he described himself as arrogant and extremely opinionated. After a brief introduction into Bugliosi’s childhood, family background, and service in the United States Army prior to joining the Los Angeles county District attorney’s office, the author moves onto a discussion of the two murder cases which helped bolster Bugliosi’s reputation as a prosecutor more than any others. The first case was the murder convictions of former Los Angeles Police Officer Paul Perveler and his girlfriend Kristina Cromwell. Bugliosi had successfully convicted them in February, 1969, for conspiring to murder Cromwell’s husband Marlin, and Perveler’s wife Cheryl (ibid).
As most people who have heard of him are aware, Bugliosi co-authored the bestselling book Helter Skelter with Curt Gentry. The book was based on the murders of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, her boyfriend Victor Frykowski, Steve Parent, and Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary. Bugliosi had successfully convicted Charles Manson and several of his followers, such as Tex Watson and Susan Atkins, for these horrific murders. Curiously, like Reclaiming History, Helter Skelter was published by W.W. Norton, and following its publication in 1974, it went on to become the number one best-selling true crime book to date (ibid).
The author spends several pages in his book explaining why Bugliosi’s motive for the crimes is not supportable today. The author also spends several pages comparing Bugliosi’s views on the investigation of the Tate/LaBianca murders, to those of President Kennedy’s assassination. According to Bugliosi, the murders were inspired in part by Manson’s prediction of Helter Skelter, a so-called apocalyptic war which he allegedly believed would arise from tensions over racial relations between whites and blacks. However, as the author explains, the more likely motive for the murders was to get a friend of Manson’s named Bobby Beausoleil out of jail for murdering Gary Hinman in July, 1969 (ibid). Hinman was stabbed to death by Beausoleil, after Manson sliced Hinman’s ear due to a dispute over a bad batch of mescaline (ibid). As the author writes, Manson once actually said that the real motive for the murders was to get Beausoleil out of jail. This was confirmed by Susan Atkins (ibid). In fact, the Los Angeles Police had actually thought the Tate and LaBianca murders were copycat murders (ibid). All of this would seem to undermine Bugliosi’s motive for the crimes.
The author also scores Bugliosi by showing how Bugliosi’s opinions on the investigations of the Tate/LaBianca murders contradict his opinions on the investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination. For one thing, Bugliosi spent many pages in Helter Skelter complaining about how the Los Angeles Police had initially failed to connect the Tate murders to the LaBianca murders; because of the similarity of the crimes. However, in Reclaiming History, Bugliosi refuses to acknowledge the similarities between the attempted plot to assassinate President Kennedy in Chicago, and his eventual assassination in Dallas (ibid). Bugliosi also complains in Helter Skelter about the length of time it took for the gun used by Tex Watson during the murders to arrive at the San Fernando Valley Police station, but doesn’t have any qualms about the Dallas Police departments delay in sending three of the four bullets removed from the body of J.D Tippit, to the FBI lab in Washington for ballistics tests.
The author goes on to explain that following the prosecution of Tex Watson for the Tate/LaBianca murders, Bugliosi was indicted for perjury. This came about after someone leaked a transcript of Susan Atkins’ discussion about the murders with Virginia Graham, a fellow inmate of Atkins in the Sybil Brand jail (ibid). The transcript was leaked to Los Angeles Herald Examiner reporter, William Farr. Bugliosi was one of two lawyers involved in the Manson trials to be indicted for perjury, the other being Daye Shinn. Bugliosi’s assistant, Stephen Kay, testified at his perjury trial that William Farr had asked him (Kay) to hand Bugliosi a manila envelope (ibid). Kay had also testified that Farr was in Bugliosi’s office during the afternoon that Bugliosi accepted copies of Graham’s statement for storage, and that Bugliosi had threatened to remove him and a fellow assistant named Don Musich from the Tate/LaBianca cases, if either he or Musich asked for a hearing into the passing of the manila envelope between Farr and himself. (These proceedings had been covered by the LA Times in June and October of 1974. The reader can also read about this incident.)
Then there’s Bugliosi’s two time campaign to become the DA of Los Angeles in 1972 and 1976, and his run for Attorney general of California in 1974 (ibid). As the author explains, all three campaigns were personal and rabid in nature. For instance, in his 1976 run for DA against John Van de Kamp, Bugliosi accused Van de Kamp of not prosecuting 7 out of 10 felony cases when he was District attorney; whereas in actual fact, Van De Kamp had the highest prosecution rate in the whole of California, at an 80% prosecution rate (ibid). Bugliosi also stated that Van De Kamp had never prosecuted a murderer or rapist. But in actual fact, Van De Kamp had successfully prosecuted two murder cases (ibid).
If all of the above isn’t enough to convince the reader that Bugliosi has a tendency for hyperbole, then consider each of the following. Bugliosi had harassed his former milkman, Herbert H. Wiesel, after Bugliosi suspected him of having an affair with his wife (ibid). Bugliosi later broke into the home of a woman named Virginia Caldwell, who claimed that Bugliosi was having an affair with her, after Caldwell refused to have an abortion at Bugliosi’s request. After striking her, he then convinced Caldwell to concoct a cover story that the bruise on her face, was actually caused by her child hitting her with a baseball bat (See Fact Check Vincent Bugliosi).
To my knowledge, no one has ever put all of these quite pertinent facts about Bugliosi into one place before.
Following his long discussion of Bugliosi’s character, and his career as a prosecutor, the author moves onto a discussion of how Playtone producers Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, along with actor Bill Paxton, conceived the idea of turning Reclaiming History. into a television mini-series; which thankfully never came to fruition. Included in this chapter is a biography of Hanks, which serves as a prelude to the author’s discussion of why Tom Hanks is not a true historian. The author actually begins this chapter with the following statement by Gary Goetzman in the Hollywood trade magazine Daily Variety, in June, 2007: “I totally believed there was a conspiracy, but after you read the book, you are almost embarrassed that you ever believed it.” (DiEugenio, Chapter 2). For Goetzman to say that he was “almost embarrassed” to believe that President Kennedy’s assassination was a conspiracy after reading Reclaiming History. is, in this researcher’s opinion, utterly absurd. In this day and age, the evidence that there was a conspiracy is simply overwhelming.
According to the author’s sources, the idea to produce a mini-series based on Reclaiming History, actually originated with actor Bill Paxton. As it turns out, Paxton had an interest in the assassination, because on the morning of the assassination, at the age of just eight, Paxton’s father took him to see President Kennedy in Fort Worth, Texas, as the president emerged from a Texas hotel (ibid). As Paxton told Tavis Smiley on Smiley’s talk show, he (Paxton) wondered whether anyone had told the story of the assassination without bias, without an agenda, and without a conspiracy (ibid). It is apparent to this reviewer that Paxton had an agenda from the beginning: namely that Oswald had acted alone. And as the author put it, Paxton was; “…uniquely unqualified to inform any prospective buyer about the merits of Reclaiming History. .” (ibid).
The author then goes on to explain how the positive reviews of Reclaiming History. had influenced Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman to purchase the film rights to the book. Within a period of just three months after Hanks and Goetzman had purchased the rights to the book, the President of HBO films, Colin Callender, announced that HBO would be producing a ten part mini-series based on the volume (ibid). And as the author painstakingly explains in the book, the film which came out of all this, entitled Parkland, does not even resemble Reclaiming History. . The author asks the reader, how did a man like Tom Hanks ” … get into a position to make such momentous public decisions about highly controversial and very important historical issues?” (ibid).The author tells us that in order to understand all of that, we must understand who Tom Hanks is (ibid). Whilst I will spare the reader every sordid detail about Tom Hanks’ past, from his childhood, to his career as an actor and producer, I will briefly give the reader an overview of what, in this reviewer’s opinion, is the essential information to understanding why Tom Hanks bought into Reclaiming History.
Born in Concord, California, in 1957, Tom Hanks began his screen acting career in the 1980 slasher film, He Knows You’re Alone (ibid). Hanks, of course, starred in the multi awarded film, Forrest Gump, and in the Ron Howard directed film, Apollo 13. Reading through Reclaiming Parkland, it is this reviewer’s opinion that the three productions in which Hanks was an actor and/or producer, which are essential in understanding the type of historian that Hanks is, are From the Earth to the Moon, Saving Private Ryan and Charlie Wilson’s War (the author discusses the latter film in Chapter 12 of the book).
From the Earth to the Moon was a 12 part television mini-series by HBO, which was co-produced by Hanks (ibid). As Hanks’ biographer David Gardner wrote, Hanks believed the NASA space missions of the 1960’s ” … were amongst the few lasting, happy memories he had of the era” and ” … he [Hanks] wanted to reclaim the ’60’s for his own generation by giving the space program a context he felt it had been denied.” (ibid). Reading through these quotes, it immediately struck this reviewer that Hanks was much more concerned about the space programs than the four political assassinations of the era. Worse still, as the author explains, towards the end of part 4 of From the Earth to the Moon, the script says that a person had wired into NASA during the Apollo 8 space flight in 1968 and the script now said that the flight ” … redeemed the assassinations of King and RFK that same year since, a woman named Valerie Pringle said so.” (ibid). That quote almost made this reviewer’s eyes pop out of their sockets. For how could any true historian contemplate that a manned space mission had somehow “redeemed” the RFK and MLK assassinations? In this reviewer’s opinion, such a notion is completely ridiculous.
In 1998, Hanks starred in the Steven Spielberg directed film Saving Private Ryan; which, as the author writes, was a fictional film, with Hanks’ goal being to “…commemorate World War II as the Good War and to depict the American role in it as crucial.” (ibid) The author states that the film was actually 90% fiction, and that Tom Hanks had to have known it was so (ibid). But in spite of this, Hanks made the following remarks:
When I saw the movie for the first time I had the luxury of being in a room by myself, so I wept openly for a long time. I have never cried harder at a movie, or almost in real life, than at the end of this one-it was just so painful. I think an absolutely unbelievable thing has occurred here, and I am part of it, and I sort of can’t believe it. (ibid).
It is quite curious that Hanks actually said the above. For why would an alleged true historian cry over a fictional film? The author tells the reader that the story of Frederick “Fritz” Niland (portrayed as James Ryan in the film) was first reported in the book Band of Brothers, authored by Stephen Ambrose (ibid). As the author explains, Ambrose is Tom Hanks’ favorite historian. Hanks first met him when Ambrose worked as a consultant on Saving Private Ryan (ibid). Ambrose was also instrumental in influencing Hanks and Gary Goetzman to launch Playtone. What’s important to bear in mind, is that Ambrose was critical of Olive Stone’s film JFK, and demeaned several Warren Commission critics such as Jim Garrison and Jim Marrs in the New York Times, following the release of JFK. (ibid). But Ambrose didn’t just demean the critics of the Warren Commission. He also made the comment that ” … it seems unlikely at best that he [Kennedy] would have followed a course much different from the one Lyndon Johnson pursued” (ibid). But as the author writes this is “completely fatuous”, as books such as James Blight’s Virtual JFK have utilized declassified documents (such as President Kennedy’s National Security Action Memorandum # 263) to show that Kennedy was withdrawing from the Vietnam War at the time of his death (ibid). Ambrose was also exposed as a liar and a serial plagiarizer (ibid). For one thing, Ambrose lied when he said that it was Eisenhower’s idea for him to write Eisenhower’s official biography (ibid). Ambrose also lied when he said he spent hundreds of hours with Eisenhower to write his biography. In reality, Ambrose had merely met with Eisenhower three times; which totalled only five hours (ibid). With someone like Ambrose as Tom Hanks’ favorite historian, it comes as no shock to this reviewer that Hanks decided to produce a film upholding the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone in murdering President Kennedy.
There is also one other important detail about Hanks which is not in Reclaiming Parkland, but which the author told this reviewer about on Greg Parker’s research forum, Reopen the Kennedy case. Apparently, Tom Hanks named his sons, Truman and Theodore Hanks, after the American presidents Harry Truman and Theodore Roosevelt. As most of us know, it was Truman who had two atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World War Two. However, this reviewer wasn’t aware that Roosevelt helped force Colombia out of its northern province when they voted not to sell it to use for the Panama Canal. Roosevelt then helped fake a rebellion (with help from the French), sending ships into the Caribbean to prevent the Colombian Army from restoring order. As anyone who has a true understanding of the sort of President that John F. Kennedy was should know, Kennedy would never have contemplated the aforementioned acts by Truman and Roosevelt. But it would seem that Tom Hanks is quite unaware of these differences. So how can we say that Tom Hanks is someone who admired President Kennedy, and therefore, is someone we can trust to tell the truth about his assassination? In this reviewer’s opinion, we cannot.
What follows next is the author’s masterful discussion of the shameful London Weekend Television mock trial of Oswald in 1986. Vincent Bugliosi was the mock prosecutor at this trial. According to the author, it was this trial which inspired Bugliosi to write his overgrown tome, Reclaiming History. (DiEugenio, Chapter 3). Since the trial can be viewed online on YouTube, it is not this reviewer’s intention to spend a considerable amount of time discussing it here. Suffice it to say, the author meticulously explains to the reader just how biased the trial was in Bugliosi’s favor, and also illuminates the incompetence of Gerry Spence, the acting defense attorney, in defending the deceased Oswald.
In the opening paragraphs of his discussion, the author makes a number of astute observations of just why the trial was strongly biased against Oswald, and how this ultimately led to the jury finding Oswald guilty. First of all, obviously, Oswald was not present at the trial. As the author soundly explains, Oswald would have been the most important witness to his defense, as he would have been able to inform the jurors of his connections to extreme right wing figures such as David Ferrie, Guy Bannister, and Clay Shaw (ibid). Shockingly, Bugliosi actually wrote in Reclaiming History. that it was probably better for the cause of pursuing the truth behind Kennedy’s assassination that Oswald died. (ibid). In this reviewer’s opinion, this is one of the most bizarre statements that Bugliosi has made concerning the assassination.
Furthermore, the author notes that the following important witnesses were also absent from the trial: Marina Oswald, who, amongst other things, testified before the Warren Commission that her husband owned the alleged murder weapon. The three autopsy doctors who performed the autopsy on the President’s body at Bethesda Naval hospital were also absent. Also, Sylvia Odio, the young Cuban woman who testified before the Warren Commission that Oswald and two Latin looking men had visited her at her apartment in Dallas, was also absent from the trial (DiEugenio, Chapter 3). Odio’s testimony was crucial, as it strongly implied that Oswald was being framed for the assassination.
The author also makes several other sharp observations, such as the fact that the prosecution called a total of fourteen witnesses, whereas the defence called a total of only seven witnesses (ibid). The prosecution had also used scientifically false evidence against Oswald, namely, the Neutron Activation Analysis tests, which Bugliosi’s witness, Vincent Guinn, presented to the jury as evidence that CE 399 (the magic bullet) went through both President Kennedy and Governor John Connally. This was allegedly accomplished by showing that the lead from the core of CE 399, was identical to the lead fragments embedded in Governor Connally’s wrist (ibid). Neutron Activation Analysis has since been thoroughly debunked as a valid scientific method for identifying the origin of lead fragments.
Another key point the author makes is that the jurors (unlike in an actual trial) were not allowed to view the actual exhibits located in the National Archives in Washington. As an example of why this is important, the author states that the marksman who originally tested the rifle in evidence, said it had a defective telescopic sight and the bolt was too difficult to operate, but the jurors wouldn’t be able to know that for themselves since they weren’t allowed to actually handle the rifle. Furthermore, the defense was limited, as the 2 million pages of documents declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board, following the passing of the JFK act were not yet available. (ibid
In his discussion of each of the witnesses, the author first introduces them by describing who they were, and how they were involved with the assassination, and/or its aftermath and the investigations which followed. The author then provides an evaluation of how the witnesses were questioned by both Vincent Bugliosi, and Gerry Spence. For the purpose of this review, I will discuss the author’s evaluation of one of the prosecution witnesses, and one of the defense witnesses. Let’s begin with Ruth Paine, in whose house Oswald allegedly stored the rifle the Warren Commission concluded was used to assassinate President Kennedy. As the author introduces her, Ruth Paine testified at the London trial that she had helped Oswald obtain his job at the TSBD prior to the assassination (ibid). During the trial, Bugliosi attempted to make a major issue out of the fact that Oswald had normally visited the Paine home (where his wife was staying) on weekends after obtaining the job at the TSBD, but had broken that so-called routine by instead arriving on the Thursday night prior to the assassination (ibid). The author scores Bugliosi by pointing out that Oswald had broken that so-called routine the previous weekend, since he didn’t turn up at the Paine home (ibid). The author also scores Gerry Spence by pointing out that Spence failed to mention that Oswald’s “routine” was only one month old (ibid).
Bugliosi also tried to make a big deal out of the fact that Ruth Paine claimed someone had left the light on in the Paine garage on Thursday evening. Bugliosi asked Paine if she thought that it was Oswald who left the light on, and she responded that she thought it was him. The author scores Spence and the presiding judge for not objecting to the question, as it called for a conclusion not based on observable facts (ibid). It was an opinion which was contradicted by the testimony of Marina Oswald who said Oswald was in their bedroom at the time. The author also scores Spence for not objecting to Bugliosi’s question to Ruth Paine about how Oswald viewed the world around him, since Paine had limited contact with Oswald (ibid). In this reviewer’s opinion, the author could also have criticized Spence by noting, for example, that during his cross-examination, he didn’t ask Paine about the metal file cabinets which contained what appeared to be the names of Cuban sympathizers. The information about these metal file cabinets was contained in the report by Dallas deputy Sheriff, Buddy Walthers, to Bill Decker, who at the time of the assassination was the Sheriff of Dallas County. (See Warren Commission, Volume 19, p. 520 for Walthers’ report).
In his discussion of reporter Seth Kantor, the author gives credit to Spence for using Kantor, as Kantor discussed Ruby’s phone calls with Mafia enforcers such as Barney Baker, Lenny Patrick, and Dave Yaras, in the latter part of 1963 (ibid). Kantor also testified that he had seen Ruby at Parkland Hospital, just as he testified that he had before the Warren Commission (ibid). However, the author criticizes Spence for not using Kantor more effectively on how Ruby had entered the basement of the Dallas Police Department, where he shot Oswald as Oswald was being transferred to the County jail (ibid). As a matter of fact, throughout the entire discussion of this sordid trial, the author rightly criticized Spence for not calling many of the key witnesses to the assassination to testify. For example, Victoria Adams and Sandra Styles (both of whom were on the rear stairs of the TSBD when Oswald was allegedly coming down the stairs, but never noticed him) were not called to testify. In the reviewer’s opinion, reading the author’s takedown of this trial was delightful.
