Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: JFK ASSASSINATION

  • William Turner, Rearview Mirror

    Is Bill Turner the most valuable journalist now writing? Is he the most underrated? His new book certainly seems to advance those arguments. Rearview Mirror is a memoir of Turner’s professional career since his enlistment into the FBI as a young man in 1951. It then takes us through his resignation about ten years later and his attempt to expose J. Edgar Hoover’s inefficient and public-relations minded FBI regime. The book then highlights Turner’s journalistic career, first at Ramparts and then as an independent journalist and author. When one looks at the books and articles that have come from that career, Turner’s stature seems to me to be quite high. In an era when the left values such people as Alex Cockburn and right exalts writers like Bill Kristol, Turner seems an undervalued jewel. Consider some of his achievements. Hoover’s FBI was one of the earliest and best exposures of the hollowness of J. Edgar Hoover’s tyranny of the Bureau. Power on the Right was an early look at the then eccentric and relatively sparse religious right that would later, under men like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, become a political juggernaut. His book, The Police Establishment, showed how conservative and connected to the FBI your supposedly independent local police force was and is. His two major articles on Jim Garrison in Ramparts were perhaps the two finest short pieces written on the investigation at the time. (And his unpublished book on that probe is also a quite creditable effort.) The Fish is Red (later reissued as Deadly Secrets) is still the best volume on America’s extended aggression against Castro’s Cuba. And his 1978 book The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy is also the finest volume yet produced on that tragically ignored political murder. Can any other living journalist equal such a record of high achievement on so many divergent and important topics? If so, I can’t think of one. And I should add that in my view it is one of the top ten books written on any of the assassinations of the sixties, a comment that takes in a lot of ground.

    And when one considers the fact that most of the volumes above stand independent of Turner’s newspaper/magazine output, his achievement is even more impressive. And I for one cannot ignore the fact that Turner is a fine writer whose phrasing is always smooth, easily digestible, and, at times, quite felicitous. This quality makes the, at times, complex issues he discusses e.g. the Manchurian Candidate aspects of the RFK case, much more easy to understand and even assimilate. In a field where one has to wade through the obstructionist prose of some, to be kind, untalented writers, Turner’s books are like driving on a California freeway at four in the morning. Cruise control.

    Rearview Mirror is structured as a chronological memoir. It begins with his unsuccessful battle to expose Hoover’s hollowness, a battle that secured turner’s eventual departure from the Bureau. Turner was one of the earliest insiders to complain about Hoover’s blindness to the powers and influence of organized crime in America. Turner and a friend of his, Skip Gibbons, did all they could to get a public hearing to air their gripes about Hoover. They tried at a Civil Service Commission hearing, they tried for an audience with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, they tried to get to political stalwarts like Estes Kefauver and Jacob Javits in the senate. Almost of necessity, because of Hoover’s long reach and unseemly tactics, it was fruitless. And because there were no whistleblower laws at the time–laws designed to protect government employees who report malfeasance–Turner left his job, at considerable personal sacrifice.

    And this is where one of the outstanding features of the book appears. For it is not only a memoir. Turner has provided the reader with a stereophonic view of the past. He has decked it out with archival releases that retrospectively illuminate events and actions. For instance, Turner now knows that John Mohr of the FBI discussed his civil service appeal with Civil Service Staff Chief Ed Bechtold. Bechtold told Mohr that they would sustain the Bureau’s discharge of Turner.

    When Turner wrote his 1964 article on John Kennedy’s murder for Saga, Hoover’s assistant Cartha DeLoach monitored his every move both pre and post-publication, and then retaliated through his press flacks like Drew Pearson. Turner also details the attempts by CIA to undermine Ramparts after that now legendary magazine exposed the agency’s use of universities in support of the Vietnam War and the later exposure of its program to infiltrate the National Students Association. Codenamed Operation CHAOS, the program actually seems to have started as an attempt to wreck that magazine although it later spread out to much of the antiwar underground press. CHAOS is another program suspected by Turner at the time, but only confirmed much later.

    Another retroactive perspective is an appearance made by Turner on “The Joe Pyne Show” in 1968. Pyne was an earlier version of the now all too common right-wing yokel who liked to make a lot of noise without generating much light: a sixties Rush Limbaugh. His producer called the local office of the FBI for information to counter the derogatory writing by Turner on the Bureau. The request reached all the way up to Hoover’s desk. Another fascinating episode has Turner penning an article on Hoover’s nonexistent war against the Mob. Playboy was interested in featuring it but they passed it on to Sandy Smith of the Time-Life circuit. Smith took the piece to his pals at the Bureau and then told the magazine not to run the story because it was too error-strewn. How obsessed was the Bureau with Turner? When the author was on tour to push his book Hoover’s FBI, the Bureau faked a phone call as “John Q. Citizen” to an earlier version of the Tom Snyder show.

    For me, and for most of his longtime admirers, the highlights of this distinguished and fascinating book were the chapters on the Garrison inquiry and the one on the Robert Kennedy murder. The first is done as a dual look at both the inquest and the press coverage of it (the latter is appropriately titled The Media’s Circus.) Again Turner has updated his previous work with much newly released material on both Garrison and the press. So the pieces form a good short summary of what we now know about that ill-fated and sandbagged probe. The chapter on the RFK case is basically a truncated magazine version of his extraordinary book (co-authored with Jonn Christian). But as they say at the racetrack, that is an admirable sire. As many have said, the RFK case is a more provable conspiracy than the JFK case.

    Turner closes his book with an overview of developments since 1975. He discusses the CIA/Contra-Cocaine connection. He delves into the fey inquiry into the JFK-MLK murders, the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He updates the King case by noting the pro-conspiracy verdict in the 1999 King family civil lawsuit and the subsequent Justice Department report on that case. Turner warns us of the encroaching and insidious power of “the dark parapolitics of the FBI, CIA, and private intelligence triad.” He needn’t have. He’s a crusader nonpareil who’s been at it for 40 years. Bravo Bill.

  • Gunrunner Ruby and the CIA

    From the July-August, 1995 issue (Vol. 2 No. 5) of Probe

    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

    If They Dared

    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.

    Cuban Excursions

    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.

    A Whole Lot of Jeeps

    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.

    Questioning Trafficante

    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:

    “Mr. Trafficante, have you at any time been an employee, a contract employee, or in any manner been in the service of the Central Intelligence Agency, or any other agency of the Federal Government of the United States?”

    The rest of the questions followed in a similar vein:

    “Mr. Trafficante, did you know John Rosselli?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, did you know Sam Giancana?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, do you know Robert Maheu?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, prior to November 22, 1963, did you have information that President Kennedy was going to be assassinated?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, prior to November 22, 1963, did you advise other people of the assassination of President Kennedy?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, prior to November 22, 1963, did you know Jack Ruby?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, have you ever met with representatives of the Central Intelligence Agency to discuss the assassination of various world leaders, including Fidel Castro?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, is any agency of the U.S. Government giving you any immunity with regard to any plans to assassinate any world leaders?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, did you ever discuss with any individual plans to assassinate President Kennedy prior to his assassination?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, while you were in prison in Cuba, were you visited by Jack Ruby?”

    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:

    “Mr. Trafficante, as a result of your appearance here today, have you been threatened by anyone, any group or agency? Has your life been threatened in any way?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, have you been contacted by any agency in the executive branch, say the CIA or FBI, in connection with your possible testimony before or after you received formal subpena to appear before this committee?”

    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.

    Jack and James

    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

    Mysterious Mr. Browder

    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.)

    Notes

    1. George Michael Evica, And We Are All Mortal (University of Hartford, 1978), p. 161.
    2. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press, Ltd, 1993), p. 179.
    3. Memorandum to J. Lee Rankin from Leon D. Hubert and Burt W. Griffin, May 14, 1964, p. 3.
    4. Memorandum to J. Lee Rankin from Leon D. Hubert and Burt W. Griffin, May 14, 1964, p. 4.
    5. HSCA, Vol. 5, pp. 197-198.
    6. HSCA, Vol. 5, p. 204. On page 205 Stokes said that Ruby was admitted to his box on August 20th, but the copy of the FBI report on the bank records on the previous page show both a typewritten date of August 21 and a handwritten note with the same date.
    7. Anthony Summers, Conspiracy (Paragon House paperback edition, 1989), p. 439.
    8. HSCA, Vol. 5, p. 221.
    9. Report of the Warren Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964), p. 345.
    10. WC Vol. 26, p. 661, CE 3069.
    11. Summers, p. 437.
    12. Summers, p. 441.
    13. Summers, p. 440; HSCA Vol. 5, p. 365.
    14. HSCA, Vol. 5, p. 325.
    15. HSCA, Hearings March 16, 1977, pp.37-41.
    16. WC Vol. 14, pp. 349-350.
    17. For a lengthy treatment of Elrod, see the article by Ray and Mary La Fontaine, The Washington Post, 8/7/94, “The Fourth Tramp”.
    18. WC Vol. 26, p. 642-649.
    19. WC Vol. 26, p. 634, CE 3063.
    20. WC Vol. 26, p. 650, CE 3066.
    21. Summers, p. 437.
    22. WC Vol. 26, p. 639.
    23. WC Vol. 26, p. 639.
    24. WC Vol. 26, p. 640.
    25. Jim Marrs, Crossfire (Carrol & Graf, 1989), p. 284.
    26. Marrs, p. 392.
    27. Don Eduardo was a well known alias of E. Howard Hunt. But James McCord also used the name Don Eduardo. Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (Random House, 1984), p. 80. Blaney Mack Johnson said Don Edward Browder was sometimes called “Don Eduardo.” WC Vol. 26, p. 642.

