Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Joachim Joesten, aka Franz von Nesselrode, Walter Kell, and Paul Delanthuis, a German-born American, wrote the next book, Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? (published in Germany in mid-June 1964, and soon thereafter in America), attacking the Warren Commission’s anticipated findings before its report was published on September 24, 1964. Per the same issue of the Congressional Record, Joesten was a “German Communist party member. Joesten’s book was published in this country by the recently defunct publishing firm of Marzani and Munsell,…one of the most foremost publishers of Communist and extreme left literature in America.” Indeed, a copy of some German documents seized by U.S. authorities at the end of World War II contain the statement that Joesten had been a member of the Communist Party of Germany since 1932. A November 8, 1937, memorandum of the Gestapo documents his membership in the party, which was outlawed in Germany at that time.3

  Joesten, in his book, concludes that Oswald “never was a genuine Communist who looked upon Soviet Russia as the Fatherland of the Oppressed,” as he claimed, but was simply “masquerading as a pro-Communist.” What Oswald was, per Joesten, was “an FBI agent provocateur with a CIA background and connections” who was a “perfect fall guy, a scapegoat” in the assassination, which was orchestrated by “some officials of the CIA and FBI, as well as some Army figures such as General Walker and reactionary oil millionaires such as H. L. Hunt.”4

  The next two conspiracy books on the assassination, Whitewash and Rush to Judgment, did not have any kind of political orientation and were not written by Communists, but by, as assassination researcher Johann Rush says, “leftists sympathetic to Marxist ideology.”5 The first of the two authors, Harold Weisberg, self-published Whitewash in August of 1965 after, the author says in the book’s preface, it had been rejected by sixty-three American publishers over a fourteen-month period and eleven publishers in eight foreign countries.6 The Dell edition of Whitewash was published in 1966. Per the same February 1968 issue of the Congressional Record, Weisberg “was earlier, in 1938, discharged from his investigator post on the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee ‘for giving confidential matter to the Daily Worker, the leading Communist newspaper in the country.’ In the summer of 1947, Weisberg was fired from his post with the U.S. Department of State along with nine others for known association with agents of the Soviet Union.” Whitewash is more about a conspiracy by the authorities to cover up the truth about the assassination than it is about the conspiracy to commit it.

  The last of the “original four” books was Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment, published in 1966.* It accuses the Warren Commission of so many misdeeds and suggests so many things (e.g., one or more shots came from the front, Ruby knew Oswald, Oswald may have been framed) that a gullible reader has no choice but to infer the existence of a conspiracy. The aforementioned Congressional Record says about Lane, “He has a long and curious involvement with a host of extreme left-wing causes and is a well-established spokesman for leftist ideology…Lane is a former executive secretary and national board member of the National Lawyer’s Guild, a cited Communist front…This past year he was a member of the Committee of Sponsors for a Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade dinner. The brigade is also a cited Communist front.”

  Though Lane’s Rush to Judgment, to this day the biggest-selling book on the assassination, was the main spark igniting a strong (as opposed to merely visceral) belief in many Americans that there was a conspiracy behind the death of the president, the real genesis of what we think of as the conspiracy movement, and that which has persisted to this day, probably began back on November 23, 1964 (eight weeks after the Warren Report was published), when the Government Printing Office started to sell the twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission over the counter at its office in Washington, D.C., for seventy-six dollars a set, mostly to the media and private researchers. A total of 1,340 sets were sent free to libraries around the country.7 As conspiracy theorist David Lifton says, “A small but hardy band of individuals [including Lane and Weisberg], sometimes called the ‘first generation researchers,’ began going over [the volumes] with a fine tooth comb.”8 And there were many others, some not working with the volumes, all from various walks of life ranging from lawyers (Vincent Salandria), farmers (Weisberg), graduate students (Lifton), and small businessmen (Raymond Marcus), to a Hominy, Oklahoma, housewife (Shirley Martin), a Dallas legal secretary (Mary Ferrell), a researcher at the World Health Organization in New York City (Sylvia Meagher), a Los Angeles bookkeeper (Lillian Castellano, who also later became a major RFK assassination researcher), the wife of a Beverly Hills stockbroker (Marjorie Field), a radio host in Carmel-by-the-Sea (Mae Brussel), and a small-town Texas newspaper publisher (Penn Jones Jr.). Most were idealistic, patriotic men and women who sincerely believed that the official version of the assassination was a lie. Convinced that a vigorous and promising young American president had been cut down by malevolent forces whose interests were dangerously adverse to those of the average citizen, they were willing to consecrate their lives in an attempt to shine a bright, prosecutorial light on these dark forces and reclaim America from them. If it is true, as they say, that one man can make a difference and that passion changes the world, then someone like Martin, the Oklahoma housewife who got in her car and drove down to Dallas with her four children in tow and knocked on the doors of Dealey Plaza witnesses to interview them with her pad and pencil, represents the type of commitment and flame that, in confluence with other currents, can change the status quo.

