Why You Should Care That Selma Gets LBJ Wrong
by David Kaiser, At: Time
Tag: MEDIA
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Gary Mack’s “Magical” Powers of Dissuasion
During the last half century, the assassination of President Kennedy has seen a lot of obfuscation and disinformation. All of it presented as evidence to support the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin of JFK. A lot of these demonstrations, as exposed on this web site, have been shown to be calibrated lies. Many of us are not knowledgeable enough in certain intricate areas of the JFK case to fully grasp this disinformation campaign. But in this field, we cannot afford to rely on most evidence shown through the medium of television because that medium, since the issuance of the Warren Report, has been firmly on the side of the perpetrators. Who can forget Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather putting together a program to support the Warren Report the day it was published. Once we understand this, then we should view almost all TV presentations touting the verdict of the Warren Commission as nothing but a continuation of the Cronkite-Rather production, and we unfortunately just experienced a blitzkrieg like effort last November leading up to the 50th anniversary. Truth was hit hard. But sometimes when a perpetrator covers truth with a falsity, it therefore causes even more to submerge than the original lie, and more knowledge to become illuminated.
Having established this as a touchstone, let us take a closer look at some past instances of fraudulent evidence portrayed as factual on mass broadcasted cable TV and perhaps learn more about who or what was behind it. Ten years ago, the Discovery Channel, ran a JFK episode on its series Unsolved History. In 2003’s Unsolved History entitled “The Conspiracy Myths” a live shooting recreation was featured along with a laser trajectory test done in Dealey Plaza
Michael Yardley was the weapons and terrorism expert who was chosen to do the live shooting and the night time laser trajectory tests. According to his web site, Yardley thinks that Oswald fired at least one shot that day, but that he was not just a lone nut. Yardley also thought that until his simulation, all previous attempts to do so had been flawed. But as we will see Yardley was not aware of how flawed his own test was. And that the laser recreations in Dealey Plaza were flawed scientifically, causing their conclusions to be false.
The voice that serves as the narrator for this show told us things like “We scientifically search for evidence”, and “Was the book depository the only place where a gunman could have fired the fatal shots?” My personal favorite from the narrator was, “In order to find out we will turn the city of Dallas into a laboratory.” But as we will find out for ourselves, as with all these programs, their methods do not end up being fully scientific. At times, even being quite contrary to scientific methods. We shall see that their flaw was that the film-makers had to alter known facts and images, and even their own supposed conclusive findings in order to disprove an only hypothetical frontal shot trajectory. And when all the hocus pocus is exposed, it becomes quite believable that they knew of the plausibility of such a shot.
Let us now take a close look at the night-time possible trajectory tests with the lasers, and their supposed scientific claims. The lasers were used as an attempt to check the possibility of sources of shots from in front of the motorcade and possible scenarios for a sniper. As the narrative voice chimes, “This is an experiment,” and “We will turn the city of Dallas into a laboratory”, it gives the show a feeling of importance and honesty. But now we’ll see ourselves how credible and objective these experiments actually were. After Yardley tries out a few locations, which never really seemed to have much credibility as a potential frontal shot source, he then moves up behind the picket fence, to a location known as the North storm drain. This is where the western end of the picket fence, which sits atop the grassy knoll, approximates the railroad overpass bridge. Yardley readies his Mannlicher-Carcano carbine with a trigger-activated laser and opens fire as the motorcade stand-in rides down Elm Street.
This illustrates a potential trajectory to a JFK stand-in, and Yardley hits him on the right side of the head. Which is where many think he was actually hit by the fatal shot. Along with Yardley that night, are historian Daniel Martinez, and of course, the spokesman for the Sixth Floor Museum Gary Mack. (Mack must be making quite a living these days off these cable TV programs.) (Watch the video segment embedded below.)
Now, as we see the alignment of Yardley’s rifle with the head of the person standing in for JFK, the narrator reiterates that yes, the shot did line up, but there are some complications. Gary and Daniel Martinez huddle on the street like an officiating team during a football game. Gary Mack (real name Larry Dunkel) now proceeds to inform us of these complications: “We know from the pictures there were three men standing on the middle of the steps, so they were in the way.” He also says there was a tree in the way, but it’s no longer living, and he then spoke of the trouble finding the target from that angle. According to Mack/Dunkel, “You would only have a fraction of a second to find him in the motorcade.” Yet, Yardley the weapons expert, certainly had no problem locating the target, did he Gary? Also, in a 2008 episode when Yardley did a daytime test run, again from near the same storm drain, he stated that there was, “Plenty of time to track the vehicle”, and who is a better witness to the validity of a potential shot, than a weapons expert?
So the main complications Gary Mack claims prevented a shot from the drain were the three men, who were standing basically at the Elm Street sidewalk base. And they display a night time background shot of the grassy knoll, along with a cut out portion of the Mary Moorman photo. This cut out segment contains the three men and the cement staircase on which they stood. It seemingly represents a collaged image of then and now, and should be visual proof of the terrain and obstacles from 1963, merged with that of the background of today. But it is not a factual representation. It may have been visually verified by a said “Kennedy assassination expert”, and on a show under the titular rubric of “solving history”, but things are not always what they seem. They precisely merged a modern background shot with the Moorman segment with the three men.
But upon proper scrutiny of this collage, one can see that some of the alleged obstacles that would have been there that day have been altered. Most blatantly the three men who stood on the steps the day Kennedy was shot have now – in the altered collage – taken a slide down Gary Mack’s Magical Staircase, into the pages of some sort of a fictitious Hollywood annual of history. Obviously this alteration was done to conceal the fact there was a true line of sight from JFK to the north storm drain. The three men on the stairs would not have been in the way of an assassin’s bullet. But with a simple altered collage and the help of Gary Mack and his magical power of dissuasion, it seems as if the trio would have blocked this shot. Although one can hardly anymore believe what is seen or said about Kennedy’s assassination on television. In other words, someone or more than one person at Unsolved History manipulated this collage and placed the three men from the Moorman photo all the way to the bottom of the Elm Street sidewalk. And somehow, they got Gary Mack from the Sixth Floor to verbally agree with this altered image and supposed reality. This tinkering with time, space, and images now allows the storm drain location to be labeled as another “outrageous theory”. Yet in the altered image, there are as many as seven steps missing to make the men appear as if they are all the way down at street level. So if anything is an outrageous theory, its this altered collage through which the producers and Gary Mack try to trick the uninitiated into thinking something is not possible. When in fact it most certainly is and most likely did happen. As we shall see, Mack had to have known the true locations of the three men. As he was at another filming location for the show where the trio was recreated in their true locations.
Because of this fakery, the lead man of the trio, Emmett Hudson is shown as being all the way down on the sidewalk. This would have made him the closest witness to the shooting. But he was not. In fact, it actually appears that the program created a new staircase. While looking at the forgery one can see the white reflection off the concrete middle beak on the staircase, just to the left of the men. This is because in order to falsely prove that the men were in the way, a separate staircase had to be created. Let us now refer to it as, Gary Mack’s Magic Staircase. So basically when the faked collage was superimposed over the nighttime background shot in 2003, the creators took the overblown cut out of Moorman, and pasted it using the three men to cover over the area of the bullet path, and used Gary Mack to say: Well see these three men would have blocked the path of such a shot. In the genuine unaltered Moorman photo, the top of the limo windshield blocks us from seeing Emmett Hudson’s feet. But in the altered version they just have him standing on the sidewalk anyway – without his feet. Another obvious point of forgery is when Mack first points to the knoll, we can see the concrete wall and the pergola. But when the collage is completed, this whole area disappears, and the grossly enlarged clip covers over the true background of the knoll. All that is intact is a small portion of the pergola not blocked by Mack’s head or covered over by the blown up segment. The concrete wall and pergola are true landmarks still standing today. So they should be visible. But because of this overblown cut-out, it causes the portion of the picket fence to approximately double in size. It then blocks out the concrete wall and much of the pergola.
Let us now take a look at another episode of this series called Unsolved History. This installment also featured the ubiquitous Gary Mack who, at the very least, should have no problem sending his son to college. This one was called “Death in Dealey Plaza” and was aired in early 2003. It includes a segment attempting a photo recreation or staging of the Moorman photo. The recreation was also done in Dealey Plaza, and there is an attempt to take a photo with the same type of camera Mary Moorman used, and from the nearly exact spot that she took her famous photo from. Since the three witnesses on the staircase were part of Moorman’s photo, stand-ins for the trio of men are placed on the staircase for the Moorman photo recreation. The men are shown in the still taken from the show, seen below, and it gives one quite a shock,. For this time they are placed in their correct locations. From the top left, we have a still from the Muchmore film, a known verified image along with the Moorman photo. On the top right is a close up of the cement staircase where it meets a walk up from the T intersection with the sidewalk. This is how the staircase was then, and is still today. So this is further visual proof that the collage shown in 2003’s “The Conspiracy Myths”, was faked. One can detect this because none of the three men could be standing on the staircase where it meets the sidewalk, because it does not even exist in physical terrain in this manner. Not then and evidently still not now. This also causes the sidewalk barrier where it turns a ninety degree angle and meets the staircase, to vanish.
In the graphic at right, the images in the bottom left and right quadrants are an intact screen grab that was a double split screen image shown in Death in Dealey Plaza. Their Moorman recreation is on the left, and on the right, the original intact Moorman photo without alterations. The reason this is so important is that Gary Mack was on hand for this. Not merely present, but by his own admission, a participant. “I was fully involved in the restaging,” he said in response to a question on a Discovery Channel viewer page. So how in the world could Gary have not known the true locations of the trio in November of 2003, when we see that yes, he already did know their accurate locations for the earlier show airing in February of 2003?
If there is no cover up going on today in the media then why were these 2003 images altered, and yet only months before the same person was admittedly so “fully involved” in the restaging, and had the three men placed in their correct locations. In other words basically in the earlier show when it was not necessary to disguise the origins of a frontal shot trajectory, the men’s positions were truthful, but when they did need to discredit a frontal shot they were not honest in their image overlay shown in the later 2003 episode. Seemingly so to deny the validity of a shot from the storm drain area, even after their laser trajectory aligned, and how strange for Gary Mack to be the one who verbally denies this possibility. Since Gary has been involved directly with the Mary Moorman photograph for decades, he had to have known the true locations of the three men, and has admitted being fully involved with the Moorman photo staging in the earlier filmed episode. How strange it is to have two separate placements that supposedly represent the three men’s locations, in a span of one year, on the same series, and Gary Mack involved with both. There must be a grand reason for this strange historical contradiction.
Let us look at another attempt at disinformation. This one is also associated with Gary Mack, and another Unsolved History production. This time Gary and the show say that no one could have fired from the storm drain because there were too many witnesses in the area and two railroad workers nearby. According to Gary, these two RR men were to have been so close, that no shot could have come from there without them hearing the shot, or the supersonic crack of the bullet. Again, Michael Yardley lines up there, this time with a rifle without a laser attached. He makes an attempt to line up a shot and fire at a stand in. But now there is shrubbery in the north storm drain area, and it blocks his view. So Yardley now moves to the front of the picket fence, standing on the grassy knoll. Everyone can see that Yardley has a clear shot at Kennedy, even though the program director has Jackie Kennedy giving her husband a bearhug – something she is not actually doing at this time. It’s apparently done to make it appear she would get hit by such a shot, and further discredit this ateempt. Still Yardley notes “There is plenty of time to track the vehicle”, and this is a potentially viable shot.
But then, old reliable Gary Mack informs us there is a “historical problem.” There were two railroad men “not ten feet from there.” A shot from a video taken from behind the presidential limousine shows these railroad men standing on the overpass bridge as the car passes underneath. Unfortunately for Gary Mack, a still photo exists of these same two men dressed in white, and still standing in basically the exact placements when the shots were fired.
One can see from this photo, and by estimating these men as being close to six feet tall, it’s quite obvious they were more like the 40-50 feet away from the storm drain., and not less than 10 feet. In a talk I had with Dave Perry, a close associate of Gary Mack, he agreed that the closest witnesses were not ten feet away, but more like 40-50 feet away. It’s interesting that even after Gary Mack dumped his bad information on Yardley, the expert sniper adds, “Nevertheless, with all that going on, I’d still take this spot into consideration, provided I could get away.” Which he could since the parking lot was adjacent to the storm drain.
I also asked Perry about the claim made by Gary Mack about the three witnesses being on the stairs and in the line of sight for an assassin from the storm drain. Perry referred to a plan of Dealey Plaza prepared by Greg Ciccone and said, “Using the Ciccone drawing, a shot from this location fired to the point of the fatal head shot would not have an effect on the three individuals standing on the steps. The bullet would pass several feet to the south of their position with Emmett Hudson being the closest to the path of the bullet. So if Mr. Mack claims the men would be in the way, that would be incorrect.” (Emphasis in original.)
Kennedy assassination researcher Dr. David Mantik also chimed in on this issue. He said that he thought the storm drain was a very good spot for an assassin. Mantik said he had been to this spot, “and I have seen how isolated one could be there…Because of the way the fence was angled at this point, it would have been difficult for anyone actually on the grassy knoll, or on the overpass, to see any activity in the storm drain.” Even though Mack has stated how a shot would surely have been noticed, even having to exaggerate the proximities of witnesses, but still Dr. Mantik and Yardley see it as a potential sniping location. In his review of the Unsolved History show, Dave Mantik said, “My own observations of the skull X- rays suggested to me a shot from about this direction.” So here a medical doctor agrees, and he is not the only one. President Kennedy’s personal physician, Dr. George Burkley, who saw his head-wound said, “It was a simple matter of a bullet right through the head”. Later when acting Presidential Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff parroted this to the press, as he said , Kennedy died of a gunshot wound to the head, and he pointed to his right temple. Strange that this is the same right head/temple location that aligned for Yardley’s laser, only to be falsely denied as possible. Did they at Unsolved History know the likeliness of this right temple shot, and how it best matches only to the North storm drain?
Later on Dr. Mantik saw the image (graphic at right, top left) of a crowd of witnesses and a police officer who first ran up the knoll to the storm drain area. On the top right is an enhanced photo taken seconds after the last shot. Circled at right in this image is a possible cloud of gunsmoke; it too appears to come from the drain area.
The images at the bottom, left and right, are from Mark Lane’s film Rush to Judgment, and it is a clear view of the north drain from behind. The red mark denotes as close as the 2 railroad men stood to the drain and clearly one can see how far away these two RR men were from a potential shooter at the fence at the drain. They are not the 10 feet away Gary said, but more like the 40-50 feet away as Perry admitted they were.
According to Unsolved History, they were shedding light on the assassination, and seemingly solving history. Well, with an unbiased viewpoint, let us shed some light on true known images, and also see how they accomplished their forged images and trickery. By literally illuminating some images from the episode, we will enhance contrast and see how it was actually done.
The narrator back in 2003 told us that lasers did find a possible trajectory from the north storm drain, but that “witnesses and obstacles in the way conclusively eliminate these storm drain theories.” Yet, from the images here, we see that there are no obstacles nor were there any witnesses that day that would have prevented such a shot trajectory. We can see that the actual photos show the three men at the staircase break, well above the sidewalk. (SEE IMAGES BELOW)
The image seen at top left is the grassy knoll seen from the south side of Elm Street. Notice the white cement retaining wall sticking out above the bushes, and the full, intact staircase on the grassy slope, with its reflection off the middle break in the steps. There, just below the middle break is where the trio stood, and this image helps us see the men’s positions in relation to the road. Clearly as Dave Perry also noted, we all can see the shot would have gone below the men. That must have been the reason that they created the faked collage, seen at bottom right. In the same image atop left, also note the white cement cage structure just to the right of the staircase, known as the pergola. Part of this structure seems to magically vanish when the cutout of the three men is inserted. Also we can see in the altered collage that the fence grows nearly to the height of the pergola, which becomes quite ridiculous when comparing the fence’s height difference to that of the pergolas, seen in the images at top. Next is Mary Moorman’s photo taken at just about the impact moment of the head shot, and it clearly shows the three men standing just below the middle break on the staircase. Below are two screen captures from “The Conspiracy Myths”. At bottom left is Gary Mack, pointing to where he claims these three men stood. But he falsely portrays them at the sidewalk base, seen in the picture on the bottom right. Just look at the two photos on the right, top and bottom, and see how the three men have been moved. They clearly have been swept down in the form of half of an X, riding down on Gary’s magical staircase, only to become the physical vanguards of denial for a frontal shot.