  • Gus Russo

  • Why ABC?

    The Seizing of the American Broadcasting Company ABC is offering a new pro-Warren Commission television documentary — the latest in a long line of support for the party line. But who watches the watchdogs? This article probes the background of the purchase of ABC by Capital Cities Communications in 1985. This Introduction sets the story up with a 2003 perspective.

    Capital Cities Before it Bought ABC How Cap Cities developed into the powerhouse it is today.

    David Westin The President of ABC News.

    John Stossel ABC’s “Consumer advocate” more closely resembles a corporate advocate. Whose side is he on?

    ABC and the Rise of Rush Limbaugh How CC/ABC launched Rush Limbaugh and ushered in a new era in radio.

  • “Davy Disappoints”: A Rebuttal

    From the November-December 1999 issue (Vol. 7 No. 1) of Probe

    I have to admit I was initially reluctant to respond to this “review” of my book for several reasons. First and foremost, I am averse to feeding into the divide-and-conquer strategy so prominently played out among the critics for too long – a tactic that is ultimately counter-productive. Second, I had never heard of the author of this “critique,” Dave Reitzes, and information subsequently provided to me by colleagues who regularly check the Internet has done little to assign Reitzes even a modicum of credibility. And finally, Reitzes habitually haunts something called the alt.conspiracy.jfk newsgroup on the Internet and his “review” appeared on a Web site run by someone called John McAdams. Given that the combined readership of these two electronic fora probably rivals that of the Eskimo population of Miami Beach, I was even more disinclined to respond. But having waded through Reitzes’ abundant medley of errors and distortions, I felt some response was warranted.

    Reitzes titles his “review”, Davy Disappoints. One thing I can say for Mr. Reitzes is that he does not. In fact he is quite predictable. He begins by complaining that, less the front and back matter, my book is “a skimpy 204 pages.” (He chose not to include the Endnotes section in his count which runs for another 36 pages, but that’s OK). Of these 204 pages, Reitzes writes, “approximately 27 are blank.” It is a standard publishing convention to leave the verso page blank if the chapter ends on the recto page. But the mind boggles at Reitzes’ command of the intricacies of mathematics. Of the 204 pages Reitzes mentions, only 8 chapters end on the recto page for a grand total of (Can you grasp this Mr. Reitzes?) 8 blank pages. Not 27. But it’s a ludicrous argument anyway. Look at some of the literature that has been published on the assassination and related events. Phil Melanson’s Spy Saga is 149 pages (I won’t count footnotes or front and back matter since Reitzes seems to be averse to this). Trumbull Higgins’ volume on the Bay of Pigs, The Perfect Failure is 176 pages. James and Wardlaw’s Plot or Politics? is 167 pages. And Peter Dale Scott’s Crime and Cover-Up weighs in at a mere 49 pages. Yet would anyone deny the contributions made by these slim volumes? On the other hand, one gets weighed down by the gross tonnage of Harrison Livingstone’s, often incomprehensible, output. Apparently, Mr. Reitzes hasn’t grasped the concept of quality over quantity.

    Reitzes dazzles us further with his mastery of math by writing this bizarre calculation, “Davy provides us with an estimated 5 1/2 chapters of new information, or and estimated 67.1 pages (177 divided by 14 chapters total times 5 1/2 chapters). By my estimation, then, only about a fifth of Davy’s book produces the promised new information, while about four-fifths provide what Davy calls context.” Allow me to correct this bit of misinformation. Of the over 700 citations in the Endnotes section, approximately 425 of them have (to the best of my knowledge) never been published in print before. This includes many documents from the intelligence agencies, the HSCA, Garrison’s files (culled from numerous sources), interviews, and miscellaneous other collections. This doesn’t take into account the hard-to-find books and manuscripts I cite including William Turner’s unpublished manuscript, The Garrison Investigation, Arthur Carpenter’s Ph.D. dissertation, Gateway to the Americas, and rare books such as Menshikov’s Millionaires and Managers and Scheflin and Opton’s, The Mind Manipulators. Not even counting those volumes the amount of new material is roughly 64%. Back when I went to school 1/5 did not equal 64%, Mr. Reitzes. His convoluted formulas cause Reitzes to ponder; “One wonders what [Lisa] Pease makes of Bill Davy’s math.” Better yet, one wonders what the reader will now make of your math, Mr. Reitzes.

    Reitzes continues his “review” by acknowledging that the longest chapter in my book is the chapter dealing with the concerted efforts of the media and the intelligence agencies to spread disinformation about Garrison and subvert due process. This chapter is indeed the longest because of the massive amount of supporting documentation affirming the attacks. Reitzes finds this all irrelevant contending that the reason Garrison lost his case “would hardly seem to be related to any alleged resistance from the CIA and/or the media.” His conclusion doesn’t surprise me since I doubt that he has studied any of the documents I cite.

    Later Reitzes asks incredulously why haven’t I read his Internet masterpiece, Who Speaks For Clay Shaw? I know this might be a little difficult for someone like Reitzes to understand, but not everybody spends their life on the Internet. This concept is obviously foreign to someone who apparently spends all of his waking hours on-line. Consider the following usenet post from Jim Hargrove, dated January 10, 1999:

    According to the results a DejaNews “power Search,” posts made to alt.conspiracy.jfk by Dave Reitzes as dreitzes@aol.com totalled [sic] “about 15,000.” Posts made by Dave Reitzes as ERXF03A@prodigy.com SINCE JUST BEFORE LAST CHRISTMAS totalled [sic] “about 14,000” posts. Since DejaNews breaks up long posts and counts then as multiple instances, these numbers are too high. Nevertheless, they are astronomical, and represent abuse of Usenet. [Emphasis in original]

    Hargrove continues:

    But don’t take my word for it. There is a long-established newsgroup devoted to the very topic of spamming and net abuse, and Dave Reitzes is a real fixture there. In just the last two months of 1998, his name appears on 19 different news.admin.net-abuse hit lists.

    Again from Hargrove:

    Switching over to Prodigy on the account of “Marc Reitzes,” Dave Reitzes has also been fingered by news.admin.net-abuse three times since last Christmas.

    Two months later, Reitzes was still at it, causing David Lifton to comment in a March 10, 1999 post that Reitzes is:

    Completely divorced from reality, and, according to DejaNews, posting over 5,000 posts this year (that’s right, 5,000 posts)

    Reitzes certainly gives new meaning to the expression “get a life.”

    Reitzes later complains that I didn’t report that an HSCA document that concludes that Clay Shaw may have been involved in the planning of the assassination, “did not reflect the opinions of its author, but rather the statements of its interview subject: Judge Jim Garrison.” It is true that the title of the document reads “Interview with Jim Garrison in New Orleans” but even a casual reading of the memo shows that it contains more information than what was gleaned from an interview. In fact, the “interview” was actually a series of conferences that ran from July 29th through August 6th, 1977 between Garrison and several members of Team 3 of the HSCA, including Gaeton Fonzi, Jonathan Blackmer, Cliff Fenton, and L.J. Delsa. The subsequent memo contains not just the highlights of the Garrison interviews, but information gained from Garrison’s files and separate research already conducted by Team 3, independent from Garrison. This content was confirmed to me by two of the HSCA staffers involved. Tell us Mr. Reitzes, how many HSCA people have you interviewed? Since the document concludes “We have reason to believe that Shaw was heavily involved in the anti-Castro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960’s and [was] possibly one of the high level planners or “cut out” to the planners of the assassination,” it is quite apparent that Blackmer is stating his team’s conclusions, not Garrison’s. (Since when does Garrison refer to himself in the plural form?)