Since it was the London trial’s guilty verdict which inspired Bugliosi to write Reclaiming History, what naturally follows, in Chapter 4, is the beginning of the author’s meticulous discussion of just why Bugliosi’s book is nothing but a cover-up tome for the Warren Commission. The author begins his discussion of Reclaiming History. with the following quote by Bugliosi in the U.S. News and World Report:
The conspiracy theorists are guilty of the very thing they accuse the Warren Commission of doing … There is no substance at all for any of these theories, they’re all pure moonshine … I’m basically telling them that they’ve wasted the last 10 to 15 years of their lives. (DiEugenio, Chapter 4)
But in reality, as the author shows, it was Bugliosi who had wasted twenty years of his life writing a specious book defending the utterly ridiculous Krazy Kid Oswald concept. In the opening paragraph of the chapter, the author actually writes that Bugliosi has the personal attributes of humour, self-effacement (emphasis added) and intelligence (ibid). Whilst Bugliosi may be both funny and intelligent, this reviewer couldn’t help but think that the author had erred in describing him as a self-effacing person, as Bugliosi’s arrogance in upholding the Oswald acted alone theory, and demeaning the critics of the Warren Commission, is simply palpable. (In discussions with the author, Mr. DiEugenio has informed me that this quality is one Bugliosi displays in private.)
DiEugenio begins his long discussion of Reclaiming History. by first complementing Bugliosi on three of his previous books: No Island of Sanity, The Betrayal of America, and The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. The author recommends all three of these books, and writes that compared with Reclaiming History, all three of these books were brief, and were actually based on facts, the law, and morality (ibid). The author writes that Reclaiming History. is essentially divided into two separate books, which Bugliosi smugly entitled “Matters of fact: What happened” and “Delusions of Conspiracy: What did not happen” (ibid). Book one covers topics such as the autopsy, the Zapruder film, evidence of Oswald’s guilt, and Oswald’s possible motive. Book two is comprised of nineteen chapters, and covers topics such as the various groups suspected of being involved in the assassination, including the Sylvia Odio incident, and a ferocious attack on Oliver Stone’s film JFK, and critics such as Mark Lane and David Lifton (ibid). Bugliosi also makes an abundance of negative remarks throughout his overblown book, such as “…simple common sense, that rarest of attributes among conspiracy theorists…” and “But conspiracy theorists are not rational and sensible when it comes to the Kennedy assassination.” (ibid).
Perhaps one of the most interesting revelations about Reclaiming History. is that it was actually co-authored by two other Warren Commission defenders; namely, Dale Myers, and the late Fred Haines. DiEugenio credits this discovery to David Lifton (ibid). Haines apparently wrote most of the section of the book on Oswald’s biography. Dale Myers apparently wrote a lot about the technical aspects of the assassination in the book, such as the photographs taken during the assassination, and the acoustics evidence (ibid). However, Bugliosi and Myers had a falling out, so Myers’ name wasn’t mentioned on the front cover of the book (ibid).
The author devotes a large section of this chapter to a discussion of Oswald’s alleged ownership of the Mannlicher Carcano rifle discovered on the sixth floor of the TSBD. Like every Warren Commission defender before him, Bugliosi states that Oswald owned the rifle, and the author describes the rifle as the centrepiece of Bugliosi’s case against Oswald (DiEugenio, Chapter 4). According to Bugliosi: “If there is one thing that is now unquestionably certain, it is that Lee Harvey Oswald ordered and paid for one Mannlicher Carcano rifle that was found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.” (ibid). In light of all the compelling evidence DiEugenio presents to the contrary, to say that it is now unquestionably certain that Oswald owned the rifle is a rather unjustified statement to make, and the book specifically demonstrates why that is so.
But first, the author explains that the first type of rifle reported as being found on the sixth floor of the TSBD, was a 7.65 mm German Mauser bolt action rifle (ibid). To bolster his argument, the author cites the affidavits and reports by Dallas Deputy Sheriff, Eugene Boone, and Dallas Deputy Constable, Seymour Weitzman, in which they reported that the rifle discovered was a 7.65mm German Mauser (ibid). In this reviewer’s opinion, the Mauser discovered was probably one of the two rifles owned by TSBD employee, Warren Caster, and that Caster then participated in a cover-up to dispense with the Mauser story. (Read through this reviewer’s discussion of this pertinent issue.) It is perhaps also worthwhile noting that Sam Pate told HSCA investigators that he observed DPD detective, Charlie Brown, carrying two rifles outside the TSBD following the assassination (click ).
Oswald allegedly purchased and mailed the money order for the rifle on the morning of March 12, 1963, during his work hours (ibid). However, Oswald’s time sheet at work for March 12 shows that Oswald was working when he allegedly purchased and mailed the money order (ibid). Furthermore, the money order allegedly arrived and was deposited by Klein’s sporting goods at the First National Bank of Chicago (a distance of approximately 700 miles), received by the Chicago Post Office, then processed and deposited in the bank by Klein’s all within a period of 24 hours! As the author states, this supposedly happened before the advent of computers, and that he; ” … sends letters within the county of Los Angeles that do not arrive the next day” (ibid). So this is truly exceptional.
To make matters worse for Bugliosi (and Warren Commission defenders alike), the date of the duplicate deposit slip for Klein’s bank deposit on the rifle reads February 15, 1963; whereas the money order for the rifle was allegedly deposited on March 13, 1963. There were also no financial endorsements on the back of the money order, which Robert Wilmouth, the Vice President of the First National Bank of Chicago, claimed there should have been (ibid). Worse still, Oswald allegedly ordered a 36 inch long Mannlicher Carcano rifle, using a coupon from The American Rifleman magazine, but he was instead shipped a 40.2 inch long rifle (ibid). This reviewer could go on, but to do so would take too long, and I would refer the reader to Gil Jesus’s website for even more details on this topic. This reviewer can state that DiEugenio leaves Bugliosi standing on nothing but quicksand on this issue. And further, contrary to the above noted pledge made by the prosecutor, Bugliosi does not state the critics’ case on this point as they themselves would make it.
Throughout this entire chapter, the author proves that Bugliosi’s claim that; “There was not one speck of credible evidence that Oswald was framed,” is preposterous (DiEugenio, Chapter 5). The issues discussed by the author include the provenance of CE 399, the Neutron Activation Analysis tests used to allegedly determine that the lead fragments embedded in Governor Connally’ wrist originated from CE 399, the Tippit shooting and the Walker shooting (both of which the Warren Commission concluded Oswald was responsible for), Oswald’s alibi at the time President Kennedy was assassinated, Marina Oswald’s credibility and so forth.
As far as CE 399 is concerned, the author notes the familiar fact that Darrell Tomlinson, who allegedly discovered the bullet on a hospital stretcher in Parkland Hospital, testified to the effect that the bullet was not found by him on Governor Connally’s stretcher (ibid). The author also cites the interview of Parkland Hospital security chief, O.P Wright, by Josiah Thompson, during which Wright told him that Tomlinson gave him a sharp nosed, lead colored bullet (ibid). This is not at all what CE 399 looks like. As the study by statistics professor Cliff Spiegelman and metallurgist Bill Tobin showed, Neutron Activation Analysis was useless as a means of identifying lead fragments as originating from a particular bullet (ibid). This finding was supported by a separate study by statistician Pat Grant and metallurgist Rick Randich, which was actually released before Reclaiming History. was published (ibid). Yet in spite of this finding, Bugliosi tried to argue in his book that Neutron Activation Analysis was still reliable (ibid).
As far as the Tippit shooting is concerned, the author argues that the four shell casings recovered after the shooting were two Remington Peters and two Winchester Western casings, whereas the bullets removed from Officer Tippit’s body were three Winchester Westerns and one Remington Peters, and therefore, the shell casings had been switched (ibid). Furthermore, the author also cites the discovery of a wallet in the vicinity of the shooting, which contained ID for both Oswald and his alleged alias, Alek James Hidell. This reviewer discussed this pertinent issue on his blog in an article entitled Oswald and the Hidell ID. Regarding the Walker shooting, which occurred on the night of April 10, 1963, the author cites the fact that the bullet recovered in Walker’s home was originally reported as a 30.06 being steel jacketed bullet, and that a witness named Walter Kirk Coleman, told the FBI that he observed two men driving away from the Walker home following the shooting in separate cars, whereas the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald had acted alone. Furthermore, Michael Paine (Oswald’s friend and Ruth Paine’s husband) actually testified before the Warren Commission that he had dinner with the Oswalds on the night of April 10, 1963; which tends to exonerate Oswald as the shooter. (This was amended later by Ruth Paine.)
Like every other Warren Commission defender, Bugliosi discounts the testimony of TSBD employee Victoria Adams before the Warren Commission, where she testified that both she and her co-worker, Sandra Styles, had taken the rear stairs to the first floor from the fourth floor shortly following the assassination and they didn’t encounter Oswald coming down the stairs (ibid). Adams allegedly told David Belin during her testimony that she saw William Shelley and William Lovelady on the first floor, as soon as she stepped off the stairs (ibid). Shelley’s and Lovelady’s testimony indicates they had gone to the railroad tracks, and then returned to the TSBD. This was then used to discredit Adams’ testimony that she had arrived on the first floor shortly following the assassination (ibid). The author scores Bugliosi and the Warren Commission, by noting that neither Shelley nor Lovelady made any mention of going towards the railroad tracks in their first day affidavits. Furthermore, the author notes that Sandra Styles was not called to testify before the Warren Commission, and neither were Dorothy Ann Garner or Elsie Dorman, both of whom were with Adams and Styles on the fourth floor viewing the President’s motorcade (ibid). Relying on Gerald McKnight however, the author errs in stating that the FBI kept Sandra Styles interview with them separate from the other TSBD employees, for in Warren Commission exhibit 1381. Styles interview is included amongst the interviews of 73 TSBD employees.
It would take an entire essay on its own to thoroughly discuss all of the problems with Marina Oswald as a witness. For the purpose of this review, I will limit my discussion. The author scores Bugliosi by noting the many contradictions Marina Oswald made concerning the so-called backyard photos, Oswald’s rifle practice, the so-called Walker note which Oswald allegedly left her, and the Warren Commission’s own doubts about using her as a witness. For example, Alfredda Scobey, a member of Richard Russell’s staff, claimed that she lied directly on at least two occasions (ibid). Warren Commission lawyers Joseph Ball and David Belin described her to be; “at best and unreliable witness” (ibid). Furthermore, Norman Redlich told the FBI and the Secret Service that she was a liar (ibid).
As most researchers of the assassination are aware, in early November, 1963, the Secret Service had discovered a plot to assassinate President Kennedy in Chicago. In fact, the author opens this chapter with the following quote from Edwin Black, who wrote about this plot in the Chicago independent, in November, 1975:
There are strong indications that four men were in Chicago to assassinate John F. Kennedy on November 2, 1963, twenty days before Dallas. Here’s how it happened.
The designated patsy for the assassination plot in Chicago was a disgruntled ex-Marine named Thomas Arthur Vallee (ibid). As the author explains to the reader, there are many similarities between the Chicago plot and the assassination in Dallas, and between Oswald and Vallee. There are so many that no objective researcher (which Bugliosi is not) could possibly dismiss all of them as meaning nothing. For example, as James W. Douglass, the author of the fine book JFK and the Unspeakable discovered, the President’s motorcade in Chicago would have taken him past the building in which Vallee was working, in a similar slow turn in which his motorcade made in Dallas from Houston Street onto Elm Street (ibid). As far as Oswald and Vallee are concerned, both of them had been US Marines, and both of them had been stationed in a U2 base in Japan while in the Marines. Also, just like Oswald, the cover unit for Vallee’s probable CIA recruitment was allegedly called the Joint Technical Advisory Group. Like the Oswald who appeared at Sylvia Odio’s, Vallee had actually spoken bitterly about President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs invasion failed (ibid). Yet Bugliosi never mentionsd any of the above in Reclaiming History. . He does however, snidely describe Black’s magazine article as follows; “For a long magazine article trying to make something of the Vallee story … see HSCA record 180-10099-10279…” (ibid). This about what is perhaps the most crucial essay written on the JFK case at that time.
One of the most important events related to the assassination was the impersonation of Oswald at the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City. Just as the Warren Commission concluded before him, Bugliosi believes that Oswald actually was in Mexico City attempting to get a visa to travel to Cuba (ibid). Whilst DiEugenio is amongst those researchers who believes it unlikely Oswald ever went to Mexico City in late September, 1963, this reviewer has not made up his mind on the matter yet. However, there is little doubt that Oswald was being impersonated. Referring to the so-called Lopez Report, written by HSCA investigators Eddie Lopez and Dan Hardway, Bugliosi calls it “A giant dud” (ibid). But this came as no shock to this reviewer, since it was CIA Officer David Philips (one of the CIA Officers involved in the Mexico City cover-up and who lied under oath before the HSCA on this matter) who helped encourage Bugliosi to write a book on the assassination! (ibid)
The author spends many pages discussing the numerous problems with Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico City; in fact, it is one of the longest sections of the book. Whilst Bugliosi is fond of referring to the assassination as a simple case, the author thoroughly demonstrates that the entire Mexico City debacle on its own destroys that utterly absurd belief. For instance, the author scores Bugliosi on this crucial issue by noting the fact that it has never been firmly established how Oswald allegedly went to Mexico City, after first travelling to Houston from New Orleans (ibid). However, Sylvia Odio testified before the Warren Commission that two Mexican looking Cubans had visited her apartment with Oswald in Dallas, in late September on either Thursday the 26th or Friday the 27th; whereas Oswald allegedly boarded a bus to Houston on the 25th (ibid). Bugliosi actually believes Oswald was at Sylvia Odio’s apartment with the two Cubans, but claims that it actually occurred on either the 24th or the 25th of September (ibid). Bugliosi also believes Marina Oswald’s testimony before the Warren Commission, where she testified that Oswald went to Mexico City, even though she initially denied that he did! (ibid).
The impersonation of Oswald in the Russian consulate in Mexico City is one of the most significant factors pertaining to the assassination. For Oswald allegedly spoke to Valery Kostikov, a man suspected by the CIA of being the KGB agent in charge of assassinations in the Western Hemisphere (ibid). In fact, the information about Kostikov was quite conveniently revealed on the day of the assassination. As the author explains, Oswald’s alleged meeting with Kostikov implied that Oswald had conspired with the communists to assassinate President Kennedy (ibid). This then forced President Lyndon Johnson to cover-up the assassination, because, as he told Senator Richard Russell on the phone; “… they’re testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour.” (ibid) However, if the reader can comprehend it, Bugliosi didn’t think that this was important enough to mention in Reclaiming History.
Here, the author discusses Bugliosi’s opinions on both the famous Abraham Zapruder film, and Kennedy’s utterly horrendous autopsy. As the author writes, in defiance of common sense and logic, Bugliosi actually believes the Zapruder film is not really all that important in understanding the assassination. Why? Because according to him, physical evidence such as the three spent shell casings discovered on sixth floor of the TSBD provide conclusive evidence that only three shots were fired at the President (DiEugenio, Chapter 6). The author scores Bugliosi by pointing out that one of the shell casings discovered on the sixth floor (CE 543) had a dented lip, and could not have been fired at the time of the assassination (ibid).
Just like the overwhelming majority of Warren Commission defenders, Bugliosi believes in the single bullet theory, and actually writes in his book that President Kennedy and Governor Connally were aligned in tandem when the same bullet allegedly went through both men (ibid) However, he then doubles back on himself in a subsequent page in his book when he writes that they were not actually aligned in a straight line. DiEugenio argues that Bugliosi was actually misinformed on this matter by his ghost writer, Dale Myers (ibid). Myers says Connally was six inches inboard of JFK. Yet, as Pat Speer has pointed out, the HSCA said the distance was less than half of that. Bugliosi actually included in his book Senator Richard Russell’s objection to the single bullet theory in the Warren Commission’s executive session hearing on September 18, 1964, in which he wanted his objection to the single bullet theory described in a footnote (ibid). However, Bugliosi discounts the fact that Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin fooled Russell into believing there would be a stenographic record made of his objection, when in actual fact, there wasn’t (ibid).
As far as the autopsy is concerned, Bugliosi doesn’t believe it was botched; even though he actually acknowledged on the same page of his book that his own primary expert, Dr Michael Baden, claimed that it was (ibid). As the author writes, Baden claimed: “Where bungled autopsies are concerned, President Kennedy’s is the exemplar.” (ibid) This reviewer finds this to be incredibly ironic. Adding further to the irony, Bugliosi tries to defend the autopsy doctors by stating that the HSCA medical panel’s critique of the autopsy was “considerably overstated”. But at the same time, he agrees with the HSCA medical panel that the autopsy doctors had mislocated the bullet entry hole in the back of President Kennedy’s skull! (ibid) As the author writes, “What he [Bugliosi] seems to be trying to do is to soften the critique of the autopsy and actually vouch for the competence and skill of the pathologists.” (ibid) This reviewer couldn’t agree more.
What’s worse, in this reviewer’s opinion, is that Bugliosi actually tries to pin the blame about the limited autopsy on the President’s own family. The author scores Bugliosi on this assertion by informing the reader that both Drs. Humes and Boswell told the Assassination Records Review Board that this was not true (ibid). In fact, Dr Humes actually told a friend that he was given orders not to perform a complete autopsy, but this order did not come from Robert Kennedy (ibid). But perhaps the final blow to Bugliosi’s absurd assertion comes from Admiral Galloway, who was the commanding Officer of the Bethesda Naval Center. Galloway claimed that; “…no orders were being sent in from outside the autopsy room either by phone or by person.” (ibid). Bugliosi can blame the Kennedy family all he wants for the botched autopsy, but Reclaiming Parkland proves that they were not responsible.
Former New Orleans District Attorney, Jim Garrison is, without a doubt, one of the most – if not the most – vilified Kennedy assassination investigator ever. Garrison has been berated by Warren Commission defenders for prosecuting prominent New Orleans businessman, and CIA agent, Clay Shaw, for conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy. By the same token, Oliver Stone, the director of the controversial film JFK, has been berated by Warren Commission defenders for what they conceive to be a distortion of facts in his film about the assassination JFK. Being the zealous Warren Commission defender that he is, Bugliosi pummels both Garrison and Stone (DiEugenio, Chapter 7).