Now go back to the bottom left, and we can see the top of the white cement retaining wall, and we can just see the upper edge about the bush line. Look right above the top of Gary’s pointing finger and we see the wall; which is visible in all the photos except the bottom right. So we see that this section in missing in the right bottom image, #4. It is missing because the collaged section containing the three men has been overblown to falsely portray the men in the line of fire; whereby it causes the cutout section containing the fence to be grossly enlarged. But without a contrast change, the deception is hard to pick up. Surely, the producers at Unsolved History knew the dark backgrounds during the night filming eased their deceptions. By simply performing a contrast enhancement, we all can see how easily the forgery was created.
It would seem from this that the show’s producers and Mr. Mack are not working from empirical evidence in their deductions. They had an agenda. Their agenda was to make the audience believe that there was no frontal shot. If the reader recalls, Mr. Mack did the same thing for Discovery Channel’s Inside the Target Car, even altering the position of Jackie Kennedy’s stand in inside the limousine. Mack tried to say that a shot from a much more oblique angle up the picket fence would not work. Now we have shown that it appears he tried a similar ploy, except with the shot further down, near the end of the fence. Except that this is just as fatuous as his former pretext. Can we trust these were just errors? Even if they are now done at least twice to the same effect? Someone should pose that question to Mr. Mack.
Or perhaps the Oswald family, Marina and her daughters should investigate filing a lawsuit for fraud.
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The Pigs Grunt
“What do you expect from a pig but a grunt?”
– Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison, JFK
In early February 1967, Warren Commission critic Ray Marcus received a letter from Robert Richter of CBS News. The news organization was thinking of producing a new program on the Warren Report, Richter said, and was contacting some of its critics. One of them, Vincent Salandria, had given Richter a copy of The Bastard Bullet and described some of Marcus’s other work. Perhaps Marcus would be willing to give CBS a hand.
Marcus wrote back on February 14: “I shall be happy to assist as best I can.” He described his Zapruder film analysis and his conclusions on the assassination shot sequence, and some of his photographic work, including the #5 man detail of the Moorman photograph, which he believed revealed a gunman on the grassy knoll.
A few months later Marcus nearly changed his mind. He was in Boston attending to some business interests when he happened to see an article in The Boston Herald-Traveler by the paper’s television editor, Eleanor Roberts. The article’s first sentence told most of the story. “A most unusual television experiment is taking place at CBS News—the preparation of a documentary on another look at the Warren Commission Report—which may never be telecast.” Unless CBS could develop new information that weakened the arguments of the Commission’s critics, Roberts wrote, the project might be shelved.
Immediately, Marcus telephoned Roberts. She would not tell him the source of her story, but did say it was a CBS executive who had been a reliable contact in the past.
A few weeks later Marcus heard again from Bob Richter. The CBS program was in development and he wanted to discuss Marcus’s work with him. But Marcus said no, he had changed his mind; he had seen the Roberts article, and it was plain that CBS was not approaching the subject impartially.
But Richter had a good comeback. “Some of us here are trying to do an honest job,” he said, “and if those of you who have important information don’t cooperate with us, you’re just guaranteeing that the other side wins.” Richter seemed sincere and his reasoning sound. Marcus agreed to meet with him.
The two men met several times and Marcus outlined the work that he had done. Richter was impressed with the Moorman #5 man detail (below right), discovered by David Lifton in 1965, which Marcus and Lifton both believed revealed a Dealey Plaza gunman. Richter agreed that the murky image was almost certainly a man. He saw a series of ever-larger blow-ups of the picture, which Marcus had placed in a special portfolio. Richter arranged to have duplicates made of the entire set, and said he would show them to his superior at CBS, Leslie Midgley, the producer of the program.
Midgley, it turned out, said he could not see anything resembling a man in any of the pictures when Richter showed them to him. But he agreed to meet with Marcus to go over the portfolio one more time. They met, along with Richter, in Midgley’s office. Included in the portfolio was a detail from a photograph of civil rights activist James Meredith moments after he was shot—a photo which revealed, unambiguously, his assailant in the shrubbery along the side of the road. Marcus had included an enlargement of the gunman for purposes of comparison to the #5 man detail, since the lighting and the figure obscured among leaves—this one known to be a man—were similar in appearance. Flipping through the series of #5 man enlargements, Midgley kept repeating that he couldn’t see anything that looked human. Then he came to an especially clear photo, and he said, “Yes, that’s the man who shot Meredith.”
Marcus and Richter immediately glanced at one another, in what Marcus took to be obvious and mutual understanding of what had just happened. Midgley was looking not at the photo of the Meredith gunman, but of the clearest enlargement of the Moorman #5 man detail, which he had previously looked at but dismissed.
Midgley understood what happened, too. He visibly reddened but did not acknowledge the error. Marcus must have felt completely vindicated, for this was an absolute, if tacit, admission: in order for Midgley to wrongly identify the #5 man detail as “the man who shot Meredith,” he first had to be able to see #5 man in the picture.
Marcus politely reminded Midgley he was looking at #5 man. The meeting ended shortly after this, without further discussion of what had just happened.
After the incident in Les Midgley’s office, Marcus had met again with Richter and stayed in touch with him by telephone. By June, the broadcast date was drawing near, and the CBS project had developed into a four-part special. On June 19 Marcus wrote Midgley an eleven page letter describing, in great detail, the incident in Midgley’s office, and calling the mis-identification “a very understandable error. But one which would have been impossible for you to make had you not promptly recognized the #5 image as a human figure, despite your earlier denials that you saw anything in the pictures that looked like a man.” With its vast resources, both technical and financial, CBS was obviously capable of presenting the #5 man image clearly and objectively. “Need it be stated,” Marcus told Midgley, “that if CBS fails to do so—especially considering your positive reaction to #5 man—that fact in and of itself will constitute powerful evidence that the entire CBS effort was designed to be what I fear it to be: a high-level whitewash of the Warren Commission findings?”
The next morning Marcus mailed the letter to Midgley and enclosed additional copies of #2 and #5 man and other photographs. That same day he telephoned Bob Richter in New York. He wanted Richter to confirm, in writing, the mis-identification of the #5 image that had taken place in Midgley’s office, which Richter agreed to do. Then Richter, while cautioning that Marcus would probably be unhappy with the overall content of the four programs, added that some of the Moorman details might make it into the final edit of the show. Richter described one of images but Marcus said it wasn’t the best one to use. Which one was? Richter asked. The most advantageous one to show, Marcus replied, would be the clearest one of the bunch—the one Richter’s boss, Les Midgley, had mistaken for the man who shot Meredith.
That same evening, the CBS television network broadcast the first of its four-part CBS News Inquiry: The Warren Report. CBS was touting the documentary as “the most valuable four hours” its viewers might ever spend in front of their TV sets. It was anchored by Walter Cronkite, a broadcasting legend already considered the Dean of American television newsmen. Cronkite said later it would have been “the crowning moment of an entire career—of an entire lifetime—to find that Oswald had not acted alone, to uncover a conspiracy that took the life of John F. Kennedy.” But, he continued, “We could not.”
Each segment of the CBS News Inquiry posed a series of questions and answered them with an unbiased evaluation of the evidence. That, at any rate, was the appearance. The actual content of the four programs left many wondering whether CBS had really taken a disinterested approach to the subject. The Boston Herald Traveler article Ray Marcus had seen, stating that the CBS documentary might really be aimed at “weakening the arguments of those who criticize” the Warren Report, may have been accurate, after all.
Mark Lane also had a stake in the program. “I decided to watch the CBS effort very closely,” he said later. Like Ray Marcus, Lane had met with Bob Richter in the months preceding the broadcast, and had also been interviewed for the documentary. After watching the series he concluded that the programs were highly deceptive. “What had evidently been the original approach—to present the evidence and permit the viewer to draw his own conclusions—bore no resemblance to the final concept.”
In 1964, Thomas G. Buchanan observed that the facts of the assassination as they were initially reported in the media changed several times, but the conclusion of Oswald’s lone guilt never did. “If, as a statistician, I were solving problems with the aid of a machine and I discovered that, however the components of my problem were altered, the machine would always give me the same answer, I should be inclined to think that the machine was broken.”
CBS was such a machine. It altered its components with firearms and ballistics tests that improved on the original FBI tests; with new analyses of the Zapruder film; and with new interviews with witnesses to the events of November 1963. But its answer was the same one it had always reported, the same one delivered by the Warren Commission: Lee Oswald, for reasons not entirely fathomable, had murdered President Kennedy without direction or help from anyone.
To answer the questions it posed, CBS used a number of experts. One of them was Lawrence Schiller. Schiller was the photographer and journalist who had once acted as Jack Ruby’s business agent, and had played a role in developing research that became an anti-critic triple threat: an article in a World Tribune Journal supplemental magazine, a record album called The Controversy, and a book called The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report. CBS used Schiller to refute allegations that a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald brandishing the alleged assassination rifle was a forgery.
Schiller, Walter Cronkite said, had studied both the original photograph and its negative. Appearing on-camera, Schiller said that the critics “say that the disparity of shadows, a straight nose shadow from the nose, and an angle body shadow proves without a doubt that [Oswald’s] head was superimposed on this body.” But Schiller said he had gone to the precise location in Dallas where the original was taken, and on the same date, at the same hour, had taken a photograph of his own. This picture, he said, perfectly reproduced the controversial shadows, indicating the Oswald picture was genuine.
Mark Lane was not able to respond to Lawrence Schiller on the CBS program. But he later said that the negative for the photograph was never recovered by the authorities, suggesting the photograph was not genuine. Lane wrote: “It is interesting to fathom the CBS concept of the life of the average American if it imagined that watching Jack Ruby’s business agent after he studied a nonexistent negative might constitute ‘the most valuable’ time spent watching television.”
On the second installment of the CBS documentary, Dr. James J. Humes, the Navy doctor who had been in charge of the President’s autopsy and had burned his autopsy notes, was interviewed. Asked about the discrepancy between the schematic drawings that placed an entry wound at the base of the neck, and the autopsy “face sheet” that indicated this wound was really lower down on the back, Humes said that the face sheet was “never meant to be accurate or precisely to scale.” The exact measurements were in fact written in the face sheet margins, and conformed to the schematic drawings.
Sylvia Meagher was so incensed by this that she wrote to CBS News President Richard Salant. The CBS documentary was “marred by serious error and fallacious reasoning which inevitably will have misled and confused a general audience.” In the case of Dr. Humes, while he insisted the measurements written in the face sheet margin were correct, “CBS failed to pursue or challenge this explanation, as in conscience it should have done, by pointing out no marginal notations giving precise measurements for any other wound, cut-down, or physical characteristic appear on the diagram; that every other entry in the diagram appears to be accurate, as opposed to the crucial bullet wound in the back; that the clothing bullet holes match the diagram, not the schematic drawings; that a Secret Service agent saw a bullet hit the President four inches below the neck; and that another Secret Service agent, summoned to the autopsy chamber expressly to witness the wound, testified that this wound was six inches below the neck.”
The third part of the CBS special proved to be especially newsworthy. A portion of this segment was devoted to the JIm Garrison investigation in New Orleans, although for much of it Garrison was put on the defensive. CBS included a sound bite with Clay Shaw, who said: “I am completely innocent … I have not conspired with anyone, at any time, or any place, to murder our late and esteemed President John F. Kennedy, or any other individual … the charges filed against me have no foundation in fact or in law.”
Most damaging to Garrison was the appearance of William Gurvich, a former Garrison investigator introduced as his “chief aide” who, Cronkite told his viewers, had just resigned from the DA’s staff. Asked why he quit, Gurvich said that he was dissatisfied with the way the investigation was being conducted. “The truth, as I see it, is that Mr. Shaw should never have been arrested.” Gurvich said he had met with Senator Robert F. Kennedy “to tell him we could shed no light on the death of his brother, and not to be hoping for such. After I told him that, he appeared to be rather disgusted to think that someone was exploiting his brother’s death.” The allegations of bribery by Garrison investigators, Gurvich said, were true. Asked whether Garrison had knowledge of it, Gurvich answered: “Of course he did. He ordered it.”
Garrison himself was interviewed by Mike Wallace. Reflecting on all the bad publicity he was getting, which included allegations of witness intimidation and bribery, the DA said, “This attitude of skepticism on the part of the press is an astonishing thing to me, and a new thing to me. They have a problem with my office. And one of the problems is that we have no political appointments. Most of our men are selected by recommendations of deans of law schools. They work nine to five, and we have a highly professional office—I think one of the best in the country. So they’re reduced to making up these fictions. We have not intimidated a witness since the day I came in office.”
Not missing a beat, Wallace pressed on: “One question is asked again and again. Why doesn’t Jim Garrison give his information, if it is valid information, why doesn’t he give it to the federal government? Now that everything is out in the open, the CIA could hardly stand in your way again, could they? Why don’t you take this information that you have and cooperate with the federal government?”
“Well, that would be one approach, Mike,” Garrison countered. “Or I could take my files and take them up on the Mississippi River Bridge and throw them in the river. It’d be about the same result.”
“You mean, they just don’t want any other solution from that in the Warren Report?”
“Well,” the DA replied, “isn’t that kind of obvious?”
Garrison told Wallace there was a photograph in which assassins on the grassy knoll were visible. He was referring, of course, to the #5 man detail of the Moorman photograph. As he had for CBS, Ray Marcus had supplied Garrison with a portfolio of images from the picture, including the clearest copies of the #5 man enlargement.
“This is one of the photographs Garrison is talking about,” Wallace told his viewers, holding up one of the Moorman pictures Marcus had given to Bob Richter. It was not the one that Marcus had recommended to Richter. Instead Wallace held up a smaller version—the smallest one, Marcus recalled, that he had given CBS. “If there are men up there behind the wall,” Wallace said, “they definitely cannot be seen with the naked eye.”
Marcus had urged Bob Richter to use the enlargement that the producer of the CBS New Inquiry, Les Midgley, had mis-identified as “the man who shot Meredith.” Some months after the airing of the CBS documentary, Midgley was asked to reflect on the broadcasts. Echoing Walter Cronkite, Midgley said, “Nothing would have pleased me more than to have found a second assassin. We looked for one and it isn’t our fault that we didn’t find one. But the evidence just isn’t there.”
The final segment of the CBS Inquiry on the Warren Report was broadcast on the evening of June 28. It posed viewers with the question, Why doesn’t America believe the Warren Report?
“As we take up whether or not America should believe the Warren Report,” said correspondent Dan Rather, “we’ll hear first from the man who perhaps more than any other is responsible for the question being asked.” That man was Mark Lane.
Lane said that the only Warren Commission conclusion that was beyond dispute was that Jack Ruby had killed Lee Harvey Oswald. “But, of course, that took place on television,” Lane said. “It would have been very difficult to deny that.” Beyond that, Lane continued, there was not a single important conclusion that was supported by the facts. The problem was compounded by so much of the Commission’s evidence being locked up in the National Archives where no one was allowed to see it.
The photographs and X-rays of the President’s body, which represented some of the most important evidence in the entire case, were not seen by any of the Commission members, Lane said. This was a very serious shortcoming, since these films could show decisively how many wounds the President had suffered and precisely where they were located.
Rather than immediately address this, however, CBS chose to question Lane’s credibility, presenting a Dealey Plaza eyewitness named Charles Brehm, who accused Lane of misrepresenting his statements in his book Rush to Judgment.
But the most notable feature in the final installment of the CBS documentary was the appearance of former Warren Commission member John McCloy. Aside from his comments to the Associated Press the previous February when the Garrison case first broke, these were his first public statements about the Warren Commission investigation. “I had some question as to the propriety of my appearing here as a former member of the Commission, to comment on the evidence of the Commission,” McCloy told Walter Cronkite as their in-studio interview began. “I think there is some question about the advisability of doing that. But I’m quite prepared to talk about the procedures and the attitudes of the Commission.”
The Warren Commission, McCloy said, was not beholden to any administration. And each Commission member had his integrity on the line. “And you know that seven men aren’t going to get together, of that character, and concoct a conspiracy, with all of the members of the staff we had, with all of the investigation agencies. It would have been a conspiracy of a character so mammoth and so vast that it transcends any—even some of the distorted charges of conspiracy on the part of Oswald.”