  At the beginning, with the exception of the researchers who did their work at the National Archives, and therefore knew of each other’s existence, most researchers around the country, working out of their kitchen, living room, or local library, and not knowing of the others, felt all alone. But here and there, through word of mouth or an occasional article, they learned who their soul mates were, and the “discovery that they were not alone struck most of the buffs as monumental. They finally had someone to talk to.”9 It wasn’t too long before these amateur “detectives,” trying in their mind to educate the vast American public about a crime they perceived to be much greater than a lone nut killing Kennedy,* networked into a community of researchers, meeting at their homes and elsewhere, and excitedly exchanging their findings by phone and letter. They even helped each other with their work, such as furnishing documents and editing each others’ writings. What undoubtedly brought them closer together in spirit is that their group was small and they were facing a monolithic establishment that scorned them.† Also, as Josiah Thompson observed, the Kennedy case became an “obsession,” and “there’s a fantastic way in which the assassination becomes a religious event. There are relics, and scriptures, and even a holy scene—the killing ground. People make pilgrimages to it.”10

  Apart from the few who would write an entire book about the case (e.g., Josiah Thompson, Mark Lane, Harold Weisberg) or the occasional article in a prestigious publication(e.g., Richard Popkin’s 1966 attack on the Warren Commission in the New York Review of Books), most needed a non-mainstream home for their articles and essays, since the mainstream press, for the most part, didn’t believe in a conspiracy, and still doesn’t to this day. They found it in a small, alternative magazine, Minority of One, a monthly operating out of Passaic, New Jersey, which started to include articles by conspiracy theorists who became known as “The Philadelphia School” of theorists because most of its members, like lawyer Vincent Salandria and Gaeton Fonzi (editor of the Greater Philadelphia Magazine), were from Philadelphia. Though the conspiracy theorists would later branch out and find other homes, such as Ramparts magazine (which replaced Minority of One in 1967 as the principal journalistic voice of the conspiracy movement) and periodicals of their own (such as the Decade series, which ended with the Fourth Decade; Continuing Inquiry; Assassination USA; Conspiracy Newsletter; Investigation; Coverups!; JFK Honor Guard; Echoes of Conspiracy; Prologue; Grassy Knoll Gazette; Kennedy Assassination Chronicles; Probe; and JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly
) that catered exclusively to those interested in the assassination and its various conspiracies theories, Minority of One was the first magazine to routinely publish articles propounding the conspiracy theory. Its most important early one (in the March 1965 issue) was “Fifty-two Witnesses: The Grassy Knoll” by Philadelphia schoolteacher Harold Feldman, who examined the testimony of Warren Commission witnesses and reported (erroneously) that most thought the shots came from the grassy knoll. The article was published as a small book that same year by Idlewild, an alternative-press San Francisco publishing house.

  By 1965, the relatively small but unflagging, energetic, and resourceful band of Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists were raising such a ruckus that former Warren Commission assistant counsel Joseph Ball became concerned and called Chief Justice Warren. “Chief, these critics of the report are guilty of misrepresentation and dishonest reporting,” Ball lamented to Warren. “Be patient,” Warren replied. “History will prove that we are right.”11

  The year 1966 was an important one in the history of the conspiracy movement, with the number of conspiracy theorists starting to multiply like bacteria, the original band of lonely doubters now looking more like a small army.12 In addition to producing a great number of pro-conspiracy and anti–Warren Commission articles in newspapers and magazines, the theorists came out with a spate of conspiracy books, including Edward Epstein’s Inquest (more an assault on the internal workings of the Warren Commission, with hints in the book of a second gun, and hence, conspiracy), Léo Sauvage’s Oswald Affair (original French edition in 1965), Richard H. Popkin’s Second Oswald, Penn Jones’s Forgive My Grief, and Joesten’s second book on the case, Oswald: The Truth.* Moreover, the passage of the Freedom of Information Act in 1966 guaranteed almost perpetual oxygen to the movement, allowing theorists—after being put through the hoops by federal agencies—to get their hands on many previously sealed Warren Commission documents.

  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 C
ommission’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.)