Reclaiming History (230 page)

Perhaps more importantly, the critics had made enough noise and charges that for the first time they were making inroads into the nation’s establishment in their call for a reinvestigation of the assassination. In July of 1966, JFK speechwriter and adviser Richard N. Goodwin, believing that Epstein’s
Inquest
, which essentially alleged that the Warren Report was hastily prepared and inadequate, was “a fairly impressive book,” became the first member of JFK’s inner circle to publicly call for a small group of prominent citizens who had no connection with public office to review the Warren Report and recommend whether or not there should be a reinvestigation of Kennedy’s death.
¹³
A few months later, in November, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a former assistant to the president whose book on Kennedy’s presidency,
A Thousand Days
, had won a Pulitzer Prize, went further than Goodwin, stating there was a “residue of uncertainty” among the American people about the assassination and recommending that Congress should initiate a new inquiry “to reduce, to narrow that zone of uncertainty.” That same week,
Life
magazine called for a new investigation (joined by the
Saturday Evening Post
two months later), while its sister publication,
Time
, took the opposite view. But opposition among most members in Congress to a reinvestigation was strong, a typical response coming from Carl Albert, the House Democratic majority leader, that he wasn’t troubled by “minor inconsistencies” in the report and felt confident “the Warren Commission answered the basic questions.”
¹⁴

But two days later in an editorial, even the nation’s leading newspaper, the
New York Times
, joined in the chorus of those who wanted something to be done, not the reinvestigation that most of the other voices wanted, but for the Warren Commission and its staff to address themselves to “the many puzzling questions that have been raised…There are enough solid doubts of thoughtful citizens,” the paper said, that now “require answers. Further dignified silence, or merely more denials by the commission or its staff, are no longer enough.”
¹⁵

The tide against the Warren Commission was gaining so much vigor that on September 25,
New York Times
White House correspondent Tom Wicker wrote, “A public discussion group in New York sought to hold a round-table session about the Warren Report…The major difficulty for the group was in finding anyone of stature who was willing to
defend
the Warren Report and its findings.”
¹⁶

The next year, 1967, brought two of the best, but inevitably flawed, books the conspiracy community has ever produced. One was Josiah Thompson’s classic
Six Seconds in Dallas
, which perceptively focused on the technical part of the case (firearms, bullet trajectories, photographic and medical evidence, etc.) more than any book before it. Thompson, a professor of philosophy who became an ardent student of the assassination, was hired by
Life
magazine to be its special consultant on the assassination.
Life
also allowed him to work with and study one of the first-generation copies of the Zapruder film it had purchased, which put him in an envied position among his fellow critics and theorists. From his examination of the film, he was the first Warren Commission critic to postulate the theory that Kennedy had been hit by two shots in the head almost simultaneously, one from his rear, one from his right front.

The other was Sylvia Meagher’s well-researched
Accessories after the Fact
, in which her sense of scholarship is consistently at odds with her strong conspiracy orientation (admitting to her readers she had an “instantaneous skepticism about the official version of what happened in Dallas”), with the former barely managing to prevail, the book being reasonably sober and factual.

The year 1967 also brought the first article about the conspiracy phenomenon: a June article in the
New Yorker
by Calvin Trillin appropriately titled “The Buffs,” which was a peek into their world of passion and idiosyncracy. But Trillin didn’t coin the term
buffs
, even though he remarked at one point in his article, “They are also known as ‘assassination buffs.’”
¹⁷
*

Although a plurality of Americans were now accepting the conspiracy argument of the Warren Commission critics, this meant nothing to the theorists if there wasn’t going to be a reinvestigation into the assassination to find out just who the actual villains were so they could be brought to a punishing justice. So when New Orleans DA Jim Garrison announced his decision in March of 1967 to prosecute Clay Shaw for the murder of Kennedy, many members of the conspiracy community reached a high-water mark of excitement and hope and flocked to New Orleans to help him in any way they could to get to the bottom of what they perceived to be, so far, an impenetrable mystery. The cafés and bars along the fabled Bourbon Street were now rocking with not only Dixieland jazz but also the tingle of fevered, late-night conversations among the theorists.
†
The conspiracy community was on such a high that nothing could penetrate the armor of their resolve, not even a four-part CBS news documentary hosted by Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather and seen by an estimated 30 million Americans in June of 1967, which concluded that Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone. Garrison was going to deliver them to Nirvana, and neither the Warren Commission nor the esteemed Cronkite and Rather were going to stand in their way.