McCloy insisted that the Warren Commission had done an honest job. Its Report may have been rushed into print a little too soon, he said, but the conclusions in it were not rushed. McCloy did, however, indulge in a little second-guessing. “I think that if there’s one thing I would do over again, I would insist on those photographs and the X-rays having been produced before us. In the one respect, and only one respect there, I think we were perhaps a little oversensitive to what we understood was the sensitivities of the Kennedy family against the production of colored photographs of the body, and so forth. But … we had the best evidence in regard to that—the pathology in respect to the President’s wounds.”
At the outset of this last installment of the CBS News Inquiry, Walter Cronkite had informed his audience: “The questions we will ask tonight we can only ask. Tonight’s answers will be not ours, but yours.” In wondering why America didn’t believe the Warren Report, CBS asked two underlying questions: Could and should America believe the Warren Report? “We have found,” Cronkite said at the program’s conclusion, “that wherever you look at the Report closely and without preconceptions, you come away convinced that the story it tells is the best account we are ever likely to have of what happened that day in Dallas.” He criticized the Commission for accepting, without scrutiny, the FBI and CIA denials that there was any link between Lee Oswald and their respective agencies. And he criticized Life magazine for its suppression of the Zapruder film, and called on Time-Life to make the film public. Nevertheless, Cronkite said that most objections to the Warren Report vanished when exposed to the light of honest inquiry. Compared to the alternatives, the Warren Report was the easiest explanation to believe.
“The damage that Lee Harvey Oswald did the United States of America, the country he first denounced and then appeared to re-embrace, did not end when the shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository. The most grevious wounds persist, and there is little reason to believe that they will soon be healed.”
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The State of the JFK case: 50 Years Out
What occurred at the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder was one of the most bizarre outbursts of controlled hysteria that the MSM has put on in years. Perhaps since its mad rush to protect the exposure of George W. Bush’s transparently phony excuses for invading Iraq. In fact, the basic underlying tension was evident everywhere. The most blatant example was the cordoning off of Dealey Plaza with 200 police officers. The public, and most of the media, both knew that what was being broadcast was false. But in order to fulfill their function as tribunes for the Establishment, the media was going to put their heads in the sand again.
Another good example would be the Tom Brokaw/Gus Russo NBC special, Where Were You? This show interviewed several famous people about their initial reaction to the news President Kennedy was dead e.g. Jane Fonda, Steven Spielberg. But alas, if that is all the show had been about, Brokaw would not have needed Gus Russo. The big-name celebrities were there to pull in the ratings. The show made no bones about wanting to 1.) Reinforce the Warren Commission verdict that Oswald was the lone assassin, and 2.) insinuate fairly openly that all this residual affection the public has for Kennedy is misplaced. He really was not that good of a president. The ultimate proof of this was the interview done with film director Oliver Stone, the man who made JFK. His spot on the two-hour show ran about 15 seconds. Yet, when I talked to Stone about this program, he told me he was actually interviewed for about an hour. (Author interview with Stone, 12/20/2013.) The fact that almost all of this was cut shows that Brokaw and Russo had no intention of letting the other side have anything like equal time at this important point in the JFK assassination saga.
What makes that undeniable element of MSM control so unbelievably bizarre today is this: There had been no change in the media’s attitude in this regard since 1964! To those old enough to recall, almost immediately after the Warren Report was issued, CBS News put together an evening special hosted by Walter Cronkite. Now, this program was broadcast within hours of the report being issued to President Johnson. In other words, neither Cronkite nor anyone else on his production staff had read the 26 volumes of supporting evidence, which would not be published until the next month.
In 1967, due to the investigation by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, the CBS network launched another special program on the JFK case. This ended up being a four night special. It again ended up siding with the Warren Commission in every significant aspect. There was a story behind this that CBS did not want anyone to know about. After a similar 1975 special, CBS employee Roger Feinman began writing letters to the network’s Standards and Practices department about how Cronkite and Dan Rather had violated the company’s code of ethics in both the ’75 and 1967 programs. Executives at the company moved to terminate him, but Roger did not go quietly. In subsequent hearings he asked for certain documents that he knew existed since he heard of them through other employees.
Those documents showed that producer Les Midgley had originally planned for a real and open debate between the Commission counsel and some of the more prominent critics of the report. [Some of this is described in a 2009 CTKA article – Ed.] He even wanted to spend one night interviewing witnesses the Commission had ignored. Then a panel of law school deans would decide the case. But as this proposal was passed up the corporate ladder to executives like CBS President Frank Stanton and News Chief Dick Salant, this idea became diluted. When the executives passed the proposal on to two northern California attorneys, Bayles Manning of Stanford, and corporate lawyer Edwin Huddleson, both of them cited the “political implications” and “the national interest” in shooting it down. Manning suggested that CBS ignore the critics, or even convene a panel to criticize their books. When Midgley persisted in critiquing the Commission, Salant did something behind his back. He showed his memo to former Commissioner John McCloy. McCloy now fired back a broadside at Midgley’s proposal. This was the beginning of Midgley becoming emasculated on the issue, and McCloy becoming an uncredited consultant on the program. Something CBS would keep secret. In fact, during Feinman’s dismissal proceeding, both McCloy and Stanton would deny this secret relationship.
But some say, that was then. This is now. Surely with all the information that has surfaced in the intervening decades, the media would now grant the critics equal time. As Pat Speer showed in his valuable blog, “The Onslaught,” such was not the case. (Click here for that report) Not by a longshot. What is most disturbing today is that even alternative media, like PBS, now joined in the mass denial exercise. Online journalists who had a reputation for being mavericks, like Fred Kaplan also turned tail.
What makes this all even more puzzling is the results of polls on the issue by first class professional Peter Hart. Done for the University of Virginia Center for Politics, the work of Hart essentially shows that, after decades of being pounded on this issue by both the MSM and the Establishment, the public still does not buy the official story. Either about the assassination, or about President Kennedy. A full 75% responded that they do not accept the Warren Commission verdict that Oswald acted alone. (Larry Sabato, The Kennedy Half Century, p. 416) That figure is stunning. Because since the last major poll by ABC in 2003, it has remained unchanged. Even though every aspect of the national media, has been unrelenting in their attempt to make the public believe the whole Commission propaganda tale about Oswald as the lone assassin. It hasn’t taken. But further, and perhaps even more stunning, Kennedy is, far and away, the most admired of the last nine presidents. (ibid, p. 406) Perhaps the most stunning number of all was this one: 91% said that Kennedy’s assassination altered the United States a “great deal.” The general reaction described by Hart was that a “deep depression set in across the country, and the optimism that had mainly prevailed since the end of World War II seemed to evaporate.” (ibid, p. 416) The respondents’ reactions when discussing President Kennedy were “eye-popping” to political scientist Sabato. Kennedy was perceived as “the polar opposite of the very unhappy views they have of the country today. Whereas contemporary America is polarized and divided, Kennedy represents unity and common purpose … as well as a sense of hope, possibility and optimism.” (ibid, p. 417) Brokaw and Russo tried to attack this image also in their tawdry special.
So the question arises: Why is the country schizoid on this issue? Why does the Establishment and the MSM continue to hold these views of the Kennedy case, which the public simply does not believe, and have not since about 1966? What makes this even more puzzling now is the fact that the state of the evidence today is much more powerful with respect to the fact of conspiracy than it was back then in the sixties with Jim Garrison.
II
Due to the work of the Assassination Records Review Board, the database about the John F. Kennedy murder was greatly expanded. If one is talking only about sheer volume of paper, the document page count was doubled. But if one is talking about the actual knowledge base, the increase was much exponentially larger. Because as many people felt, what the government was hiding was of paramount importance. But secondly, the many authors who used these documents incorporated them with previous knowledge to create large advancements in the case. Some would call these quantum leaps.
For instance, the ARRB finally declassified the HSCA’s Mexico City Report, commonly called the Lopez Report. Despite what Vincent Bugliosi has written, this legendary document has lived up to its reputation. The sheer quantity of information in the 400-page report was staggering. No one ever got inside a CIA operation – in this case the surveillance of the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City – the way that authors Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway did. But besides the sensational disclosures in that report, at Cyril Wecht’s recent Passing the Torch conference, we learned that the HSCA had prepared three indictments over their inquiry into Mexico City. There were two separate perjury charges for David Phillips, and one for Anne Goodpasture. One would have thought that this would have merited some kind of attention by the media during their three-week extravaganza over the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death. In their attempt to reassert the Warren Commission, it was bypassed. Even though, the credibility of Phillips and Goodpasture are of the utmost importance to the Warren Commission’s story about Oswald in Mexico. For as Phillips himself later admitted, there is no evidence that Oswald ever visited the Soviet Embassy there. (Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, p. 82)
In fact, today, one can question each aspect of the original report assembled by the Warren Commission of Oswald’s supposed purpose and itinerary in Mexico City. To the point that one can argue whether or not Oswald was there at all. And if that is the case to any degree – even if Oswald was only impersonated at the two compounds – then it is highly unlikely that there could be any benign explanation for such a deception. Which is why Phillips and Goodpasture risked going to jail. Mexico City looms more importantly today than it ever did. (Read the summary of these discoveries.)
The attempt to kill Kennedy in Chicago in early November was also ignored during the three-week exercise in denial. This is incredible. Because before the publication of Abraham Bolden’s The Echo from Dealey Plaza, and Jim Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable, almost no one had done any real work on this very crucial topic. But thanks to the work of the ARRB and Douglass, Edwin Black’s exceptional 1976 report about Chicago was finally recovered and placed online. As Douglass pointed out, it is very hard to exaggerate the importance of both Black’s work, and the outline of the conspiracy in Chicago. Why? Because its outline unmistakably resembles the successful plot in Dallas. So much so that it is very hard to believe it could be a coincidence. If it is not, then it appears that the same forces that failed to kill Kennedy in Chicago, succeeded three weeks later. With a similar plan. Why would the MSM ignore such an important discovery dealing with the methodology of the crime?
In another aspect, what we know about Oswald today, and his associations with the CIA and FBI, completely vitiates the paradigm the Warren Commission tried to sell to the public about him. Its quite clear now, as John Newman and Jefferson Morley have pointed out, that both intelligence agencies had much more information about Oswald than they ever admitted to in public. In fact, this began as soon as Oswald defected to Russia in 1959. At that time both the FBI and CIA began to keep files on Oswald. According to John Newman’s updated edition of his milestone book, Oswald and the CIA, counter-intelligence chief James Angleton was the man at the Agency who had access to all of the Oswald files. (Newman, p. 636) The fact that the CIA had so much paper on Oswald is something that the Agency had tried to conceal for three decades. One of these documents is quite tantalizing. Before Oswald returned from the USSR, the chief of the Soviet Russia division wrote, “It was partly out of the curiosity to learn if Oswald’s wife would actually accompany him to our country, partly out of interest in Oswald’s own experiences in the USSR, that we showed operational intelligence interest in the Harvey (Oswald) story.” (Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 150)
Newman did much to rebuild this file on Oswald in his book and show what it revealed about who knew what about Oswald at both the FBI and CIA prior to the assassination. Along the way he revealed that the CIA and FBI had continually misrepresented what they knew about the man. This rebuilt file trail – which the Warren Report did not even approximate – raises the most compelling questions about Oswald, especially in conjunction with what happened in Mexico City. The surviving counsels of the Warren Commission have repeatedly said they saw these files. They most recently reiterated this antique plaint to Philip Shenon for his apologia, A Cruel and Shocking Act. Yet, none of those survivors, e.g. Howard Willens or David Slawson, has ever explained why they never noted the significance of this trail in the Warren Report. For example, why did the CIA not open a 201 file on Oswald until over a year after he defected? Why did it take over a month for the CIA to file its acknowledgement of Oswald’s defection? And then, when it did, why did it go to the wrong place at the Agency? (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pgs. 143-44)
Today, the portrait we have of Oswald as an undercover intelligence agent is substantively more well-defined than when Philip Melanson published his important book on Oswald, Spy Saga, in 1990. This career began in the Marines with Oswald’s language training as part of the CIA’s fake defector program. (ibid, p. 139) To the KGB it was fairly obvious what he was up to in Russia. Therefore they shipped him out of Moscow and put up a security net around him in Minsk. (ibid, pgs. 145-46) After his return from Russia, he was working in New Orleans, out of Guy Banister’s office, as part of the Agency/Bureau attempt to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. That effort was being run on the Agency’s side by David Phillips and James McCord. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 155) Again, its truly remarkable that except for Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary Killing Oswald, there was no serious attempt to deliver to the public any of this new information we have about the alleged assassin of President Kennedy during the 50th anniversary. ()
The ARRB conducted a rather lengthy inquiry into the medical evidence in the JFK case. Today, this is one of the most controversial areas of evidence in the case. The official story, as first assembled by the Warren Commission, is today riddled with so many holes it simply cannot be taken seriously. That spurious tale was assembled mainly by Commission counsel Arlen Specter, with help from chief pathologist James Humes. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 119) It is clear from Shenon’s disgraceful book that he had help on it from the deceased Specter, and also Specter’s former co-author and collaborator, Charles Robbins. One of the worst parts of Shenon’s travesty is his failure to confront the problems with the autopsy in the Kennedy case. This surely must be the only autopsy in which the official story had the victim hit by two bullets – but yet neither of those two bullet tracks was dissected! And Specter never explained why this was not done in the Warren Report.
Further, the Warren Report never explains the crucial difference between the witness reports about the hole in the back of Kennedy’s head and the failure of the autopsy photos to reveal this fact. Through the work of the ARRB we now know that the House Select Committee lied about this by saying this hole was not seen at Bethesda Medical Center, when in fact it was seen. The problem was, apparently no one took a photo depicting this wound. Probably because it would clearly suggest an exit wound. Which would mean Kennedy was hit from the front.
Then there is the problem with Kennedy’s brain, perhaps the most important exhibit in the medical side of the case. Why was the brain not weighed the night of the autopsy? Why are there no photos of the brain sections in order to trace directionality? Why is there no written description of the sectioning process? Why did photographer John Stringer deny he took the official photos of this exhibit? And finally, if so many witnesses saw a brain with so much matter missing and damaged, why do the photos and Ida Dox drawing of the brain show pretty much an intact brain? (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 136-41) This problem is so inherent in the case that “Oswald did it” writers – like Shenon and Larry Sabato – talk about a severely damaged brain, without understanding that these statements vitiate the official story they are upholding. Again, the reader should ask himself, was any of this absolutely crucial evidence discussed during the anniversary extravaganza?
Finally, as far as forensics goes, there are the questions surrounding the weapon and the ammunition. For many, many years the upholders of the official Commission mythology e.g. Tom Brokaw, would always maintain, that well, the rifle in evidence is the one that Lee Harvey Oswald ordered. Due to work by the late Ray Gallagher, and John Armstrong, this aspect of the case is also rendered dubious. In two respects. First, there are simply too many irregularities in the evidence trail of this rifle transaction – both in the mailing in of the money order, and in the sending and picking up of the rifle. Secondly, the rifle in evidence today is not the rifle the Commission says Oswald ordered. The Commission says Oswald ordered a 36-inch Mannlicher-Carcano carbine. The weapon in evidence is a 40.2 inch short rifle. The HSCA discovered that Klein’s Sporting Goods placed scopes on the carbine. But not the short rifle. Yet the rifle in evidence has a scope. Not only did the Warren Commission not answer this question. They never even outlined any of these problems. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 56-63)
Then there is the shell evidence found at the alleged “sniper’s nest” on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. We now know that the photos found in the Commission volumes depicting these shells scattered in a haphazard way were staged. Police photographer Tom Alyea was the first civilian witness on the sixth floor. He states for the record that when he first arrived on the scene, the shells were spaced within the distance of a hand towel. They were then picked up and dropped by wither Captain Will Fritz or police photographer R. L. Studebaker. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 70) Which suggests that the police understood that for forensic photographic purposes the initial arrangement was not credible. It was too indicative of the shells being planted.