    Reitzes also incorrectly claims that I “take on faith” that other Vieux Carre denizens identified Shaw as “Bertrand” and that “these alleged witnesses would not speak for the record.” Wrong. I name two of the witnesses in my book, William Morris and David Logan, both of whom were interviewed by the DA’s office for the record. William Morris is a name Reitzes should be more than familiar with. For months, Reitzes hammered away on the Internet claiming that William Morris never existed and that Garrison invented him out of whole cloth. When confronted by Jim Hargrove’s posting of the July 12, 1967 NODA interview of Morris (an interview that has been available at the AARC or its precursor for almost 30 years, by the way), Reitzes beat a hasty retreat, posting this mea culpa on January 9th; “I did, of course, assert on this NG that Morris never existed, a reckless statement I have fully retracted and for which I apologize.” Apologizing for his inaccuracies is something Reitzes must be quite used to by now. After falsely alleging that David Lifton cribbed Best Evidence from an unpublished manuscript by Newcomb and Adams, Reitzes had to post this retraction on March 11, 1999: “I retract the charge and I apologize for alleging it. It was a cheap shot.” He made another false claim about Harrison Livingstone’s presence during the ARRB deposition of Dr. Humes and once again Reitzes had to atone, writing, “I humbly retract the statement.”

    I won’t rehash Reitzes’ attempted defense of Dean Andrews, since it is simply a regurgitation of Patricia Lambert’s nonsense. However, I would refer the interested reader to my and Jim DiEugenio’s review of Lambert’s book in PROBE Vol. 6, No. 4, as well as the Dean Andrews section of my book. I will comment on one claim made by Reitzes though. He says that my revelation that Andrews was not under sedation at the time of the Clay Bertrand call is not borne out in the December 1963 FBI reports. On the contrary, as anyone who has read my book would know, the December 1963 FBI reports are the source for this revelation.

    Reitzes is right about one point. An FBI report does mention that Metropolitan Crime Commission Director Aaron Kohn was one of the FBI’s sources who had information about Clay Bertrand. But Reitzes finds it suspicious that I didn’t explain why Kohn “would pass along this potentially helpful information – at a time it was common knowledge in the French Quarter that Garrison was seeking “Bertrand” – instead of sitting on the allegedly dangerous stuff.” What Reitzes leaves out is that Kohn countered this revelation with another in which he said he received information that Clay Bertrand is actually a real-estate broker living in Lafayette, Louisiana – clearly disinformation. Maybe I should have included this in my chapter on the disinformation campaign.

    Reitzes’ prosaic attempt at critiquing the final chapter in my book is equally ridiculous. He apparently doesn’t like my choice of titles as he feels it necessary to add his air of incredulity by referring to it as “The Hidden(!) Record.” His emphasis on the word “hidden” is certainly appropriate since approximately 85% of the material in that chapter was suppressed until at least 1993. Regarding a March 2, 1967 FBI memo which Cartha DeLoach wrote to Clyde Tolson stating that “Shaw’s name had come up in our investigation in December, 1963, as a result of several parties furnishing information concerning Shaw,” Reitzes takes on the role of apologist for the FBI asking, “DeLoach couldn’t be mistakenly referring to that FBI report of February 24, 1967 (the Aaron Kohn document noted above), could he?” Let’s see, the number 3 man at the FBI is writing a memo to the number 2 man, knowing full well it will also be read by Hoover, and he gets something like that wrong? I don’t think so. Reitzes thinks he’s really on to something as he writes, “Unfortunately, Davy disdains hunting for primary sources to support his theory when he can simply misquote the anonymous Justice Department informant who told the New York Times that “Bertrand” and Shaw were “the same guy” (Davy, 191).” It’s interesting that Reitzes cites page 191 of my book for the Justice Department “it’s the same guy” quote, because nowhere on page 191 or anywhere else in the book do I mention the “it’s the same guy” quote! Even though that quote is nowhere to be found in my book, that doesn’t stop Reitzes from his pathetic attempt at discrediting. He writes, “What the Justice Department source actually said was, “We think it’s the same guy.”” Reitzes cites the New York Times of March 3, 1967 as his primary source and Lambert as his backup. A quick look at Lambert’s book shows she doesn’t cite the New York Times at all, but rather the New Orleans Time-Picayune of March 3, 1967 and a Washington Post article some three months later. So, does Reitzes’ main source, the New York Times of March 3, 1967 mention the “We think it’s the same guy” quote? Well, I don’t know what edition Mr. Reitzes has, but I have the New York Times, March 3, 1967 article in front of me right now and the Justice Department is quite unequivocal on the matter. I quote verbatim:

    “A Justice Department official said tonight that his agency was convinced that Mr. Bertrand and Mr. Shaw were the same man, and that this was the basis for Mr. Clark’s assertions this morning.”

    And this is precisely what I cite in my book, not the, “it’s the same guy” or “we think it’s the same guy” quotes that Reitzes erroneously attributes to the New York Times and me. Just who is misquoting the Justice Department here, Mr. Reitzes? It is also interesting to note that in his “review” Reitzes tries to downplay the Justice Department conclusion by saying I misquote an anonymous Justice Department informant. As the reader can see, the Times article (and my book) clearly states that it is a Justice Department official making the statement.

    Later, Reitzes incredulously asks “How come none [witnesses linking Shaw to the Bertrand alias] came forward even after the success of Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, which made much of the alleged “Bertrand” alias?” I would expect this from someone who probably hasn’t interviewed a witness in his life. Within two days of my arriving in New Orleans, I located several people in the French Quarter and beyond, who claimed Shaw used the Bertrand alias. But since they wished to remain anonymous I chose not to use them in my book. One of these witnesses was a very credible 30-year veteran of one of New Orleans’ major newspapers, whose name would be recognizable to anyone familiar with the New Orleans aspects of the case. (It was not Jack Dempsey).

    Reitzes continues lowering his batting average when he writes, “Davy devotes a great deal of space trying to prove that Clay Shaw perjured himself when he denied knowing David Ferrie. Again Davy must resort to witnesses that Jim Garrison had, but were clearly not credible to use.” Wrong again. One of the several witnesses I use linking Ferrie to Shaw, is Banister operative, Joe Newbrough – a very credible source. I also quote an FBI report in which they interview Carroll Thomas, a self-described friend of Shaw’s whose funeral home handled the arrangements for the death of Shaw’s father. While being interviewed by the FBI on an unrelated matter, Thomas volunteered that Shaw had introduced him to Ferrie. Neither of these witnesses shared this information with Garrison.

    Reitzes attempts to score me for citing Jules Ricco Kimble as a source for a flight he made to Montreal with Clay Shaw and David Ferrie. Reitzes’ main points for his argument are:

    1. According to Reitzes, “early accounts of Kimble’s story mentioned flying to Montreal with David Ferrie, but did not mention Clay Shaw.” Reitzes cites Flammonde’s The Kennedy Conspiracy, pp. 206-7. A check of Flammonde’s book shows that Flammonde devotes all of one sentence to the Montreal trip that reads, “Kimble also claimed that he had flown to Montreal on what he said was a Minuteman errand.” True, Flammonde doesn’t mention Shaw in his one-sentence summary, but neither is Ferrie mentioned as Reitzes claims.
    2. Reitzes also writes that “Kimble originally claimed the flight to have taken place a year before the assassination, then later moved the date to the summer of 1963, apparently in order to imply a more credible link to the JFK assassination.” And what is Reitzes’ source for this revelation? Some newly released document, perhaps? Or maybe an interview he conducted? No. He provides a web link to a book blurb for a book that hasn’t even been released in this country and is only available in the French language. Assuming Reitzes does not have the book and is not bi-lingual, is this an example of his primary sources? A book blurb?!

    He also wrote in a follow-up post on the Kimble episode that an undated NODA memo about the Montreal trip states “Despite the fact that the original source of this information was JULES RICCO KIMBLE, a man with a record, this lead keeps growing stronger.” He cites a PROBE article by Lisa Pease as the source for this and that’s about the only thing he gets right. He later writes that my book “briefly discusses the Freeport [Sulpher] story, but doesn’t mention that the tale originated with Kimble, even though a discussion of Kimble’s NODA statement directly follows the Freeport material. Davy, in fact, implies that Kimble’s story “corroborates” the Freeport tale.” Allow me to correct you once again (this is getting arduous). Kimble’s statement is dated October 10, 1967. Almost four months prior to Kimble’s statement, the NODA’s office had information from Ken Elliot, a former newscaster, that Shaw and Ferrie had made the flight to Canada on Freeport Sulpher business. This was later corroborated by James J. Plaine, who had been contacted by a high official in Freeport Sulpher and also told Garrison’s office about the Shaw/Ferrie flight and Freeport Sulpher angle. Apparently this was such common knowledge in New Orleans, that both Dean Andrews and WDSU reporter, Richard Townley revealed this information to Shaw’s lawyers. Kimble’s statement was just icing on the cake. And all of this information is laid out quite clearly in my book. As for the undated memo in Ms. Pease’s article, I have a copy of the memo with the date on it. It is one of several memos from the spring of 1969, after the Shaw trial, as Garrison and Assistant DA, Andrew Sciambra were continuing the investigation on a very limited basis. At that point Garrison may very well have believed Kimble was the original source of the Canada trip, but as I’ve shown, the chronicled record indicates otherwise.