As the author reveals, Bugliosi uses Harry Connick, who was Garrison’s successor as district attorney, as a witness against Garrison in Reclaiming History. (ibid) But what Bugliosi omits is that Connick had destroyed many of the court records and investigative files pertaining to Garrison’s investigation and the prosecution of Clay Shaw (ibid). Connick also fought the Justice Department for over one year before he was finally ordered by a federal court to turn over Garrison’s file cabinets to the Assassination Records Review Board (ibid). As any objective minded person can understand, using such a man as a witness to berate his predecessor does not make for a convincing argument. Incredibly, in spite of all the evidence which surfaced prior to his writing Reclaiming History, Bugliosi also does his best to deny that David Ferrie and Oswald knew each other. The author scores Bugliosi with the famous photo of Oswald and Ferrie in the Civil Air Patrol, which surfaced in the nineties. Bugliosi also tried to discount the fact that six witnesses claimed that Ferrie and Oswald knew each other (ibid). Even worse in this reviewer’s opinion, Bugliosi tried to deny that Oswald was ever associated with the notorious Guy Banister at Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street in New Orleans. Bugliosi does so in spite of the fact that Oswald had 544 Camp Street stamped on the flyers he was passing out in August, 1963; and despite the fact that no less than thirteen witnesses indicated that Oswald was either at 544 Camp Street or seen with Banister. Amongst the witnesses who saw Oswald there were Banister’s secretary, Delphine Roberts, and two INS agents named Wendell Roache and Ron Smith (ibid). This reviewer could also go on about, for example, Bugliosi’s denial that Clay Bertrand was in reality Clay Shaw, but to do so would take a very long essay. Suffice it to say, by going through the declassified files of the ARRB, DiEugenio has supplied a surfeit of witnesses for that fact also.
Bugliosi refers to Oliver Stone’s film JFK, as being a “Tapestry of Lies” (ibid). Reclaiming Parkland provides a detailed discussion of the film. There are certain scenes that are not entirely accurate as far as the historical record is concerned. However, the author argues that in any movie a certain amount of dramatic license is allowed, and that a film has to allow for “…the ebb and flow of interest and emotion in order to capture and sustain audience interest.” (ibid). One issue for which Bugliosi pummels both Stone and his screenwriter, Zachary Sklar, is whether President Kennedy was withdrawing from the Vietnam War. Bugliosi actually writes that the evidence President Kennedy was withdrawing from the Vietnam War is at best conflicting and ambiguous (ibid). Yet, as the author explains, books such as Jim Blight’s Virtual JFK and Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster, which were based on the many declassified documents pertaining to this issue, show beyond a doubt that President Kennedy was in fact withdrawing from Vietnam (ibid). Bugliosi also writes that President Johnson’s intentions in Vietnam were not really certain. The author scores Bugliosi by noting that in Reclaiming History, there is no mention of Fredrick Logevall’s book Choosing War, which proves that from the moment he became President, Johnson’s intention was to escalate the war in Vietnam. (ibid). Furthermore, Bugliosi leaves out the fact that back in 1961, Johnson urged Ngo Dinh Diem to ask Kennedy to send combat troops to Vietnam! (ibid). The author proves that Bugliosi was clearly being less than comprehensive about the Vietnam War.
The first Official investigation of the President’s assassination was by the Dallas Police department. As the author puts it, Bugliosi has nothing but fulsome praise for the DPD’s investigation of the assassination (DiEugenio, Chapter 8). Throughout this entire chapter, the author chronicles what he terms ” … some of the unbelievable things done by the first official investigators of the John F. Kennedy assassination.” (ibid). Whilst Bugliosi happily praised the DPD and former Dallas district attorney, Henry Wade, it was later revealed that Wade and the DPD had been responsible for framing African Americans, e.g. James Lee Woodard, for crimes which they didn’t commit (ibid). The investigation into wrongful convictions was undertaken by Craig Watkins, who was elected the district attorney of Dallas in 2006. As the author writes, Watkins claimed that most of the convictions by Wade, “were riddled with shoddy investigations, evidence was ignored and defense lawyers were kept in the dark.” (ibid).
The author also spends several pages discussing the brown paper sack which Oswald allegedly used to carry the rifle into the TSBD, on the morning of the assassination. The only two witnesses who allegedly saw Oswald carrying a package on the morning of the assassination were Buell Wesley Frazier (Oswald’s co-worker who drove him to work on that very morning) and his sister, Linnie Mae Randle. Not only do both witnesses have serious credibility problems, but Jack Dougherty, the only TSBD employee who saw Oswald enter the building, claimed he didn’t see Oswald carrying any package. Nor did any other TSBD employee, besides Frazier (ibid). When the FBI tested the paper bag, they found no abrasions or gun oil on its interior surface. (ibid) Oswald allegedly made the bag using paper and tape from the TSBD shipping department. However, no TSBD employee, including Troy Eugene West, who worked as a mail wrapper using the tape and paper the bag was made from, ever recalled seeing Oswald with any paper or tape (ibid). Furthermore, no photographs of the bag were taken by the DPD where it was allegedly discovered (ibid). The reader is encouraged to read through Pat Speer’s work on the paper bag.
According to the Warren Commission and Bugliosi, Jack Ruby entered the basement of the DPD where he shot Oswald, by coming down the ramp from Main Street. This ramp was guarded by Dallas Policeman, Roy Vaughn (ibid). But what Bugliosi discounts is that Vaughn, reporter Terrance McGarry, cab driver Harry Tasker, and DPD Sgt Don Flusche (among others) all denied that Ruby came down the ramp (ibid). As the author explains, although former DPD Officer Napoleon Daniels said he saw Ruby come down the ramp, he claimed this was when no car was going up the ramp (ibid). Yet, Ruby allegedly came down the ramp when the car driven by Lt Rio Pierce and Sgt James Putnam was exiting the ramp, and neither one of them saw him (ibid). Bugliosi also claims that if Ruby had planned to kill Oswald in advance, he would have been in the basement well ahead of the transfer (ibid). However, the author scores Bugliosi by pointing out that a church minister claimed he was on an elevator with Ruby at Police headquarters at 9:30 am, with the transfer occurring at about 11:20 am (ibid). The author also points out that three TV technicians named Warren Richey, Ira Walker, and John Smith all claimed they saw Ruby outside the Police station before 10:00 am, standing near their broadcast van (ibid). Like Ruby, Bugliosi claims that Ruby’s motive for killing Oswald was to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of a trial, but he also writes that Ruby liked to be in the middle of things no matter what it was (ibid). However, Bugliosi again minimizes the instances where Ruby placed himself as part of a larger apparatus. For example, the fact that Ruby had given former Dallas deputy Sheriff Al Maddox a note in which Ruby claimed he was part of a conspiracy, and that his role was to silence Oswald (ibid).
Just as he defends the Dallas Police department’s investigation of the assassination, Bugliosi also defends the utterly shoddy investigation of the assassination by the FBI. At the time of the assassination, the man who was at the helm of the FBI was J. Edgar Hoover, who’s sordid past the author spends page after page exposing, and to whom he refers to as an “ogre” (DiEugenio, Chapter 9). In his book, Bugliosi wrote; “J. Edgar Hoover, since his appointment as FBI director in 1924, at once formed and effectively ran perhaps the finest, most incorruptible law enforcement agency in the world.” (ibid). In this reviewer’s opinion, for anyone to claim that Hoover ran the finest and most incorruptible law enforcement agency in the world, is a rather startling comment to make. In upholding Hoover’s professional integrity and character, Bugliosi ignores or heavily discounts, for example, the Palmer raids of 1919/1920, the deportation of Emma Goldman, the FBI’s campaign against Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers, and the framing of Bruno Hauptmann. The important thing to keep in mind is that Hoover was directly involved in all these heinous acts (ibid).
In upholding the FBI’s investigation, Bugliosi also ignores the fact that Warren Commissioner Hale Boggs once famously said; “Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission – on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it.” (DiEugenio, Chapter 9). Bugliosi also ignores what the Warren Commission’s own chief counsel, J. Lee Rankin, said of the FBI’s investigation. Namely that; “They [the FBI] are concluding that Oswald was the assassin … that there can’t be a conspiracy. Now that is not normal … Why are they so eager to make both of these conclusions.” (DiEugenio, Chapter 9). Several former FBI agents and employees, such as Laurence Keenan, Harry Whidbee, and William Walter, provided information that Hoover had determined from the beginning that Oswald was the lone assassin (ibid). Finally, on the very next day following the assassination, instead of investigating the assassination from his office, Hoover was at the racetrack running the inquiry between races . (ibid). Yet, this is the man Bugliosi, and Warren Commission supporters alike, defend as an investigator into the Kennedy murder.
Of course, no defence of the Oswald acted alone theory would be complete without defending the Warren Commission itself. Here, the author explains why the Warren Commission’s investigation was spurious from the start. For one thing, there was no defense team representing Oswald (DiEugenio, Chapter 10). The author also argues that since Oswald had been essentially convicted by the national media, the pressure was on the Warren Commission to find Oswald guilty. As a matter of fact, in a document dated January 11, 1964, and titled “Progress report”, J. Lee Rankin prepared a work outline, with subheadings titled “Lee Harvey Oswald as the Assassin of President Kennedy”, and “Lee Harvey Oswald: Background and Possible Motives” (ibid). Therefore, before the first witness was called to testify, the Warren Commission decided that Oswald was the assassin. In fact, Earl Warren didn’t even want to call any witnesses to testify before the commission, or have the power to subpoena them. (ibid). One must ask how the Commission was to investigate the assassination, if they weren’t going to subpoena any witnesses? The author also spends much time discussing Senator Richard Russell’s internal criticisms of the Commission. He then does something that very few, if any, writers in the field have done. He fills in, at length, the sordid backgrounds of the commission’s three most active members: Allen Dulles, John McCloy, and Gerald Ford. Besides being interesting and revelatory on its own, this helps us understand why the Commission proceeded as it did. For the author collectively refers to these three men as the Troika , as Reclaiming Parkland. shows, it was they who controlled the Commission proceedings. (ibid). It is amazing that in the over 2,600 pages of Reclaiming History, Bugliosi could not bring himself to do such a thing. Probably because he knew that it would seriously hurt his attempt to rehabilitate the Commission’s effort.
As one can easily guess, what the author discusses here is how Bugliosi dismisses any involvement of suspect groups in the assassination. This includes President Johnson, the Mafia, the FBI, the CIA, the KGB, Fidel Castro, and the radical right-wing (DiEugenio, Chapter 11). As the author meticulously demonstrates, two of Bugliosi’s most ridiculous denials are that Jack Ruby had no connection to the Mafia, and that the CIA was not at all complicit in the assassination. On Ruby and the Mafia, Bugliosi wrote in his book that Ruby “was no more of a Mobster than you or I…” (ibid). The author explains that although this may be true in a purely technical sense, Ruby was associated with Mafia figures such as Joe Campisi and Joseph Civello (ibid). Further, Ruby also idolized Lewis McWillie, the Mafia associate who was involved in transporting guns to Cuba with Ruby. And according to British journalist John Wilson, Ruby had visited an American gangster named Santo, in a Cuban prison. Wilson was almost certainly referring to Mafia don, Santo Trafficante. (ibid). But perhaps most significantly, Ruby was in contact with Mafia figures such as Lenny Patrick and Barney Baker leading up to the assassination (ibid). As the author writes, Bugliosi believes this was over a labor dispute, something which the even the anti-conspiracy advocates of the HSCA didn’t believe. (ibid)
The author refers to Bugliosi’s section on possible CIA involvement in the assassination as one of the worst in Reclaiming History. (ibid). Bugliosi argues that there is no evidence that Oswald had any relationship with the CIA. However, the author scores him by pointing out that Oswald was a member of the Civil Air Patrol with the CIA affiliated David Ferrie (ibid). And Ferrie had recruited many of these young men for future affiliation with the military. And it was at this point that Oswald began to show an interest in Marxism and in joining the military. A contradiction that Bugliosi acknowledges but never explains. As DiEugenio also notes, there is very little, if anything, in the section dealing with the role of James Angleton. Which is quite odd given all the work that serious analysts have done on the Oswald/ Angleton relationship due to the ARRB declassification process.
Bugliosi actually writes that once Oswald was in Mexico City, the CIA initiated background checks on Oswald, and informed other agencies of Oswald’s possible contacts with the Soviets (ibid). The author refutes this claim by stating that the CIA had sent the wrong description of Oswald to other agencies, and that Angleton had bifurcated Oswald’s file so that only he had all the information about him. This then resulted in no investigation of Oswald by the CIA before the assassination. (ibid)
Shockingly, Bugliosi also tries to minimize any antagonism between the CIA and the President Kennedy. The author scores Bugliosi by noting that after President Kennedy realized the CIA had deceived him with the Bay of Pigs invasion, he fired CIA director Allen Dulles, deputy director Charles Cabell, and Director of Plans Richard Bissell (ibid). The author also explains that CIA officers who are suspected of being involved in the assassination, such as David Philips, Howard Hunt, and James Angleton, were all close to Dulles (ibid). To further undermine Bugliosi, President Kennedy issued National Security Action Memoranda 55, 56, and 57, to limit the CIA’s control over paramilitary affairs (ibid). He also issued orders that the CIA would not be able to supersede the charges of American ambassadors in foreign countries (ibid). In sum, what the author has shown here is that Bugliosi’s belief that President Kennedy was warm and friendly towards the CIA is simply unfounded.
From this stimulating and comprehensive discussion of the many shortcoming of Reclaiming History. the book now shifts to focus to a review of Tom Hanks’ qualities as a historian, the CIA’s influence in Hollywood today, and a review of an early script of the film Parkland.
The discussion of Hanks as a historian is keyed around a review of his purchase of the book by George Crile called Charlie Wilson’s War. That film was a Playtone production which Hanks had control over and which tells us much about his view of what makes good history. Therefore, DiEugenio entitles his chapter about the film, A Case Study. In the film, Hanks starred as Charlie Wilson, the conservative Democrat from Texas who was a member of the United States House of Representatives (ibid). As the author explains, Wilson was a staunch supporter of the CIA’s policy of arming the Afghan rebel groups, such as the Mujahideen, to fight the Soviets after they invaded Afghanistan (ibid). The author spends time here discussing Wilson, Crile’s book, and the film of the book. In fact, it is hard to point to another discussion of this adaptation which is as multi-layered and as comprehensive as this one. DiEugenio does this because, in his own words it, “…reveals all we need to know about his [Tom Hanks’] view of America, and also what he sees as the function of history.” (ibid). In this reviewer’s opinion, once you read through this illuminating chapter, it’s hard to disagree with the author on either observation. And that is not very flattering to Hanks.
In both Crile’s book and Hanks’ film of the book, Wilson is portrayed as a hero of the Afghan refugees (ibid). But the author shows that there are many omissions and distortions of facts to support this image of Wilson. For one thing, in his book, Crile only gives a brief mention about the opium trade out of Afghanistan, and about the dangers of supplying weapons to radical Muslim fundamentalists (ibid). As the author also reveals, Wilson was an admirer of Central American dictator, Anastasio Somoza. And Wilson’s closest partner in the Afghan operation was CIA Officer Gust Avrakotos, a man who backed the coup orchestrated by the Greek colonels in 1967 (ibid). The author also reveals that Wilson used his position as a member of the House appropriations committee and its sub-committee on defense to raise the funds for CIA director William Casey who, in turn, allowed General Zia, the Pakistani dictator and Islamic fundamentalist, to have complete control over all weapons and supplies the CIA brought into Pakistan (ibid). Through General Zia, Charlie Wilson and the CIA ended up working with Muslim extremists such as Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and finally, Osama Bin Laden (ibid.) These all turned out to be disastrous associations, since these men all turned out to be anti-American terrorists who the USA ended up combating later.
In this reviewer’s opinion, perhaps worst of all, Wilson persuaded the United States Congress not to take retaliation against Pakistan for building nuclear bombs. Which eventually resulted in about eighty nuclear warheads being built by Zia and Pakistan (ibid). Yet, this is the sort of man Playtone decided to produce a movie about, and whom Tom Hanks himself portrayed as a hero in the film. Go figure. As DiEugenio notes, in and of itself, that decision tells us much about Hanks the historian. Especially since, by the time the film was released, Steve Coll’s much better, more honest, and comprehensive book, Ghost Wars, had been in circulation for three years. There is no evidence that Hanks ever read Coll’s award winning book on the subject. Which tells us a lot about his qualities as an amateur historian.
In this chapter, the author gives the reader a true understanding of just how closely the CIA is associated with Hollywood. This reviewer vividly remembers watching Michelle Obama announce the winner of the 2013 Oscar awards from the State Room of the White House. From there, she announced Ben Affleck’s CIA inspired film, Argo, as the winner of the Best Picture Oscar. (DiEugenio, Chapter 13). My initial response to this was something like, “Well, that’s interesting”. It was only after reading through this chapter of the book that the reality of this event hit me like a ton of bricks. The author discusses two people who, unknown to this reviewer, have had an enormous influence on how films are produced in the United States. These two people are Phil Strub, the Pentagon’s liaison to Hollywood, and Chase Brandon, a twenty five year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine services branch before becoming the CIA’s first chief of their entertainment liaison office, in 1996 (ibid).
Reading about the influence these two men have had in film production was, to say the least, rather startling. As the Pentagon’s liaison to Hollywood, Phil Strub has the power to actually make film producers to alter their screenplays, eliminate entire scenes, and can even stop a film from being produced. (ibid) As the author explains, for film producers to be able to rent military equipment, such as tanks and jet fighters, they must first seek approval from Strub and his colleagues (ibid). But even if the producers are finished shooting the film, and then editing it for release, the film must first be screened in advance by the generals and admirals in the Pentagon (ibid). In other words, in a very real way, with military themed projects, the Pentagon decides what the public is allowed to see. One example the author uses to demonstrate this point is the film Thirteen Days, which was based on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Strub and the Pentagon didn’t cooperate with the film’s producer, Peter Almond, because the film portrayed Air Force General Curtis Lemay in a realistic manner (ibid). Therefore, Strub refused to cooperate with Almond, even though the negative portrayal of LeMay in the film was accurate (ibid). However, most shocking of all, the author reveals that the Unites States Congress never actually gave Strub the power to curtail free speech or to limit artistic expression (ibid). However, by doing so, Strub and the Pentagon have the ability to exercise influence on the cinematic portrayal of historical events, such as the Missile Crisis.