What makes the shell evidence even worse is the condition of CE 543. This was the infamous dented shell. This exhibit cannot be explained away, and for multiple reasons. Unlike the other shells, it had markings on it indicating it had been loaded and extracted from a weapon three times before. The other shells did not have these markings on them. (ibid, p. 69) Further, of all the markings on this shell, only one links it to the rifle in evidence. And that mark comes from the magazine follower, which marks only the last shell in the clip. Yet, this was not the last shell since the clip contained a live round. This suggests that this shell had been previously fired from the rifle, it was recovered and then deposited on the sixth floor. (ibid)
To further that thesis, as Josiah Thompson, the late Howard Donahue and British researcher Chris Mills have all shown, the dent on CE 543 could not have been made during normal usage. That is, from either falling to the floor or from ejection. Mills has demonstrated that this dent could have only originated during dry loading, that is with only the shell in the breech. (ibid) Finally in this regard, and also exculpatory of Oswald, there was never any evidence entered into the record that Oswald purchased any of the ammunition that was used in the assassination. The evidence trail the FBI did produce indicated he had not. (ibid)
Finally, as we all know today, the evidence which the HSCA used as the “lynchpin” in its case against Oswald has now been thoroughly discredited. That would be the Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis, sometimes called Neutron Activation Analysis for bullet lead traces. That FBI procedure always had questions surrounding it. In fact, the first time it had been used was in the JFK case. Today, after the painstaking reviews by two professional teams of metallurgists and statisticians, it has been so vitiated that the FBI will never use it again in court. (ibid, pgs. 72-73) Unfortunately, that verdict came a bit late for Oswald.
When approaching CE 399 today, the so-called Magic Bullet, one wonders how Warren Commission defenders can keep a straight face discussing it. All the desperate schemes used in the past decade on cable TV shows with their preposterous computer simulations and numerous trajectories all avoid the main point. And it is the similar problem that we have with CE 543. Today, the adduced evidence trail indicates that CE 399 was never fired in Dealey Plaza. The work of people like Gary Aguilar and Josiah Thompson, John Hunt, and Robert Harris, clearly indicates that CE 399 is, and always was, a plant.
To quickly sum up this work, Aguilar and Thompson discovered that the FBI likely lied about showing CE 399 to the witnesses at Parkland Hospital, O. P. Wright and Darrell Tomlinson. Because the agent who was supposed to have done so, Bardwell Odum, said he never did. (ibid, p. 66) Secondly, Hunt discovered that the FBI lied again about this exhibit. The Bureau said that agent Elmer Lee Todd placed his initials on it. It turned out that Hunt discovered at the National Archives that Todd’s initials are not on it. (ibid, pgs. 224-26) But beyond that, Hunt also found out that, although the FBI was not in receipt of the magic bullet from the Secret Service until 8:45 on the evening of the assassination, the FBI lab had already checked in the “stretcher bullet” at 7: 30. Which indicates that either there were too many bullets and one was deep-sixed, or that someone later substituted the present CE 399 for another bullet. If the latter, that would jibe with Wright’s statement to Thompson in 1966 that the bullet in evidence today is not the bullet he gave to the Secret Service. Finally, Robert Harris has noted with quite compelling evidence, from witnesses like Henry Wade, that a separate bullet fell out of Governor John Connally’s body and was picked up by a nurse.. The FBI then covered this up, realizing it would create problems since this bullet was supposed to have been found on an empty stretcher. (ibid, p. 67)
As noted above, all this new evidence strongly indicates that there never was any Magic Bullet trajectory through Connally and Kennedy. Just as there never was any miraculous minimal loss of mass from the bullet. For the simple reason that bullet was never fired in Dealey Plaza. In fact, all this so-called “hard evidence” is clearly so suspect today that it does not deserve to be seriously considered. Because in a real court of law, with adequate defense counsels employed, it would all be skewered and roasted like hot dogs on a griddle. And without this evidence, where is the case against Oswald?
III
The above is the actual state of the evidence today in the JFK case. There is such a split between the above and what was broadcast and printed for the 50th anniversary that it seems that America is divided up into two countries: a reality based one and a mythological one. The MSM is clearly in the latter. But a veteran newsman like Tom Brokaw is smart enough to employ people like Gus Russo to help him navigate through the ponderous and complex evidence trail. They know people like Russo will keep them from stumbling, however accidentally, onto the truth. After all, that is what Gus Russo gets paid to do these days.
And this, as well as the above, shows a rather disturbing conclusion about the Kennedy case. Which is that even today, fifty years after the fact, there has never been a real investigation done of it by either the federal government of any MSM outlet. Today we know that the Warren Commission was a haphazard body at best. Most of the staff quit before the investigation was completed. Howard Willens then hired assistants that were barely out of law school, with no experience in criminal cases, to finish writing the document.
But even before that, we know today that the FBI investigation was severely compromised. Even before Nicolas Katzenbach typed his memorandum about satisfying the public that Oswald was the lone assassin and he had no accomplice, J. Edgar Hoover had expressed similar aims the day before, on November 24th. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 252-53) But, as we have seen from above, Hoover actually was in a position to falsify the evidentiary record. And he did. We know this not just from the sorry chain of evidence, but also from people in the FBI who talked about the alterations later. This includes agents and employees like Harry Whidbee, William Walter, and most recently, Don Adams. Adams is especially interesting in that he was stationed in Dallas in the summer of 1964 while the FBI inquiry was still ongoing. He had an opportunity to see the Zapruder film with two other agents. Afterwards, he told them it was clear that Kennedy was hit from two different directions. They replied that they were aware of that but Hoover did not want them to go down that path. So they would not. (Ibid, p. 221) Since the Commission was overwhelmingly reliant on the FBI for their information, the Warren Report was doomed to be a counterfeit inquiry from the start.
Most people today know what happened to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. It began as a promising, open-ended inquiry into the case led by two veteran criminal prosecutors, Richard Sprague and Robert Tanenbaum. When the MSM saw this was going to be a real criminal inquiry, which would expose the fallacies of the Warren Commission, they began to attack, and eventually derailed, the committee. Both Sprague and Tanenbaum then resigned. The handwriting was now on the wall for the new chief counsel Robert Blakey. And he ran a much more controlled operation. In its published volumes we know that the HSCA never really challenged the crime scene evidence noted above. When the Assassination Records Review Board declassified its working papers we discovered that the HSCA was even worse than we imaginedsince it knowingly lied and manipulated evidence e.g. about the location of the wound in Kennedy’s back, about the Zapruder frame where Kennedy was first hit, and, as described above, also about the condition of the back of Kennedy’s head.
What we know today would indicate that, if anything, the first generation of critics on the JFK case did not go far enough. They erred in accepting pieces of evidence like Oswald ordering the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, and that Oswald had been in Mexico City. Things like this were allowed to enter the record for the simple reason that the Warren Commission never obeyed any kind of rules of evidence or the adversarial legal procedure. Which is startling since the body was overwhelmingly made up of attorneys, including the Chief Justice of the United States. And Earl Warren was primarily responsible for advocating for the rights of the accused to have sufficient counsel so that justice would not be denied to them. But in this case, Oswald was never represented by any counsel. As far as being a fact-finding commission, the HSCA criticized the performance of those duties by the Commission in no uncertain terms. (See especially Volume11 of the HSCA volumes.) In fact, every attorney who has looked into this case in any official capacity since 1964 has nothing but disdain for the work done by the Commission. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 315) The fact that almost none of this coruscating criticism was aired during he MSM’s three week media blitz shows how deep the denial runs.
In fact, it has become so bad that two staples of the Commission’s fraudulent case – Ruth Paine and Wesley Frazier – resurrected themselves for the occasion. They were revived, resuscitated and polished, as if there were no questions to be asked about their bona fides. When , in fact, in keeping with the mass ritual of denial, there were literally dozens of pointed questions that should have been posed to these two witnesses. But just like the prospective indictments of Phillips and Goodpasture, the MSM put up a sign saying, “Stop! Don’t go there!”
The irony in all this is that the head in the sand attitude perfectly exemplifies the attitude of the MSM in “going down with the ship”. We all know today that the MSM is dying. Newsweek recently sold for a pittance. As Jefferson Morley revealed at the Passing the Torch conference in Pittsburgh, he tried to get the Washington Post to cover the Kennedy case repeatedly. They refused. Even though as he noted, their circulation numbers continued to decline. The Post was recently sold to Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com for the shockingly low price of 250 million dollars. The LA Times has also declined radically in circulation from a peak of 1.1 million to almost half of that today. The LA Times was purchased by Tribune Company, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2008. There have been numerous reports about the precarious financial position of the New York Times. One of the problems of course has been a loss of readers to the Internet. Not just because it’s mostly free, but also because it offers a wider variety of information. For example, this year, CTKA.net broke all of its records for readership, with over 3.5 million hits. Much of this was aided by the blackout by the MSM in November. But the MSM still does not get the message. Not only does hardly anyone else believe them anymore on this and related subjects, but with the competition from the web, they are now on the endangered species list as financial entities.
But that doesn’t appear to matter to them. That is how wedded they are to the Commission’s follies. Even when all the new evidence indicates they are wrong, they ignore it. In fact, as we saw with the case of Mayor Mike Rawlings in Dallas, he and the Power Elite did not even want to hear anything about it. Even if it meant violating the first amendment rights of American citizens.
That is the state of the JFK case today. There is more evidence now of what really happened than there has ever been. The problem is that the general public is not aware of it. Because the MSM refuses to countenance it. Even if it is to the detriment of themselves, this country, and democracy. The MSM and the Power Elite continue to deny it all. That death wish, of course, says much more about them than it does the Kennedy assassination.
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Larry Sabato, the Kennedy Assassination, and the Rise of the Post-Modern Sound Bite Scholar
Dozens of new books have been published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Many of them are breaking new ground.
The JFK research community has come a long way in just the past twenty years. I first got interested in the assassination right before Oliver Stone’s JFK movie was released and probably read thirty or so book around that time. They all pointed to one theory or another. It was easy for someone new to the topic to get lost in the deluge of counter theories.
But things have changed since then. I went to a conference of the leading JFK assassination researchers in Pittsburgh last month, organized by the famous forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht and his son. It was called “Passing the Torch.”
I don’t pretend to have all of the answers, but it became clear to me at this event that something of a consensus has emerged in the JFK research community pointing to elements of the government being involved. In particular men working with Cuban exiles associated with Operation Mongoose, the CIA operation to subvert Cuba and overthrow Castro after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, have come under increasing suspicion. Simply put more has become known thanks to the release of government files following the JFK movie. And people are still learning things and there are yet to be documents to be released.
Not only are new details of the suspicious characters around Oswald, and the mystery man himself, being discovered, but we now have a much better understanding of what was actually going during Kennedy’s Presidency.
To name just one example a new work is being developed by a scholar at the UVA Miller Center based on Presidential tapes about Kennedy’s policies in Vietnam and moves towards withdrawal he made in the last year of his life. The release of new tapes and records over the past fifteen years show that Kennedy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had sharp disagreements over Cuba, Vietnam, and nuclear weapons policies. They had what can only be described as dismal relations with each other.
Even popular mainstream historians like Robert Dallek are touching upon this area – and it is hard not to find out some of these things and wonder about the assassination itself. As Douglas Horne, who worked for the Assassination Archives Review Board put it JFK “was at war” with the national security state. But some things have never changed. During this anniversary year if you have watched November’s TV specials you would not know of any of this new information. National Geographic’s testament to the Kennedy assassination was the retread boring Killing Kennedy movie. Almost all network news broadcasts managed to stick to the lone assassin line and promote only those books and authors that conform with the proper talking points.
One exception I saw shows you the straight jacket that is television. CNN’s Piers Morgan had Jesse Ventura on to discuss the government shutdown that was going on at the time and Ventura’s new book about the assassination called They Killed Our President. The book isn’t designed to solve the murder, but to present some of the dozens upon dozens of facts pointing to a conspiracy.
Morgan looked at Ventura and his book and just repeated over and over again that he thought there was no conspiracy, because he said he talked to former Secret Service agent Clint Hill and he told him there wasn’t one. Ventura countered by listing some of the things in his book and Morgan completely dismissed him, treating Ventura as if he was merely making it all up. At the end of the interview Morgan said this was spot, because it made for a great “talking point.” You can see this discussion in this video at around the five minute mark:
The ugly truth is that many people have made fortunes off of the assassination by creating books that line up with exactly the talking points required of them to get praised by the TV media. Gerald Posner’s work Case Closed did this following Oliver Stone’s movie and he became a celebrated talking head for a few years until he fell into a nasty plagiarism scandal.
Vincent Bugliosi took his place for a few years with his doorstop sized book Reclaiming History, which has been demolished by James DiEugenio in a recent book. But it seems like the overwhelming size of the book made it so that it was difficult to catch on with the general public, even though it became a vehicle for Bugliosi to get on TV and be used as a counterpoint whenever a reasonable author who wrote a book about the darker aspects of the assassination got on TV, as when Chris Mathews used him as an attack dog against David Talbot when he did a segment on his Brothers Book.
But Bugliosi seems to have disappeared. The Tom Hanks Parkland movie, which was credited as having been based upon his work, totally bombed at the box office. It was just too banal and boring. But a few have come into the picture to try to use the Kennedy assassination to get on TV this 50th anniversary and promote themselves by delivering the right talking points.
There is probably no better example of this than University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato. Sabato’s book The Kennedy Half Century was written by a team of people at the UVA Center for Politics, which Sabato runs. It is really three small books in one. The first part of it is a fast recap of Kennedy’s political career, the second part deals with the assassination and the final part of the book is his “legacy” with examples of how the Presidents since President Kennedy claimed his mantel from time to time.
I found the first and last part of the book to actually be the weakest parts of it. The amount of research that went into them just seemed to be very thin. The first part in particular really added nothing new and seemed to have little understanding of Kennedy’s real legacy and his foreign policy. For example he claimed that the Soviets put missiles in Cuba, because they perceived that Kennedy was a weak man after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion who wouldn’t do anything in response. In reality Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba out of desperation – he had fallen behind the United States in the nuclear arms race and put missiles in Cuba as a hail marry pass to try to force Kennedy into making some sort of deal. It was something the Soviets did out of weakness – they perceived the United States as being the stronger and more aggressive party, which is exactly the opposite of what Sabato claims in his book.
We know all this because of the work of Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali and their book Khruschchev’s Cold War, based in part on transcripts of Soviet Politburo records. This book is seven years old now and an important part of the scholarship. You would think Sabato would know of it, especially since Naftali used to work at the UVA Miller Center in the Presidential recordings program. Incredibly when I looked at the acknowledgements to his book it appeared that Sabato did not consult with hardly anyone there and barely any academic historians at all.
Sabato did manage to consult with Gary Mack of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, John McAdams and TV media stars such as James Carville, Bill Moyers, and Chris Matthews. And he indeed has been able to use his book to get on the television set. You can get a feeling for what Gary Mack is about in this video:
He has been able to provide TV producers with the correct talking points. Sabato has made a career out of being a minor TV celebrity able to charge $10,000 a pop speaking fees so he knows the game.
In the initial promotion for the book he was on CBS News, which put a story on its website with the headline “JFK assassination conspiracy theory ‘blown out of the water’ in new book, author says”, to describe an interview with Sabato.
Sabato said he commissioned a study of dictabelt recordings that the Congressional House Select Committee on Assassinations used that they said showed that more than three shots were fired, which would mean there was a conspiracy. Sabato said he had “new” evidence that he commissioned by a sound analysis company called Sonalysts, Inc. which proved that the HSCA study was flawed. But in reality other researchers who studied these tapes in the early 1980’s came to the same conclusion, so there was nothing “new” in what Sabato said. The tapes aren’t important in the big picture.
But his claim enabled him to make a big splash and get on TV, because it made for a great politically correct talking point. Nonetheless, there is much more evidence of a conspiracy than these tapes and Sabato knows this. He also knows that over 80% of the American people do not believe in the Warren Commission and so to be someone who simply mouths the Warren Commission line can damage one’s image with today’s public.
However, to talk of conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination means becoming toxic to American TV news producers. It could mean the end of being a talking head. When I was at UVA over fifteen years ago, in the graduate history program, I had one professor tell me that to write about the Kennedy assassination would make a career in academia impossible. That wasn’t because of something about UVA in particular, but the reality of the way the topic is treated by the mainstream media and upper reaches of establishment research. It’s simply not politically correct to talk about and you’ll be blacked out by TV if you do. It would be like being against slavery in the pre-Civil War American South.
Despite what I’ve said so far, the strongest part of Sabato’s book is actually his section on the assassination. Even though I do not agree with his conclusions, he does make some interesting comments, and you can tell from the footnotes that more research went into putting this part of the book together than the rest of it.
Sabato argues that the “establishment view, even today, in the halls of government and many media organizations” is “that it is irresponsible to question the ‘carefully considered’ conclusions of the Warren Commission report.” Sabato warns that there are some who consider it close to being a threat to national security. “Further, say the lone gunman theory’s advocates, the widespread accusations that senior political, governmental, and military figures participated in the planning, execution, or cover-up of the assassination of President Kennedy have damaged the image of the United States around the globe, fueling anti-American sentiments by undermining the very basis of our democratic system, ” he explains. In such a siege atmosphere it is no surprise that TV news producers have stuck managed to keep themselves within the bounds of the proper “responsible” talking points. And so has Sabato.