    In my book I quote a CIA document that indicates Shaw was cleared for a project called QK/ENCHANT, which Reitzes accuses me of “mangling.” However, the relevant paragraph is quoted in its entirety in my book. Yet Reitzes claims the document says Shaw was an unwitting source. I can assure the reader that nowhere in the QK/ENCHANT document I quote is there any mention of Shaw being an unwitting source. Earlier Reitzes had claimed that another CIA document exists (apparently a different one) that says Shaw was an unwitting source for QK/ENCHANT. In fact, the document in question says no such thing. Both Reitzes and McAdams have been claiming this CIA document exists which clearly states Shaw was used on an unwitting basis. I have obtained a copy of the CIA document and this is what it says: “Subject was granted a Covert Security Approval for use under Project QKENCHANT on an unwitting basis on 10 December 1962.” Lo and behold, the document does say he was used on an unwitting basis. Unfortunately for Reitzes the subject in question is J. Monroe Sullivan, the San Francisco Trade Mart Director, not Clay Shaw. Just who is mangling documents here, Mr. Reitzes?

    Reitzes’ swipe at the Clinton witnesses is old news, but interviewing them could clear up any questions he has about their statements, testimony and veracity. Tell us Mr. Reitzes, how many of the Clinton witnesses have you interviewed? One witness he obviously didn’t interview is Henry Burnell Clark. Instead he trots out Posner’s attempt at discrediting this prospective “Clinton” witness. Reitzes repeats Posner’s claim that Clark did not place Ferrie and Shaw in town on the same day. Reitzes even provides a web link to Clark’s statement on-line. I’ve heard this allegation before and thought perhaps there was another statement out there I hadn’t read. A click on Reitzes’ link confirmed this was not the case. Just a casual reading of the document verifies that Clark is talking about the same time frame. Consider what Clark says about his Clay Shaw sighting:

    In the summer of 1963, after a period of civil rights demonstration and picketing had ending [sic], and during the attempted registration of Negro voters….” Clark then goes on to describe his sighting of Clay Shaw. Now, here is how Clark describes the time frame in which he saw Ferrie:

    During this same period of time in the summer of 1963, after the conclusion of the picketting [sic] demonstrations and during the attempted voting registration of the Negroes…” [My emphasis] Note that the context is exactly the same as his Shaw sighting. Further, there is no mention anywhere in Clark’s statement about these sightings being on different days. At this point I’m beginning to wonder if Reitzes, McAdams, and Posner even read the documents they cite.

    Reitzes also accuses me of an “uncritical acceptance of such discredited Garrison “evidence” as David Ferrie’s allegedly unnatural death (Davy, 66-7).” Here is exactly what I say about Ferrie’s death: “The coroner ruled Ferrie died from a brain aneurysm, despite the presence of two typed “suicide” notes. (Whether they were suicide notes or not is a matter of interpretation. Ferrie, who knew he was quite ill, probably saw the end coming and decided to compose his own epitaph). Garrison would postulate that Ferrie could have been force-fed a fatal dosage of Proloid, a thyroid medication Ferrie had been prescribed. It is doubtful that Ferrie could have been fed enough Proloid to be fatal…” And from my preface I write, “…Ferrie was found dead in his apartment, apparently of natural causes.” Does this sound like an uncritical acceptance of the “mysterious death” theory? The only thing mysterious about it, which I note in my book, is what Deputy Coroner Frank Minyard concluded about something being traumatically inserted into Ferrie’s mouth.

    Reitzes cites Lambert as a source for Perry Russo’s supposed 1971 recantation of his original statement. His “recantation” was anything but, as he revealed in two lengthy interviews with me. Tell us Mr. Reitzes, how many times did you interview Russo?

    Reitzes even tries to dispute Oswald’s ties to Guy Banister and 544 Camp Street. He is apparently so confused at this point that he doesn’t realize he’s refuting his own lengthy treatise supporting Oswald and 544 Camp (See Reitzes, Oswald and 544 Camp, Parts 1 and 2, alt.conspiracy.jfk newsgroup posting of November 3, 1998). Reitzes’ main source for his dissertation is Michael Kurtz. The reader may recall that Kurtz authored a book called Crime of the Century in which he cites numerous unnamed witnesses who placed Oswald with Ferrie and/or Banister in 1963. He even promotes his own “Castro did it” theory – a hypothesis long since discredited. Kurtz even claims he saw Oswald with Banister. Yet Reitzes accepts Kurtz’ views uncritically (Apparently, aligning himself with discredited critics is Reitzes modus operandi. He’s also fond of quoting A.J. Weberman, the former “journalist” who used to scour peoples’ garbage cans for material. In the 1970’s, he co-wrote a book called Coup d’etat In America in which he claims Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt were two of the three “tramps” arrested in Dealey Plaza. Dallas Police records have since disproved that bizarre theory. In addition to “Castro did it” Kurtz and the garbage-sniffing Weberman, Reitzes has now found an advocate in Walt Brown, who recently published a Reitzes piece in his journal. Can anyone say, “Mac Wallace?”)

    Lou Ivon’s recollection of Ferrie’s breakdown gets pooh-poohed by Reitzes, despite the fact that Ivon confirmed this personally in my interview with him. Tell us Mr. Reitzes, how many times have you interviewed Ivon?

    He also claims I say Vernon Bundy was a credible witness. I didn’t say it. William Gurvich and John Volz did! Neither of whom were fans of Garrison’s. Volz confirmed his take on Bundy in an interview with me. Tell us Mr. Reitzes, how many times have you interviewed John Volz?

    At least Reitzes does provide some comic relief. He rebukes me for claiming “that the major media engaged in a conspiracy to discredit Garrison and interfere with his investigation despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary.” And what is the sum total of Reitzes’ “abundance of evidence?” It is as follows: “Lambert’s discussions of James Phelan and Richard Billings.” Whew! I’m overwhelmed with that “abundance of evidence.”

    Reitzes’ credibility goes even further over the edge when he claims I “attempt to rehabilitate nutball witness Charles Spiesel (Davy 173-4).” In fact, I do no such thing. On the very pages Reitzes cites I list all of Spiesel’s wild, paranoid claims. I criticize his story as being too pat and describe his testimony as “lunatic.” Is this Reitzes’ idea of rehabilitation? It was Judge Haggerty himself who thought Spiesel may have been dismissed too easily and I note that in the book.

    Reitzes then writes “Davy also presents a dubious new theory of his own when he attempts to link the mental hospital in Jackson, where Oswald allegedly was seeking a job, to the CIA’s infamous MK/ULTRA mind control experiments.” No, this was recalled to us by Dr. Alfred Butterworth, one of the East Louisiana State Hospital’s physicians and corroborated by other hospital employees. Tell us Mr. Reitzes, how many of the Jackson hospital employees did you interview?

    But less commendable, according to Reitzes, is my “acceptance of Daniel Campbell’s assertions that Banister was a “bagman for the CIA” and “was running guns to Alpha 66 in Miami (There is no evidence to support either claim).” I guess Reitzes naively expects a CIA document to appear affirming something like that. While he’s waiting, he may be interested to know that this was confirmed by Dan Campbell’s brother, Allen as well as close Banister associate, Joe Newbrough. Tell us Mr. Reitzes, how many of Banister’s operatives did you interview?

    Reitzes accuses me of being an advocate first, and an investigator second. But who’s the real advocate here? Just look at the title of Reitzes’ magnum opus, Who Speaks For Clay Shaw? and I think the answer is obvious. He also claims that I take all of Garrison’s assertions at face value. Yet in the over 700 citations in my book, only about 20 are from Garrison’s published works.

    So, where has all of Reitzes’ stellar research led him? – He thinks LBJ killed Kennedy.

    And what does the reader get once he/she clicks on the link? An odd treatise called Yellow Roses by Dave Reitzes in which the author claims Johnson was responsible for, or covered-up, a series of murders, including LBJ’s own sister(!) Assisting LBJ in the Kennedy assassination, according to Reitzes, were Texas millionaire, H.L. Hunt, Mac Wallace (of course), and everyone’s favorite boogie-man, J. Edgar Hoover. Reitzes can spin this fantastic yarn because he cites no primary sources. He uses a couple of books (Haley’s and Caro’s books on LBJ and Harrison Livingstone’s Killing The Truth) and an article by Walt Brown and that’s about it.

