Reclaiming History (4 page)

Although Oswald’s widow, Marina, declined to testify, I can’t think of one
absolutely critical
witness I would have needed—were Oswald alive and I had prosecuted him—whom I did not have at the London trial. (When you have witnesses like the lady at whose home Oswald spent the night before the assassination with his wife, and who testified to Oswald’s storing the murder weapon on the garage floor of her home; the witness who drove Oswald to work on the morning of the assassination and saw Oswald carry a large bag into the Texas School Book Depository Building, Oswald’s place of employment; the witness who was watching the presidential motorcade from a window right below where Oswald was firing his rifle at Kennedy and actually heard the cartridge casings from Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle falling to the floor directly above him; a witness who saw Oswald shoot and kill Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit just forty-five minutes after the assassination; expert witnesses from the HSCA, as well as one from the Warren Commission, who conclusively tied Oswald to the assassination by fingerprint, handwriting, photographic, neutron activation, and firearm analyses; and so on, you know you’re dealing with the real thing.) I simply would have called, in some areas,
more
witnesses to establish the same thing—for example, more witnesses than the ones I called to place Oswald at the Tippit murder scene.

The trial in London took place on July 23, 24, and 25, 1986. After the jury was out deliberating for six hours, they returned, on July 26, with a verdict of guilty, convicting Oswald of the murder of John F. Kennedy.
*
Obviously, were it not for my participation in this docu-trial of Oswald, which
Time
magazine said was “as close to a real trial as the accused killer of John F. Kennedy will probably ever get,”
³⁶
this book would never have been written.

Before I go on, I’d like to relate an incident I feel may strike home with many readers of this book. Back in early 1992, a few months after the strongly pro-conspiracy movie
JFK
came out, I was speaking to around six hundred lawyers at a trial lawyers’ convention on the East Coast. My subject was “Tactics and Techniques in the Trial of a Criminal Case,” not the Kennedy assassination, but during the question-and-answer period that followed, the assassination came up, and I could tell from the rhetorical nature of the questions that the questioners believed there was a conspiracy in the assassination.

I asked for a show of hands as to how many did not accept the findings of the Warren Commission. A forest of hands went up, easily 85 to 90 percent of the audience. So I said to them, “What if I could prove to you in one minute or less that although you are all intelligent people you are not thinking intelligently about the Kennedy case?” I could sense an immediate stirring in the audience. My challenge sounded ridiculous. How could I
prove
in one minute or less that close to six hundred lawyers were not thinking intelligently? A voice from my right front shouted out, “We don’t think you can do it.” I responded, “Okay, start looking at your watches.” With the clock ticking, I asked for another show of hands as to those who had seen the recent movie
JFK
or at any time in the past had ever read any book or magazine article propounding the conspiracy theory or otherwise rejecting the findings of the Warren Commission. Again, a great number of hands went up—about the same, it seemed to me, as the previous hand count. I proceeded to tell the group that I didn’t need a show of hands for my next point. “I’m sure you will all agree,” I said, “that before you form an intelligent opinion on a matter in dispute you should hear both sides of the issue. As the old West Virginia mountaineer said, ‘No matter how thin I make my pancakes they always have two sides.’ With that in mind, how many of you have read the Warren Report?” It was embarrassing. Only a few people raised their hands. In less than a minute (one member of the audience later told me it was forty-seven seconds) I had proved my point. The overwhelming majority in the audience had formed an opinion rejecting the findings of the Warren Commission without bothering to read the Commission’s report. And mind you, I hadn’t even asked them how many had read the twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission, just the single-volume Warren Report.

Well over a hundred million Americans reject the findings of the Warren Commission, whose report at least ninety-nine out of a hundred have never read.