Sabato declares to his reader that “given the lack of hard evidence, to accuse any arm or agency of the federal government of orchestrating Kennedy’s assassination is both irresponsible and disingenuous.” However, it is hard for anyone who studies the assassination by going beyond the Warren Commission’s final report to escape the conclusion that there was more to the assassination than Oswald. On the day after the assassination at President Lyndon Johnson’s first morning meeting as President CIA director John McCone told him that Lee Harvey Oswald went to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City and had contact with a dangerous KGB agent. After this meeting Johnson had a phone conversation with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who told him that the evidence as it stood was not enough to convict Oswald and that someone else was in Mexico City pretending to be him. Hoover told him that information that the CIA gave him, such as taped phone conversations, that was supposed to be Oswald wasn’t him.
Sabato knows that the lone assassin story simply is not credible. So he writes, “at the same time, it is impossible to rule out the possibility that a small, secret cabal of CIA hard-liners, angry about Kennedy’s handling of Cuba and sensing a leftward turn on negotiations with the Soviets and the prosecution of the war in Vietnam, took matters into their own hands lest the United States go soft on Communism.”
Sabato dismisses just about all possible conspiracy theories in his book. He claims it simply is “irresponsible” to think that elements of the United States government could be involved. He won’t do that so he comes up with one possible politically correct conspiracy theory of his own buried in a footnote – “in theory, the cabal could also have been the opposite: Communist inspired. In April, 1961 FBI J. Edgar Hoover sent Attorney General Robert Kennedy a memo admitting that the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA’s parent organization) had been infiltrated by a “Communist element” that “created problems and situations which even to this day affect US intelligence operations.”
In other words it’s a thought crime to think that some people in the United States government could have been a party to President Kennedy’s assassination so if there were people like that they must have been under the control of the KGB. If the CIA killed Kennedy so to speak it did so, because it was actually a cat’s paw of the KGB.
Well, look there are a lot of crazy conspiracy theories that have been peddled over the years, from the driver did it, to some Secret Service agent accidently shot the President, and on and on. Most of the theories have no real proof, but what Sabato proposes is one of the craziest theories I’ve ever seen in print. In fact the idea that the CIA was under the control of the KGB is more of a nightmare than any of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.
Sabato tries to appeal to all sides in his book. On one hand he says that there are plenty of reasons to believe in a conspiracy, because the Warren Commission was such a botched investigation, but in the end he comes down on the side of believing in the single assassin theory, but does little to convince the reader of that. It’s a line though that he uses to get on TV.
You can watch Sabato essentially play for the TV in this interview making big talking point sound bites:
In this interview Sabato makes the big claim that Oswald is the only person who killed Kennedy, but “we’ll never know” the truth. Of course that’s a nonsensical statement, because if it’s only Oswald than what is there not to know so to speak? But it’s the proper politically correct talking point for TV news. Sabato doesn’t provide a shred of evidence in this TV appearance explaining why he thinks Oswald is the only person involved.
Now In his book Sabato has a few paragraphs of evidence in support of the Oswald did it alone story in his giant book. The evidence Sabato marshals is that Oswald “is the only logical suspect from the Depository, the place where he worked from and from which he fled. The murder weapon was Oswald’s, his palm print was on the gun, and (despite the dispute over the size of Oswald’s ‘curtain rods’ package) he likely brought it to work with him the morning of the assassination.” He also says Oswald shot the policeman J.D. Tippit and “four bullets were retrieved from Tippit’s body, one of which matched Oswald’s revolver.”
However, Henry Hurt’s book Reasonable Doubt demolished most of this more than twenty years ago. Hurt found that the crime scene investigator left marks on the bullets at the Tippit slaying that were not on the bullets used as evidence by the Warren Commission. The palm print was not on the gun when it was first examined by the authorities and only later magically appeared on it. I cite Hurt’s book, because it an excellent account of the evidence and Sabato cites him in his acknowledgments, so surely he must know of these things. He may not know of John Armstrong’s work Harvey and Lee which even puts Oswald purchase and ownership of the rifle in doubt, because it is newer. Who can read every single Kennedy assassination book?
Do we even need to talk, though, about the medical evidence and all of the doctors at Parkland who saw the back of Kennedy’s head shot out by an exit wound? To make a long story short the evidence against Oswald is a joke and Sabato only spends a few paragraphs in his book using it in support of the lone assassin story.
To his credit though Sabato does talk about the contradictory evidence. I just think a reader will be left with more confusion than answers from it. In the end though what is most interesting about Sabato’s book and media appearances is his talking line stance. He does not merely play the same card of a Posner or Bugliosi and try to merely uphold the Warren Commission one more time.
Instead he tries to recognize the disbelief of the public and still keep to the required talking points message to be acceptable to the Washington beltway media establishment. He is indeed “responsible” to the Washington power structure. We live in an era of economic malaise and an empire falling apart. The power elites are failing this nation and the assassination of President Kennedy will be seen decades from now as an event that took us to where we are.
The way the Kennedy assassination is being treated by the media 50 years after the event is an example of how disjointed the Washington elites and TV talking heads are from the rest of the nation, but they are where true power in the United States rests. So enter Sabato and his positioning. It’s an interesting play he has made – and the right one when it comes to getting on TV and selling books as a result. He can now charge for more speaking appearances as a Kennedy assassination expert, because the TV proclaimed him to be one.
Sabato says that many inside the Washington beltway crowd and national TV producers fear that talk of a Kennedy assassination conspiracy is a potential danger to national security, because it can cause people to doubt the United States government and lash out at it.
But to take such a rigid position does one have to sacrifice the search for truth in order to hold onto a proper political line? That is not what scholarship is about.
Nor is that what journalism is about either, but there is a big difference between it and what passes as “reporting” on TV. TV news does very little real investigative work to what really is going on in the economy and the government.
A few weeks before the November anniversary of the JFK assassination CBS News “Face the Nation” aired a segment about a new book on the subject that contained evidence that the Warren Commission covered up facts.
When it was her turn to talk about the book popular talking head Peggy Noonan said that as a nation we were lucky that the truth didn’t come out, because it could have been “destabilizing.” She seemed to suggest that she agreed with covering things up.
The book being discussed doesn’t say there was a conspiracy so it’s safe enough to talk about on TV. It just says there were things being covered up, but they cause people to ask too many questions, so Noonan is thankful for the cover-up.
Then reporter Bob Woodward and Noonan spoke of a “deep state” that engages in covert operations and mass surveillance in the name of national security, saying the things being covered up in regards to the JFK assassination is a part of the “deep state” activities. I call it the war state. But they seem to have no problem with cover-ups.
This “Face the Nation” segment is in essence an argument in justification of the JFK assassination cover-up.
The phrase “deep state” was created by professor Peter Dale Scott to explain the Kennedy assassination.
Is the duty of a journalist to hide government secrets? That seems like a slippery slope that leads to becoming a sycophant or propagandist. That is not what journalism is about.
TV news acted as a cheerleader for the war in Iraq and asked no questions before it started. It wasn’t until it turned into a total disaster that they asked a few questions and then they simply stopped reporting on it all together.
They never talk about the war in Afghanistan. They failed to recognize the problems that led into the 2008 financial crisis and fail to even talk about the problems of debt inflation caused by the Federal Reserve today.
If you think back to just the past few months and how TV news has reported on the NSA spying revelations you can see how it has done almost no real investigative work and acted simply as a mouthpiece for power.
Instead of really digging into what the NSA spy programs are doing to the American people and the legal issues surrounding them TV news made the story about Snowden and the real journalists that were doing research into the affair and demonized them as enemies.
The journalist Glen Greenwald has been at the forefront of breaking the story about NSA spying. When he appeared on MSNBC talking head reporter David Gregory attacked him and questioned him on whether he should be considered a criminal and virtual enemy of the state. You can see this in this video clip:
It isn’t hard to imagine that if producers of shows such as this think that to investigate the JFK assassination could threaten national security than they could easily conclude that to investigate the NSA spy programs is too.
The problem is the press is supposed to investigate government and look for wrongdoings and crimes. It is supposed to act as a watchdog for the people – and if it doesn’t something is seriously wrong.
It also means that to make oneself into a TV news talking head celebrity one has to make giant sacrifices of integrity. One has to be willing not to care about searching for the truth and to conform to the correct talking points and political lines. It means becoming a professional propagandist instead of a scholar.
It’s sad to think that some people have to do this to become acceptable and important in the circles of power in the United States and you know they must suffer in one way or another. You know that if they have a conscience they have trouble sleeping at night and feel like in the end they are not leaving much of a legacy behind. They end up being either cowards or total opportunists.
I want to say one last thing. Sabato has claimed in at least one TV appearance “we will never know” the real truth when it comes to the assassination. He never asks if that is true, then why? The answer would be simple: lack of political will by the men in Washington. When I see Sabato on TV and read his book I feel like he really doesn’t even care what the truth is. He is mostly interested in being credible and “responsible” for the TV producers. In reality much of the truth is sitting there and more is being discovered – it’s just not politically correct for the TV to talk about it.
But Sabato seems to be an example of today’s post-modern scholar. Right before the financial crash of 2008 there were economists doing “research” to “prove” that everything was great with the financial system and that mortgage backed securities and other such inventions were wonderful “innovations.” Some were paid to go to countries with troubled debt situations and say everything was great. They were complicit in the crash that helped bring today’s economic mess. The story of one was detailed in the movie Inside Job. It was a story NEVER revealed on CNBC – and never will be:
Men such as this were “post-modern” economists who catered to their paymasters. It is in small movies like this, books, internet sites, and newspaper articles that real journalism, scholarship, and investigative reporting takes place. The TV has failed to ever dig anything up about the Kennedy assassination in fifty years and has failed to inform the public about the reality of the economy, the recent wars associated with the “war on terror,” and the depth of the NSA spy programs. Instead it simply repeats talking points and TV producers seem to always be able find people willing to say and do anything to get on TV and mouth the establishment propaganda lines in this age of dying empire and transition into a new age.
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Anti-Conspiracy theories: Why the media (and Shermer) believe the implausible
A reply to Michael Shermer and the Los Angeles Times
In the JFK assassination, why do the media refuse to accept the overwhelmingly obvious conclusion that Oswald was framed?
Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, to which I once subscribed. [1] Skeptic has printed at least two pieces that favor a JFK conspiracy, but now Shermer paradoxically promotes the lone gunman theory. Ironically, for that case in particular, he has dropped his pretense of skepticism.
In a November 26, 2013 Op-Ed, Shermer purports to explain away a JFK conspiracy via psychology. However, if this notion is logically extrapolated, no one (not even the judicial system – nor even string theorists) would ever need to consult any facts, i.e., merely identifying an author’s motives would suffice to discern the truth. But what is good for the conspiracist is good for the anti-conspiracist – perhaps some day Shermer will reveal what deep psychology motivates his own persistent obfuscation of the JFK case.
Shermer believes that conspiracy theories offer tidy and simple-minded explanations. But what could be more simple-minded than Oswald as a lone gunman?
Shermer claims that we have had a surfeit of documentaries favoring conspiracy. On the contrary, in my three decades of observing this event, we have never had such a deluge of mainstream support for Oswald. (See my critique of just one of these – on NOVA.)
He claims that evidence points toward Oswald. For once, he is correct. Unfortunately, nearly all of it is suspect. An itemized demolition of these fraudulent claims has come from a fellow Wisconsin Badger (see Into the Nightmare, pp. 195-205, by Joseph McBride). Is Shermer truly ignorant of all this soiled laundry? Moreover, this is hardly the first case in history of misleading evidence. The French had their own Dreyfuss Affair, where virtually all the “official evidence” pointed toward an innocent man. And the Lincoln assassination was a lone gunman case before additional evidence emerged. Even in Watergate, the evidence of conspiracy only evolved across time.
A conspiracy, by definition, requires only two persons. Given the pervasive tendency of humans to socialize, that is the natural state of human affairs. Most curiously, the original meaning of conspiracy theory was neutral. Only since the mid-1960s (suspiciously right after the JFK assassination) did it become a term of ridicule. It is now a term of derision, whose sole purpose is promptly to strangle any serious examination of the evidence. Oddly enough, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (by Richard Hofstadter), was first published in Harper’s Magazine on the first anniversary of the JFK assassination – in November 1964.[2]
Michael Parenti has observed that even the CIA is, by definition – via its covert actions and secret plans – a conspiracy. Ambassador David K. E. Bruce, in his formal report on the CIA to President Eisenhower, disclosed the devastating impact these conspiracies had on US foreign policy.[3] Even the Mafia (by its very nature) believes in conspiracies.
Justin Fox of Time magazine describes most Wall Street traders as conspiracy-minded; he adds that most good investigative reporters are also conspiracy theorists. For conspiracy theorists in this JFK case, see my long list (with supporting documentation – see Addendum 5). Here are several: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, John Connally, J. Edgar Hoover, John McCone, David Atlee Phillips, Robert Tanenbaum, James Rowley, George Burkley, Jesse Curry, Roy Kellerman, Evelyn Lincoln, Richard Russell, Bertrand Russell, G. Robert Blakey, and Robert Kennedy, Jr.
Cass Sunstein, in a 2008 paper, offered his own remedies for conspiracy theories; he proposed infiltrating them to cause internal disruption. In other words, his response to conspiracy theories was to propose a conspiracy of his own. Several years ago, I sent him a rebuttal. I am still waiting for his reply.
My own view of the JFK assassination has evolved from mere belief into actual knowledge. Based on my seeing (on nine different occasions) the JFK artifacts at the National Archives, I now know that the JFK skull X-rays are copies, not originals, and that the mysterious 6.5 mm bullet-like fragment (supposedly at the back of the skull) was added to the X-ray in the darkroom, merely to incriminate the supposed weapon – a 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano.
On November 22, 2013, I met with James Jenkins, who had been Dr. Boswell’s technician at the JFK autopsy. He confirmed my conclusion (based on hundreds of data points via optical densitometry on the extant JFK skull X-rays) – that the images of the brain in the National Archives are fraudulent. But this was no surprise; after all, the official autopsy photographer, John Stringer, had long ago disavowed these photographs as those he took.
• David W. Mantik earned his Ph.D. in physics at Wisconsin and his M.D. at Michigan. He is Board Certified in radiation oncology by the American Board of Radiology. A former fellow of the American Cancer Society and director of residency training in radiation oncology at Loma Linda University, he has also used proton beams to cure cancer.
“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
“It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.”
“The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see very little. We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing – what [you] see is all there is (WYSIATI).”
“They didn’t want more information that might spoil their story.”
– Thinking Fast and Slow (2011) by Daniel Kahneman
(Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology)Postscript: A Rebuttal from Shermer (and the Los Angeles Times)
Before my critique had even been submitted to the Los Angeles Times, Shermer had already struck back. Here is what the Times printed on Saturday, November 30, 2013 (p. A15).
Facts or Conspiracies?
Almost all of the readers who responded to Michael Shermer’s November 26, 2013 Op-Ed didn’t buy his idea that psychology helps to explain why JFK assassination theories persist. Reader Stephany Yablow of North Hollywood wrote:
“J. Edgar Hoover came up with the lone-gunman scenario within 24 hours of the assassination as a cover-up. Lyndon Johnson backed it, demanding that the case be closed quickly.
“The Warren Commission was political window dressing. It failed to thoroughly investigate, interview witnesses and experts and conduct forensic studies. It produced a shallow report.
“Maybe people would believe the lone-gunman theory if Jack Ruby didn’t waltz into the jail and kill Lee Harvey Oswald; hence, the theory that someone directed Ruby to do so. There must have been at least two people (the requisite number of actors to define a ‘conspiracy’). If the lone-gunman proponents had a better answer, they haven’t convinced us yet.”
Michael Shermer responds:
[Note by Mantik: Misleading statements so densely infest this manifesto that each opinion is itemized, followed by my comments. Shermer’s words are in italics.]
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The Warren Commission report was shallow? At 880 pages, I wonder what would be considered deep.