Equally enlightening was the author’s discussion of Chase Brandon. Since becoming the CIA’s first chief of its entertainment liaison office, Brandon has been astonishingly effective in influencing film producers to portray the CIA in a positive light. For example, Brandon provided the writers of the film, In the Company of Spies, with ideas of what should go into the script, and both the film-makers and the actors met with high officials of the CIA (ibid). And the film actually premiered at CIA headquarters in Langley (ibid). Brandon also worked on the TV series entitled, The Agency. Michael Beckner, who was the producer and writer of the show, submitted drafts of each script to Brandon, which Brandon then forwarded to his CIA superiors (ibid). The production team were then allowed access to shoot the film at CIA headquarters, and an original CIA assigned technical advisor actually became an associate producer of the series! (ibid). Brandon used the show to deflect criticism of the CIA for its negligence in predicting and combating the Islamic terrorist threat, which so surprised the Bush administration. Aiding Brandon in this Hollywood endeavor was Bruce Ramer, who is one of the most influential entertainment lawyers in the film industry. One of Ramer’s clients is the legendary director and producer, Steven Spielberg (ibid). Spielberg and Hanks are best friends. They even drive each other’s kids to private school. What’s noteworthy in this reviewer’s opinion is that Spielberg was an early proponent of George Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. He and Hanks are friends with both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and Spielberg has donated close to $700,000 to political candidates (ibid). With all of the above in mind, and much more, this reviewer now understands how it came to be that Michelle Obama, from the White House, presented the Oscar to a CIA inspired film. But as the author notes, this incestuous relationship furthers the tyranny of the two party system in America. Which leaves the public with little choice at the ballot box.
Following on from his discussion of the CIA’s influence on film production, the author moves onto a discussion of the movie Parkland, co-produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, and directed by Peter Landesman (ibid). But prior to discussing the film itself, the author provides the reader with an insight into Tom Hanks’ own relations to the Agency. For one thing, Hanks is a close working associate of Graham Yost, a man who worked with Hanks on Playtone’s two mini-series, Band of Brothers and The Pacific (DiEugenio, Chapter 14). Yost is the executive producer of the FX series entitled The Americans, which was created and produced by a former CIA agent named Joe Weisberg (ibid). For the film Charlie Wilson’s War, Hanks and Playtone hired Milt Beardon as a consultant, the former CIA station chief in Islamabad who was involved in the US-backed Mujahedeen war against the Soviets. (ibid). In this regard it is interesting to note that although it was revealed too late to be included in the book, director/writer Landesman had consulted with infamous intelligence asset Hugh Aynesworth on the script of Parkland. (Dallas Morning News, August 28, 2013)
As for the film Parkland, the author writes that he was able to obtain an early draft of Peter Landesman’s script for the film (ibid). Oddly, Landesman had no experience in directing or writing a produced screenplay prior to this assignment (ibid). But apparently, this didn’t bother Tom Hanks. Essentially, the film depicts the time period of a few hours before, and 48 hours following the assassination. The main locations in the film are Parkland Hospital, the Dallas FBI station, Dallas Police headquarters, and Abraham Zapruder’s home, office, and the film labs where his film was developed and copied (ibid). As the author explains, the script omits any mention by Dr. Malcolm Perry (who was played by Hanks’ own son, Colin Hanks) that the wound to President Kennedy’s throat was one of entrance (ibid). Hanks and Landesman also omit from the script any mention of the backwards movement of the President’s body, after he is shot in the head (ibid). The script also has Oswald’s brother, Robert, recognize the rifle shown to him at DPD headquarters as Oswald’s; even though the last time Robert saw him was before Oswald allegedly purchased it in March, 1963. (Wisely, this last howler was omitted from the edited film.)
Landesman and Hanks also tried to demean Marguerite Oswald in the script simply because she thought Oswald was some kind of intelligence asset and wanted him to be represented by an attorney. (ibid) As the author writes: “Maybe Hanks forgot: in America the defendant is innocent until proven guilty.” (ibid) Perhaps even worse is the script treatment of James Hosty, the FBI agent who was assigned to keep an eye on Oswald after his return from the Soviet Union (ibid). According to the script, when someone asks Hosty why he has been keeping an eye on Oswald, he replies; “I couldn’t tell. Just a sorry son of a bitch.” (ibid). Evidently, someone, perhaps Aynesworth, later told Landesman that there was a lot more to Oswald than just that. Like, for example his defection to the USSR at the height of the Cold War. So, again, this was incorporated into the completed film. (ibid).
Although the film has already been released and is headed to home video, the author reviewed the early draft of the script to show that Hanks had an agenda. Namely, as with Reclaiming History, the book it was adapted from, from the start, it was meant to uphold the Warren Commission’s conclusion.
What the author has demonstrated thus far is that Vincent Bugliosi and Tom Hanks are not genuine historians. In Chapter 15, the author discusses his meeting with Giorgio DiCaprio (the father of actor Leonardo DiCaprio). The author met with DiCaprio after it was announced by Entertainment Weekly, that Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way, had purchased the film rights to Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann’s bizarre book, Legacy of Secrecy (DiEugenio Chapter 15). This reviewer has never read Legacy of Secrecy, and after reading DiEugenio’s review of it on CTKA website, I felt that it would be a huge waste of time. At the meeting at Appian Way, with the author and Giorgio were Paul Schrade, a witness to Robert Kennedy’s assassination, documentary film producer Earl Katz, and Waldron himself (ibid). Essentially, what the author demonstrates here is that much like Tom Hanks, Giorgio DiCaprio and Katz did not do their homework either on the JFK , or the book they decided to adapt.
After briefly discussing Waldron and Hartmann’s theory that the Mafia had the President assassinated, the author explains what specifically transpired at the meeting with Giorgio, Katz, and Waldron, and how loud and argumentative Waldron was when challenged by both the author and Shrade. For example, when the author and Schrade brought up the importance of John Newman’s work on the entire Mexico City charade, Waldron shouted the following weird remark, “What does he [Newman] know about Mafia!” As the author writes, as he sat in stupefied silence, neither Giorgio nor Katz asked Waldron what the Mafia had to do with Mexico City (ibid). As most informed researchers are aware, the Mafia had nothing to do with Mexico City. Furthermore, when the author and Schrade brought up the issue of how Waldron and Hartmann incorrectly referenced Edwin Black’s essay on the Chicago plot to assassinate Kennedy, to a book called the The Good Neighbour, by George Black in their footnotes, Waldron accused the error on his footnote editor (ibid). DiEugenio notes, he has never heard of a footnote editor, and this reviewer has never heard of one either. Incredibly, Giorgio DiCaprio then also blamed this error on the footnote editor (ibid). Suffice it to say, after reading through the author’s discussion of this meeting, it is readily apparent that Giorgio DiCaprio is a novice on the subject of President Kennedy’s assassination.
In the interesting Afterword, DiEugenio tells us that, just like the book Reclaiming History, the film Parkland is irrelevant today. And for the same reasons. Neither work tells us anything about how President Kennedy was killed or what that event means to America today. He then intertwines two subjects: The decline of the USA after Kennedy’s death, with the decline of American cinema after 1975. This reviewer has never seen this done before. It is quite a fascinating subject in and of itself. And it tells us something about the scope of the book.
The author also tells the reader that Oliver Stone’s decision to produce and direct the film JFK, for which he was exoriated in the national media, was a gutsy and patriotic act which resulted in the declassification of two million pages of documents pertaining to the President’s assassination. But yet, after the impact of Strub and Brandon, the conditions in Hollywood today are so poor, that the public knows little or nothing about those discoveries of the ARRB. Furthermore, the author pays a tribute to John Newman for his milestone books, JFK and Vietnam and Oswald and the CIA. As the author put it, a real historian like John Newman is worth a hundred Vincent Bugliosis, a hundred Tom Hanks, and a thousand Gary Goetzmans (p. 384). Because an author like Newman liberates the public from a pernicious mythology about the past. One that, as with Vietnam, helped gull the country into a huge and disastrous war in Southeast Asia.
In this reviewer’s opinion, the American public owes a debt to Jim DiEugenio, an ordinary, everyday American citizen, who through his dedication, courage, and above all, patriotism, produced an insightful book explaining why Reclaiming History is a sham, and explaining the influence the CIA and the Pentagon have on what the public is allowed to see on their theater and television screens. Perhaps the biggest lesson to be learned from reading this book is that no one should be afraid to voice their opinions against those who have attained fame, power, and prestige.
Let me put it this way; if Jim DiEugenio can do it, then I think the rest of us can as well.
Researcher Pat Speer also wrote a critique of Gary Mack’s latest concoction. His was briefer and it appeared quickly after JFK: The Ruby Connection was broadcast. He posted it at John Simkin’s Spartacus JFK forum on November 24th. Pat posed some valid criticisms of the show: both what was in it and what was left out of it. He made some of the same criticisms that I did, only in more concise form. For instance, he noted the acceptance of the Warren Commission’s version of Jack Ruby entering the police department basement via the Main Street ramp, the testimony of Bill Grammar about the Ruby phone call, and the exclusion of the very suspicious behavior of policeman Patrick Dean, in charge of security on 11/24, a man who even the Commission had doubts about. Speer went on to wonder about Mack’s contractual bona fides on this case today. That is, does his agreement with the Sixth Floor Museum require that he appear in public as the contemporary purveyor and extender of the cover-up about President Kennedy’s murder, i.e. a combination of David Belin/Dan Rather. And he closed with a reminder of how bad Dallas law enforcement is and was by recommending the reader view firsthand the miscarriage of justice in the frame-up of Randall Adams as depicted in the Errol Morris documentary The Thin Blue Line.
Gary Mack – real name Larry Dunkel – e-mailed a reply to Speer. The reply makes clear why, in some quarters, his new nickname is Larry Fable.
Mack/Dunkel/Fable characterizes JFK: The Ruby Connection as a “look at some of the details surrounding the shooting” of Oswald. Elsewhere he has said that the show was not a complete look at the case. But there is a problem with saying that. The program does directly comment on all three major events of that traumatic weekend: the killing of President Kennedy, the murder of Officer Tippit, and the shooting of Oswald. And, as I noted in my two-part review, in all three cases Mack/Dunkel stands firmly beside the Warren Commission. There was no conspiracy in the Kennedy murder, Oswald did it alone. Oswald also killed Tippit. And Ruby shot Oswald because he was temporarily deranged by grief over Kennedy’s death. And as I mentioned in Part 2, the show actually went further than that by mimicking the Commission’s cartoon portrait of Oswald as a both a “marksman” and “Russian exile” among other things. So, even though it dealt briefly with the Kennedy and Tippit murders, the show toed the Commission line on both. It also used the Commission’s now obsolete-and actually dishonest – misrepresentation of Oswald as the backdrop. And in its presentation of the murder of Oswald, it was ridiculously one-sided.
Mack/Dunkel then tries to discredit the testimony of both Seth Kantor and Wilma Tice, who both swore they saw Ruby at Parkland Hospital. He says he made a timeline about Ruby’s activities after Kennedy’s murder. His timeline precludes Ruby meeting up with Kantor. Sorry Gary, but as you can see by my critique, after having experienced your timelines, I have to be a wee bit skeptical. So I will side with Kantor, Tice, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).
Mack/Dunkel then questions Billy Grammar’s testimony about the call by Ruby to the Dallas Police Department (DPD) trying to talk them out of transferring Oswald. His reason for skepticism is a real doozy. He says that Grammar did not tell anyone about this call until later: Grammar should have told DA Henry Wade about it earlier. I am presuming that Mack/Dunkel kept a straight face while typing this – but I hope not. In my review I discussed the cover-up that went on inside the DPD about the murder of Oswald. One aspect of the DPD cover-up was the concealment of the testimony of Sgt. Don Flusche. This is the man who told Jack Moriarty of the HSCA that he was standing on Main Street, right outside the ramp. Flusche said that Ruby did not come down Main and he did not get anywhere near the ramp. (HSCA Vol. IX, p. 134, Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, p. 462) Flusche did not keep his testimony a secret from his colleagues, yet it was not part of the police investigation and was not mentioned by the Commission. Why? The HSCA sure found out about it. And it was quite significant to them. Furthering this point, when Commission Counsel Burt Griffin wanted to make Patrick Dean a target since he knew he was lying, the Dallas authorities applied the pressure to keep the cover-up about themselves intact. Who personally applied the heat? Mack/Dunkel’s buddy, DA Henry Wade. So the idea that Grammar’s testimony would be welcome and then trumpeted by the DA or the police is just nonsense. Especially since Grammar stated that the caller said that “We are going to kill him”, thereby denoting a conspiracy. With the near-unanimous oath of silence taken by the DPD, I am amazed Grammar’s testimony ever surfaced at all. (See Part 6, of my review of Reclaiming History for the details about Wade and Dean, especially Sections VI and VII.)
Mack/Dunkel then tried to dispute the fact that there was no discussion on the show about the dispute over whether Ruby came down the ramp or through an alley door to enter the basement and kill Oswald. He actually said that they reconstructed the alternative route and there was very little difference in timing between the two routes Ruby could have taken. Therefore the tests proved nothing one way or the other!
This is really something – which is why I placed it in italics. First of all, after Inside the Target Car, and The Ruby Connection, how can anyone trust a “reconstruction” by Mack/Dunkel, Discovery Channel, or the production entity Creative Differences? It’s like trusting the Warren Commission’s recreations. But secondly, to say that the timing was roughly the same and that therefore it’s not worth mentioning, that is just off the wall. The main point about Ruby coming in the alley door is this: It would clearly imply that he knew it was accessible at that time. In other words, that Dean and his cohorts on the security detail did not do their job. Or why risk it? And to know that would necessitate having an inside man. Which is why Burt Griffin was so suspicious about Dean. And once that particular line would have been crossed, it would have opened up a whole new inquiry. For example, did Dean signal Ruby from the back door once he knew the side entrance was unlocked and Oswald was coming down? And this appears to be why Wade strongly resisted Griffin’s targeting of Dean. And this is probably why Dean failed his polygraph. And it’s also the likely reason that Dean failed to appear before the HSCA. Because with the testimony of Flusche now clear of the DPD cover-up, they believed that Officer Roy Vaughn did not let Ruby come down the ramp.
But then Mack/Dunkel makes himself look even worse. He actually says that he personally believes that Ruby did come in through the HSCA’s alley door, not the ramp. Which puts him in a class with the likes of Gus Russo and Dale Myers and their ilk. He knows better but he doesn’t care. (I have it on good sources that he used to communicate with them regularly about keeping up a propaganda barrage.)
Mack/Dunkel then tries to dismiss Ruby’s suspicious phone calls in the month before the assassination. He uses the stale, tired excuse that it was all about a labor dispute over his employees and the unfair trade practices of his competitors. Really? And he had to call Teamster enforcer Barney Baker and his gambler-idol Lewis McWillie over that? David Scheim thoroughly exposed this union dispute as a cover-up many years ago in his book Contract on America. For Mack/Dunkel to still maintain this smoke screen shows just how compromised and untrustworthy he has become.
Pat Speer also scored the show on not mentioning the HSCA’s experts who concluded Ruby very likely lied during his polygraph exam. Dunkel’s comments on this issue were rich, even for him. He says that Ruby’s polygraph test was useless based upon standard practices at the time and that the polygraph remains of little value. Again, can this man be that obtuse without being compromised? As I discussed at length at the end of Part 6 of my Reclaiming History review, the HSCA report went way beyond that point. When one reads the report closely they are saying something beyond that: that the many violations of normal procedure, plus the deliberate turning down of the GSR machine (Galvanic Skin Response), suggest that the test was rigged in advance. The combination of the GSR malpractice, plus the ludicrously overlong nature of the questioning, these almost guaranteed that – exaggerating only slightly – that after about 1/5 of the test, Ruby could have been asked if he was the Governor of Texas, said yes, and would have still passed the test. That is the real point of the HSCA report. One that Larry Fable, in his front man pose, cannot admit.
In an exchange with longtime researcher Ed Tatro, Mack has also tried to dismiss the exquisite timing of the two horns as Oswald is escorted out the door and down the corridor. He first called it a coincidence, then he said it was a signal from the awaiting car. With Tatro, he ignored the fact that Ruby specifically mentioned the “horn-blowing” in correspondence he wrote from jail in 1965. In a letter secured by Bill Diehl of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Ruby talked about being gravely ill and going to a hospital. He closed with, “If you hear a lot of horn-blowing, it will be for me, they will want my blood.” As I said in Part 6, Section VII of my review of Reclaiming History, one could argue that he was referring to St. Gabriel, but 1.) Ruby did not strike me as being very religious, and 2) He was Jewish. But the fact that Mack was fully aware of the two horns and then both distorted and eliminated them anyway shows the thorough dishonesty of the program.
How far is Mack/Dunkel willing to go in doing dirty work for the Dallas Police? He even tries to dismiss the numerous reversals of Henry Wade’s convictions. He says that every city has problems like that, and that at least Wade preserved the evidence to mount the reversals upon. Gary or Larry: Each city is supposed to preserve evidence until the defendant’s appeals process has run out. Not destroying evidence is not something to be congratulated upon. Second, yes many cities have problems with a compromised police force but a.) Not to the degree that Wade’s regime maintained, and b.) Only with a police force that bad could the nightmare of November 22-24 have happened. But third is a point that Mack/Dunkel has to ignore. If Craig Watkins had not been elected in 2006, we almost certainly would have never known about Wade’s perfidy. Because the lying, dirty, unethical, Old Boys Network Wade had established would have surely not exposed itself. And Mack and Vince Bugliosi would have been free to expound upon what a wonderful operation Wade and Captain Will Fritz had run.
Elsewhere, Mack/Dunkel has written that people like Pat Speer and myself have attacked him only because we disagree with him. Not true. The critiques that Milicent Cranor, David Mantik, Speer and myself have made of Mack’s Discovery Channel debacles cannot be reduced to that. They are not really based on a disagreement over conclusions, but with the methods by which the conclusions were reached. When CTKA reviewed last year’s ludicrous Inside the Target Car, the authors indicated numerous points where the show clearly broke from the record to make their simulation work. (See here.) Yet, all those now exposed falsifications did not stop Discovery Channel from repeating that ridiculous show this year. As I pointed out in relation to the more recent show, this same unscholarly and dishonest process was repeated there. It is that kind of performance-the adulteration of the record, with key facts omitted – that drove the reputation of the Warren Commission into the ground.
