Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: VINCENT BUGLIOSI

  • Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: Besmirching History

    Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: Besmirching History

    Besmirching History: Vincent Bugliosi Assassinates Kennedy Again

    The purpose of Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History is to defend the integrity of the USG National Security State by grossly distorting its nature and function, by disguising that it is the servant of factions of the ruling classes within the United States, and by pretending that it did not and could not contemplate the assassination of a democratically elected President whose recalcitrant politics fell outside its parameters. According to Bugliosi, only the lunatic can seriously entertain that Kennedy was murdered because he pursued dÈtente with the USSR, championed nuclear disarmament, decided not to back the invasion of the Bay of Pigs with US military, made a peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the military wanted invasion and war, and decided to withdraw US troops from Vietnam rather than pursue by brute force an imperial venture in Southeast Asia. According to Bugliosi, Oswald is not just the murderer of Kennedy, he is the only one involved, and he is nothing but “a first class ‘nut.’” (945) Thus, Kennedy’s murder is deprived of any political significance whatsoever.

    Bugliosi considers himself at liberty to mock those who appreciate the opposing world view, inter alia, “conspiracy icon Vincent Salandria [for claiming that] ‘the killing of Kennedy represented a coup d’Ètat.’ … I suppose that since a coup d’Ètat is defined as a sudden, unconstitutional change of state policy and leadership ‘by a group of persons in authority,’ … you couldn’t even have a coup without the involvement, cooperation, and complicity of groups like the FBI, CIA, and military-industrial complex.” Individuals who entertain such notions are so wrapped up in “their fertile delusions” that they substitute finding a motive for finding evidence, make no connections between, e.g., the CIA and Oswald, and thus sadly show nothing but “this crazy, incredibly childlike reasoning and mentality that has driven and informed virtually all of the pro-conspiracy sentiment in the Kennedy assassination from the beginning.” (985-987) We shall answer Bugliosi by showing direct involvement of all these organs of state power in the cover-up and the assassination, though in this brief excerpt, only the FBI.

    Three Mannlicher-Carcano shell casings were found in the SE corner of the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository. The home movie film of the assassination taken by Abraham Zapruder, the obstruction of the line of sight to the motorcade by a large oak tree, and the fact that bystander James Tague nearly several hundred feet away was struck by cement fragments from a missed bullet that nicked the curb, imposed constraints on the official cover-up. The final shot that blew open Kennedy’s head, and the missed shot, left just one other bullet to do all the rest of the damage to the president and Governor Connally. The “single-bullet” theory is essential to the Warren Commission’s indictment of Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman, and Bugliosi is committed to it in full. ” … in this case, the physical evidence isn’t just persuasive or even overwhelming, it’s absolutely conclusive that only three shot were fired, and that one of the two shots that hit Kennedy [CE 399] also went on to hit Connally. Hence, Connally was not hit by a separate bullet, which would have established a second gunman and a conspiracy.” (451)

    The official story has that bullet, CE 399, enter President Kennedy from behind through the base of his neck to the right of his spine at a steep downward angle, pass through him without hitting bone, exit at the very base of his anterior neck, and then strike, as Bugliosi tells us, “the upper right area of Connally’s back, exit the right side of the chest (just below the right nipple), reenter the back of his right wrist, exit the opposite side, and finally come to rest after causing a superficial entrance wound in the left thigh.” [1] This gentle description omits that 399 shattered Connally’s fifth rib in many places, then broke the radius bone in his wrist, the densest and hardest-to-fracture bone in the human body, yet came out unscathed except for a slight flattening at its end.

     

     

    Real bullets don’t behave this way: when they break bone they are smashed, dented or mangled, whereas this slightly flattened bullet looks much like the sample Mannlicher-Carcano bullets fired by the FBI in its tests into cotton wadding or by Henry Hurt (Reasonable Doubt, 1985, photo section) into a bucket of water.