Reply (based on the work of Walt Brown): Of the 488 witnesses who testified, only 93 did so in the presence of any of the seven members of the Commission. Here is the scorecard: Earl Warren – 93, Allen Dulles – 70, Gerald Ford – 60, John Sherman Cooper – 50, John McCloy – 35, Hale Boggs – 20, and Richard Russell – 6. What value would be placed on a judicial proceeding in an American courtroom in which the prosecutors, the defense attorneys, or certain jurors just came and went as they pleased? Furthermore, anyone who has even glanced at these volumes quickly recognizes that trivia and irrelevancies populate the pages, but critical witnesses are often studiously avoided. Insofar as a “deep” analysis, one example is Douglas Horne’s five volume set: Inside the Assassination Records Review Board. Horne’s book is 1880 pages. (The Warren Report is actually 888 pages.) Another would be Walt Brown’s Chronology of the JFK Assassination.
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In any case, five different government investigations – along with countless private inquiries – have concluded that the evidence overwhelmingly points toward Oswald as the lone assassin.<
Reply: Shermer apparently has not read that brilliant piece by Dr. Gary Aguilar and Kathy Cunningham: “How Five Investigations into JFK’s Medical Autopsy Evidence Got It Wrong.” Insofar as private investigations, Shermer likewise seems hopelessly lost – the vast majority favor conspiracy. (See his last statement here, which implies that he does know this.)
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Oswald’s Carcano rifle with his fingerprints on it was found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
Reply: The weapon (actually a carbine, not a rifle) in evidence is not the one ordered by LHO. The Commission states that he used a coupon from the February 1963 issue of The American Rifleman (but this ad does not appear in the Commission). The ad is for a 36″ Carcano weighing 5.5#. The weapon in evidence is supposedly 42″ and weighs 8# (with sling and sight). The first weapon reported in the Texas School Book Depository was a 7.65 German Mauser; Eugene Boone filed two separate reports to this effect, and Seymour Weitzman filed a confirming affidavit. Boone later testified that Captain Fritz and Lt. Day also identified it as a Mauser. The weapon in evidence, however, clearly reads “Made Italy” and “Cal, 6.5″.” Furthermore, no one has explained why a wannabe assassin would purchase a weapon by money order through the mail – instead of paying cash locally (with no trace of ownership). In addition, on the supposed purchase date (March 12), Oswald was at work from 8 AM to 12:15 PM (see Harvey and Lee by John Armstrong for company employee records). If the post office records can be believed, LHO walked 11 blocks to the General Post Office, purchased a money order, but then did not mail it from there. Instead, he walked many bocks out of his way (eventually using a mailbox) before returning to work, where his absence was not noted. This order then arrived the very next day at Klein’s (in Chicago) – and was already deposited at the bank that same day! Unfortunately, the bank deposit actually reads February 15, 1963 – not March 13, 1963. Of course, if the date really had been February, then the serial number C2766 could not apply to the weapon in the backyard photographs. For even more anomalies on the MC see Reclaiming Parkland by James DiEugenio.
Insofar as fingerprints go, none were initially found on the weapon. Only after a visit by federal agents to the morgue, where Oswald was fingerprinted – according to the mortician, did a palm print appear on the weapon. Moreover, during the last several decades much doubt has been cast on fingerprint evidence in general; see my review of John McAdams’s book.
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Three bullet casings there match what 80% of eyewitnesses in Dealey Plaza reported hearing: three shots.
Reply: The initial report described only two casings. The so-called Magic Bullet (which should have matched the casings) could not be identified at Parkland Hospital by the man who handled the actual bullet. Josiah Thompson (a private detective) and Dr. Gary Aguilar have demolished the chain of possession for this bastard bullet. Regarding witnesses, a long list of them reported that the final two shots were very close together, much too close for the Mannlicher-Carcano. [4]
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It was the same rifle Oswald purchased in March 1963, which he then used the following month in an attempt to assassinate the rabidly anti-communist Army Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker.
Reply: Walker denied that Oswald had shot at him. The bullet was not matched to any weapon owned by Oswald. At the time of the event, the Dallas Morning News reported a 30.06 bullet. (Of course, the Warren Report omitted this.) A witness, Kirk Coleman, saw two men, but neither was Oswald. A photograph of a car behind Walker’s house turned up at Ruth Paine’s house and was ascribed to Oswald. While the police had that photograph, the license plate disappeared from the back of the car. However, Chief Curry’s book (1969) contains a photograph of Oswald’s possessions, including that Walker photograph. In that version, the license plate is intact – which strongly implies that the police had cut it out of the other one.
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Co-workers saw Oswald on the sixth floor of the depository shortly before JFK’s motorcade arrived, and saw him exit soon after the assassination.
Reply: Oswald worked in the building and might well have been seen there. But Shermer fails to tell us when he was seen there. The only witness the Commission could round up was Howard Brennan, who had poor eyesight; he could not identify Oswald in a line-up later that same day. Furthermore, the window in the sniper’s nest was partly closed, making it virtually impossible for Brennan to get a good look at the man’s face. Arnold Rowland and Carolyn Walther saw a man with a rifle, but neither identified Oswald. Furthermore, both said they saw two men! Within 90 seconds of the shooting, Roy Truly spotted Oswald drinking a coke in the second floor lunch room. Victoria Adams walked down the same stairs (from the fifth floor) right after the shooting and did not see Oswald.
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Oswald went home and picked up his pistol and left again, shortly after which he was stopped by Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit, whom Oswald shot dead with four bullets.
Reply: “The official story of the Tippit killing is full of holes.” [5] McBride has devoted most of his book (and much of his life) to the Tippit case. If Shermer truly likes long books (as he claimed about the Warren Report), then he will love this book (662 pages). It is mostly devoted to the Tippit case. The author firmly denies that Oswald shot Tippit. Another author, John Armstrong, has investigated this murder for two decades and has now developed a detailed scenario of the event. Has Shermer done as much research on this as Armstrong or McBride?
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He then ducked into a nearby theater without paying, which resulted in a police confrontation.
Reply: Theater employee Warren Burroughs said that Oswald went to the balcony. A police dispatcher (at 1:46 PM) stated that Oswald was in the balcony. However, Oswald was arrested on the main floor. Bernard Haire saw a second man (who was flushed, as though he had been in a struggle) leave the rear of the theater and then be placed into a police car. Until Haire saw Oliver Stone’s film, he had always thought that he had seen Oswald’s arrest. Can Shermer explain any of this?
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Two days later, Oswald was himself assassinated by a pro-Kennedy nightclub owner named Jack Ruby, who said his motive was “saving Mrs. Kennedy the discomfiture of coming back to trial.” Thousands more pieces of evidence all converge to the unmistakable conclusion that Oswald acted alone.
Reply: Does Shermer truly know more than these legal minds, which were deeply immersed in the case? (None of them believed in a lone gunman.)
Senator Richard Russell, member of the Warren Commission
John McCloy, member of the Warren Commission
Rep. Hale Boggs, member of the Warren Commission
Senator John Sherman Cooper, member of the Warren Commission
Rep. Henry Gonzalez, chair of the HSCA
Rep. Don Edwards, chair of the HSCA
Robert Blakey, Chief Counsel for the HSCA
Robert Tanenbaum, Chief Counsel for the HSCA
Richard A. Sprague, Chief Counsel for the HSCA
Gary Cornwell, Deputy Chief Counsel for the HSCA -
In the 50 years since, conspiracy fabulists have concocted more than 300 different people and organizations allegedly involved in the assassination, and yet not one line of evidence conclusively supports any of these suspects. It’s time to move on and let JFK R.I.P.
Reply: If Shermer had paid any attention to JFK books or meetings during the past year, he would know that the evidence of a cover-up by federal agencies is now overwhelming. Instead, he has responded like an automaton, programmed to recite the Commission’s dogmas. He even evades the last official government investigation (the HSCA), which declared a probable JFK conspiracy. We might well ask: What about history? For example, what if the Dreyfuss affair had simply been left to lie dormant? Or what if the Lincoln assassination had never been pursued – or if no investigation had been done into Watergate, or into Iran-Contra, or into BCCI? What then Mr. Shermer?
Notes
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I let my subscription lapse after I became skeptical of some of these alleged skeptics.
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According to Wikipedia, on November 21, 1963 (sic) Hofstadter delivered the Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford University (on this same subject)
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Timothy Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (2007), pp. 133-135. The complete report is still unavailable!
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Assassination Science (1998), edited by James Fetzer, p. 296.
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Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare (2013), p. 201.
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Cold Case JFK vs. Cold Hard JFK Facts
G. Robert Blakey (as quoted on “Cold Case JFK”):
“…the need that led to the Warren Commission was not to find out what happened but to assure the American people what didn’t happen.”John McCloy (Warren Commission):
[It was of paramount importance to] “show the world that America is not a banana republic, where a government can be changed by conspiracy.”Jim Marrs (Crossfire 2013, p. 441):
“Allen Dulles told author Edward Jay Epstein that since an atmosphere of rumors and suspicion interferes with the functioning of the government, especially abroad, one of the Commission’s main tasks was to dispel rumors.”
This was a remarkably disingenuous program, with many erroneous assumptions, misleading statements, and crucial omissions. I label these accordingly below. I also list several correct statements and provide additional comments.
Assumption: Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO) owned the Mannlicher-Carcano (MC)
Comment: The weapon in evidence is not the one ordered by LHO. The Warren Commission (WC) states that he used a coupon from the February 1963 issue of The American Rifleman (but this ad does not appear in the WC). The ad is for a 36″ Carcano carbine weighing 5.5#. The weapon in evidence is supposedly a 40″ short rifle and weighs 8# (with sling and gunsight). Further, when the HSCA interviewed the gunsmith at Klein’s, he said he placed scopes on the 36-inch model but not the 40-inch model. Yet this rifle had a scope on it. How did it get there?
No one addressed these problems on this program. Or even acknowledged they existed.
The first weapon reported in the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) was actually a 7.65 German Mauser; Eugene Boone filed two separate reports to this effect, and Seymour Weitzman filed a confirming affidavit. Boone later testified that Captain Fritz and Lt. Day also identified it as a Mauser. The weapon in evidence, however, clearly reads “Made in Italy” and “Cal, 6.5″.” Therefore, how could those affidavits be filed if the police could read properly?
Furthermore, no one has explained why a wannabe assassin would purchase a weapon by money order through the mail – instead of paying cash locally (with no trace of ownership). In addition, on the supposed purchase date (March 12), LHO was at work from 8 AM to 12:15 PM (see Harvey and Lee by John Armstrong for company employee records). If the post office records can be believed, LHO walked 11 blocks to the General Post Office, purchased a money order, but then did not mail it from there. Instead, he walked many bocks out of his way (eventually using a mailbox) before returning to work, where his absence was not noted. This order then arrived the very next day at Klein’s (in Chicago) – and was already deposited at the bank that same day! Unfortunately, the bank deposit actually reads February 15, 1963 – not March 13, 1963. Of course, if the date really had been February, then the serial number C2766 could not apply to the weapon in the backyard photographs. For even more anomalies on the MC see Reclaiming Parkland by Jim DiEugenio. (Especially Chapter 4, pages 56-63)
Omission: The witnesses pointed to the TSBD.
Comment: The narrator fails to say that most witnesses ran to the overpass and to the Grassy Knoll.
Misleading: John McAdams claims that the ballistics evidence would have been admissible in court.
Comment: The palm print on the weapon was not initially discovered by the Dallas Police Department, but only turned up later, after the FBI apparently fingerprinted LHO at the morgue (according to the mortician). In addition, fingerprint evidence can be surprisingly subjective (see my CTKA review of McAdams’ book). Although CE-399 (the Magic Bullet) was supposedly matched to the MC (see Jerry McLeer’s website for this controversy), that does not prove that LHO fired the gun on 11/22/1963, or even that LHO handled it that day. After all, the paraffin test on his cheeks was negative. And then there is the fundamental question of whether LHO actually owned the MC – as well as where the bullets were obtained.
Correct: The FBI did not stock MC bullets.
Comment: Nor did most gun shops in Dallas. Nor were any extra bullets found anywhere in LHO’s possessions. In fact, the only MC shells in the case were in the sniper’s nest. But the FBI did find a Mauser shell in Dealey Plaza, which they kept secret for 30 years.
Therefore, if LHO had actually purchased these bullets, he bought only a few, which is quite remarkable – or perhaps he did not buy any at all. Although the FBI did not have MC samples, the CIA likely did. In the 1950s, the Marine Corps purchased four million rounds – even though these bullets do not fit into any Corps weapons. This leads one to wonder if the purchase was for the CIA, since they often prefer weapons (and bullets) that cannot be traced.
Assumption: LHO was a communist.
Comment: This statement is made without any introduction or any context, almost as if it were a fundamental theory of physics. This is the most overt clue to NOVA’s inexorable bias. James Jesus Angleton, who was CIA Chief of Counterintelligence, would have been amused to hear this. After all, according to John Newman, Angleton controlled the Oswald files at Langley. (2013 edition of John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA.) Further, there is evidence from two FBI employees, Carver Gayton and William Walter, that Oswald was an FBI informant. It is even conceivable that LHO ordered a MC at the request of the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agency, in order to assist with federal efforts to trace gun purchases.
Misleading: John McAdams speaks of an “entrance” for a bullet hole in JFK’s back.
Comment: The pathologists clearly stated that this site could be probed only superficially. No bullet was ever discovered at that site (or at an exit site). The abrasion collar surrounding the wound suggested that the projectile (whatever it was) was traveling upward (not downward, as would be required for a shot from the TSBD). That this projectile penetrated to any real depth is nothing but sheer speculation. Furthermore, an entry into the back would have caused a lung puncture, but this was not reported at the autopsy.
Misleading: The pathologists did not know about the throat wound while at the autopsy.
Comment: My good friend, Dr. Robert Livingston (now deceased), had advised Dr. James Humes, the lead pathologist, about this apparent entry wound during a telephone call before the autopsy began. He repeated this recollection during the depositions for Charles Crenshaw’s suit against the Journal of the American Medical Association. Many other witnesses attest to Humes’s knowledge of this wound while the autopsy proceeded. These include the autopsy radiologist, Dr. John Ebersole, with whom I had two separate telephone calls. It also includes pathologist Dr. J. Thornton Boswell, who confirmed this directly to the Baltimore Sun (Richard H. Levine, 25 November 1966, front page article). He later repeated this to the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Finally, tissue samples were taken of the tracheotomy site – and several autopsy witnesses saw probes passing through the tracheotomy. Neither of these items makes any sense unless the tracheotomy site harbored a forensically meaningful wound; it also implies that the pathologists understood that very fact during the autopsy.
Misleading: The shirt collar and tie show evidence of an exit.
Comment: Although both were damaged, such damage is mostly silent about the direction of a projectile. The nurses claimed that scalpels (used to remove JFK’s clothing) caused this damage. Neither the front of the shirt nor the tie showed any scientific evidence (low energy X-ray scattering) of metal from a bullet passage, although the bullet holes in the back of JFK’s jacket and shirt did show such evidence. Furthermore, the relevant witnesses described the throat wound as lying above the collar and tie. While before the WC, Dr. Charles Carrico clearly implied that the wound was above the necktie and above the shirt collar (3H361-362). To leave no doubt about what Carrico had seen, Harold Weisberg reports his own confirmatory interview with Carrico (Post-Mortem 1969, pp. 357-358 and 375-376). And then there is nurse Diana Bowron, who saw the throat wound while JFK was still in the limousine – before the shirt and tie had been removed. But here is the problem: the lacerations in the shirt lie well inferior to the top of the collar – and therefore well inferior to the throat wound. Moreover, I have seen the clothing at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The shirt does not exhibit any missing material, but such missing material would be expected for a real bullet. And the lacerations in the shirt do look like the work of a scalpel.
Misleading: The final shot (a headshot) occurred just an instant before Z-313 (where the bloody spray is seen).
Comment: The skull X-rays show a trail of metallic debris across the top of the skull. Using JFK’s orientation in Z-312 (at the instant of impact), this trail lies at an angle of 34° from horizontal (proceeding downward from the rear). But the angle from the “sniper’s nest” in the TSBD to JFK’s head at this moment is only 16°, according to Thomas Canning, the rocket scientist for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Therefore, in order for LHO to reproduce this particle trail in the X-rays (at Z-312) he must have been hovering above Dealey Plaza in a hot air balloon. Furthermore, there is much evidence (including WC documents) for a shot well after Z-313. See this writer’s review of Sherry Fiester’s book at this website. There is also evidence for this in overviews of Dealey Plaza (published in Newsweek, November 22, 1993) and in Secret Service photographs (right after the event). In the latter, a traffic cone clearly marks a final shot well after Z-313. Curiously, NOVA’s own interviewee, the famous author Josiah Thompson, at the recent Pittsburgh conference (October 17-19, 2013), announced his own new conviction that the final shot came well after Z-313.