I
f Oswald’s guilt as the lone assassin is as obvious as I suggest, why, one may logically ask, the need for this extraordinarily long book? Make no mistake about it. The Kennedy assassination, per se, is not a complicated case. I’ve personally prosecuted several murder cases where the evidence against the accused was far more circumstantial and less robust than the case against Oswald. Apart from the fact that there is no audio on the famous Zapruder film (the film of the assassination by amateur photographer Abraham Zapruder, which, if reference is made only to it, would prevent one from knowing, with certainty, the number, timing, and sequence of the shots fired), the case against Oswald himself is overwhelming and relatively routine.
*
Earl Warren himself said, “As district attorney of a large metropolitan county [Oakland, California] for years…I have no hesitation in saying that had it not been for the prominence of the victim, the case against Oswald could have been tried in two or three days with little likelihood of any but one result.”
³⁷

The allegation of conspiracy introduces an element of complexity into the case because it is inherently more difficult to prove a negative than a positive, and this complexity is compounded by the fact that Oswald was a deeply troubled person and a restless Marxist who traveled to Russia and Mexico. But the complexity is only superficial. As will be shown in this book, upon scrutiny the various conspiracy theories turn out to be weightless and embarrassingly devoid of substance. Again, then, if the case is not complex, why such a massive tome? The answer is that a tenacious, indefatigable, and, in many cases, fraudulent group of Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists have succeeded in transforming a case very simple and obvious at its core—Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone—into its present form of the most complex murder case,
by far
, in world history.

Refusing to accept the plain truth, and dedicating their existence for over forty years to convincing the American public of the truth of their own charges, the critics have journeyed to the outer margins of their imaginations. Along the way, they have split hairs and then proceeded to split the split hairs, drawn far-fetched and wholly unreasonable inferences from known facts, and literally invented bogus facts from the grist of rumor and speculation. With over eighteen thousand pages of small print in the twenty-seven Warren Commission volumes alone, and many millions of pages of FBI and CIA documents, any researcher worth his salt can find a sentence here or there to support any ludicrous conspiracy theory he might have. And that, of course, is precisely what the conspiracy community has done. To give the critics their day in court (which they never give to the Warren Commission and the HSCA), and thus effectively rebut their allegations, does regrettably and unavoidably take a great many pages. For instance, it takes only one sentence to make the argument that organized crime had Kennedy killed to get his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, off its back, but it takes a great many pages to demonstrate the invalidity of that charge.

T
here are several reasons, over and above Jack Ruby’s supposedly “silencing” Oswald and a general distrust of government and governmental agencies, which was only intensified by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, why the majority of Americans have embraced the conspiracy theory and rejected the findings of the Warren Commission. One is that people inevitably find conspiracies fascinating and intriguing, and hence subconsciously are more receptive to conspiratorial hypotheses. As author John Sparrow points out, “Those who attack the Warren Report enjoy an advantage over its defenders: they have a more exciting story to tell. The man in the street likes to hear that something sinister has been going on, particularly in high places.”
³⁸
And, of course, we know that humans, for whatever reason, love mysteries (which, to most, the JFK assassination has become), whether fictional or real, more than they do open-and-shut cases. For example, who killed JR? Who is Deep Throat? (Now answered.) Are there really UFOs? We all know about the considerable popularity of murder mysteries in novels and on the screen. Tom Stone, who teaches a course on the Kennedy assassination at Southern Methodist University, says that “by the late 90’s I had come to believe that Oswald was probably the only shooter. But I found I was taking the fun out of the assassination for my students.”
³⁹
Stories of conspiracy, then, are simply more appealing to Americans than that of a gunman acting alone. And when one prefers an idea, one is obviously more apt to accept its legitimacy, even in the face of contrary evidence.

Secondly, a wide-ranging conspiracy, in a strange way, gives more meaning not only to the president’s death but to his life. That powerful national interests killed Kennedy because he was taking the nation in a direction they opposed emphasizes the importance of his life and death more than the belief that a lone nut killed him for no reason other than dementia. Abraham Lincoln scholar Reed Turner says, “Somehow it is more satisfying to believe that a president died as the victim of a cause than at the hands of a deranged gunman.”
⁴⁰
Even Jacqueline Kennedy was moved to say that her husband “didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little communist. It even robs his death of meaning.”
⁴¹
In the unconscious desire of many to make a secular saint out of the fallen president, the notion of martyrdom was inevitable. But a martyr is not one who dies at the hands of a demented non-entity. Only powerful forces who viewed Kennedy’s reign as antithetical to their goals would do.