     

     

    The frame-up of Lee Harvey Oswald was extensive, and pre-meditated long before the assassination itself. Here, however, I want to give you one example of the frame-up that is clean and simple, easy to understand and easy to remember. Bugliosi writes of Friday night, 11:30 p.m., the day of the assassination. Dallas Chief of Police Curry is being pressured to turn over his evidence to the FBI, when Curry has the only legal jurisdiction, and if something goes wrong with the evidence that undermines Oswald’s prosecution, Curry will be blamed for it. Finally, Curry strikes a compromise to loan the evidence to the FBI for 24 hours only, provided there are “photographs of everything sent to Washington, and an accountable FBI agent, Vince Drain, to sign for and accompany all of the evidence to and from the nation’s capital.” (183) In an endnote on p.158, Bugliosi smears Curry by repeating sworn testimony from a subsequent DPD custodian of the evidence that “Jesse E. Curry, had pilfered the files to get material for his 1969 book, Retired Dallas Chief Jesse Curry Reveals His Personal JFK Assassination File,” making Curry seem a cheap opportunist. It will become immediately clear why Curry may have had to pilfer the evidence. A portion the DPD picture of the evidence before it was taken to FBIHQ follows from p.88 of the 1969 edition of Curry’s book.

     

     

    Exhibit “9” is the gun taken from Oswald when he was arrested in the Texas Theater. #4 is “a .38 Special bullet taken from Officer Tippit’s body.” And, the fact to take home with you, #3 is “a metal fragment from the arm of Governor Connally.” The smashed bullet fragment, Exhibit #3, is wider than the .38 Special and about as wide as CE 399 itself. Stop and think! Here, in Exhibit #3, is the full assassination cover-up in a single example: The bullet fragment #3 smashed after breaking so much bone is at least the size of your pinky nail. It did not come from CE 399, so the FBI is not framing Oswald because they sincerely believe he is the guilty lone assassin, but because that is the assassination cover story, full stop. CE 399 was, of course, planted in order to have a bullet whose ballistic markings could be matched to the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that Oswald allegedly used to shoot Kennedy. There were many other bullets fired that day, but this bullet fragment gives the others collective legitimacy.[2]

    The crucial point is that the FBI could not undertake this frame-up without full confidence that the National Security State, of which it is a member, had both the will and the means to accomplish all aspects of the cover-up. There were multiple shooters from multiple locations. Thus, masses of evidence would have to be ignored or destroyed. Scores of witnesses would need to be overlooked, dismissed, intimidated, or eliminated, most especially Lee Harvey Oswald. August committees would have to be formed whose witting members would pressure, seduce, or trick the others into sufficient compliance to fool the people. High-ranking well-respected trusted members of society who control the media would have to be complicit in fronting the salesmanship. Minions of the intelligence community, only relatively few of whom were in on the planning stages of the assassination, had to be counted upon to do their part to conceal the plotters of the assassination from the American public. The media would have to be ready and able, and known in advance to the FBI and others to be ready and able to bewilder and confuse the people. In fact, none of the plotters involved in the cover-up would have dared to undertake such a cover-up without the full faith and understanding that the media was under the control of the ruling class and would be used to facilitate, rather than expose, the cover-up. Think! How the hell could any such plotters ever dream of getting away with such a crime but for their control of the fictionally named “free press”? We shall in any case prove such control and use of the media. This “national security state” is not jargon, but the ugly reality behind the façade of democracy in American life.

    We shall, in due course, reveal the essentials of the National Security State by making the “invisible government” visible. It is not a pretty sight. The only silver lining from Curry’s Exhibit #3 is that it liberates us to look upon and interpret the evidence for what it is because we know that the National Security State, tool of the ruling class, is lying to us. Bugliosi, needless to say, repeatedly tells us that the evidence for the single-bullet (i.e., that did all the damage to Kennedy and Connally) is compelling and overwhelming.

    Chief Curry provides a copy of the 11/23/63 five-page FBI analysis of the evidence completed within the 24-hour window given by the DPD. Guess what?† The fragment from Connally’s arm is returned not weighed, to the Dallas Police Department.† (The only other bullet fragments that the FBI does not weigh are two fragments removed at autopsy from Kennedy’s head.) In the process, it will be doctored or replaced to produce a drastic reduction in size and shape that will conform to the official story, and that will give rise to endless debate about whether the paltry fragments remaining as official evidence might have come from CE 399. [3] To answer Bugliosi, we have just shown the part of the coup d’Ètat directly engaging the FBI in the cover-up.