Omission: NOVA failed to ask Thompson (their own interviewee!) for his opinion on this critical issue of when the final shot occurred.
Comment: While in Pittsburgh, Thompson shared with me the steps that led to his conclusion, which I found extremely interesting – since I had independently arrived at the same endpoint.
Misleading: CE-399 was quite deformed.
Comment: Not at all the case. For a truly deformed bullet, see Commission Exhibit 856, a bullet fired through a cadaver’s wrist (See Cover-Up by Stewart Galanor, Document 23).
Misleading: Luke Haag, NOVA’s ballistics expert, claims to see “bullet wipe” around the hole in the back of JFK’s jacket. (This is superficial debris transferred from the bullet surface to the jacket.)
Comment: This critical observation was not demonstrated visually at this point in the show (although the bullet wipe from the experiment was clearly shown). Oddly, the hole in the jacket had been shown earlier, so it could easily have been shown again. When I rewound the recorded show to examine the jacket hole, I saw no bullet wipe. I also carefully inspected close-up and high resolution images of this hole from other sources (e.g., Galanor, Document 6) and still could see no bullet wipe. Finally, I have personally inspected the jacket at NARA. I recall no bullet wipe from that visit either. Curiously, Haag describes the jacket hole as showing a “small, round hole.” Although Galanor’s image agrees with Haag’s description, the hole shown by NOVA is very elongated and quite irregular (obviously different from Galanor’s image). In fact, about ½ of the circumference had been removed by the FBI, but Haag seems unaware of this. If samples had been taken, then whatever evidence initially existed for “bullet wipe” has been severely compromised.
Correct: The MC bullet traversed 36″ of pine board in a straight trajectory and emerged undeformed.
Comment: This is very old news, as John Lattimer and John Nichols performed similar experiments many decades ago. They found that the bullet penetrated two feet of tough elm or through four feet of Ponderosa pine.
Correct, but misleading omission: The exit hole (in soap) was larger than the entrance wound.
Comment: In fact, the images show that Haag’s thumb would likely have fit into the exit hole. All of this, of course, is grossly inconsistent with JFK’s throat wound, which was often described as the size of a pencil. And JFK’s throat wound, of course, was also smaller than the purported entry wound in the back. Of course, NOVA avoids any discussion of these gross paradoxes.
Misleading: The bullet yaws (its axis of rotation varies) after leaving JFK and then strikes Connally’s (JBC) back sideways, leaving an elliptical hole in his jacket and an elongated wound on his back.
Comment: Dr. Cyril Wecht testified to the HSCA that an elongated wound might well result if the bullet had struck at an oblique angle. In fact, since no one really knows where the bullet (that struck Connally’s back) originated, such an oblique strike must logically remain on the list of possibilities. (NOVA merely assumes that the SBT is true, thus creating a circular argument.) Even worse though, the size of the JBC’s back wound has often been misrepresented. In particular, Milicent Cranor stated that “Connally’s back wound was only as long as the wound in the back of Kennedy’s head: 1.5 centimeters. No one has suggested Kennedy was hit in the head with a tumbling bullet.” She adds that “The head wound was 1.5 x 0.6 centimeters, and the back wound, 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).” JBC’s back wound became 3 cm (exactly the length of the MC bullet) when it was surgically enlarged, as Shaw explained. Dr. Charles Gregory, who operated on JBC’s wrist, also doubted that the bullet (that hit JBC’s chest) had struck anything before JBC. He even speculated that a fragment from JFK’s head wound had caused JBC’s wrist wounds. Finally, John Hunt has argued that Connally was likely turned to the right when struck; that would, of course, produce a tangential strike and therefore an elongated wound. In particular, Hunt states that if JBC had been rotated by 43°, and the bullet was approaching at 10.2° (right to left), then a yaw of merely 6° is enough to yield the 1.5 cm wound.
Misleading: Luke Haag states that there is no reason not to believe in the single bullet theory (SBT).
Comment: This is a breathtaking, almost staggering statement. Because it fails to take into account – in any way – the entry and exit points in either man, nor does it require any knowledge of cross sectional anatomy! A CT scan, with a cross section through the area of interest (that I presented long ago – see Galanor, Document 45) still remains an effective demolition of the SBT. The trajectory for the SBT would either have shattered a vertebra body or it would have punctured the apex of the lung – but neither was seen at the autopsy. NOVA did not address this profound conundrum. With simplistic conclusions such as this one by Haag, forensic pathologists could be spared much serious work.
Correct: Jefferson Morley points out that the acoustics evidence is not decisive.
Comment: It is not even relevant. See my review of Don Thomas’s book at the CTKA website.
Correct: Based on a meticulous reconstruction of Dealey Plaza, using detailed laser data, a shot from the top of the stockade fence to JFK’s head is possible; the distance is 105 feet, with a downward trajectory of 4°.
Comment: Hmm, I cannot add anything to that.
Correct: Connally and his wife both strongly disagreed with the SBT – for their entire lives.
Comment: Furthermore, while in the hospital, JBC referred to shooters (in the plural). He later told a reporter that he never for one second believed the conclusions of the Warren Commission. (Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 418)
Misleading omission: The skull X-rays show no shot from the front, but they do show a posterior entry.
Comment: This contradicts the experts for the ARRB, none of whom could identify an entry. Nor could I, via detailed optical density (OD) measurements at NARA. To rule out a frontal entry requires a good measure of hubris: e.g., it assumes that Humes and Boswell did not tamper with the skull before the official autopsy began. There is now serious evidence that this did occur. One line of evidence for such tampering is the major absence of brain in the anterior skull (on both sides) on the skull X-rays, as the OD data clearly demonstrate. Why is this evidence of tampering? The answer is that multiple witnesses at Parkland described a major loss of posterior brain tissue. This was recently confirmed by Dr. Robert McClelland during his videotaped presentation at the Cyril Wecht Duquesne conference. This is a major paradox, because the brain is not likely to have fallen backward while en route to Bethesda. However, if the major moorings of the brain (the falx) had been severed shortly before the official autopsy (e.g., illicitly by Humes), then the brain would indeed have fallen backwards. (On the other hand, if the falx had been severed before Parkland, the brain should already have fallen to the rear, thus leaving little significant brain tissue loss for McClelland to see.) Moreover, NOVA assumes only one headshot. NOVA’s participants, of course, fail to point out this fundamental assumption. After all, following a second shot, the evidence of the first shot may no longer have existed.
Misleading: No shot came from the (right) side.
Comment: My recent detailed discussion of the Harper fragment (presented at Duquesne, and soon to be posted at the CTKA website) clearly demonstrates, from multiple lines of evidence (especially including intrinsic information from the skull X-rays), that it arose largely from the occipital bone. In that case, the trigger for such an ejection most likely was a frontal shot (e.g., entering near to the right ear). Furthermore, there is strong eyewitness testimony (from the closest witnesses) that JFK was struck near the right ear. Even Kemp Clark, the neurosurgeon, described just such a tangential shot. As further corroboration for a tangential shot, at the recent JFK Lancer Conference (November 22, 2013), the autopsy technician James Jenkins recalled an apparent entry hole near Kennedy’s right ear that was surrounded by a gray border; even the pathologist Finck commented on this (off the record) during the autopsy. (Also see my review of Sherry Fiester’s book at the CTKA website). And G. Paul Chambers (a Ph.D. physicist, who worked for NASA), in Headshot (p. 136) agrees that a shot “…striking Kennedy’s head from the right front side was possible, even probable.”
Misleading: Fracture lines on the JFK skull X-rays begin at the rear and go forward. (In general, these typically begin at the point of entry and very quickly extend outward from that point.)
Comment: In Enemy of the Truth, (p. 212) Sherry Fiester, a forensic specialist, reaches the opposite conclusion: she concludes that the fractures radiate from the front of the head, which would imply a frontal shot. More importantly, though, if two headshots occurred (especially one from the rear and one from the front, as is quite likely – based on witnesses, the X-rays, and pathologic evidence), then this entire argument becomes moot.
Assumption: The JFK autopsy photographs of the brain are authentic.
Comment: Again, this is breathtaking. The experts seem oblivious to the serious doubt cast about this issue by the ARRB. Because, under oath before that body, official photographer John Stringer did not recognize the film or the process by which they were taken. Because he did not use either. They also seem unaware of Douglas Horne’s essays on the two brain examinations , which was well publicized in the media. My own OD data on the skull X-rays show virtually no brain (on either side) in a fist-sized area at the front of the skull. This is radically inconsistent with the autopsy photographs, which show a completely intact left side and a nearly intact right side. In principle, one can accept as authentic either the skull X-rays or the brain photographs, but not both.
Misleading: Larry Sturdivan interjects his now-hoary explanation for the posterior head snap – the neuromuscular reaction.
Comment: This has been refuted so many times that I leave this for the reader to pursue.
Misleading: Josiah Thompson states that Humes was not very competent.
Comment: Humes conducted the weekly brain cutting seminars at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center. All his life he had the respect of his peers. Although more experienced forensic pathologists would have done better, Humes’s chief problem was that he was boxed into a corner, where he often had no choice but to lie. The best example of this is his barefaced misplacement of the metallic trail of particles on the skull X-rays. (He became greatly embarrassed about this during his ARRB deposition.) Even my son at age six would not have done that. This was not a mistake by Humes. After all, consider the consequences: if he had reported the truth about the superior location of this particle trail it would have directly implied a second gunman, which he knew was not (politically) allowed.
Misleading: NOVA’s illustrations for the SBT demonstrate the trajectory going through JFK’s collar.
Comment: This is incredible, inasmuch as the hole in the jacket (shown earlier in the program) is about six inches inferior to the collar. So is the hole in the shirt. No one in NOVA even comments about this bizarre discrepancy.
Misleading: Jim Lehrer and John McAdams both believe that LHO did it – and that he fired three shots.
Comment: Among other things, Lehrer is a prolific novelist, and may say whatever he likes. Regarding McAdams, I have critiqued the SBT thoroughly (and with detailed anatomic models) in my review of his book at the CTKA website (this also includes the aforementioned CT scan). I have never seen any response from him about this. Until one is forthcoming, he really should cease to pontificate. Furthermore, the media have no cause to listen to someone (especially on human anatomy) who is solely a professor of “American politics, public opinion, and voter behavior.” In fact, NOVA should be mortified to quote such slender sources. Surely the American public deserves better.
Correct, but misleading omission: Most witnesses heard three shots.
Comment: Many, many witnesses heard two final shots in very quick succession (much too close for the MC), which could well imply two, near-simultaneous headshots. Further, there was never any systematic interviewing of witnesses either on the grassy knoll or in the Texas School Book Depository. Therefore, this database is sorely incomplete.
Misleading omission: NOVA seems to refer to the Edgewood Arsenal skull shooting experiments, and then implies that these support the Commission’s theory.
Comment: Dr. Gary Aguilar and Kathleen Cunningham have discussed these in detail. In particular, they point out that these experiments (supposedly using the official entry site) actually destroyed the faces of the skulls. Furthermore, the actual movies shown on NOVA (of exploding skulls) also show destruction of the anterior skull. Of course, since JFK’s face was intact, we (not surprisingly) have another paradox.
Misleading: CE-399 entered JBC’s thigh and then fell out, but not before depositing a small metal fragment. (On the X-ray, the fragment is 3.5 mm x 1.3 mm.)
Comment: The wound was no more than 1 cm deep, while the bullet was 3 cm long. The only site from the bullet for lead to extrude into the wound is from the tail. (NOVA shows the bullet entering the thigh nose first.) So how does the lead get under the skin, when the tail of the bullet is at least 2 cm outside of the skin? Dr. Tom Shires, who worked on the thigh wound, claimed that it looked like a tangential hit – or else a large fragment had stopped in the skin and then had subsequently fallen out. Dr. Malcolm Perry told Harold Weisberg that the hole in Connally’s skin was too small to be caused by a bullet. Arlen Specter shrewdly avoided this entire issue.
Misleading omission: NOVA assumes, without any proof – or even any discussion – that CE-399 actually flew over Dealey Plaza that day.
Comment: Their own interviewee, Josiah Thompson, is the reigning expert on this question, but NOVA did not discuss the chain of possession of CE-399 with him. (Thompson confirmed to me, via e-mail, that he was not asked.) If CE-399 is the wrong bullet, then the entire program immediately becomes hapless and hopeless. In fact, Thompson’s original pursuit of this issue (in Six Seconds in Dallas) was more recently renewed with the assistance of Dr. Gary Aguilar. The critical witness at Parkland Hospital (who actually handled the bullet) clearly did not recognize CE-399. On the contrary, the bullet he saw had a pointed nose, like the four bullets from World Wars I and II that NOVA displayed. John Hunt has also incisively highlighted serious problems with the timeline for receipt of this bullet (or perhaps even two different bullets) in Washington, DC. If the producers knew that Thompson had shattered the provenance of CE-399, and they nonetheless deliberately avoided this issue, then they are hypocrites. On the other hand, if they did not know this fundamental fact, then they are amazingly ignorant.
In the lead up to this program, both McAdams and the director Rush DeNooyer proclaimed that their program would prove with modern forensic science that Lee Oswald alone shot John Kennedy. (See Los Angeles Times, August 7, 2013.) If that was their intent from the outset, then they were being unprofessional. But even with that inherent bias, they have failed ignominiously.
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“Shoot Him Down”: NBC, the CIA and Jim Garrison
Jim Garrison With the arrival of the 40th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, it was hardly surprising that one of the major television networks attempted to make the case for Lee Oswald’s sole guilt. Despite four decades of solid research indicating a conspiracy, the American viewing public was once again treated to a one-sided, unfair and unbalanced presentation. In light of this, it might be instructive to look at how one of the other networks tackled the case for conspiracy some 37 years ago. The mystery of the assassination is still a popular subject among people of all ages. A college student might not know how to ask a girl out, but you can bet they have strong opinions on the JFK assassination based solely on the network specials that run every so often.
On June 19th, 1967 NBC aired an hour long “analysis” of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation titled, The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison. While unnecessary to rehash Garrison’s case here, in summary Garrison’s investigation focused on three individuals: A former Eastern Airlines pilot and probable CIA asset, David Ferrie; ex-FBI man and private detective Guy Banister; and Managing Director of the International Trade Mart, Clay Shaw. Garrison believed all three were connected to American intelligence and had, at a minimum, conspired to set up Oswald as a potential patsy in the JFK assassination. Barely three months into his investigation, Garrison’s main suspect, the forty-nine year old David Ferrie, died apparently of natural causes. Banister had also passed away in 1964 as a result of a heart attack. On March 1st, 1967 Garrison arrested the surviving member of this trio, the CIA connected Clay Shaw. By mid-March both the Grand Jury and a three-judge panel had ordered Shaw to trial.
Garrison’s case was big news and predictably the news media swung into attack mode. None was more vicious or had more resources at their disposal than NBC. For the job as lead investigative reporter, NBC assigned Walter Sheridan. Shortly after Shaw’s arrest Sheridan arrived in New Orleans and began questioning witnesses — perhaps bribing and intimidating would be a better choice of words. Sheridan questioned a former electronics expert and CIA asset Gordon Novel and immediately put him on a $500 a day retainer. (Novel had briefly consulted with Garrison’s team). Sheridan then urged Novel to skip town to avoid being indicted and paid him an additional $750 while Novel was in Columbus Ohio. Attorney Dean Andrews, who received the call from a “Clay Bertrand” to represent Oswald, was promised a recording studio if he cooperated with Sheridan. Andrews was overheard bragging, “I can get the equipment here. All I have to do is make a phone call, I’ll have open credit, I can pay off on any terms. Look, Bobby Sarnoff promised me those facilities. He’d better pay off, baby.” Bobby Sarnoff was, of course, Robert Sarnoff, NBC president and later chairman of the board of its parent company RCA.