But with the present perpetrators, I think it is even worse. Why? Because now, through the releases of the Assassination Records Review Board, there is much startling new evidence that we know the Commission did not have. But yet with Mack/Dunkel, the production entity Creative Differences, and Discovery Channel, that monumental declassification process did not happen. In my 30 minute essay for the DVD version of the film JFK, I used about twenty times as many of these newly declassified documents as are in the combined three hours of The Ruby Connection, Inside the Target Car, and Did the Mob Kill JFK? And the few documents that the last show used, were misrepresented.
In light of that unsavory fact, Mack/Dunkel, Discovery Channel and Creative Differences deserve everything that has been thrown at them. Because the only thing worse than an uninformed public is a misinformed one. And that is the true sin behind what these shows do: They deliberately mislead the public about an epochal event in twentieth century history. In light of that, the word “sin” is the proper word to use in this regard. As I indicated in my essay on Mack and his guru Dave Perry, Mack/Dunkel, like Doctor Faustus, has sold his soul. In his case, Perry was his Mephistopheles.
As I proved in Part One, the title to this documentary is a misnomer. Since it deliberately shears off all the possible connections Jack Ruby could have to the Kennedy assassination i.e., to the Cosa Nostra, to the CIA, to Oswald, and finally to the Dallas Police. In Part One, I presented only a précis of the multitude of connections Jack Ruby had to those three entities and to Oswald. Other authors, like Jim Marrs and John Armstrong, have done longer and fuller examinations of what those ties were. For instance, Armstrong traces Ruby’s gun-running activities with the CIA back to the late fifties. But how could that be if Castro was not in power at the time? Because, as it often does, the CIA was playing both sides in the Batista/Castro struggle. So they were actually sending some aid to Castro at the time. And Ruby appears to have been part of it. (See John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, pgs. 177, 586)
The Warren Commission attempted to conceal almost everything I dealt with in Part One. But since they published 26 volumes of evidence, some of it managed to slip through. In the intervening years, due to declassification, field investigation, and the work of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the final Commission cover-up about Ruby fell apart. (I say “final” because as we have seen, even the assistant counsel of the Commission understood that, with Ruby, it was just a matter of how hard you wanted to dig.) With his low-level ties to the CIA, and mid-level ties to the Cosa Nostra, plus his ties to the Dallas Police as a source of information about narcotics – and probably as a source of graft in more ways than one – Ruby seems a logical choice to enter the basement of City Hall on 11/24 and polish off Oswald.
Like the Warren Commission, Gary Mack leaves all this out and reduces Jack Ruby, the man who Henry Hurt called, “A Pimp for All Seasons” , to a cipher. When, in fact, as far back as November of 1973 in Ramparts, Peter Dale Scott described Ruby as being part of the “longest cover-up”, and that Ruby’s sinister connections were even harder to conceal than Oswald’s. Scott wrote about the Ruby cover-up in 1973. This Discovery Channel program is being broadcast in November and December of 2009! Thirty six years later, they are continuing the Ruby cover-up.
As with Inside the Target Car, once you understand the objective, you can understand why the show does what it does. Like the Warren Commission, if you conceal who Ruby is, then it is much easier to portray what he did as something like a random act of violence. Or as the Commission said, and Oliver Stone parodied so memorably, you can disguise Ruby killing Oswald as the desperate act of a patriotic bartender who wanted to spare Jackie Kennedy the pain of sitting through a trial. But by depriving Oswald of his day in court, what the Commission and Ruby actually accomplished was this: Oswald may very well have been acquitted at trial. Or worse, he may have talked during or before the proceedings. In that sense, Ruby’s silencing of Oswald can be seen as a way of sealing off the best attempt at cracking the conspiracy. If you do what this show does, that is send Ruby through a twenty dollar car wash, dry him off, spray deodorant all over him, and give him a makeover, then you mislead the audience as to any motive Ruby could have besides sparing Jackie Kennedy.
But that is what this show does. And, as we shall see, Gary Mack knows better.
One of the more gassy and pretentious devices the show uses is a sub-titled timeline combined with a glass map over which the stage named Gary Mack (real name Larry Dunkel) traces with his finger. In other words, an event will be time stamped on the screen and then Mack/Dunkel will trace and match that with what the other party, say Ruby, was doing at the time. Or else he will trace the path that Ruby traveled from say his apartment to the Western Union station on Sunday morning. I think this was done to give the show a veneer of scientific investigation. In other words, to convince the audience that, as in Dragnet, the show was after “Just the facts, m’am.” The problem is that what matters are which facts you choose to time stamp, and how you figure that particular time. And the problems this show has in that regard are revealed very early.
For instance, the narrator intones that Oswald took a bus, then a taxi out of Dealey Plaza after the assassination. He then arrived at his rooming house at about 1:00 PM, then Officer J. D. Tippit was shot at 1:15 at 10th and Patton. No surprise, the show agrees with the Warren Commission: Oswald shot him and then fled the scene. I exaggerate very slightly when I say that this is all dealt with in about a minute. In other words it is completely glossed over in order to incriminate Oswald in the Tippit murder. It is never explained that Oswald took a bus headed the wrong way, apparently realized it, and then walked back to the Dealey Plaza area. That he next hailed a taxi, and then offered to give up the taxi to an elderly lady who declined. When she did, he then took the taxi to a point actually past his rooming house. I believe all this is shoved under the rug so the viewer does not ask the logical questions which would follow: 1.) If he shot Kennedy why didn’t Oswald stay on the bus and take it to the outskirts of town? 2.) If he was in a hurry to leave the area, why did he return to it? 3.) If he wanted faster transportation out of town, why did he offer to give up the cab ride? 4.) Did he take his taxi past the rooming house in order to scope out if anyone was there?
Once Oswald left his rooming house, why was he then last seen waiting for a bus going the wrong way from 10th and Patton, the scene of the Tippit murder? Mack/Dunkel then chose his time of Tippit’s murder to roughly match the Warren Commission’s time for the shooting. His 1:15 time is specious. But since Mack/Dunkel is protecting the official story he has to do it. But the two most reliable times at the scene of the shooting would make it nearly impossible for Oswald to arrive at the scene of the crime in time to kill Tippit then. Those would be T. F. Bowley and Helen Markham. (Markham did not become hysterical and unreliable until after the shooting.) Bowley said he looked at his watch after he stopped his car near the scene of the shooting. It said 1:10. (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 848) Markham had a regular routine where she washed her clothes at the washateria on the first floor of her building, then went to work. By this, she placed the time of the shooting at 1:06. (ibid, Armstrong) It would be incredible for Oswald to have traversed nearly a mile in the time period provided by these witnesses. So the Commission did two things. First, it ignored the actual time of its own reconstruction of the walk from the rooming house to 10th and Patton. It cut about five minutes from it. (Harold Weisberg Whitewash II, p. 25) As Weisberg writes, the Commission “staff got Oswald to the scene of the Tippit murder five minutes after the murder was broadcast on the police radio.” (ibid) Second, the Warren Commission requested a verbatim transcript of the police log. They ended up getting three versions of it: one in December, one in April, and one in August. The transcripts did not match each other. For instance, the order for Tippit to move into central Oak Cliff was absent from the first transcript. (See Weisberg, p. 24; Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, p. 261) Further, the Secret Service “improvement” of the transcripts began as early as December 6th. (Weisberg, p. 25)
The ballistics evidence at the scene of the crime exonerates Oswald further. So much so that it clearly suggests a cover up by the Dallas Police. There were two early reports by the police that the man at the scene was carrying an automatic pistol. In fact, Gerald Hill actually reported that the shells at the scene indicated the suspect was armed with an automatic. (Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 198) As both Garrison and Robert Groden (in his book The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald) show, it is hard to believe that anyone who could identify an automatic could mistake it for a revolver. And second, could mistake automatic shells for a revolver’s shells.
The next Tippit anomaly was that the shells did not match the bullets. The police said there were two Winchester/Western shells and two Remington-Peters shells found at the scene. Yet, turned over to the Commission, were three Winchester copper bullets and one Remington lead bullet. (Armstrong, p. 850) As many have commented, since when does Remington put Winchester bullets in their shells?
I say “turned over to the Commission” because the bullets had a strange chain of custody. Instead of sending all the bullets to the FBI lab, the Dallas Police sent only one. (Garrison, p. 199) Probably because they did not want to advertise the fact that the shells and bullets did not add up. They also held up the release of Tippit’s autopsy report for three weeks. (Weisberg, p. 28) This tardiness caused errors in the first Secret Service report of Tippit’s murder, which said he was shot only twice. When he was actually shot four times. (ibid, p. 26) The absence of an autopsy report also allowed the police to tell the FBI that this was the only bullet found in Tippit’s body. (Garrison, p. 199) Which was false. (Weisberg, p. 29)
This bullet did not match Oswald’s revolver. The reason given was that the bullet was too mutilated. (Armstrong, p. 850) So now the Commission asked the FBI to find the other bullets. Four months later they were found in the files of the Dallas homicide office, the domain of Capt. Will Fritz – aka Barney Fife. (Garrison, ibid) There has never been any cogent reason proffered as to why they were kept from the Bureau and the Commission for that long.
But the FBI told the Commission that they still could not find a match. The reason given was that the revolver attributed to Oswald was a .38 Special that had its bullet chambers slightly enlarged so the identification markings were difficult to decipher.(Armstrong, ibid) So now the ballistics evidence relied on the cartridges to link Oswald to the crime. The cartridges, unlike the bullets, were in the province of the police from the time of the murder. At the scene of the crime, the police are supposed to make out a report listing the evidence recovered there. The police did not list any cartridges as first day evidence. (Garrison, p. 200) It was not until six days after the police sent the single bullet to the FBI that the cartridges made it into the evidence summary. Again, why this was so has never been adequately explained. Once they arrived, presto! The FBI said they matched the revolver in evidence.
Except there was a huge cloud over this alleged match. At the scene of the crime, Gerald Hill told officer J. M. Poe to mark the shells for identification purposes. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 153) This was a routine matter for a homicide detective, which Poe was. In 1984 Poe told author Henry Hurt that he was certain he had done this. When Hurt inspected the shells at the National Archives, Poe’s initials were nowhere to be found. (ibid, p. 154) As both Hurt and Garrison write, the ballistics evidence more than suggests that the murderer was not Oswald. That the Dallas Police understood this. That they then fired the revolver in evidence after the fact in order to finally produce shells that matched the revolver.
I could go into other aspects of the Tippit murder that exculpate Oswald. A witness said that the killer came up to the right side of the car and might have touched it. Fingerprints were later recovered from that part of the cruiser car. They did not match Oswald’s. (Armstrong, p. 861) There was also the allegedly discarded jacket with a laundry tag. The Commission checked 293 laundries in both New Orleans and Dallas but was unable to match the tag or laundry mark on the jacket to any of them. (ibid p. 855) But for me the clincher is the following.
When FBI agent Bob Barrett arrived at the scene of the murder, Captain Westbrook asked him two odd questions: “Do you know who Lee Harvey Oswald is?” and then, “Do you know who Alek Hidell is?” Barrett said no to both since Oswald has not been charged yet with the Tippit murder. So how could Westbrook know about him at that time? Because Westbrook had a wallet with both of those name identifications inside. (ibid, p. 862) He found it near a puddle of blood where Tippit’s body was. WFAA-TV cameraman Ron Reiland shot film footage of the wallet being passed around to various law enforcement agents at the scene. But the official story has Oswald’s wallet being discovered on his person as he was driven from the Texas Theater, where he was apprehended, to City Hall. It was then turned over to Officer C. T. Walker. (ibid, p. 868) Yet, according to the Warren Report, Oswald allegedly left his wallet in a dresser drawer at the Paine household that morning. (p. 15)
What kind of a person maintains three wallets? And then carries two wallets to work with him? But worse, if Oswald shot Tippit, why on earth would he leave his wallet at the scene of the crime?
In the face of the evidentiary mess above, Mack/Dunkel says that the Tippit murder is an open and shut case: Oswald did it. To which I reply: “Are you for real?” Which, as we shall see, this program is not.
Mack/Dunkel begins the program with the complaint that Jack Ruby cheated history. Which might be a good way to open a show that was open ended in its discussion of the Kennedy case. Maybe we will now see both sides of the argument and be allowed to come to our own conclusions. But Mack/Dunkel quickly reveals this will not be the approach. He quickly adds that Ruby cheated history only insofar as the public will never know what drove Oswald to do what he did that day. You mean like murdering Tippit? Question to Gary/Larry: Would you like to explain to a jury how Oswald had three wallets on the morning of November 22nd? Would you also like to explain to them how Detective Poe’s initials disappeared from the shells? Or how a jacket with a laundry tag never got laundered?
The show also says that Oswald was 1.) a rabid Marxist, 2.) a Soviet exile and 3.) a Marine marksman. My reply to this is: Three strikes and you’re out. He was none of these. A rabid Marxist who knew no other Marxists, eh? When was Oswald exiled from the Soviet Union? The record says he left on his own with a Russian wife. Finally, he may have technically qualified as a Marine marksman since that was the lowest qualifying category. But everyone, even members of the Commission like Wesley Liebeler, understood he was not a good shot. And no one who saw him fire could believe he pulled off the extraordinary feat of sharpshooting that killed President Kennedy. (Hurt, p. 198)
Mack/Dunkel keeps up the program’s low level of scholarship by saying that, when Oswald was arrested at the Texas Theater, he drew his handgun and attempted to fire at a cop. Gil Jesus, among others, has shown that this was later exposed as a likely fabrication. Testimony by the FBI said that the firing pin never touched any of the bullets in the chambers. So what did the Dallas Police come up with as a fallback? That Oswald’s skin got caught in the mechanism. Hmm.
One of the strangest and most shameful episodes in the program is how it deals with Ruby’s presence at the press conference on the evening of November 22nd at Dallas Police HQ. They acknowledge that Ruby was there. They even show two still photographs of him. But Mack/Dunkel can’t bring himself to tell the American public two crucial facts about his presence there. First, that Ruby attempted to disguise himself as a reporter while in the gallery of DA Henry Wade’s press conference. (Hurt, p. 185) By ignoring that, Mack/Dunkel does not have to explain why Ruby would do such a thing.
But second, and even worse, Mack/Dunkel does not tell the public that Ruby actually said something during this conference. In briefing the press about Oswald, Wade mistakenly said he belonged to the Free Cuba Committee, which was a rightwing, anti-Castro group. Ruby quickly corrected this error and said that Oswald belonged to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a leftist pro-Castro group. (Hurt, p. 186) Ruby apparently knew the difference between them. But further, he wanted the record to show that Wade was wrong and there should be no confusion about Oswald. By depriving the public of this crucial information, Mack/Dunkel cuts off any curiosity about how Ruby could know such a thing about Oswald and why he would be determined to correct the record. No one else did.
Throughout this coverage of Friday, Mack/Dunkel is hard at work on his See No Evil-Hear No Evil-Say No Evil time line showing no relation between Oswald and Ruby’s activities. Let’s make a different time line of Ruby’s Friday activities. One that is not censored by a preconceived agenda. Let’s start with Julia Ann Mercer’s testimony. Remember, the Commission did not call her as a witness and she is not mentioned in the Warren Report. (Hurt, p. 114) So apparently, for this program, she doesn’t exist. Mercer said that a little before 11:00 AM, she was driving west on Elm Street, a little beyond where President Kennedy would be killed. Once she got past the triple underpass, traffic was slowed by a green truck stopped in her lane. As she waited, a young man got out of the passenger’s side and went to the side tool compartment. He then took out a long package and walked up the embankment to the grassy knoll area. As she tried to pass the truck, her eyes locked onto the driver. She got a good look at him. She later identified this man as Ruby. (ibid, pgs. 114-115)
Ruby was next seen at the offices of the Dallas Morning News. This was right around the time of the assassination. One reporter said that Ruby disappeared for about 20-25 minutes, and then reappeared after the assassination. There is a photo of a man who looks much like Ruby in Dealey Plaza. And the newspaper offices were only four blocks away. If the idea was to give himself a convenient alibi, but to be in relatively close proximity to the crime scene, this fit the bill. (ibid, p. 184)
After the assassination, at around 1:30 PM, Ruby was seen by two reliable witnesses at Parkland Hospital. One of the witnesses, reporter Seth Kantor, said he actually exchanged words with Ruby. (ibid) The Warren Commission bought Ruby’s denial about this incident. The House Select Committee on Assassinations didn’t buy it. They believed Ruby was there. As some have speculated, it may have been Ruby who planted the Magic Bullet on the wrong stretcher at Parkland Hospital.
After Oswald was apprehended and paraded out for his first line up, there are reports of Ruby being at the police department. This was about 4:30 and “he spoke and shook hands with people he knew.” (ibid, p.185)
That evening, Ruby decided to take some sandwiches up to the police department for those cops working over time on the JFK case. He called in advance and was told this was not necessary. But he showed up anyway. (Ibid) He ended up on the third floor, mingling with reporters. He then followed the reporters to the basement and did his reporter impression. Except, at that time, he knew more than either Wade or the reporters did about Oswald.
Talk about connections. There is a barrel full of them. You have Ruby possibly delivering a weapon to the crime scene, allowing himself an alibi for being near the actual shooting, following Kennedy’s body to Parkland – and perhaps planting a false bullet – monitoring Oswald’s movements at the Dallas Police HQ, and finally sneaking into a press conference and maintaining Oswald as a fake Marxist by correcting an error by the DA. If the program had given us Ruby’s true background, as I did in Part One, and then drew this particular time line, the audience could have come to a more informed opinion about Ruby’s possible connections to the JFK murder. In regards to that, I must quote Mack/Dunkel’s comment: “The problem for those investigating the assassination is whether or not to put Ruby involved in a conspiracy with Oswald: how do they mix the two together in a way that makes sense today?” My reply: Did you ever hear of the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro? If so, why did you not mention them?
In light of what the show actually does, the real title of the program should be: “How to Erase Ruby’s Connections to the JFK case”.
As with the Tippit killing, the show assumes Oswald killed Kennedy. Mack/Dunkel has former Dallas cop Jim Leavelle say that if Oswald had not been killed, he would have been convicted and may still have been incarcerated and running out his appeals. Mack/Dunkel echoes this by saying that many people wonder what would have happened if Oswald had gone to trial. He then adds that a good lawyer would want to keep Oswald off the stand and that a lot of testimony would have been presented as to what did and did not happen.