    Citations

     

    1. Reclaiming History, p. 447, with grammatical tense changed to fit this essay’s text.

    2. Robert J. Groden, The Killing of a President, 1993, under “Gunshots” in the index for possibly six shots, esp. pp. 41, 68-70 for photos of where missed shots struck.

    3. In Post Mortem, JFK Cover-up Smashed!, ©1969, 1971, 1975, Harold Weisberg, the doyen of micro-analytic detail, discusses Curry’s book and the 11/23/63 FBI report analyzing the bullets sent by Chief Curry, with particular attention to Q9, the fragment taken from Connolly’s arm. (See especially pp. 603-604) Weisberg complains loud and long and justifiably at the paucity and poverty of the analysis, and about the omission of the requested spectrographic analysis, all of which permits endless debate about what the evidence means rather than “smashing” the cover-up. But the keen-eyed, detail-oriented Weisberg apparently never notes that the FBI did not weigh Q9 (DPD Exhibit #3), that it returned it to DPD, and most crucially – what would have smashed the cover-up by itself — that Q9 is the size of a pinky nail. The Killing of a President, 1993, p.100, has a cropped picture of the evidence that DPD sent the FBI on 11/23/63 that is almost identical to the one in this article, but he offers it without any caption or explanation so that DPD Exhibit #3, which is FBI Q9, is meaningless, like so many of the otherwise excellent pictures in Groden’s book. Although a picture may be worth a thousand words, this is the

  • Letter to the Editor re: Bryan Burrough’s review of Reclaiming History

    from The New York Times

    June 17, 2007

    J.F.K.

    To the Editor:

    Bryan Burrough’s laudatory review of Vincent Bugliosi’s book on the Kennedy assassination (May 20) is superficial and gratuitously insulting. “Conspiracy theorists” — blithe generalization — should according to Burroughs be “ridiculed, even shunned … marginalized the way we’ve marginalized smokers.” Let’s see now. The following people to one degree or another suspected that President Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy, and said so either publicly or privately: Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon; Attorney General Robert Kennedy; John Kennedy’s widow, Jackie; his special adviser dealing with Cuba at the United Nations, William Attwood; F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover (!); Senators Richard Russell (a Warren Commission member), and Richard Schweiker and Gary Hart (both of the Senate Intelligence Committee); seven of the eight congressmen on the House Assassinations Committee and its chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey; the Kennedy associates Joe Dolan, Fred Dutton, Richard Goodwin, Pete Hamill, Frank Mankiewicz, Larry O’Brien, Kenneth O’Donnell and Walter Sheridan; the Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman, who rode with the president in the limousine; the presidential physician, Dr. George Burkley; Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago; Frank Sinatra; and the “60 Minutes” producer Don Hewitt. All of the above, à la Burrough, were idiots.

    Not so, of course. Most of them were close to the events and people concerned, and some had privileged access to evidence and intelligence that threw doubt on the “lone assassin” version. That doubt remains today. Bugliosi himself this year joined us, Don DeLillo, Gerald Posner, Robert Blakey and two dozen other writers on the assassination in signing an open letter that appeared in the March 15 issue of The New York Review of Books. The letter focused on a specific unresolved lead, the discovery that a highly regarded C.I.A. officer named George Joannides was in 1963 running an anti-Castro exile group that had a series of encounters with Oswald shortly before the assassination.

    This is obviously pertinent, yet the C.I.A. hid the fact from four J.F.K. investigations. Since 1998, when the agency did reluctantly disclose the merest outline of what Joannides was up to, it has energetically stonewalled a Freedom of Information suit to obtain the details of its officer’s activities. Here we are in 2007, 15 years after Congress unanimously approved the J.F.K. Assassination Records Act mandating the “immediate” release of all assassination-related records, and the C.I.A. is claiming in federal court that it has the right not to do so.

    And now your reviewer, Burrough, seems to lump together all those who question the official story as marginal fools. Burrough’s close-minded stance should be unacceptable to every historian and journalist worthy of the name — especially at a time when a federal agency is striving vigorously to suppress very relevant information.

    Jefferson Morley
    Washington

    Norman Mailer
    Provincetown, Mass.