Garrison’s ultimate, miserable failure in 1969 (see later text), with the world watching, dealt a solar plexus blow to the movement, and many members, angry at the embarrassment Garrison brought to them, denounced him as a fraud and a megalomaniac. As conspiracy theorist Robert Anson put it, because of Garrison, “bills in Congress asking for a new investigation were quietly shelved. The reporters who had spent months digging up leads put away their notebooks.”
¹⁸
But in the detritus of his ignoble defeat, Garrison had nonetheless inspired a new generation of conspiracy theorists and made a very significant contribution to the movement that has endured to this day. He added a whole new New Orleans subplot to the case “with its own cast of characters. By finding associates of Oswald, naming names, locating addresses of secret rendevous, and logging dates and times of purported plot events, he gave new impetus to conspiracy thinking.”
¹⁹
Though hurt by Garrison’s fiasco, the foot soldiers in the conspiracy movement continued, unabated, in their work and charges. Indeed, the skewering of the Warren Commission’s findings by the critics became so intense, and there were so many “new revelations,” that by 1969 an article in
Ramparts
was declaring that the critics “were doing the job that the Dallas police, the FBI, and the Warren Commission should have done in the first place.”
²⁰

In a preview of Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie,
JFK
, the year 1973 brought
Executive Action
, the first feature film on the assassination, to the big screen. Based on a novel by Mark Lane and Donald Freed,
Executive Action: Assassination of a Head of State,
and starring Burt Lancaster, the screenplay, written by Dalton Trumbo, one of the alleged Communists blacklisted by Hollywood following the McCarthy hearings in the early 1950s, hypothesized the assassination of Kennedy by three professional gunmen (none of whom was Oswald, who, the movie suggests, was just a patsy). The gunmen were commissioned by the right wing and powerful members of the nation’s military-industrial complex, who had concluded that Kennedy had to die because they feared he would sign an all-encompassing test-ban treaty, pull out of Vietnam (based on his announced intent to withdraw one thousand troops by the end of 1963), and provoke a black revolution by his proposed civil rights legislation. The 1974 film
Parallax View
also assumes a conspiracy behind the assassination of a Kennedy-like politician with a Warren-like commission that bungles the investigation.

The year 1973 also saw the formation of the Assassination Information Bureau in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The group was led by Carl Oglesby, a sometime instructor at MIT operating out of his home who was the former president of Students for a Democratic Society. He and his four associates (the latter all in their twenties) spoke to increasingly large audiences on hundreds of college campuses, from Maine to Hawaii and parts in between, urging a reopening of the investigation into the assassination, and were very instrumental in helping to get Congress to eventually do so. (The group folded shortly after the HSCA issued its report in 1979.)

In March of 1975, Geraldo Rivera’s
Good Night America
show on ABC national television showed millions of Americans, for the very first time, the Zapruder film and the head snap to the rear. As I indicated earlier, this created, overnight, a whole new wave of Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists demanding that the federal government—not a clearly irresponsible and inept local DA in New Orleans—order a new investigation. The climate in Washington was heating up: the Rockefeller Commission, also in 1975, revealed that the CIA had trespassed beyond the margins of its jurisdiction (limited to gathering
foreign
intelligence) and had infiltrated and spied on anti–Vietnam War dissidents here in the United States; and the Church Committee in 1976 found that U.S. intelligence agencies (for years one of the main suspected conspirators behind the assassination) had engaged in clandestine foreign operations that most Americans considered far beyond the moral and ethical pale (most prominently the CIA’s effort, with organized crime no less, to murder Cuban premier Fidel Castro). With so much accumulated cynicism about national affairs spawned by Watergate and the Vietnam War, the conspiracy movement finally received enough institutional support to get the investigation of the assassination reopened. The result was the HSCA’s inquiry from 1977 to 1979, which found that the president “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”
²¹