Garrison’s main witness at the time was Perry Russo, a young insurance agent who had claimed he overheard a conspiratorial conversation between Shaw, Ferrie and Oswald at Ferrie’s home. Sheridan “interviewed” Russo and seriously distorted his statements during the broadcast. As the New Orleans States-Item reported, “Russo said Sheridan, WDSU-TV reporter Richard Townley and Saturday Evening Post writer James Phelan repeatedly visited his home in attempts to persuade him to cooperate with NBC and the defense.” Russo said he met with the trio with the full knowledge of the district attorney’s office and reported everything that happened to Asst. DA Andrew Sciambra. Russo said, “Sheridan offered to set me up in California, protect my job and guarantee that Garrison would never get me extradited back to Louisiana” if he cooperated. He accused Townley of threatening him with public humiliation unless he changed his story and cooperated with the NBC program. The 25-year-old witness said members of the trio told him both, “NBC and the Central Intelligence Agency are out to wreck Garrison’s investigation.” Of course, Russo’s accusations were met with denials, but as we shall see Russo’s claims seem to have been accurate.
Another of Garrison’s witnesses was Vernon Bundy, a heroin addict and prisoner who had testified at the preliminary hearing that he had seen Shaw and Oswald together at the Lake Pontchartrain seawall. Once Bundy had been exposed in the preliminary hearing, he was now fair game for Walter Sheridan and NBC. In their attempt to discredit Bundy, NBC aired interviews with two fellow convicts, Miguel Torres and John Cancler. Cancler, a convicted burglar and pimp, appeared first and said Bundy had told him he was going to lie to the DA’s office to get out of prison. Torres, whose own record of heroin abuse, burglary, pimping, assault, and suspected murder out rivaled Cancler’s, was currently serving a nine-year sentence for robbery. He said that Bundy told him he was going to make up a story about Shaw to get the DA to “cut him loose” from prison. After the airing of the NBC special, Garrison invited Messrs. Torres and Cancler to repeat their stories in front of the Grand Jury. Both pleaded the Fifth Amendment and were subsequently convicted of contempt. Another problem with Torres’ story is his accusation that Bundy needed the DA to “cut him loose” from prison. In a recently released memorandum from the New Orleans DA’s files, former aide William Gurvich wrote of his investigation of Bundy. Gurvich states, “Shortly after my interview with Bundy, I contacted local narcotics officers for background information on him. I also made an extensive inquiry into his criminal history.” Of his heroin use Gurvich writes, “[Bundy] uses four or five capsules of heroin daily… This amount is considered sufficient for addiction, but is not an excessive amount as the more heavily addicted use as much as 20-30 capsules daily.” Gurvich goes on to write “Bundy claimed he was in Parish Prison at the time because he went there voluntarily when he felt himself reverting back to the use of narcotics and feared the consequences of his addiction. Official records corroborate this.” Bundy was on probation for breaking into a cigarette machine, but was not serving time. So much for Bundy needing to be “cut loose.” Since NBC offered to relocate Perry Russo to California and provide him with a job if he changed his original testimony one can only imagine what incentives Sheridan offered Cancler and Torres.
Garrison’s one time “aide”, the aforementioned William Gurvich also assisted Sheridan having left the DA’s office several weeks earlier. As Garrison noted shortly after the broadcast Gurvich didn’t so much resign as “drift away about six weeks ago” and that since that time he had been in contact with Walter Sheridan. Gurvich also admittedly made off with the DA’s master file. The CIA was so smitten with Gurvich that they wanted to make sure he was in touch with Shaw’s lawyers. In their enthusiasm to give Shaw’s lawyers all the help they could the CIA recommended:
Shaw’s attorneys ought to talk to William H. GURVICH. This is an excellent suggestion. It is assumed they have done so, or plan to, but we should try to assure that they do.
One other witness Sheridan used makes for an interesting case study of Sheridan’s abuse of power. Fred Leemans, the owner of a Turkish bath house in New Orleans, originally stated that Shaw had frequented his establishment using the name of Clay Bertrand. By the time Sheridan and company got to him, he went on the NBC special claiming he had been offered a $2500 bribe by one of Garrison’s men in exchange for his incriminating testimony. After the NBC special had aired, Leemans came forward with the truth. In a sworn statement Leemans admitted that part of the reason he participated in the show was threatening phone calls “relative to the information that I had given Mr. Garrison.” Leemans also recalled a visit from a man with a badge who stated that he was a government agent. The man supposedly told Leemans that the government was checking bar owners in the Slidell area for possible income tax violations. The man also warned him “it was not smart” to be involved in the Clay Shaw case “because a lot of people that had been involved got hurt.” An anonymous caller told Leemans to change his statement and claim he had been bribed. The caller also suggested that Leemans contact Irvin Dymond, one of Shaw’s attorneys. After contacting Dymond, Leemans was introduced to Walter Sheridan. Leemans claimed Dymond offered an attorney and bond in the event he was charged with giving false information to the DA’s office. Leemans said his appearance on the show was taped in the office of Aaron Kohn, managing director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, in the presence of Sheridan and Dymond.
The newly released CIA files present an interesting biography of “reporter” Sheridan. In 1955 Sheridan was security approved as an investigator for the CIA. A month later this was cancelled because Sheridan accepted a position at the ultra-secret National Security Agency. In 1956 he was security approved once again by the CIA so that he could attend their “Basic Orientation Course”. After leaving the NSA, Sheridan went to work for Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department in the “Get Hoffa” squad, where his tactics in nailing Hoffa earned him a rebuke from none other than Chief Justice Earl Warren and paved the way for Hoffa’s eventual release. With this background in the intelligence communities Sheridan was now apparently qualified to work for NBC as a reporter, despite having no previous journalism experience. However, documents reveal that Sheridan did not sever contact with the CIA. In early May of 1967 the Counter Intelligence office of the CIA issued a memorandum for the Deputy Director of Plans which stated:
Richard Lansdale, Associate General Counsel, has advised us that NBC plans to do a derogatory TV special on Garrison and his probe of the Kennedy assassination; that NBC regards Garrison as a menace to the country and means to destroy him. The program is to be presented within the next few weeks. Mr. Lansdale learned this information from Mr. Walter Sheridan of NBC.]
As noted previously, during Sheridan’s tenure in New Orleans he enlisted the aid of Richard Townley from NBC’s affiliate, WDSU-TV. Townley’s loose tongue offered further proof that the NBC White Paper was no more than a deliberate attempt to sabotage the investigation and to ruin Jim Garrison. A recently released FBI memo reads:
A local FBI agent reported that Richard Townley, WDSU-TV, New Orleans, remarked to a special agent of the New Orleans office last evening that he had received instructions from NBC, New York, to prepare a one hour TV special on Jim Garrison with the instruction “shoot him down.”
After the program aired, Garrison petitioned the FCC who agreed that the program was biased and granted Garrison a 30-minute rebuttal to air on July 15 at 7:30 P.M. — hardly equal time. Nevertheless, the NBC program aided greatly in the discreditation of the DA’s office and potentially contaminated the Shaw jury pool.
In addition to the aforementioned Richard Townley, the local New Orleans news media seemed to have more than its fair share of newscasters willing to flack for the intelligence agencies. Ed Planer, also of WDSU, offered to share information he had relative to the Garrison probe with the FBI. Also reporting to the FBI was Assistant U.S. Attorney Gene Palmisano. In a May 12th memo from the New Orleans office to Director Hoover, Palmisano stated that he had received information that NBC was planning a White Paper concerning Garrison and that this news special would destroy the credibility of Garrison’s investigation.
As these repeated and obviously orchestrated attacks on the DA’s office continued, Garrison decided to fight back. On July 7 Walter Sheridan was charged with four counts of public bribery and Richard Townley was charged with attempted bribery and intimidation of witnesses. Sheridan’s New Orleans attorneys of record were Milton Brener, a former Assistant D.A. under Garrison, now vociferously anti-Garrison, and Edward Baldwin of Baldwin and Quaid. In May of 1967, Baldwin’s partner James Quaid wrote a letter to Richard Helms, then Director of the CIA, requesting that the Agency place his name “on their referral list of qualified attorneys in this area.” However, Sheridan’s Washington representation is much more illuminating.
Herbert Miller was a former head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice who had worked closely with Walter Sheridan. In the aftermath of the assassination Miller was the Department of Justice’s point man in Dallas coordinating the Justice, FBI and Texas investigations. After leaving the DOJ, Miller entered private practice in the Washington firm of Miller, McCarthy, Evans, and Cassidy — the Evans in this case being former FBI Assistant Director Courtney Evans. In 1967 Miller went to work for the CIA representing the Agency’s interests in the Hans Tofte case. (Tofte was a long-time CIA covert operative who worked in the Domestic Operations Division with his protégé, Tracy Barnes. In 1966 he was fired by the Agency for apparently hoarding classified material in his apartment.) While he was representing the CIA in the Tofte flap, Miller found time to interject himself into the Garrison investigation. On May 1, 1967, Miller began offering intelligence on the Garrison investigation to the CIA.
Later that week Miller called CIA Associate General Counsel Richard Lansdale to inform him of the expected arrival in Washington of Alvin Beauboeuf. Beauboeuf was one of assassination suspect David Ferrie’s close friends, having accompanied him on his mad dash to Texas on the day of the assassination. Miller’s source on Beauboeuf was Walter Sheridan. As Lansdale notes in his memo, “[the NBC special] is expected to ‘bury’ Garrison because everyone is convinced that Garrison is a wild and dangerous man.” Miller went on to assure the CIA that “Beauboeuf would be glad to talk with us or help in any way we want.” Garrison would note that after Beauboeuf’s Washington trip “a change came over Beauboeuf; he refused to cooperate with us further and he made charges against my investigators.”
To recap, we have evidence that NBC reporter Sheridan was providing intelligence on the Garrison investigation to a CIA lawyer, a situation that indicates certain sinister possibilities. In fact, recently declassified records show that Sheridan wasn’t satisfied with solely presenting his own warped view of Garrison. A May 11th CIA memo reveals that Sheridan wanted to meet with the CIA “under any terms we propose” and that Sheridan desired to make the CIA’s view of Garrison “a part of the background in the following NBC show.”
While Sheridan’s litigation was pending, Miller began doing double duty as a conduit between Shaw’s lawyers and the CIA. In May of 1968 Miller wrote to the CIA’s Lansdale:
Dear Dick:
Enclosed are the documents I received from Clay Shaw’s attorney, Ed Wegmann.
Best Regards,
Herbert J. Miller, Jr.
The following month Miller provided the Agency with at least two more such packages.
Miller was certainly a very busy man during this time frame. While Miller was acting as a CIA courier for Shaw’s lawyers and representing Walter Sheridan, he was also performing similar duties for Gordon Novel. While Novel was fighting extradition from Ohio, Miller came to his aid and was successful in getting an Ohio court to quash Garrison’s subpoena. Miller also provided the CIA with the transcripts from Novel’s civil suit against Garrison and Playboy. After Novel successfully avoided Garrison’s extradition he sent a clipping to former CIA Director Allen Dulles. In his own handwritten marginalia to Dulles, Novel took great pride in Miller’s victory, noting what a great job “Miller the Killer” did for him. It is interesting to note that the supposedly itinerant Novel now had four lawyers representing him: Miller, Stephen Plotkin, Jerry Weiner, and Elmer Gertz. Gertz, who had also represented Jack Ruby, was one of Novel’s lawyers in his civil suit. When answering a list of interrogatories posed to him by Playboy’s lawyers Novel stated that payment of legal fees to Weiner and Plotkin were “clandestinely remunerated by a party or parties unknown to me.” It was later revealed to a Garrison investigator by a former member of the CIA that Plotkin was receiving his fees from the CIA via a cutout, Stephen Lemman. As for Miller, just a few short years after the Shaw trial ended, he represented President Richard Nixon as his post-resignation attorney.
What brings the Sheridan affair full circle is a friend of Sheridan’s, one Carmine S. Bellino. Bellino was a former FBI agent and Kennedy insider who worked with Robert Kennedy on the McClellan Committee in the fifties and was brought on to Sheridan’s “Get Hoffa” squad in the sixties. In 1954 Bellino actually shared his office with CIA/Mafia go-between, Robert Maheu. But what is troubling about the Bellino/Sheridan relationship is that Bellino once worked with none other than Guy Banister, performing background checks for the Remington Rand Corporation. In the seventies Bellino became an investigator on the Watergate Committee and did his best to steer the committee away from investigating any CIA involvement in the crime.
In a 1967 memo the CIA outlined several mass media approaches to counter Garrison’s charges. One of their recommendations was to make sure that CIA Director Helms assure that various media outlets “receive a coherent picture of Garrison’s ‘facts’ and motives. In anticipation of a trial, it would be prudent to have carefully selected channels of communication lined up in advance.” Certainly the evidence above indicates that NBC was one such “channel.”
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Yes, there was a cover-up: The JFK assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald and the ‘Magic Bullet Theory’
By Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar
(originally a Chicago Tribune commentary, 9-18-13)
In his opinion article “Who needs facts when you have conspiracy theorists?” (Sept. 6), Cory Franklin asserts that the film JFK is “far removed from historical accuracy” and “is full of distortions and outright falsehoods,” yet he offers not a single specific example. As co-screenwriters of the film, we want to assure Franklin and your readers that we made every effort to be as accurate and true to historical fact as possible.
The film is based on two source-noted nonfiction books and two years of our own additional research, including hundreds of interviews. We have published an annotated screenplay, JFK: The Book of the Film, that provides source notes for every fact in the film and labels clearly what is speculation, where there has been compositing of characters and where dramatic license has been taken.
Franklin’s labeling of the film as “a propaganda piece meant to demonize a covert, evil, right-wing paramilitary group” makes us wonder if he has ever seen the film. It bears no resemblance to the film we made, which depicts various scenarios of what might have happened in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but most prominently explores the possibility that the CIA was involved.
Franklin repeats the Warren Commission’s long-discredited conclusion that “Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy,” but offers zero evidence to support this claim. The facts lead to a very different conclusion.
- Lee Oswald was given a nitrate test after his arrest, and it proved that he had not fired a rifle that day.
- According to his fellow Marines, Oswald was a mediocre marksman at best.
- The most skilled FBI sharpshooters tried to duplicate the shooting feat within the time frame set out by the Zapruder film and failed.
- The Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, the weapon Oswald was alleged to have used, is well-known to gun dealers as one of the least accurate rifles ever made, and the particular one Oswald allegedly used had a defective sight.
- Warren Commission staffer (later U.S. senator) Arlen Specter’s “Magic Bullet Theory,” which attempted to account for the seven wounds in Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally with only two bullets, defies the laws of physics and strains the credulity of any reasonable person.
- Fifty-one eyewitnesses interviewed by the Warren Commission testified that they heard or saw shots from the grassy knoll of Dealey Plaza in front of the president, not the Texas School Book Depository in back, meaning there had to have been a second gunman.
- The Zapruder film clearly shows the president’s head and body snapped back when hit by the third shot, meaning that it came from in front, not behind.
- The House Select Committee on Assassinations’ 1979 investigation concluded that there was a fourth shot and a “probable conspiracy,” based on acoustical evidence contained on a police Dictabelt recorder. In 2001, a more sophisticated acoustical study published in Science and Justice, a publication of Britain’s Forensic Science Society, confirmed the House committee’s conclusions.
Our film does not come to a firm conclusion about who was responsible for the Kennedy assassination, but it does reject the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman theory as implausible at best – a conclusion that 90 percent of the American people share, according to polls.
Finally, Franklin attempts to tarnish the reputation of former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison by saying that his case against Clay Shaw, charged with conspiring to assassinate Kennedy, was “quickly laughed out of court.” The truth is that Garrison’s case was sabotaged by the federal government and never had a fair day in court. Every one of Garrison’s attempts to extradite key witnesses from other states was rejected – something that had never happened in his six previous years as district attorney. His routine requests for important evidence such as X-rays and photos from the president’s autopsy, andtax records and intelligence files on Oswald, were denied. Federal prosecutors refused to serve his subpoenas on CIA officials such as Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. Garrison’s office phones were tapped, and Garrison and his staff were followed by FBI agents. Key witnesses were bribed or died under mysterious circumstances. And the district attorney’s files were stolen and turned over to Shaw’s defense counsel before the trial began.
Not the least of these successful efforts at sabotage was the attempt to destroy Garrison’s personal credibility. We know now, as a result of released Freedom of Information documents, that defamatory and false articles about Garrison were planted in the mainstream press as part of a smear campaign orchestrated by the CIA to discredit critics of the Warren Commission. All of these facts are source-noted in our annotated screenplay.
We worked closely with Garrison for several years and knew him well. He was an honest, highly intelligent and courageous man. We believe the American people, including Cory Franklin, should thank Garrison for standing up for the truth about the JFK assassination against the full power of the United States government’s cover-up.