    Based on the astronomical number of Internet postings provided to me, Reitzes has taken on the anti-Garrison cause with all the fervor of a religious zealot. So, what would motivate someone to take up the fight so vigorously? – He was insulted. That’s right, but don’t take my word for it. Here’s Reitzes’ own words: “…without the nasty personal attacks from Mr. Hargrove and from one Bill Cleere, I never would posted a word on Garrison or Shaw. My interest, after all, is in the Kennedy assassination, not the so-called Garrison probe.” (Reitzes, alt.conspiracy.jfk newsgroup post of January 8, 1999).

    Finally, in the practice-what-you-preach department, Reitzes wrote in March of this year, “I hope that in the future other researchers and I may embrace the things we have in common rather than seize upon our differences.” Instead of heeding his own words, Reitzes seized upon our differences in a manner so inaccurate it can only be described as vicious. How else can one account for the over 16 errors in his 8-page “review?” Using Reitzes’ penchant for math, that’s over 2 errors per page – a dismal record. How does one account for all of these blunders? Are we really to believe Reitzes’ reading comprehension is as bad as his math? Or is he trying to hurt the commercial possibilities of a book he happens to disagree with? There seems to be some support for the latter, as Mr. Reitzes has seen fit to post an abbreviated version of his error-laden “review” on the Amazon.com site selling my book. I guess I shouldn’t complain too much. Controversy sells books and sadly for Mr. Reitzes in just over 11 weeks since the book has been published it is already heading into its second printing. I take particular solace in the fact that the largest volume of orders has come from Amazon.com. Thank you, Mr. Reitzes.

  • Script of “CBS News, ABC News, and the Lone Assassin Theory”

    (Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)

  • Priscilla Johnson McMillan: She can be encouraged to write what the CIA wants

    Priscilla Johnson McMillan: She can be encouraged to write what the CIA wants

    marina pjm
    Johnson McMillan (right)
    with Marina Oswald

    One of the witnesses used by Gus Russo and Mark Obenhaus to profile Oswald on the program was a woman named Priscilla Johnson McMillan (PJM). To the new generation of viewers, that is people born in the seventies and afterward, this rather old and wizened woman would not symbolize much. To those who have followed the JFK case since 1963, she symbolizes everything negative about those who report on the Kennedy assassination in the media, especially the foreshortened, myopic, restricted view of the almost superhuman complexities of the figure and phenomenon of Lee Harvey Oswald.

    Priscilla Johnson interviewed Oswald in 1959 while he was in Moscow and she was working for a small newspaper syndicate, North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). On the weekend of Kennedy’s assassination, articles by her about Oswald appeared in several newspapers throughout America including The Boston Globe and The Dallas Morning News. Right after Oswald’s death she did an interview with The Christian Science Monitor. In April of 1964 she wrote an article for Harper’s entitled “Oswald in Moscow.” In June of 1964 she signed a contract with Harper and Row to produce a book about Oswald and his wife Marina, a book that would not be published for over ten years. At about this time, she was questioned by lawyers for the Warren Commission, namely David Slawson and Richard Mosk. All of these activities are quite interesting in their frequency and scope and consistent message. Perhaps no other writer, outside of the Warren Commission staff, had more influence in molding the image of Oswald for the American public than Priscilla Johnson.

    Up until 1967, no one really questioned who Johnson was or what she represented. Then something happened. The daughter of Joseph Stalin defected to the United States with the help of the State Department and the CIA. When Svetlana Stalin came to America she stayed in the home of Priscilla’s stepfather and PJM helped her translate her account of life with her dictator father. For those who realized at the time how high level defections worked, and who had access to prizes like Svetlana, all kinds of bells and flags went off about Priscilla and it began to throw backward light on her association with Oswald. For instance NANA had always been a highly suspect agency. It was purchased by former OSS operative Ernest Cuneo in 1951 and became home to prominent rightwing and CIA associated reporters like Victor Lasky, Lucianna Goldberg, and Virginia Prewett. Prewett’s husband was in the CIA and was handled by legendary CIA communications expert David Phillips. Finally, accruing even more suspicion to her role with Oswald, a former security officer for the State Department, Jack Lynch once wrote that Priscilla’s encounter with Oswald in Moscow was “Official business.”

    In this last regard, according to Peter Whitmey, the man who approached Priscilla about Oswald being at the Metropole Hotel in Moscow was John McVickar, who worked at the US Embassy. According to John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA, McVickar was working for the CIA also. (In 1990, PJM wrote Whitmey a letter asking him if he could remind her who McVickar was.) Much of what PJM told Mosk and Slawson was about her meeting with Oswald in Moscow so therefore it helped form their opinions of Oswald and helped shape the portrait of him in the Warren Report. In this regard it would have been important for Slawson and Mosk to know and report that Priscilla had altered her original 1959 report (published in a very small newspaper) after Kennedy’s assassination in a pejorative way. And this new version was published nationally. For instance she added a line at the end which referred to Oswald like this: “However I soon came to feel that this boy was of the stuff of which fanatics are made.” As Whitmey notes, in her first draft the image of Oswald is of a soft-spoken idealist who spoke in terms of “emigrating” as opposed to defecting. The word “fanatic” is much more in line with what the Commission is going to do with its image of Oswald as a disturbed young Marxist zealot. Whitmey also point outs two other revisions by PJM. According to McVickar’s notes, she was aware that Oswald was headed out of the hotel to work in the electronics field. She ignores this at the end of her 1963 revised article and says that he disappeared and did not notify her about it, against her wishes. The final statement in the second draft was “I’d wondered what had happened to him since. Now I know.” Since this second draft was published in the immediate wake of Kennedy’s murder, the obvious suggestion is that the fanatical tendencies — not in her original report — had warped him into an assassin.

    In her interview with The Christian Science Monitor, more details of this newly troubled Oswald emerge. PJM said that he was intensely bitter at the United States, that he displayed single-mindedness about “whatever he was attempting to do” and that he was bitter about capitalism and worker exploitation. In her Harper’s article she added even more pop psychology in her profile: “Oswald yearned to go down in history as the man who shot the President.” To explain why, if that was his intent, he then denied the act she wrote that he had a need to think “of himself as extraordinary” and “to be caught, but not to confess.”

    If this sounds very similar to what the Warren Commission’s explanation of Oswald was, it should. For right after the article appeared she did two things. She first signed a rather large contract with Harper and Row to do a biography of Oswald with help from his widow Marina. Second, she arrived in Dallas to meet Marina and spent much of the summer and fall with her and her Secret Service escorts. This in itself is extraordinary because Marina Oswald was one of the chief witnesses before the Commission and as Harold Weisberg and Peter Scott have reported, she was basically cordoned off from the world and threatened with deportation if she did not cooperate with their wishes. Yet, Priscilla was permitted to live with Marina during the summer and fall of 1964 when the Commission was still working and even accompanied her on a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

    One of the most fascinating interviews the Commission had with Marina occurred on September 6, 1964 at the U. S. Naval Station in Dallas. Two things occurred here that relate to Priscilla. First, Marina revealed that she was working on her memoirs which would be published perhaps in December. This alludes to her book deal with PJM and Harper and Row. The second point is of such extreme importance to the Commission and to Priscilla’s role with it that it requires some background information.

    In September, the Commission was in high gear on its road to wrapping things up. In fact, at this stage, as related by Edward Epstein, the lawyers had been told that they should be closing doors not opening them. Yet Senator Richard Russell was a sticking point. He was a skeptic on both the single bullet theory and on Oswald’s mysterious trip to Mexico in September and October of 1963. He was actually threatening not to sign off on the Warren Report. Russell noted that in regard to the latter point, the Commission had little or no physical evidence that Oswald had been to Mexico City. So, miraculously, at this late stage, at one of the few hearings that Russell actually attended, an amazing discovery occurred. Marina reported that a bus ticket stub had been found inside a Spanish magazine and she further stated that she had “found the stub of this ticket approximately two weeks ago when working with Priscilla Johnson on the book.” What the FBI, CIA, Dallas Police, Ruth and Michael Paine, and the Secret Service could not produce in ten months, Priscilla Johnson could find in a matter of several weeks, and seemingly by accident.

    After the Warren Commission volumes were released in late 1964, one would have expected Priscilla to publish her book on the Oswalds. She did not. She first contributed to a book called Khrushchev and the Arts which was published early in 1965. She then helped Svetlana Allileuva Stalin translate her memoir on her father, Stalin. This book was also published by Harper and Row which might explain the delay and the publisher’s cooperation in it. Especially since the advance rights on the Stalin project had already been sold for over a million dollars. Much later, after going back to the Soviet Union, Svetlana had some interesting comments about her experience in America. Talking to a group of reporters she stated that “she had been naive about life in the U.S. and had become a favorite pet of the CIA.” She also said that she had not been been “free for a single day in the so-called free world.”