And thirdly, in a related vein, there’s the instinctive notion that a king cannot be struck down by a peasant. Many Americans found it hard to accept that President Kennedy, the most powerful man in the free world—someone they perceived to occupy a position akin to a king—could be eliminated in a matter of seconds by someone whom they considered a nobody. On a visceral level, they couldn’t grasp the enormous incongruity of it all. To strike down a king, as it were, something more elaborate and powerful just had to be involved—“It’s preposterous on the face of it to believe that a mousy little guy with a $12.95 rifle could bring down the leader of the free world.”
⁴²
But of course this type of visceral reasoning has no foundation in logic. The lowliest human can pull a trigger just as effectively as someone of power and importance. And bullets are very democratic. They permit anyone to fire them through the barrel of a gun, and they injure or kill whomever they hit. There have been three assassinations of American presidents other than Kennedy (Lincoln, 1865; Garfield, 1881; McKinley, 1901) and six attempted assassinations (Jackson, 1835; FDR [president-elect], 1933; Truman, 1950; Ford, 1975 [twice]; and Reagan, 1981). With the exception of Lincoln’s murder and the attempt on Truman’s life (both of which, particularly in Truman’s case, were very limited conspiracies in their scope), all were believed to be carried out by lone gunmen—demented assailants, acting alone.

But the above reasons are only ancillary to the principal reason why I believe the conspiracy theorists have been successful in persuading the American public that their charges are true. To paraphrase Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of Hitler’s Third Reich, if you push something at people long enough, eventually they’re going to start buying it, particularly when they haven’t been exposed to any contrary view. And for over forty years, almost all that the American people have heard has been the incessant and all-pervasive voice of the conspiracy theorists. (The evidence that supports this view of mine is the previously stated fact that when the Warren Commission first came out with its findings, the majority of Americans
did
accept its conclusion of Oswald’s guilt and no conspiracy.) Oliver Stone’s widely seen but factually impoverished movie in 1991,
JFK
, only augmented for millions of Americans all the misconceptions and myths about the case. Then, too, there’s the reality that you only know if someone is lying to you if you know what the truth is. If you don’t know, and you make the assumption that the author of a book, for instance, is honorable and has a duty to the reader and history to be truthful, you accept what he says as being factual, and hence are misled. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Einstein may have had an IQ in the stratosphere, but if he didn’t know anything about chess and a purported expert on chess told him a lie about the game, Einstein would likely accept it. To know whether authors or film producers like Stone are telling the truth, you’d have to have on hand the Warren Commission and HSCA volumes so you could check out the accuracy of everything they say. But the Warren Report and its supporting volumes, for instance, cost around a thousand dollars today (originally, around four dollars for the report and seventy-six dollars for the twenty-six volumes), and very few Americans have them. In fact, even most libraries don’t. Only 2,500 sets of the volumes were printed by the Government Printing Office, 1,340 of which went to selected libraries.
⁴³
And the HSCA volumes are almost impossible to find anywhere.

So those peddling misinformation about the Kennedy assassination have been able to get by with their blatant lies, omissions, distortions, and simply erroneous statements because their readers aren’t in a position to dispute the veracity of their assertions. A few examples among countless others: When conspiracy theorists and critics of the Warren Commission allege, as we’ve all heard them do a hundred times, that no one, not even a professional shooter, has ever been able to duplicate what Oswald did on the day of the assassination,
*
that is, get off three rounds at three separate distances with the accuracy the Warren Commission says Oswald had (two out of three hits) in the limited amount of time he had, how would any reader who didn’t have volume 3 of the Warren Commission know that this is a false assertion? On page 446 of volume 3 we learn that way back in 1964, one “Specialist Miller” of the U.S. Army, using Oswald’s own Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, not only duplicated what Oswald did, but improved on Oswald’s time. In fact, many marksmen, including the firearms expert from Wisconsin whom I used at the London trial, have done better than Oswald did.