By doing this, the show cuts off any possibility of a conspiracy in the JFK case. Which, of course, makes the whole “patriotic nightclub owner” façade possible. Personally, if I was on the defense team, I would have put Oswald on the stand. One question I would have asked him is this: Did you ever live at 544 Camp street? If not, then why did you stamp that address on the flyers you handed out in New Orleans? This would have shown Oswald for who he really was. I then would have handed him a hunting round, like the one Parkland security officer O. P. Wright found and gave to the Secret Service. I would then have produced the rifle in evidence and asked Oswald if he thought that round would work in that rifle. I would then have asked him if he ever purchased the proper ammunition for that rifle, which an investigation showed he did not. I then would have recalled Wright to the stand and asked him if the FBI ever showed him CE 399-the so-called Magic Bullet that went through President Kennedy and Gov. Connally – and if so, had he identified it as the bullet he turned over to the Secret Service. After he said he did not, I would have exposed the FBI as liars in that regard. (Josiah Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas, p. 175) Then, to further decimate the ballistics evidence, I would have called FBI agent Elmer Lee Todd to the stand. I would have shown him the FBI document that says he placed his initials on CE 399. I then would have handed him CE 399 and asked him where those initials were. After he failed to locate them, since they are not there, I would have further exposed the FBI frame up of Oswald. I then would have shown Todd the receipt that says he got CE 399 at the White House from the Secret Service at 8:50 the night of the 22nd. I then would have shown him Robert Frazier’s work log which says he received the stretcher bullet at FBI HQ at 7:30, an hour and twenty minutes before Todd gave it to him. (See my Reclaiming History series, Part 7, Section three) I would then have asked Todd how Frazier could have been in receipt of CE 399 before he gave it to him. When Todd got tongue-tied, I would have asked the judge to throw out the prosecution’s case. The prosecution would have probably offered no objection. If the judge was anyone besides Mack/Dunkel, he would have granted the motion.
So much for the empty, unchallenged claims of Dallas cop Jim Leavelle.
From here the show moves to Mack/Dunkel’s grand finale. Which he actually called a “recreation” of Ruby’s killing of Oswald. It has about as much credibility as his recreation of Kennedy’s assassination for Inside the Target Car. Which is none.
Mack begins with the call from Ruby employee Karen Carlin to Ruby’s apartment on the morning of the 24th. This was a request for an advance on her salary. By beginning with this, Mack/Dunkel informs the knowledgeable viewer that he has no intention of telling the whole story. By beginning here, he leaves out the fact that Ruby had arranged a smaller payment to Karen the night before. (Commission Exhibit 2287) So she could have asked him for this further advance on Saturday night. Mack/Dunkel then adds that without this call, Ruby would not have been at City Hall to kill Ruby. What he leaves out is that during Karen’s Warren Commission testimony, it became evident that Ruby himself had arranged the Sunday morning call in advance. (WC Vol. XV, p. 663) Which turns the program’s thesis in this regard on its ear.
Another thing left out by beginning where he does is the testimony of Bill Grammar. Grammar was a police dispatcher. He was on duty Saturday night. He got a call then concerning Oswald’s Sunday transfer. The message was something like: “You have to change the plan. If not, we are going to kill him.” (italics added) Grammar knew Ruby, and he said the caller called him by name. The next day, when he heard that Ruby had shot Oswald, he retroactively put the voice together with the man who called him. He concluded the murder was planned. (see an interview with Grammar.)
Another key point left out by beginning here is the fact that there is uncertainty about Ruby’s activities that morning. This is something that even the Warren Report admitted. (WR p. 352) As Anthony Summers wrote, the Carlin call was preceded by a call from Ruby’s cleaning lady. She later said that the voice on the other end sounded terribly strange to her. She wasn’t sure it was Ruby. (Summers, Conspiracy, p. 460) Three television technicians – Warren Richey, Ira Walker, and John Smith – said they saw Ruby that morning before ten o’clock. He asked them, “Has Oswald been brought down yet?” (Jim Marrs, Crossfire, p. 418) At around this same time, a church minister said he was on an elevator with Ruby and his destination was the floor where Oswald was located. (op cit, Summers) Its interesting that Mack/Dunkel places the Carlin call at 9:30. But his Bible, the Warren Report, places the call almost an hour later. (WR p. 353) Mack/Dunkel might have moved up the call in order to clash with the four witnesses who place Ruby at City Hall at the earlier time.
Let’s stop here and measure the evidence the program has left out before Ruby even left for Western Union.
The show then says that the police tried to guard the basement from false entry and believed all the doors were secure. Which, as both Burt Griffin of the Commission and the HSCA discovered, they were not. Griffin told Summers that he thought the police lacked credibility about the security of the basement at the time of the transfer. (p. 463) Griffin’s suspicions centered on officer Patrick Dean. Dean told Griffin that Ruby would have needed a key to enter a certain door in the basement. This was wrong. (HSCA Vol. IX, p. 143) Griffin grew so frustrated at Dean’s answers that he blew up at him and repeatedly called him a liar. (Meagher, pgs. 412-13) He then wrote a memo to Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin in which he said that Dean had been derelict in securing the basement. That Griffin had reason to believe Ruby did not come down the Main Street ramp. Finally, that he suspected Dean was now part of a cover-up and was advising Ruby to say he did come down the ramp even though he knew he had not. (Seth Kantor, The Ruby Cover-Up, p. 20)
If you can believe it, the names of Patrick Dean and Burt Griffin are not mentioned in this program. By doing this, Mack/Dunkel eliminates any possibility of Ruby having an inside man at the police station.
The program then gets worse. As I noted in my Reclaiming History review (Part Six, section 6), once Ruby got to the Western Union station, it was easy for him to be hand signaled from the rear of City Hall and then let inside through an alley door. The program leaves this out and opts for the Warren Commission scenario of Ruby coming straight down the Main Street ramp. But then, in a shocking stroke, they leave out the testimony of Roy Vaughn, Don Flusche, and Rio Pierce. They had to in order to make their “reconstruction” digestible. In the spirit of free speech and honest debate, let us reveal what JFK: The Ruby Connection chooses to conceal from the viewer.
Vaughn was the officer at the top of the ramp who stopped any unauthorized person from entering the basement. He staunchly denied Ruby came down the ramp and passed a polygraph on the subject. (WR pgs. 221-22, Meagher p. 407))
Sgt. Don Flusche was an officer stationed outside the ramp and had a clear view of both Main Street and the ramp prior to the shooting. His testimony was kept from the Commission. But he told Jack Moriarty of the HSCA that there was no doubt in his mind that Ruby did not walk down the ramp. Further, he was sure that Ruby did not come down Main Street. (HSCA Vol. IX, pgs 138-39)
Pierce was the driver of the car that came out the ramp and according to the Commission blocked Vaughn’s view of Ruby coming down the ramp. Nobody in the car said he saw Ruby coming down the ramp. (Meagher, pgs 404-405) How can anyone make a show about Ruby’s shooting of Oswald and leave this testimony out? It was because of the weight of this evidence, plus the fact that Dean refused to appear before them, that the HSCA concluded Ruby did not enter the basement by way of the ramp. (op. cit. HSCA, p. 140)
The fact that Mack/Dunkel keeps the crucial testimony of these three men from the viewer tells us all we need to know about the honesty of this program.
At the end, Mack/Dunkel puts together his “reconstruction” of the murder of Oswald. In defiance of all the above, he has Ruby coming down the Main Street ramp. He then says that instead of having the Carlin money transfer stamped at 11:17 from Western Union, Ruby should have been in the basement of the police station at that time. This ignores two salient facts. First, if Ruby had been hand signaled from the back of the building, that would not have been necessary. Second, the longer Ruby was in the garage, the higher the risk that an honest cop could have spotted him.
The show then intersperses scenes of the actual shooting with the program’s modern day reenactment. And I must comment on something that seemed odd to me as I watched the intercutting. The two settings did not seem to match. The walls of the corridor did not seem to extend as far outward into the actual parking area as the 1963 films seem to show. It appears that either the area was remodeled or the little playlet was staged in a different place. There was no explanation given for this apparent discrepancy.
The show tries to place the blame for the shooting of Oswald on the fact that the transfer car was not in its proper place at the time Oswald was escorted down the corridor. Which, as I said, is foreshortened here. This takes away the depth factor that is apparent in the actual films. But if the depth factor was there, this ersatz point about the car would be vitiated. In boxing, there is a term called “shortening the angle”. This refers to a fighter who, instead of throwing a punch from the front, steps to the side of his opponent to shorten the distance to deliver the blow. Well in the actual films, its clear that Ruby could have done this if the car had been in its right spot. That is, instead of looping out from the front, he could have just slid down to his right, stepped into the corridor, and fired. The fault was not in the angle, or the car. The fact that made the shooting possible was something that, unbelievably, Mack/Dunkel never mentions. Even though it is obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain.
As Australian researcher Greg Parker has noted, the police had planned a four point pocket around Oswald as they escorted him down the corridor. This meant one man behind him , one on each side, and another in front. If this would have been maintained, it would have been difficult for Ruby to kill Oswald no matter where the car was. In all probability, Ruby would have had to delay the attempt until after the transfer, later at the press conference at the county jail. But what made that unnecessary for him was the fact that the man in front broke protection and separated himself from Oswald by several yards. This allowed Ruby enough space to kill Oswald from any angle from the side he was on (which would be Oswald’s left). The man who broke the protection pocket, allowing Oswald to be shot, was Capt. Will Fritz (Barney Fife). It is very hard to believe that Mack/Dunkel never noticed this as he watched this film over and over. In fact, I will say here and now that he did notice it.
Why am I sure? Because as I watched this scene, I had a similar shock as I did when watching Inside the Target Car. When Mack/Dunkel drew his imaginary line back to the sixth floor window in that show, my eyebrows arched upward. Because I noticed he had moved the exit wound on Kennedy’s skull in order to make that line possible. Well here, I watched the “reconstruction” over and over and I saw that Mack/Dunkel had completely eliminated Fritz from the recreation. Yep. He did. So the viewer has the most crucial flaw – the one that made Ruby’s shooting of Oswald possible – removed from his consciousness. If I say so myself, even for Mack/Dunkel and the Sixth Floor Museum, that was an Orwellian stroke.
The other thing he does is to rearrange the two horns. As I have written, in the unedited version of the shooting there are two horns that go off. Once you are aware of them, it is almost eerie to watch the shooting. The first goes off at almost the instant Oswald emerges from the office and into the corridor. The second goes off a brief instant before Ruby plunges forward to kill Oswald. It is possible to see the first one as a signal for Ruby to move into position, and the second as the signal to fire. In the first run through, Mack moves the first horn way past the point where Oswald has come into view from the office. In the second run through, the first horn is much closer in accuracy but the second horn, like Fritz, is just eliminated.
The show also tries to cloud the idea that Oswald recognized Ruby and that is why he turned sideways at the last instant – which made the shot fatal. As Dr. Robert McClelland said at the 2009 JFK Lancer Conference, if the angle of the shot had been straight on, there is a possibility Oswald could have survived. The program tries to say that Oswald could not have seen Ruby because the media lights were too powerful. First, it appears to me that the “recreation” does not position those lights as accurately as possible. It makes it look like someone like say, Oscar winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler, was lighting a movie set. Second, even on the show’s own lighting terms, Oswald would have been able to recognize Ruby as he got in front of him.
One last point about this issue: Mack/Dunkel tries to seal this point by having the ever cooperative Leavelle say that it was he who turned Oswald sideways when he saw Ruby approach. But its obvious from still photos that when Ruby plunges the gun into Oswald’s stomach, Leavelle is not looking at Ruby, but at the car.
Mack/Orwell then tries to wrap it all up with two specious closing pronouncements. First, he says that the conspirators could not have known when Oswald was going to talk. He could have talked the first day. Really? Oswald was not charged with the Kennedy murder until late Friday night. In fact, he actually seems to be a bit surprised when a reporter tells him this. Second, Oswald had been paraded around the station, going to line ups and interrogation sessions, throughout Friday and Saturday. And Wade and Fritz were giving impromptu and formal press conferences throughout both days. This provided good monitoring of the situation. But the clincher here is something that, of course, this show eliminates. On Saturday night, Oswald tried to make his call to John Hurt, the former military intelligence officer who was stationed in North Carolina. The man who former CIA officer Victor Marchetti says was likely part of the false defector program at the naval station at Nag’s Head. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 366) In other words, it was the first sign that Oswald was trying to contact someone through an intelligence cut-out. That call was aborted by the Secret Service. It was never let through. The next morning Oswald was dead. Gary or Larry, I think that timing is kind of important.
The last piece of obfuscation the show uses is the old standby: Too many people had to be involved for this to happen. Well let’s see: If there was one man on the police security team who failed to secure the basement, and then this guy signaled Ruby from the back, and then let him in the alley door … well that would be a grand total of two people, if you count Ruby. Way back in 1964, Burt Griffin had a suspect as Ruby’s accomplice. His name was Patrick Dean. Dean reportedly flunked his polygraph. The results of which are nowhere to be found today. (Summers, p. 464, HSCA Vol. IX p. 139) Roy Vaughn, the man who the Commission tried to pin Ruby’s entry into the basement on, passed his test.
Let me conclude with another key event this show leaves out. It indicates Ruby’s mindset at the time, something the show also tries to confuse. Detective Don Archer was with Ruby after he was in custody after the murder. Ruby was very nervous: “He was sweating profusely. I could hear his heart beating. He asked for one of my cigarettes. I gave him a cigarette. Finally … the head of the Secret Service came up-and he told me that Oswald had died. This should have shocked Ruby because it would mean the death penalty … .Instead of being shocked, he became calm, he quit sweating, his heart slowed down. I asked him if he wanted a cigarette, and he advised me he didn’t smoke. I was just astonished … I would say his life had depended on him getting Oswald.” (Marrs, pgs. 423-424)
In light of Archer’s assertion, it’s hard to see Ruby’s act as anything but a necessary silencing of Oswald. The viewers of this show are deprived of that knowledge by censorship. They are also deprived of the reasons Ruby would feel that way, which I provided in detail in Part One. But Ruby himself succinctly summarized them when he said: “They’re going to find about Cuba. They’re going to find out about the guns. They’re going to find out about New Orleans, find about everything.” (Armstrong, p. 193) If I was doing a documentary about Ruby, I would place this on screen as a closing quote. Like just about everything else in JFK: The Ruby Connection, it is nowhere to be found.
Larry Dunkel and the Sixth Floor are involved in serious, no-holds barred psychological warfare against the American public on the Kennedy case. In their brazen disregard of any journalistic integrity, their script and techniques might have been written by the likes of Allen Dulles or James Angleton.
How the Discovery Channel got involved in this dirty work is a mystery that needs to be addressed.
All you need to know about the value of the Discovery Channel program JFK: The Ruby Connection is this: Gary Mack is the main talking head, host, and interviewer. If one recalls last year’s Discovery debacle, Inside the Target Car, Mack used a series of tricks and omissions to achieve a preordained goal. As they say in the computer programming business it was garbage in, garbage out. In that show, Mack bamboozled the uninitiated in the audience by placing Jackie Kennedy in the wrong position in the limousine (even though Robert Groden told him about this error in advance); he put the exit wound in the wrong place on JFK’s head; and he used “replica” skulls that could not have been actual replicas.
These “errors” were all done with apparent objectives in mind. The first was to make the audience believe that if an assassin fired from a certain position from the right front, he would have hit both President Kennedy and Jackie. The actual frames from the Zapruder film prove this is false, Jackie was out of the line of fire. And Gary Mack has watched that film dozens of times. Further, as I said, , Bob Groden alerted him about this on the set. But the truth didn’t seem to matter. Mack then placed the exit wound in President Kennedy’s skull in a different place than the autopsy report. This second “error” allowed Mack to draw a trajectory line back to the sixth floor. Something he could not have done with the exit location described in the autopsy report, which – on camera – Mack said he had read. Third, he also contracted out with an Australian defense company, to construct “replica” skulls which – as it turned out – were not replicas. As Milicent Cranor pointed out, Mack’s own experiment proved they were not. For the bullets fired through the ersatz “replica” skulls did not break apart. But the Warren Commission said that the bullet that killed Kennedy did. Afterwards, Gary Mack said he couldn’t figure out why they did not. That’s funny. Milicent and I sure could. As I noted, what this experiment actually proved is that: 1.) Either President Kennedy was not hit by Mannlicher Carcano bullets, or 2.) The “replica” skulls were replicas only in the mind of Gary Mack. That is they deliberately did not have anywhere near the density they needed to shatter a bullet. This was obvious in the section of the show where a hunting round was fired at the phony replicas. The ersatz skulls completely shattered like a special effect out of a slasher movie. Not in real life.
I could go on and on about how bad this show was. But I refer you to our gallery of reviews, which deals with that now notorious program. Evidently, like John Lattimer, Gerald Posner, and Dan Rather before him, Gary Mack is being well paid for his sales services. Since it looks like he didn’t care about being exposed on each and every level and from multiple angles for Inside the Target Car. If you can believe it, he is at it again. This time, instead of the murder of President Kennedy, his subject is the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. The guy who Mack – in his new incarnation – now says shot Kennedy.
At this point, it is important to remind the novice reader of an important fact about Gary Mack. Like Gus Russo and Dale Myers before him, Mack used to be a Warren Commission critic. That is, he used to think Oswald did not shoot Kennedy and the Warren Commission was full of bunk. Around the time of Oliver Stone’s JFK, Russo’s lifelong friend Dave Perry became his guru during Mack’s conversion period. And, according to Perry, he himself was instrumental in getting the reincarnated Gary Mack his present position as Curator of The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas. (After Perry’s confession about this emerged, Mack denied Perry’s self-admitted role in his job hunt. So they probably have their stories straightened out by now.)
But the important point about Mack’s conversion is this: Like Russo and Myers, Mack knows what the holes in the official story are. He knows how the critics – with very little money or media exposure – have connected with the public on them. Now that he has flipped sides, he uses the finances of the MSM to mend those holes in the official story. But like Lattimer, Posner, and Rather before him – and as profusely demonstrated by Inside the Target Car – the holes are simply too large for any kind of simple stitching. So what Mack creates is a kind of diaphanous crazy quilt that falls apart at the slightest poke.
“What concerned Moroccan officials … was a letter they discovered on Davis … dealing with “Oswald” and the assassination.”