    In 1973, Priscilla and her then husband George McMillan wrote a glowing review for Warren Commission attorney David Belin’s recycling of his work entitled November 22, 1963: You Are the Jury. This review was published in The New York Times, which is the same body which published the book. Her husband also wrote a book on the murder of Martin Luther King entitled The Making of an Assassin. Needless to say that book is a completely one-sided view of the King case that uses character assassination to enforce a guilty verdict on James Earl Ray.

    Finally, in 1977, Priscilla’s book Marina and Lee was published. As with the discovery of the bus tickets in 1964, it is interesting to note the timing. From about 1975 forward, there had been a series of events that would eventually provoke a new investigation of the Kennedy assassination. In fact, in late 1976, the House Select Committee on Assassinations had been formed. So her book appeared right in the midst of that investigation. The publicity surrounding the book was immense. Priscilla did an interview with Publisher’s Weekly and the book was excerpted twice in Ladies Home Journal. Longtime CIA flack Thomas Powers heaped all kinds of praise on the book in his review in The New York Times. (Interestingly, Powers was working on his authorized and all too kind biography of longtime Kennedy nemesis Richard Helms at the time. On a show hosted by Phil Donahue in 1991about JFK, Helms appeared with PJM and asked her what had attracted Lee to Marxism in the first place.)

    Marina testified before the committee and when asked the last time she saw Priscilla she replied it had been the night before she appeared. Another interesting fact she revealed was how much control PJM had over the book: “I just contribute very little to the book. It was up to Priscilla to fish out all the facts and everything and put them together some way.”

    By this time period, the suspicions about who PJM really was had gone public. Jerry Policoff wrote an article about her for New Times which accused her of working for the State Department and also added that the Warren Commission had known this fact. Priscilla threatened to sue and said she had no knowledge of any such employment or the Warren Commission knowing of it. Yet prior to the publication of Policoff’s article, Mark Lane, in a public panel, had shown her the Warren Commission document which stated she worked for the State Department. She told Lane the information was a mistake she had failed to correct. At this same conference she is reported to have said, “I’ve devoted a lot of time to Oswald’s life, so I have a vested interest in his having done it.”

    After the seventies, Priscilla continued in her efforts to convict Oswald in the public eye. In 1982, she wrote an article for Martin Peretz’s magazine The New Republic about the attempted assassination of President Reagan by John Hinckley. In 1988, for CBS’s Dan Rather, she did an interview in which she concluded that one of the last words Oswald spoke to her in Moscow were, “I want to give the people of the United States something to think about.” Rather did not point out that this remark was not in either her original article published in 1959 in a New Haven newspaper nor in her revised one circulated in 1963. Further, it seems to insinuate that a) Oswald shot Kennedy, and b) He knew it four years in advance.

    Priscilla was interviewed by the House Select Committee on April 20, 1978 in executive session. She appeared with an attorney at her side. And she submitted a very detailed affidavit. These circumstances — the attorney and affidavit — were so unusual that Representative Floyd Fithian stated he was struck by the approach where he was presented “with almost a legal brief of the whole thing plus counsel, when you are obviously not a subject of investigation.” Interestingly, both the attorney and the affidavit were supplied by the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering, David Westin’s law firm. During the following interview, to many questions, she replies that she does not recall certain details. Interviewer Michael Goldsmith, on page 31 of the transcript, asks her if she had been interviewed by the CIA after her third visit to Russia. She replies yes. But, at this point, nine pages of the transcript are withdrawn by request of the CIA. When Goldsmith confronts her with a letter from the CIA which shows she is cooperating with them on reviews of Russian writers for American publications the following dialogue occurs:

    Goldsmith: When was the first time that you saw it? [The letter]
    PJM: When I read my file of documents from the CIA which reached me on February 1st, 1978.
    Goldsmith: This, then, is a copy of a letter that was in your file that you received from the CIA, is that correct?
    PJM:Yes, Mr. Goldsmith.
    Goldsmith: Do you recall having written this letter?
    PJM: No, but now that I see it, I think that I wrote it.

    When Goldsmith asks the question of Priscilla, “What was Mr. McDonald [of the CIA] doing sending you materials?” there is another withdrawal from the transcript, this time of 23 pages. Later on when Goldsmith is questioning her about her attempted return to the Soviet Union in 1962, he asks her about a contact with the CIA and insinuates that she must have initiated the contact with the New York CIA station.

    Goldsmith: This is a relatively unusual incident in your life, is it not?
    PJM: Yes.
    Goldsmith: People do not have contacts at Grand Central Station, or wherever this was with CIA stations every day, do they?
    PJM: I have no idea.
    Goldsmith: This is an unusual incident, is it not?
    PJM: In my life, yes.
    Goldsmith: Despite the fact that this was an unusual incident in you life you are unaware of how the contact was initiated?
    PJM: I am unaware of it, yes.

    Other documents released by the Assassination Records Review Board reveal why Priscilla was so defensive. For instance, the 1962 meeting resulted in a series of contacts that make up a two page memorandum from Donald Jameson, Chief of the Soviet Russia division. He concludes his memo with the following, “I think that Miss Johnson can be encouraged to write pretty much the articles we want.” In 1964, the CIA called her for a meeting which lasted for seven hours. Another meeting took place in 1965 in which she called the CIA. From the declassified record, Priscilla seems to have been recruited in 1956, although she applied for service as early as 1953. In 1956 she was granted by the Office of Security an Ad Hoc Clearance through the status of “Confidential” provided that caution was exercised. Another document dated later in 1975 classifies her as a “witting collaborator” for the Agency. It appears that Priscilla had applied for work with the CIA prior to her 1959 interview with Oswald and was in clear contact with the CIA by the time of the assassination and was cooperating with them on various matters, including cultural assignments and the matter of Svetlana Stalin’s defection. This, of course, brings her work on Oswald into serious question and dubious reliability especially since she said in person that she has a vested interest in keeping his guilt alive. And also since she has tried to keep her covert ties secret.

    All this would have made a much more interesting program for ABC than Priscilla’s unreliable cliches which she has been spouting off since 1963. Russo was likely aware of her declassified files. Did he tell Jennings and Obenhaus? Did they want to hear? They certainly didn’t tell the public which, in CIA parlance, was unwitting to Priscilla’s duplicity.

    Mr. DiEugenio owes much of this information to writer Peter Whitmey and his three part article on Priscilla Johnson which ran in The Third Decade from 1991 to 1993. The articles are online at http://www.jfk-info.com/pjm-tit.htm, as part of Clint Bradford’s JFK Assassination Research Materials web site.

  • Gerald Posner, Case Closed

    This review appeared in The Journal of Southern History 6 (February 1995), pp. 186-188.

    This electronic version is from http://www.assassinationscience.com/wrone.html

    Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. By Gerald Posner. (New York: Random House, 1993. Pp. xvi, 607. $25.00, ISBN 0-679-41825-3.)

    Gerald Posner argues that the Warren Commission properly investigated the assassination of JFK. He claims to have refuted the critics, purports to show what actually occurred, and asserts simple factual answers to explain complex problems that have plagued the subject for years. In the process he condemns all who do not agree with the official conclusions as theories driven by conjectures. At the same time his book is so theory driven, so rife with speculation, and so frequently unable to conform his text with the factual content in his sources that it stands as one of the stellar instances of irresponsible publishing on the subject.

    Massive numbers of factual errors suffuse the book, which make it a veritable minefield. Random samples are the following: Pontchartrain is a lake not a river. The wounded James Tague stood twenty feet east, not under the triple underpass. There were three Philip Geracis, not one; he confuses the second and the third. A tiny fragment, not a bullet, entered Connally’s thigh. The Army did the testing that he refers to the FBI. None, not three, commissioners heard at least half the hearings. The Warren Commission did not have any investigators. Captain Donovan is John, not Charles, and a lieutenant. The critics of the official findings are not leftists but include conservatives such as Cardinal Cushing, William Loeb, and former commissioner, Richard Russell.

    Posner often presents the opposite of what the evidence says. In the presentation of a corrupt picture of Oswald’s background, for example, he states that, under the name of Osborne, Oswald picked up leaflets he distributed from the Jones Printing Company and that the “receptionist” identified him. She in fact said that Oswald did not pick up the leaflets as the source that Posner cites indicates.

    No credible evidence connects Oswald to the murder. All the data that Posner presents to do so is either shorn of context, corrupted, the opposite of what the sources actually say, or nonsourced. For example, 100 percent of the witness testimony and physical evidence exclude Oswald from carrying the rifle to work that day disguised as curtain rods. Posner manipulates with words to concoct a case against Oswald as with Linnie Mae Randle, who swore the package, as Oswald allegedly carried it, was twenty-eight inches long, far too short to have carried a rifle. He grasped its end, and it hung from his swinging arm to almost touch the ground. Posner converts this to “tucked under his armpit, and the other end did not quite touch the ground”(p. 225). The rifle was heavily oiled, but the paper sack discovered on the sixth floor had not a trace of oil. Posner excludes this vital fact.