    Anthony Summers
    Waterford, Ireland

    David Talbot
    San Francisco

  • Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History

    Epic book resurrects finding that Oswald acted alone in killing JFK

    Bugliosi picks only the evidence that backs his argument

    This review originally appeared in the June 3, 2007 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

    Former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi claims to be “Reclaiming History” from the riffraff of conspiracy theorists in his massive new book on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The term “conspiracy theorist” is practically married to the assassination, tossed about the way the House Un-American Activities Committee used to throw around “Communist sympathizer.” One size fits all!

    But according to Bugliosi, conspiracy theorists are the reason more than 75 percent of Americans don’t believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the crimes. Bugliosi’s intent is to expose its critics as “fraudulent” on the way to resurrecting the conclusion of that panel, which found that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

    The first question to Bugliosi must be, “Who cares?”

    For more than 40 years, every wingnut outside the city limits of Roswell, N.M., has gravitated to the Kennedy case, and Bugliosi attempts to list them all.

    For instance, in a footnote, he skewers someone named Nord Davis Jr, who apparently believes 21 bullets were fired in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza and that Parkland Hospital doctors confused police officer J.D. Tippit’s body with that of Kennedy.

    Or take the case of James Fetzer, Ph.D., who, Bugliosi points out, has been on a crusade for the past decade to prove that the Zapruder film “is a complete fabrication” put together by some shadowy intelligence agency.

    Many historical events draw wacky theories. The proper response is to ignore them; it is not to write a 1,660-page book exposing their wackiness.

    ON THE OTHER HAND, the Kennedy case is remarkable in that the growth of conspiracy theories has come to obscure the basic evidence. It is as if opinions and wacky theories have grown like a fungus into the basic pattern of facts.

    From the outset, this growth threatened serious research into what actually happened in Dealey Plaza. Bugliosi has performed a useful function by scrubbing away a number of nutty theories that have surfaced since Nov. 22, 1963.

    But what about Bugliosi’s more serious intent — to resuscitate a variant of the Warren Commission’s account of the assassination?

    In 1993, another lawyer, Gerald Posner, tried the same thing in his book Case Closed. Yet Bugliosi cites numerous examples of Posner’s “distortion” and “misrepresentation.” He quotes approvingly a Washington Post review of Posner’s book, which criticized him for presenting “only the evidence that supports the case he’s trying to build, framing the evidence in a way that misleads readers.”

    But this is exactly what Bugliosi does. Like any experienced prosecutor, he highlights the evidence that furthers his case while ignoring or confusing contrary evidence. Examples of this approach can be found almost everywhere in the book.

    Take his spirited defense of Warren Commission junior counsel Arlen Specter’s “single-bullet theory.” Bugliosi agrees that this theory — that Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally were hit by the same bullet — is necessary to conclude that Oswald acted alone. He also acknowledges that the theory was developed by Specter and other commission staff members in the spring of 1964 to save the single-assassin conclusion. He also notes that when the time came to approve it, the commission split down the middle.

    To his credit, he tells us Connally denied from first to last that he was hit by the same bullet that hit Kennedy. His wife, Nellie, testified that she heard a shot and saw the president react to being hit. Only then did she see and hear a second shot crash into her husband’s back.

    Bugliosi tells us Nellie Connally was “confused” and that her husband relied upon her confusion. However, you will find nowhere in Bugliosi’s book the fact that no witness in Dealey Plaza could attest to both men being hit by the same shot or that the FBI’s review of the Zapruder film led them to conclude Connally and Kennedy were hit separately. He tells us that Dr. Malcolm Perry at Parkland Hospital estimated the size of the supposed bullet exit hole in JFK’s throat to be “3 mm to 5 mm in diameter,” but he neglects to tell us that wound ballistics experts at Edgewood Arsenal carried out experiments showing bullets from Oswald’s rifle would cause exit wounds two to three times that size.

    Even more egregious is his handling of the trajectory through JFK’s back and neck. A face-sheet on which notes were taken during the autopsy shows the supposed exit wound in the throat to be higher than the entry wound in the back.