—Henry Hurt, describing Ruby’s friend Thomas Davis
One of the problems with this show is that its very title is deceptive. Because there is simply no exploration of who Jack Ruby was and what his connections to the John F. Kennedy case were or may have been. I say “may have been” because, as with Oswald, the Warren Commission’s exploration of Ruby’s actual background was, to be kind, cursory. To be unkind, today it looks humorous. For instance, the Commission famously wrote that Ruby had no significant link to organized crime. (Jim Marrs, Crossfire, p. 389) Yet the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) listed a series of phone calls made by Ruby in the month leading up to the murder of Kennedy. It clearly exposes that assertion as dubious. In fact, the House Select Committee specifically criticized both the Warren Commission and the FBI for “failing to analyze systematically … the data in those records. ” (Vol. V, p. 188) Ruby’s phone usage went up by a factor of 300% in November of 1963. (ibid p. 190) At this time, Ruby was in phone contact with the likes of Irwin Wiener, Barney Baker, Nofio Pecora, Lewis McWillie, and Dusty Miller, all of who had ties to organized crime. (ibid pgs. 193-195) And as Jim Marrs writes in Crossfire, “the record shows his involvement in a number of criminal activities including gambling, narcotics, prostitution, and gun running.” (Marrs, p. 389) But, as the quote above shows, these activities were not done only with the Mafia.
Ruby’s gun running was at least partly done with former CIA agent Thomas Eli Davis. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, pgs 401-405) And Davis’ connections reportedly went all the way up to the CIA assassin famously code named QJ/WIN. Davis had a slight resemblance to Oswald and he used the name Oswald at times in his work. (ibid, p. 402) In fact, Ruby was so close to Davis that, after he shot Oswald, Ruby actually volunteered Davis’ name to his attorneys. Incredibly, Ruby said that if he beat the Oswald rap he wanted to go back into the gun running business with Davis. (ibid) Both Davis and Ruby had been involved with another gun runner named Robert McKeown. (ibid) McKeown had run guns to Castro and during one of Ruby’s contacts with McKeown, Ruby offered him 25,000 dollars for a letter of introduction to the Cuban dictator. (Hurt p. 177) Where Ruby would get that kind of money and why he himself needed to contact Fidel so badly is something that we will mention later, but which Gary Mack never brings up in this show that supposedly tells the viewer about Ruby’s connections to the JFK case.
Neither does Mack explain another interesting riddle. Less than three weeks after the assassination, Davis was attempting to sell guns in Morocco. He was arrested. While he was searched, the authorities found a strange handwritten letter on him referring to “Oswald” and the assassination. (ibid p. 403) In fact, there is evidence that on the day of Kennedy’s murder, Davis was in Algiers for gun-running activities, and was released with the help of QJ/WIN himself. (ibid p. 404) Geez, those are interesting Ruby connections to the JFK case: Castro, the Mafia, the CIA, and the usage of Oswald’s name. They aren’t on this program though.
Ruby also lied about how many times he had been to Cuba. He said he had been there only once, in August of 1959. (ibid, p. 178) Yet there is evidence Ruby was there two times just in that same year. Again, it appears the Commission tried to cover up this fact about Ruby. How? By blending the two trips, which took place in August and September, into one. (Warren Report, p. 370, p. 802, WC Vol. XXII p. 859) Robert Blakey, Chief Counsel of the HSCA, once wrote that it was “…established beyond doubt that Ruby lied repeatedly and willfully to the FBI and the Warren Commission about the number of trips he made to Cuba and their duration … Their purpose, was to courier something, probably money, into or out of Cuba.” (Marrs, p. 394)
The man who Ruby was closest to in Havana was the mob associated gambler, Lewis McWillie. Elaine Mynier, a girlfriend of McWillie, described the two men. She said McWillie was “…a big time gambler, who has always been in the big money and operated top gambling establishments in the United States and Cuba. He always had a torpedo (a bodyguard) living with him for protection.” She went on to say that Ruby was “a small time character who would do anything for McWillie … (Marrs, p. 393, italics added) The Commission had to have known that McWillie was a gambler and killer who Ruby idolized. (WC Vol. V, p. 201, Vol. XXIII, p. 166) While managing the Tropicana in Havana, McWillie became associated with some of the Mob’s top leaders like Santo Trafficante and Meyer Lansky, who were part owners. (FBI Memo of 3/26/64) It was Trafficante’s association with McWillie that has led some commentators to relate one of Ruby’s visits to McKeown as a favor for McWillie. In early 1959, McWillie’s boss Trafficante was arrested and jailed outside of Havana by Castro. Just a few days later, Ruby got in contact with McKeown. He told McKeown that he represented Las Vegas interests who were seeking the release of three prisoners in Cuba. Ruby told him that he would offer him five thousand dollars per prisoner for his help. McKeown said he wanted to see the money first. (Marrs, p. 396)
McWillie was also a former employee of a main power inside the Delois Green gang – Benny Binion – who had moved to Las Vegas. Binion also worked at the Tropicana in Havana in 1959. (See CD 1193, WC Vol. XXIII p. 163) Binion probably knew Frank Sturgis since Sturgis was Castro’s supervisor of gambling concessions in 1959. Further, Ruby was reportedly involved in gun running with Miami arms dealer Eddie Browder. Browder was also involved with Sturgis. (Marrs, p. 392) Frank Sturgis, of course, was connected to the CIA, Castro, and the Mafia.
There was also the testimony of Ruby employee Nancy Perrin Rich to attest to Ruby’s intelligence ties and his gun running activities. She testified that she had moved to Dallas in 1962 to reconcile with her husband Robert. Once they did so, two local detectives who knew Robert had helped her find a job. It was tending bar for Jack Ruby. But she said she didn’t like Ruby because of his overbearing manner and temper. So she quit.
She said that later her husband Robert had met with a military officer about getting some anti-Castro Cubans out of Cuba and into Miami. This meeting in Dallas was presided over by a U.S. Army colonel. The colonel suggested a cash payment of ten grand. A few nights later, the Perrins met again with the colonel but this time there were a couple of Cubans in attendance. At this second meeting the assignment was more well-defined. They were not just going to get refugees out; they were also running guns into Cuba. When they heard this, the Perrins wanted more money. The implication made by the Cubans and colonel was that the money would be arriving soon via a bagman. Rich then told the Commission: “I had the shock of my life … A knock comes on the door and who walks in but my little friend Jack Ruby … and everybody looks like … here comes the savior.” The Commission did not mention any of Rich’s testimony in their report. Further, in 1966, Nancy Rich told Mark Lane that the Commission had eliminated the telling detail that, outside of the apartment house where the second meeting took place, was a cache of military armaments. (Mark Lane, Rush to Judgment, pgs 287-297, Marrs, p. 397)
In fact, this aspect of Ruby’s life – his relations to CIA-Mafia activities in Cuba – was obvious to even Commission staffers. Warren Commission attorneys Leon Hubert and Burt Griffin, who ran the Ruby investigation, wrote a memo to Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin in March of 1964. They wrote that, “The most promising links between Jack Ruby and the assassination of President Kennedy are established through underworld figures and anti-Castro Cubans and extreme right-wing Americans.” (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 948) Two months later, they wrote another memo: “We believe that a reasonable possibility exists that Ruby has maintained a close interest in Cuban affairs to the extent necessary to participate in gun sales and smuggling … Neither Oswald’s Cuban interests in Dallas nor Ruby’s Cuban activities have been adequately explored … We believe the possibility exists, based on evidence already available, that Ruby was involved in illegal dealings with Cuban elements who might have had contact with Oswald. The existence of such dealings can only be surmised since the present investigation has not focused on that area.” (WC Memorandum to J. Lee Rankin, 5/14/64) In other words, Griffin and Hubert were saying that the connection between the two men very likely existed in these Cuban matters. But since the FBI was not interested in it, they couldn’t really discover if it was there.
Like Oswald, Jack Ruby was in the middle of the Cuban conflict as it extended into the United States. And he connected to each of the domestic power centers that interacted with that conflict. The program under review is silent about this.
“Starting with Sunday afternoon, you could no longer find a policeman in town who said he knew Ruby.”
—Seth Kantor
As most everyone knows today, but what this show does not reveal, is that Ruby was also an FBI informant. A fact that J. Edgar Hoover tried to get the Warren Commission to conceal. Which they willingly did for him. (Hurt, p. 177) As one FBI report, partly censored by the Warren Commission revealed, the FBI not only knew about Ruby’s ties to underworld gambling in Dallas and Fort Worth, but their informant said that for Ruby to carry them on as he did, he had to have police connections in both cities. (FBI report of 12/6/63) This informant, a man named William Abadie, had briefly worked for Ruby writing gambling “tickets” as well as serving as a “slot machine and jukebox mechanic.” He went on to say that he had observed policemen coming and going while acting as a bookie in Ruby’s establishment.
Further in this regard, Jim Marrs writes that another source told the Bureau that when he attempted to set up a lottery game in Dallas in 1962, he “was told it would be necessary to obtain the approval of Jack Ruby, since any “fix” with local authorities had to come through Ruby.” (Marrs, p. 390) Another source echoed this accusation by saying that Ruby was a payoff man for the Dallas Police Department. (CD 4, p. 529) Ruby also allegedly could fix things with the county authorities (WC Vol. XXIII p. 372) This last revelation was from the wife of one James Breen. She said her husband “had made connection with large narcotics set up operating between Mexico, Texas, and the East … In some fashion James got the okay to operate through Jack Ruby of Dallas.” (ibid, p. 369) Reinforcing Ruby’s ties to the drug trade, a veteran of the Special Services Bureau (SSB) of the Dallas Police said that he regarded Ruby as a source of information in connection with his investigatory activities. In other words, Ruby was a police informant on the narcotics beat. (WC Vol. XIII p. 183) The vice-chief of the SSB unit considered himself fairly close to Ruby and allegedly visited his clubs frequently. (WC Vol. XXIII p. 78 and p. 207)
As Sylvia Meagher pointed out in Accessories After the Fact, one indication of just how close to the police Ruby was is this: He had been arrested several times, yet each time he had gotten off easily. (p. 423) For instance, Ruby had been arrested twice for carrying a concealed weapon. In each case, no charges were filed and he was released the same day. (ibid, p. 422) So its no surprise that, when the police had Oswald incarcerated, Ruby would be roaming the corridors with a weapon in his pocket. Like his ties to mobsters, his vast police contacts were so commonly known that the Warren Commission had to disguise them. One way they did this was to write in the Warren Report that “the evidence indicates that Ruby was keenly interested in policemen and their work.” (WR p. 800) Phrased in that way, we are supposed to believe that Ruby was interested in joining the force.
Another way that the Warren Commission tried to camouflage Ruby’s multi-tiered connections to the police was by minimizing the number of officers he knew. Quoting Police Chief Jesse Curry, the Commission states that Ruby knew approximately 25-50 of the 1,175 men in the DPD. (WR p. 224) Meagher found this so strained as to be risible. She wrote that of the 75 policemen present when Oswald was shot, Ruby knew at least forty of them. (Meagher, p. 423) She then adds that if this same ratio was consistent for the entire force, Ruby had to have known nearly 600 officers. Several witnesses back this up. Joseph Cavagnaro, manager of the Sheraton Dallas Hotel, told the FBI that Ruby “knew all the policemen in town” and was well-acquainted with a great number of them. (Lane, p. 232) A police lieutenant told the FBI that Ruby was well known among the members of the DPD. (ibid, p. 233) Musician Johnny Cola knew Ruby for years on a personal basis. He said that “Ruby at least had a speaking acquaintance with most of the policemen in the Dallas Police Department.” (ibid) Edward McBee, a Dallas bartender who also knew Ruby well, told the FBI that Ruby “knew many, and probably most, of the officers on the Dallas Police Department.” (ibid) William O’Donnell knew Ruby for 16 years and worked for him at the Carousel Club. He stated that “Ruby is on speaking terms with about 700 out of the 1200 men on the police force” and that he was “not at all surprised to learn of Ruby’s admittance to the basement.” (ibid)
The Commission also covered up Ruby’s closeness with the police by saying that Ruby served them “free coffee and soft drinks” at his Carousel Club. He actually had his bartenders serve them free alcoholic beverages. O’Donnell said that when police officers dropped in at the Carousel, they were admitted without charge and given a free “round of drinks”. (ibid) A former police officer named Theodore Fleming said that many officers were on a first name basis with Ruby and that 90% of the time, Ruby served them free drinks. (ibid) Another police officer, Hugh Smith, said that, when he joined the force, Ruby’s place was recommended to him by another police officer. Smith then added that a great many officers frequented the club socially and that Ruby actually gave them bottles of liquor. He continued by saying that one officer actually used Ruby’s apartment on several occasions. (ibid p. 234) Smith’s statement about giving away bottles of liquor to the DPD was reinforced at the other end of the transaction. A former waitress at the Carousel, Janice Jones, described the same donation by Ruby. (ibid)
But a stripper at the Carousel, Shari Angel, said the donations went even further. The officers “all got payola, to look over – a lot of stuff … You could see ’em right up to the office getting their little pay. Patrolmen didn’t usually do it. It was detectives, vice squad, and all that.” (Ian Griggs, No Case to Answer, p. 222) This clearly suggests graft for either narcotics or prostitution, or perhaps both. (And it is an idea we will return to when we discus the Rose Cheramie incident.)
But it was not with just the DPD that Ruby was friendly. Ruby also knew lawyers in the district attorney’s office. On 11/21/63 he visited and chatted with Assistant DA Bill Alexander, Vincent Bugliosi’s trusted source. Ruby said that he and Alexander were “great friends”. (Lane, p. 261) They were such good friends that Alexander had a permanent pass to the Carousel. (Griggs, p. 222) Ester Ann Mash, a former employee who dated Ruby in early 1963, revealed that he took her to the homes of some famous citizens. At once such gathering, DA Henry Wade was in attendance. (Marrs, p. 390)
The credibility and quantity of the above evidence is convincing. So much so that it sheds backward light on a curious statement that Nancy Perrin Rich made to Mark Lane. In referring to the famous incident of Ruby disguising himself as a reporter at the Dallas Police Station, she said that “Anyone that made that statement would be either a damn liar or a damn fool.” (Lane, p. 288) Why? Because there was no way Ruby could disguise himself at the station. For the simple reasons that 1.) There was not a cop in Dallas that did not know him, and 2.) Ruby almost lived at the place. (ibid)
If Rich’s well-informed and fascinating deduction is correct, then Ruby may have disguised himself not to elude the DPD, but to protect his good friends. In other words, he was giving his good friends an out. You can’t get much closer than that. And therefore if Ruby was on a mission for his higher -ups on 11/24, he was the perfect man to choose since by hook or by crook, he could get into the police basement easily.
Let me dispose of this concept of the “temporarily deranged man.” This is a catchall term employed whenever the real motive of a crime can’t be nailed down.
—Jim Garrison, describing Ruby’s shooting of Oswald
Revising Garrison, the term can also be applied when the investigative body doesn’t want to nail a motive down. Or to put it more directly: when a cover-up is enacted afterwards. In this aspect, like nearly every other, JFK: The Ruby Connection sides with the Warren Commission. Recall what they said: “There is no evidence that Oswald and Ruby knew each other or had any relationship through a third party or parties.” (Quoted in Marrs, p. 403) So in addition to leaving out any connection by Ruby to the complex CIA-Mafia Cuban matrix, and his multitude of long-standing, and deep associations with the Dallas Police, JFK: The Ruby Connection clearly implies that there was no previous relationship between Ruby and Oswald.
Before addressing this important point, let me add a caveat. It is an issue that can never be conclusively answered or spelled out. Simply because, as most serious students of this case understand, J. Edgar Hoover was not interested in investigating any conspiracy in the Kennedy case. But although the FBI and the Warren Commission did all they could to sidestep this point, many clues were left behind that clearly suggest the two knew each other. In fact, the HSCA revised the Commission verdict on this point: “The Committee’s investigation of Oswald and Ruby showed a variety of relationships that may have matured into an assassination conspiracy. Neither Oswald nor Ruby turned out to be “loners” as they had been painted in the 1964 investigation.” (ibid) Since this show does not elucidate why that could be so, let us do that for them.
Frances Irene Hise was a woman who was applying for a job as a waitress at the Carousel Club. She said that during the interview, she saw a man enter through the rear who Ruby greeted with, “Hi, Ozzie.” Ruby then directed this man to go to the back room. Ruby then finished talking to Hise. At that point, he turned and joined “Ozzie” in the back room. On another occasion, “Ozzie” came into the club and asked her if he could buy her a drink. After the assassination, Hise was sure that “Ozzie” was Oswald. (Probe Vol. 5 No. 1, p. 22)
In early December of 1963 a man named Howard Peterson of Chicago told the FBI that he had a cousin who lived in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. She had written him and his wife a few days after Kennedy was killed. In her letter she had referred to the murder of Oswald by Ruby. And she added that she had seen Oswald in Ruby’s nightclub. (FBI Report of 12/9/63) Harvey L. Wade also saw Oswald at Ruby’s club. In the latter part of the second week of November he was in Dallas attending a convention of construction builders. While there, he visited Ruby’s Carousel Club. He recalled seeing Oswald at a table with two men. One of the men appeared to be quite dark, perhaps Mexican. Mr. Wade said a picture was flashed of the threesome. But Ruby then came over and yelled that the picture did not come out. Wade said the emcee was a man who did a “memory skit”. (FBI Report of 11/26/63)
Wade’s quite detailed report jibes with what William D. Crowe told several people after the Kennedy assassination. Crowe’s stage name was Billy DeMar. He told a reporter for the Associated Press that he was sure Oswald had been in Ruby’s club. He went on to say that “I have a memory act in which I have 20 customers call out various objects in rapid order. Then I tell them at random what they called out. I am positive Oswald was one of the men that called out an object about nine days ago.” (AP report of 11/25) Mr. Crowe was visited by the FBI and they discouraged him from repeating his story. The Warren Commission tried to discredit him by writing that he was never really positive about his ID of Oswald. Yet Crowe told the same story to the Dallas Morning News a few days after he talked to the AP. (Marrs, p. 405)
Then there is the matter of Oswald and Ruby’s automobile. Many people who have read John Armstrong’s Harvey and Lee, or the long excerpts of it in Probe (see Vol. 4 No. 6, and Vol. 5 No. 1), realize that there is a controversy over whether or not Oswald could drive. Some people, like Ruth Paine, say he did not. Many more say he could. Two garage mechanics who worked on Ruby’s car say they saw Oswald drive Ruby’s auto. One was Robert Roy, who said Oswald did this more than once. (Probe, Vol. 5 No. 1 p. 22) The other mechanic was a man named William J. Chesher. The information about Chesher first came to the Dallas Police through an informant friend of the mechanic in December of 1963. (Police report of 12/9/63) Yet the DPD detectives did not actively follow this lead until April. Unfortunately, Chesher had died of a heart attack on March 31, 1964. (Police report of 4/3/64)
Chuck Boyles ran a late night talk show on KLIF radio in Dallas. During the broadcast, he frequently talked about the Kennedy assassination. One evening an unidentified woman called in and said she knew of several phone calls between Ruby and Oswald. The woman said she knew about this since she worked as a phone operator in the WHitehall exchange area. Not only did she remember the calls, but she said the phone company had records of them. She said she remembered them because Ruby often used the “emergency breakthrough” technique. That is he would interrupt a busy signal to say the call was dire. The operator would then interrupt the call in session, and later make a note of it. The woman said that Ruby used this trick so frequently that she remembered his name and his numerous calls. (Armstrong, p. 768) This story gets partial corroboration through a man named Ray Acker. Acker was an Area Commercial Manager for Southwestern Bell. After the assassination, Acker took phone company records to the DPD.. He told the police they were proof of calls between Ruby and Oswald. Acker said that after he turned the records over he was told to go home and keep his mouth shut. (Garrison Memorandum of 9/16/67)
On the evening of 11/21/63, when Lee Harvey Oswald was at the Paine household in Irving, a knock came at the door of an apartment in Oak Cliff. The apartment belonged to an SMU professor. His friend Helen McIntosh greeted the unknown young man. The young man asked for Jack Ruby. The professor told Helen to tell him that Ruby lived in the apartment next door. Which he did. The next day, when Oswald’s picture got on television, Helen said that this was the young man who knocked on the apartment door the night before. (Armstrong, p. 789) Obviously, it could not have been the real Oswald. But it could have been the man who resembled Oswald who Roger Craig saw get into a Nash Rambler in Dealey Plaza the next day. If this was so, then Ruby knew a ton more about the assassination than the Warren Commission ever let on.