    To refute criticism that the first of three shots (the magic bullet) inflicted seven nonfatal wounds on two bodies in impossible physical and time constraints, he invents a second magic bullet. He asserts that Oswald fired the first bullet near frame 160 of the Zapruder film, fifty frames earlier than officially held, and missed. The bullet hit a twig or a branch or a tree, as he varies it, then separated into its copper sheath and lead composite core. The core did a right angle to fly west more than 200 feet to hit a curbstone and wound Tague while the sheath decided to disappear. The curb in fact had been damaged. He omits that analysis of the curb showed the bullet came from the west, which means the bullet would have had to have taken another sui generis turn of 135 degrees to get back west with sufficient force to smash concrete, which he pretends was not marred.

    He asserts proof of a core hit because FBI analysis revealed “traces of [sic per reviewer] lead with a trace of antimony” (p. 325) in the damage. What he omits destroys his theory. He does not explain that a bullet core has several other metallic elements in its composition, not two, rendering his conclusion false. He further neglects to inform the reader that by May 1964 the damage had been covertly patched with a concrete paste and that in August, not July, 1964, the FBI tested the scrapings of the paste, not the damage, which gave the two metal results.

    He says the second shot transited JFK’s neck and caused the nonfatal wounds striking Connally at Zapruder film frame 224 where Connally is seen turned to his right, allegedly lining his body up with JFK’s neck, thus sustaining the single bullet explanation. He finds proof that a bullet hit then in Connally’s lapel that was flapping in that one frame as it passed through. But he does not conform to fact. Wind gusting to twenty miles per hour that day ruffled clothing. And, there is no bullet hole in the lapel but in the jacket body beneath the right nipple area.

    Posner crowns his theory with the certainty of science by using one side of the computer-enhanced studies by Failure Analysis Associates of Menlo Park that his text implies he commissioned. The firm, however, lambastes his use as a distortion of the technology that it had developed for the American Bar Association’s mock trial of Oswald where both sides used it.

    Posner fails. I believe that irrefutable evidence shows conspirators, none of them Oswald, killed JFK. A mentally ill Jack Ruby, alone and unaided, shot Oswald. The federal inquiry knowingly collapsed and theorized a political solution. Its corruption spawned theorists who tout solutions rather than define the facts that are locked in the massively muddied evidentiary base and released only by hard work.

  • Big Lie About a Small Wound

    Background

    There is no evidence, hard or soft, that supports the single bullet theory. Its defenders spend a lot of “proving” it “could have happened that way” — which is not the same as proving that it did, a distinction they don’t make. But they can’t even prove the SBT hypothetically because the sniper’s nest and the various wounds of the two men do not line up. To solve this problem, promoters of the SBT resort to chicanery. And, in desperation, they squeeze great significance out of minutiae — the small movements of Connally’s jacket and hat — events that occur all the time without the assistance of a bullet, magic or otherwise. Yet they ignore Connally’s more dramatic movements that occur too late to be associated with the same bullet that hit JFK. Worse yet, they stoop to manufacturing evidence.

    One example of manufactured evidence is the lie about Connally’s back wound. Why do supporters of the SBT say the wound was 3 centimeters long, when, in fact, it was only half as long? Why was the 1.5 centimeter wound a problem? Defenders of the theory say that if the Carcano bullet had struck sideways (as opposed to nose-on), it would have created a wound the same size as its length (3 centimeters), and such a long wound would be proof the bullet had been tumbling. If it had been tumbling, this, presumably, would be proof it had struck something else on its way to Connally’s back. The something else in this case: John F. Kennedy.

    Problem: Connally’s back wound was only as long as the wound in the back of Kennedy’s head: 1.5 centimeters — not a size that suggests the bullet was tumbling.

     

    clip image002

    Adaptation of a drawing demonstrating the hypothetical tumbling bullet. From John Lattimer’s book, Kennedy and Lincoln. Medical and Ballistic Comparisons of Their Assassinations, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, page 268.

    The drawing above demonstrates the alleged behavior of the single bullet. The drawing was designed (though not executed) by John Lattimer, a urologist who has published several infomercials in medical journals promoting the lone assassin theory. What is wrong with this picture, aside from the fact that the men are too far apart? Experts assure me the Carcano bullet is much too stable to behave like this. Perforating a neck could divert the bullet, but not make it tumble to this extent in so short a time and in so short a space. (There is more on Lattimer below.)

    The wound in Connally’s back did not indicate a sideways hit any more than the wound in the back of Kennedy’s head. The latter was 1.5 x 0.6 centimeters, and the former, 1.5 x 0.8 centimeters, as documented on at least four occasions by the governor’s thoracic surgeon, Dr. Robert Shaw. (4WCH104,107; 6WCH85,86). The holes in the back of Connally’s shirt and jacket were as small as his back wound. (5WCH64) (See TABLE below.) The damage inside Connally’s chest also disproves a sideways hit. According to Shaw, the bullet created a “small tunneling wound” (7HSCA149) and he noted, “the neat way in which it stripped the rib out without doing much damage to the muscles that lay on either side of it.” (4WCH116) Shaw felt that the shape of the bullet was explained either by a “light tumbling,” or by it striking at a tangent. (6WCH95) It had to have been a tangential hit since the bullet “followed the line of declination of the fifth rib” (4WCH105), i.e., its path slanted downward.

    Connally’s back wound became 3 centimeters when it was surgically enlarged. Shaw explained that in order to clean and debride (cut away devitalized tissue) the wound, he had to enlarge it to twice its size. (6WCH88)

    Despite all this testimony, two doctors — John Lattimer and Michael Baden — found ways to make the magic bullet wound change its size to fit the magic bullet theory. And unethical “investigative journalists,” like Gerald Posner, Gus Russo and Dale Myers, have spread the lie further.

    John Lattimer Exploits a Coincidence

    Bullets and wounds are a bit like keys and locks, and that would make John Lattimer an amateur locksmith. Since a tumbling bullet did not fit into Connally’s back wound, Lattimer changed the lock.

    Some 30 years ago, Lattimer noticed an interesting coincidence: the size of the wound — after it was enlarged — was the same length as a Carcano bullet, 3 centimeters. Lattimer then published an article in which he claimed the wound had been three centimeters long — originally. (Medical Times 1974; 102 November:33-56; Kennedy and Lincoln, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980) As proof, he published Shaw’s operative report that described the wound as “three cm” — and never explained this was the size after surgical enlargement.

    Lattimer also chose to publish an uncorrected diagram that portrayed the back wound as it was after surgical enlargement (CE 679, 17WCH336) when, instead, he could have published the corrected diagram showing the actual size of the wound (Gregory Exhibit No.1, 20WCH32). See Exhibits A and B.

    On this same deceptive diagram, Lattimer pasted a snippet of testimony in which Shaw agrees the wound, as portrayed in the diagram, is correct — but, omitted from this snippet were statements that made it clear Shaw was talking about the EXIT wound. Lattimer did report that a correction had been made, but lied about its nature: “His careful diagram of the wound of entry (which he revised and initialed) showed it to be elongated in its vertical (not horizontal) axis and to be at least 3 cm in length.” (Medical Times 1974; 102 November:33-56; Kennedy and Lincoln, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, page 266) See Exhibits B – F.

    Lattimer included Shaw’s testimony in which he agrees with Arlen Specter that the wound could have been caused by a slightly tumbling bullet — but omitted Shaw’s opinion that it could also have been caused by a tangential hit. (6WCH95) See Exhibit G. Again, it should be noted that this wound was the same length as the entrance into JFK’s head, which supporters of the lone assassin theory say was a tangential hit.

    Michael Baden Stretches the Lie Further

    Dr. Michael Baden who headed the HSCA medical panel, knew the true size of the wound and how it had been enlarged. He had also personally examined the scar on Connally’s back. This is how he described it to the panel:

    “On removing his shirt, it was readily apparent that at the site of gunshot perforation of the upper right back there is now a 1 1/8 -inch long horizontal pale well healed…” (7HSCA 143-144; 240)

    In a book Baden wrote for the public, he doubled the size of the scar:

    “According to Connally’s medical records, the bullet struck him nose first in the back and left a vertical scar. I thought the records were wrong. If it was the same magic bullet, it would have gone in sideways — with the length, not the point, first. After leaving Kennedy, it would have lost its power and became a tumbling bullet, and tumbling bullets rotate. When they finally strike, they strike edgewise. I needed to examine Connally…

    “He removed his shirt. There it was — a two-inch long sideways entrance scar in his back. He had not been shot by a second shooter but by the same flattened bullet that went through Kennedy.” (Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner, Random House 1989, p.20) See Exhibit H.