But the HSCA’s conclusion never had the effect on the American public that had been anticipated, a public that already believed in a conspiracy and had no comprehension of the highly sophisticated acoustic basis for the HSCA’s conclusion. The committee’s nebulous conclusion, in which it named no group or individual as being responsible for the assassination, and then proceeded to seal much of its own documentation, proved to be unsatisfying to the conspiracy theorists, who were hungry for redder meat. Conspiracy theorist Gaeton Fonzi said that the HSCA’s investigation was “simply not broad enough, deep enough, ambitious enough, nor honest enough.”
²²

Though the HSCA’s conclusion never gave the conspiracy movement much of a boost, most television specials, which had started in the 1960s, continued to trumpet the conspiracy theory. And between 1978 and 1990 the cottage industry the assassination had created also continued, without letup, to churn out books and magazine articles, the most notable of which were Anthony Summers’s
Conspiracy
and David Lifton’s
Best Evidence
in 1980 and Henry Hurt’s
Reasonable Doubt
in 1985,
*
all three of which remain prominent in the conspiracy genre and have devotees to this very day. Summers’s
Conspiracy
regurgitated almost every conspiracy theory and allegation that had previously been propounded, but in a more literary and less strident fashion. The book got good reviews from the mainline press and mostly gave the reader a mass of suppositions and innuendos, each pointing toward a conspiracy that even the author seemed to distance himself from for the most part, accepting just enough to leave the reader with a sense that there couldn’t possibly be this much smoke without the fire of conspiracy. Lifton’s book, which also got good reviews and sold even better than Summers’s tome, argued that the conspirators had enlisted the work of surgeons to rearrange the bullet wounds in Kennedy’s body to frame Oswald. The book was meticulously researched but so far out in its theory that most responsible conspiracy theorists (perhaps an oxymoron) felt constrained to reject it because of its lack of feasibility. Hurt’s
Reasonable Doubt
was a fairly reasonable analysis of the assassination from a conspiratorial perspective, but loses its way when Hurt makes the centerpiece of his book a “confession” to the assassination by a patient in a mental hospital.

Three other best-selling conspiracy books in the 1980s, all in 1989, were Jim Marrs’s
Crossfire
, a low-brow version of Summers’s
Conspiracy; High Treason
, by conspiracy hawker extraordinaire Robert Groden and his more accomplished coauthor, Harrison Livingstone, which argued, among many other things, that the autopsy photos were altered; and
Mafia Kingfish
, by John H. Davis, claiming that Mafia don Carlos Marcello was behind JFK’s murder.

But by the second half of the 1980s, interest among the general public in the assassination and the conspiracy aspects of it was definitely on the wane. One reason, writer Pete Hamill pointed out, is that by 1988 “an entire generation had come to maturity with no memory at all of the Kennedy years; for them, Kennedy is the name of an airport or a boulevard or a high school.”
²³

That all changed in 1991 with Oliver Stone’s successful movie
JFK
, which introduced a whole new generation of young Americans to every hoary conspiracy argument and theory that had been around for years, dressing them up in a well-done fantasy movie with marquee Hollywood actors like Kevin Costner and Joe Pesci to sell the conspiracy psychedelic nostrum as the solution to the question of who was behind Kennedy’s murder. Millions of Americans were again talking about the assassination, particularly its alleged conspiratorial ramifications. The national interest the movie ignited actually led to the passage by Congress of the JFK Act in 1992 and the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) to implement the JFK Act’s mandate to release to the American public every previously sealed document “related” to the assassination.