Finally, there is the unforgettable story told by Rose Cheramie. She was the drug addict who had worked for Ruby. She was picked up undergoing a drug withdrawal on November 20, 1963. State Trooper Frances Fruge was notified and drove her to Jackson State Hospital. Calmed by a sedative, she told Fruge that she had been abandoned by two men who were on their way to Dallas to kill President Kennedy. They were part of a southeastern drug and prostitution ring. Rose was their courier for a drug transaction, which was to be enacted in Galveston. Fruge dismissed this all as the ranting of a drug user. But after Kennedy was killed, he went to the hospital to question her and also turn her over to the authorities. He later learned that she had also predicted at the hospital that the assassination was going to happen. Rose also told two men at the hospital, Doctors Weiss and Owen, that Ruby was involved in the Kennedy plot. And she told both Weiss and Fruge that she had seen Oswald at Ruby’s club. When Fruge tried to pass Rose on to the DPD, they were not interested. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pgs. 225-228)
All one needs to know about the latest Gary Mack fiasco is this: Almost none of the above is included in the hour. Nothing about the involvement of Ruby and Oswald in the Cuban conflict through the CIA and the Mafia; virtually none of the plentiful and multi-leveled connections of Ruby to the DPD; and none of the witnesses who indicate Oswald and Ruby knew each other.
This, of course, is ridiculous. For if a program is trying to explore whether or not Ruby shot Oswald to conceal a plot to kill Kennedy, then it is fundamentally dishonest not to tell the viewer about the above. Because clearly those three areas of evidence would suggest the following:
If this were all made clear to the viewer, one implication would be this. The CIA contacted one of the mobsters that they used in the plots to kill Castro: they needed some help again. From there the word was then sent down through intermediaries to Ruby. Ruby then used his extensive network of police contacts to silence Oswald before he could talk. All one needs to do to make this credible is recall the words of McWillie’s girlfriend Elaine Mynier. She said that Ruby would do anything for McWillie. McWillie knew Trafficante since he had worked for him in Cuba. McWillie was also in contact with Ruby the month before the Kennedy assassination. Finally, Trafficante was one of the two main Cosa Nostra chieftains the CIA used in their (unsuccessful) plots to kill Fidel Castro. This time, it looks like they pulled it off.
But you would never know any of this from watching JFK: The Ruby Connection. Because according to Gary Mack, there really was no connection. None between Oswald and Ruby, none of note between the Dallas Police and Ruby, and none between the CIA, the Mafia, and Ruby.
Yep, sure Gary. And George W. Bush was a good president. As in Inside the Target Car, Gary Mack is in his Wizard of Oz mode again – hard at work spinning black propaganda. And, as we shall see, it gets worse.
Addendum: The reader can see that I used John Armstrong’s excellent Harvey and Lee as a major source for this essay. This book is now available through The Last Hurrah Bookshop.
It’s not as if they didn’t know. Assistant counsels to the Warren Commission Burt Griffin and Leon Hubert wrote, in a memo to the Warren Commission members dated March 20, 1964, that “the most promising links between Jack Ruby and the assassination of President Kennedy are established through underworld figures and anti-Castro Cubans, and extreme right-wing Americans.” 1 Two months later, Griffin and Hubert wrote another memo to the Commission, significantly titled “Adequacy of the Ruby Investigation” in which they warned, “We believe that a reasonable possibility exists that Ruby has maintained a close interest in Cuban affairs to the extent necessary to participate in gun sales or smuggling.”
“They’re going to find out about Cuba. They’re going to find out about the guns, find out about New Orleans, find out about everything.”
Ruby had talked about it himself while in jail, reportedly telling a friend, “They’re going to find out about Cuba. They’re going to find out about the guns, find out about New Orleans, find out about everything.” 2 Tales of Ruby running guns to Cuba abounded in the FBI reports taken in the first weeks after the assassination, yet neither the Warren Commission nor the House Select Committee pursued those leads very far. Griffin and Hubert expressed concern over this, saying that “neither Oswald’s Cuban interests in Dallas nor Ruby’s Cuban activities have been adequately explored.” 3
Hubert and Griffin expressed in their memo of May 14 to Rankin that “we believe that the possibility exists, based on evidence already available, that Ruby was involved in illegal dealings with Cuban elements who might have had contact with Oswald. The existence of such dealings can only be surmised since the present investigation has not focused on that area.” 4 They expressed concern that “Ruby had time to engage in susbtantial activities in addition to the management of his Clubs” and that “Ruby has always been a person who looked for money-making ‘sidelines’.” They even suggested that since the Fort Worth manufacturer of the famous “Twist Board” Ruby was demonstrating the night after the assassination had no known sales, and was manufactured by an oil field equipment company, that “[t]he possibility remains that the ‘twist board’ was a front for some other illegal enterprise.” But what Griffin and Hubert kept coming back to is that there was “much evidence” that Ruby “was interested in Cuban matters, citing his relationship to Louis McWillie; his attempted sale of jeeps to Castro, his reported attendance of meetings “in connection with the sale of arms to Cubans and the smuggling out of refugees”; and Ruby’s quick correction of Wade’s remark that Oswald was a member of the Free Cuba Committee, a group populated with such notables as Clare Booth Luce, Admiral Arleigh Burke, and Hal Hendrix. “Bits of evidence link Ruby to others who may have been interested in Cuban affairs.”
What was their recommendation, based on such tantalizing evidence? “We suggest that these matters cannot be left ‘hanging in the air.’ They must either be explored further or a firm decision must be made not to do so supported by stated reasons for the decision.” History has given us the commission’s decision on this, but a clue to the motivation shows up in this same memo, in regards to Seth Kantor, who claimed to have seen Ruby at Parkland hospital around the time of Kennedy’s death. “We must decide who is telling the truth, for there would be considerable significance if it would be concluded that Ruby is lying.” [emphasis added] The concern was not what the truth was, but what the truth might mean if it was uncomfortably discovered.
Ruby was lying, and the implications are enormous.
Ruby had told the Warren Commission he had only been to Cuba once, on vacation, for a week to ten days. Not true. According to Cuban travel records, Jack Ruby entered Cuba from New Orleans on August 8, 1959; left Cuba September 11, 1959; re-entered Cuba from Miami on September 12, 1959; and returned from Cuba to New Orleans on September 13, 1959. 5 But bank records 6, Dallas police records 7, and FBI records 8 showed Ruby in Dallas August 10, 21, 31, and September 4, days which fall right in the middle of his supposedly continuous stay in Cuba. Somehow, Ruby was getting in and out of Cuba without the Cuban authorities detecting and recording such. Why was Ruby making multiple excursions to Cuba during this time? What were the nature of these visits and why did he choose to hide them?
The reticence of investigative bodies to investigate these matters make sense when one realizes that Jack Ruby was not going to Cuba on pleasure trips. The Warren Report tells of an incident in early 1959 where Ruby made “preliminary inquiries, as a middleman, concerning the possible sale to Cuba of some surplus jeeps located in Shreveport, La., and asked about the possible release of prisoners from a Cuban prison.” 9 Ruby’s sister indicated the jeeps might have been military surplus from W.W.II. 10 Both the story of the jeeps and the story of the prisoners tie Ruby to some interesting Cuban activities.
Texas gunrunner Robert McKeown said Ruby “had a whole lot of jeeps he wanted to get to Castro.” Ruby wanted McKeown to write a personal letter of introduction to Castro for Ruby so he could talk to Castro about releasing some unnamed friends detained in Havana. 11
At that time, Santo Trafficante was being held at the Trescornia detention center in Cuba. Was Ruby instrumental in winning Trafficante’s release at that time? John Wilson Hudson (a.k.a. John Wilson), an English journalist supposedly detained with Trafficante in the camp, indicated that Ruby came to see Trafficante in Trescornia. 12 After Ruby shot Oswald, according to CIA cables, Wilson contacted the American Embassy and reported that “an American gangster called Santo…was visited by an American gangster type named Ruby.” 13 If Ruby was trying to sell jeeps to Castro, as McKeown said, was this an arms-for-hostages type deal? Get Castro the jeeps and get Trafficante out of jail? Recent events remind us this certainly wouldn’t have been the only such effort in history. Trafficante was released from the detention center in August, 1959, 14 possibly just after Ruby’s appearance there.
Trafficante is a person often portrayed as one of Ruby’s mob contacts. But Trafficante was one of the “gangsters” who participated in the CIA’s Castro assassination attempts, according to the CIA Inspector General’s report. Key to understanding the seriousness of defining Trafficante’s relationship with Ruby are the questions originally put to him before Blakey took over the HSCA, by then-chief counsel Richard Sprague. 15 To all of the following, Trafficante’s response was, “I respectfully refuse to answer that question pursuant to my constitutional rights under the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 14th amendments.” This is the legal outlet allowed when a truthful answer will be self-incriminating, and Trafficante used it throughout.
The first question out of Sprague’s mouth is probably indicative of why he was eventually ousted – he had a habit of getting right to the point:
The rest of the questions followed in a similar vein:
When the questions were opened to the others present, more questions followed in the same vein. Note: no one was asking questions about Trafficante’s mob involvement. They were interested in his ties to the government:
Trafficante’s involvement with the CIA and Ruby bear further scrutiny. The Review Board should be asked to release all CIA and FBI files on Santo Trafficante.
The story of Jack Ruby getting Trafficante out of a Cuban jail was not the only such allegation. There is another allegation from a different source that Ruby was involved in some guns for hostages deal.
Nancy Perrin Rich told the Warren Commission a fascinating story about a group running Enfield rifles to Castro in order to run refugees out of Cuba to Florida. The guns were to be run through Mexico. Ruby was evidently the bagman for this group, since his appearance on at least one occasion made the cries about lack of money disappear when he walked in. 16
Nancy Perrin Rich’s story is perhaps the most widely retold of Ruby’s gunrunning episodes. But there are a number of other odd stories that bear dissemination, some with more substantiation than others. There are the new Elrod revelations that put Ruby in the middle of yet another gunrunning scenario. 17 And there is a story from Islamorada, Florida that leads to interesting places.
Mrs. Mary Thompson met a man named “Jack” accompanied by a women, not his wife, named “Isabel” at the home of Mary Lou and James Woodard in Islamorada, Florida. 18 At the time, Mary Thompson was accompanied by her daughter Dolores and Dolores’s husband. Jack was said to be from Chicago originally. Mrs. Thompson placed the date of this encounter around the end of May of 1958. Interestingly enough, she said Jack’s first real name was Leon but went by Jack. Jack Ruby’s middle name was Leon.
Mary Lou Woodard said Jack had a trunk full of guns he was going to supply to Cubans. Mary Thompson stated she’d been told there were supplies of guns hidden in the marshes that were being collected by the Indians in the area to be sold to the Cubans, as this was around the time of the Cuban revolution. Mary Thompson’s daughter Dolores also saw and described this same Jack, as did Mrs. W. R. Simons.
Dolores recalled that her husband’s friend James Woodard, while drunk one night, declared he would run guns to Cuba with Jack. Woodard had two or three guns of his own but said Jack had a lot more. When shown a photo of Jack Ruby she said it resembled the man she remembered, although she didn’t remember his last name as being “Ruby.”
A check of the Knoxville FBI files showed that James Woodard was considered “armed and dangerous”, packed a weapon, and had a violent temper when drinking. Interviewed by the FBI in September of 1963, Woodard “in somewhat rambling and incoherent manner” talked of his participation in an invasion of Cuba prior to the Castro regime, that he had again participated in the Bay of Pigs and had furnished ammunition and dynamite to both Castro and the Cuban exile forces. On October 8, 1963, Woodard was questioned again, this time concerning dynamite found at his residence in South Dade County, Florida, as the dynamite had been stolen from a construction company. He claimed the dynamite was being used by Cuban exile forces fighting the Castro regime.
After the assassination, James Woodard’s sister said James had been in Texas a lot, and that she had asked James if he ever knew Ruby. He said no, but then promptly disappeared and hadn’t been seen since November 25, 1963. If he truly had been running guns with Ruby to the CIA-sponsored Cuban exile forces, one can surely imagine a hefty motive for his sudden disappearance after Ruby appeared on the public scene by shooting Oswald. Woodard is another person whose records the Review Board should look into to shed light on Ruby’s contacts with Cubans and gunrunning.
Perhaps Ruby was concerned enough to hide his activities not so much because he was running guns, but because of who he was running them for, and with.
By far the most interesting account of Ruby’s gunrunning is found in an FBI report taken a week after the assassination. Informant “T-2” (Blaney Mack Johnson) revealed that in the early 1950s a man he knew then as “Rubenstein” arranged illegal flights of weapons to the Castro organization in Cuba. He added that Rubenstein “left Miami and purchased a substantial share in a Havana gaming house in which one ColLIS PRIO (phonetic) was principal owner.” 19 One recognizes the name Carlos Prio Soccaras, especially when T-2 linked “ColLIS” to Batista. In the early 50s Prio was a supporter of the Batista regime under which he had grown exceedingly wealthy, but in the mid to late 50s Prio worked hand in hand with Castro, aided by the CIA, to overthrow the increasingly difficult Batista.
In a letter to Lee Rankin of the Warren Commission, Hoover had this to say of the ongoing (since 1952) investigation of Dr. Carlos Prio Socarras, a.k.a. Carlos Prio: “The neutrality and registration act investigation related primarily to the activities of Carlos Prio Socarras, who, with a number of others including McKeown, was involved in a conspiracy to ship arms, munitions, and other war materials to Fidel Castro to assist him in his efforts to overthrow the Batista regime in this investigation.” 20 In the attachment, the FBI had McKeown knowing Castro and Carlos Prio Socarras personally. As referenced earlier, McKeown was the one who revealed Ruby’s possible jeep deal and Ruby’s attempt to get friends released from Cuban detention. McKeown also said that Ruby came to him offering a large sum of money in return for a personal letter of introduction to Castro. 21
But T-2’s account revealed possibly a contact of Ruby’s even more interesting than Prio. T-2 stated that the man he recognized as Ruby but knew formerly as Rubenstein was smuggling arms to Cuba with one Donald Edward Browder. T-2 went on to name three people who he said could corroborate his story: Joe Marrs of Marrs Aircraft whom Ruby contracted to make flights to Cuba; former Chief of Police in Hialeah, Florida Leslie Lewis, who would know of Ruby’s gunrunning and smuggling operations; and Clifton T. Bowes, Jr., formerly captain of National Airlines, Miami, for further corroboration.
Joe Marrs worked for Eastern Airlines. He claimed he never flew for hire or transported goods. He knew Browder, but claimed he avoided Browder as he saw him as a shady promoter who was all talk about air transport plans but no money (an amusing revelation from a man who just a few words earlier had said he didn’t fly for hire.) 22
Les Lewis, the former Chief of Police, denied knowing Jack Ruby and claimed to have “no knowledge whatsoever of persons flying weapons to Cuba.” A Hialeah Police Chief having no knowledge of persons flying weapons to Cuba in the fifties is a bit hard to believe. And of course, Lewis completely denied ever knowing a Donald Edward Browder. 23
Clifton T. Bowes was sure he never knew a Jack Rubenstein and said he first heard of Ruby watching him on television. He did not know a Donald Edward Browder but did claim to know Blaney Mack Johnson, saying he understood Johnson was ill and had been hospitalized, was “highly imaginative” 24, the usual FBI line for an unwelcome witness.
When the FBI collected these denials, they returned to Johnson. Johnson stuck tightly by his story and insisted all the information he had provided had been true and accurate. He also said he understood why Lewis, Marrs and Bowes would have lied to conceal their knowledge of and/or involvement in Ruby’s activities. And of course, Johnson replied he had never been hospitalized.
Enter Eddie Browder. Eddie Browder testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 70s. 25 He was a former Lockheed test pilot who was serving a 25-year prison sentence for “security violations.” He told the committee he worked for the CIA. One time he had leased a B-25 bomber under the name of a non-existent company and flown it to Haiti a year after the Kennedy assassination. He cashed a check signed by George DeMohrenschildt’s Haitian business associate Clemard Charles, in the amount of $24,000. What’s interesting is that the HSCA used Browder’s testimony in the DeMohrenschildt section, not the Jack Ruby section. Is there a tie there linking DeMohrenschildt to Jack Ruby? Only three small “innocuous” reports of the more than 1000 pages the FBI has on Browder were released to the Warren Commission. 26 It’s time the remaining documents on Browder, including the full text of his executive session testimony before the HSCA, were released. Any Browder who used the Don Eduardo alias 27, worked with DeMohrenschildt, and ran guns with Ruby to Cuba is worthy of further study.
(Continued in the following issue of Probe.)