    Apparently Baden realized that if the original wound had been three centimeters (1.2 inches), then, after its surgical enlargement, the scar would have been even bigger. It was a calculated lie. This is only one of several examples of Michael Baden’s deceptions.

    Gerald Posner, Gus Russo, and Dale Myers Perpetuate the Lie

    Two of these “investigative reporters,” Posner and Russo, never quoted primary sources on the wound, choosing instead to accept the fraudulent claims of Lattimer and Baden. (Gerald Posner. Case Closed. Random House, pp 336, 479; Gus Russo. Live by the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK. Bancroft Press, 1998, p.297).

    The third “investigative reporter,” Dale Myers, mimicked Lattimer’s technique of taking testimony out of context. On his website, he wrote: “According to Dr. Robert Shaw’s operative record, the entrance wound in JBC’s body was ‘just lateral to the right [shoulder blade] close [to] the [armpit] yet has passed through the latysmus [latissimus] dorsi muscle…the wound of entrance was approximately [1.2 inches] in its longest diameter.’” (7HSCA142) But Myers omitted what followed immediately after the quote above: “The rear entrance wound was NOT [emphasis mine] 3 centimeters [1.2 inches] (in diameter) as indicated in one of the operative notes. It was a puncture-type wound, as if a bullet had struck the body at slight declination [i.e., not at a right angle]. The wound was actually approximately 1.5 centimeters in diameter. The ragged edges of the wound were surgically cut away, effectively enlarging it to approximately 3 centimeters.” (7HSCA143)

    Conclusion

    Five people, including the head of the second biggest investigation into the medical evidence, Michael Baden, MD, have demonstrated great faith in the public’s inability or unwillingness to make a simple comparison between what they say, and what is a matter of public record.

    Copyright © 2004, by Milicent Cranor

     

    table

    exhibit a

    exhibit b

    exhibit c

    exhibit d

    exhibit e

    exhibit f

    exhibit g

    exhibit h 19

    exhibit h 20

  • Gerald Posner: Did He Get Anything Right?

    Gerald Posner: Did He Get Anything Right?

    posner toon

    Prior to the 30th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, relatively few people had heard of or purchased the books by attorney Gerald Posner. Then in 1993, a tsunami of publicity announced the coming of the volume that would finally silence all of the doubts about and critiques of the Warren Commission. Entitled, rather pretentiously, Case Closed, it was published by major publisher Random House, and it was accompanied by a publicity machine that started with a featured spot on an ABC newsmagazine where– Posner was served up softballs by Lynn Scherr; and a cover story in U.S. News and World Report, which, somehow, could not find one major fault in the book (as we shall see that is an amazing negative accomplishment.)

    Posner’s was clearly meant as an unmitigated, no holds barred, almost venomous prosecution brief against Lee Harvey Oswald. No doubt was expressed, no slack was cut, no ambiguity fit in to Posner’s work. How could it considering the title? This was doubly confounding to skeptics since at the time his book was published, the Assassination Records Review Board had not begun its work yet. There were literally millions of pages of documents no one had seen so how could Posner be so sure he was correct? As we shall see, he wasn’t sure and he had to be corrected. But that has not altered his opinion of anything. When major evidence changes, yet the prosecution insists it was correct, then clearly an agenda is in place, and justice is not part of it. This is why we have judges to overrule overly zealous prosecutors.

    One of the notable things about Posner’s book is how much of a personal attack it is upon Oswald. Who does he rely upon for much of this personal vitriol? None other than Priscilla Johnson… Another source is Ruth Paine. Another is John Lattimer. As the reader can see from other profiles, these are not the most unbiased or credible sources. Posner just used them indiscriminately. He also used Hugh Aynesworth. In the profile on this site of Aynesworth, we mention the “attempt’ by Oswald to do away with Richard Nixon. We showed how this was probably foisted on Marina Oswald by Aynesworth sometime in 1964. We also showed why not even the Warren Commission could accept it. Guess what? Posner did. In the paperback edition of his book (p. 119) he treats this episode straightforwardly, without reservations. The tell-tale sign that he got it from Aynesworth is that he uses the same newspaper heading that Aynesworth gave to his friend Homes Alexander for his 1964 article. Alexander noted in 1964 that an article in the Dallas Morning News featured a story that was headed “Nixon Calls for Decision to Force Reds out of Cuba”. This is precisely the story that Posner uses. He then adds that Nixon was not in Dallas “the day” Marina said he was, implying that Marina was off by a day or two when she was actually off by nearly seven months. He also discounts the fact that there was never any announcement of Nixon arriving around this time by saying that there was an announcement that Johnson was and Oswald confused the two. Finally he argues that Marina was strong enough to keep Oswald barricaded in the bathroom by bracing herself against the opposite wall. This is ludicrous to anyone who has ever met Marina. She is positively petite, actually dainty, being a little over five feet tall and, at the time of the assassination and probably about 120 pounds. Posner never notes the Alexander/Aynesworth column, the then association between Aynesworth and Marina, Aynesworth’s mercenary and clearly ideological aims, or Marina’s plight and later recantation of much of what she said when she was under the influence of Aynesworth and Priscilla Johnson. He could have done all of this. He mentioned none of it.

    Posner is just as bad and irresponsible on the medical evidence as he is about Oswald. In the chapter entitled “He Has a Death Look” he uses people like Michael Baden to discredit the doctors in Dallas who say they saw a large hole in the rear of Kennedy’s head. Posner is intent on getting rid of that hole because it would give strong evidence of there being a shot from the front of Kennedy’s car. In fact, he admits this himself about the hole in the back of the head: “If true, this not only contradicted the findings of the autopsy team but was evidence that the President was probably shot from the front…. (ibid. p. 307) He then spends pages trying to discredit the doctors and attendants at Parkland Hospital who say they saw this hole. The agenda being that if he does so, there will be no evidence for it left.

    But the problem for Posner was that he spoke too soon. When the ARRB declassified the House Select Committee on Assassinations medical files, we found out something Posner did not know and had not bothered to query about. (Understandable, considering what he was trying to do.) The doctors who examined the body in Bethesda, and who had it most of the night, agreed with the doctors in Dallas about the wound in the rear of the head. In fact, nearly as many witnesses at Bethesda agreed with the witnesses at Parkland. Gary Aguilar tallied them all up and it now comes to over 40 witnesses, fairly equally distributed between the two locations. So Posner’s thesis, which he spends over six pages developing, is undermined by the new files. So much for his title.

    Then there was the pronouncement in his book about there being no evidence that connected Ferrie with Oswald (p. 426) This was simply wrong as we show elsewhere. But when Posner was confronted with a photo of the two together, he had a hard time swallowing it and so he tried to weasel out of it by saying that it probably came from Jim Garrison’s office and that the DA had been shown to have doctored two other photos. This is in keeping with his penchant in smearing personages when the evidence turns against him. The problem here is that 1.) Garrison never had the photograph in question, and 2.) There is no evidence of him altering photographs.

    Finally to show how indiscriminate and undiscerning, how cynical Posner is about what his audience knows, toward the end of his book he quotes Robert Blakey, Chief Counsel of the HSCA, about what was in the classified files that he helped lock up for over 50 years: “I know everything in those files, and there is no smoking gun in there. People who expect major revelations will be disappointed. Everything of importance got into our report.” (ibid p. 469) This is an amazing quote for Posner to use on several counts:

    1. Just five pages earlier, Posner spent a long section on his book discrediting Blakey and his conclusions about a Mafia conspiracy. Now he trots out the man he just discredited as an authority on what he did not reveal.
    2. Blakey has just told him that he “knew everything in those files”. Posner does not challenge the statement. Yet, even at the time Posner’s book was written the National Archives had estimated that there were about two million pages of classified files they had to work on declassifying. The actual number turned out to be even higher. Yet Posner does not question the astounding claim that Blakey read all this stuff and still-15 year later– “knew everything” in it.
    3. It was Blakey’s report that covered up the point above about the Bethesda doctors agreeing with the Parkland doctors on the wound in the rear of Kennedy’s head. A tenet that their own (hidden) documents and interviews contravened. The two major authors of the Final Report were Blakey and Richard Billings.
    4. It was Posner himself who wrote, as we have seen, that this wound placement would constitute evidence that Kennedy was hit from the front. Meaning the fatal shot came from there and Oswald could not have fired it.

    Without exaggeration, today, almost every page of Case Closed abounds with quotes, comments, or deductions as flatulent as this one. To go through the entire book and correct them all, as I have here, would literally take a volume longer than Posner’s original work. Yet as we show here, in our links, the critiques of his indefensible book abound on the Internet. Yet, Jennings and Obenhaus either never bothered to look them up, or they were never interested. Which is worse according to a journalist’s credo?