    When the autopsy photos were finally produced in the 1970s, a medical panel concluded that the course of the bullet through Kennedy was at an upward angle (the accepted number is 11 degrees). So how does Kennedy get shot from the sixth floor of a building when the bullet takes an upward path through his body?

    The Warren Commission took the simplest course. The staff let the autopsy doctor instruct a medical illustrator to raise the back wound from the back to the neck. Commission member U.S. Rep. Gerald Ford then corrected a final draft of the panel’s report to read “neck wound” rather than “back wound.” Voila, a “back wound” had become a “neck wound.”

    Faced with that 11 degree upward angle, the House Select Committee on Assassinations took a more inventive approach in its 1978-79 investigation. It just leaned Kennedy forward at the time he was shot.

    And Connally, who took a shot at a 27-degree downward angle? His body position was leaned back a sufficient amount. Voila, an 11-degree upward angle through one body had become a 27-degree downward angle through a second body, thus a straight line had been maintained.

    Like any good prosecutor, Bugliosi admits it was “upward” but never tells us how much. Then he publishes a diagram from the House’s report showing Kennedy bent forward. He says in a caption that the diagram shows “his head tilted forward slightly more than it actually was as shown in the Zapruder film.”

    That’s quite an understatement since the Zapruder film never shows Kennedy bending forward at all. He’s sitting erect in the back seat waving to the crowd. Then when the limousine travels behind a sign and emerges three-quarters of a second later, he’s sitting erect but wounded.

    The Zapruder frames contained in Bugliosi’s book show Kennedy never took the position he had to take for the Warren Commission’s single-bullet theory to work. Bugliosi gets it to work by telling his readers only part of the story and by using a diagram even he admits is inaccurate. This prosecutorial approach infects the whole book and makes it unreliable as a guide to the evidence.

    Little light shed

    Does Bugliosi offer anything new? Not much.

    Three explanations — Bugliosi, the Warren Commission and the House committee — claim Kennedy was shot in the head at Zapruder frame 313. Bugliosi and the commission say Kennedy and Connally were hit simultaneously while the car is behind the sign, frames 207-224.

    The committee moves this single-bullet, double hit earlier to frame 190. It also cites four shots in all with two additional misses fired from the grassy knoll at frame 290 and the sniper’s nest in the book depository at frame 160.

    The commission found that a third shot missed but cannot determine when it was fired or where it hit. Bugliosi has a first shot fired at frame 160, which misses the limousine entirely.

    None of these reconstructions makes much sense. All three require that a large body of evidence indicating JFK was hit in the head from the right front be simply disregarded. All three face the fatal objections to which the single-bullet theory has been subject from the very beginning.

    The House Select Committee’s reconstruction requires the putative gunman in the book depository to have fired blindly into a tree when he would have had a clean shot only a second and a half later.

    Bugliosi’s minor change to the commission’s reconstruction makes less sense than the original. One would expect the first shot from a sniper to be the most accurate. Why would a shooter miss the limousine entirely on his first shot when it was right below him and Kennedy was large in his sight, then hit Kennedy twice with his next two shots at greater ranges?

    As the commission noted, most Dealey Plaza witnesses placed the first shot significantly later. Phil Willis, for example, said the first shot jarred his finger on the shutter of his camera and produced a photo taken at frame 202.

    The real scandal of the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination is that no reconstruction of the event makes sense. We know the event happened in one way rather than another. But the evidence is discordant and irreconcilable at a primitive level. The meaning of this discordance is unclear, but the simplest explanation is that not all the “evidence” is really evidence.

    What is crystal clear, however, is that more than 43 years after the event we don’t know what happened.

    From the very beginning, the event has been left to advocates of one view or another. The Warren Commission put together a case for the prosecution against Oswald. It failed when critics showed its conclusions were not justified by the evidence it considered.

    The same could be said for the House Select Committee, which reached a conclusion diametrically opposed to that of the Warren Commission.

    What this case doesn’t need is more advocacy on the part of lawyers like Posner and Bugliosi. They squeeze the evidence into one mold or another, offering opinions on this or that, buttressed by whatever they choose to tell us, ignoring the rest.

    What this case does need is some old-fashioned, historical scholarship. It’s a shame and a waste of great time and effort that Bugliosi decided to contribute to the problem and not to its solution.