Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  * Consistent with the confusion and errors Hoover, and many others, made in the immediate wake of the assassination, in a 1:48 p.m. memo to his staff on the afternoon of the assassination, Hoover wrote, “The President and the Governor were shot at the corner of Elm and Commerce Streets” and that he had been told “the shots came from the fourth floor” of the Book Depository Building (FBI Record 124-10012-10169); in a 2:21 p.m. memo to his staff he said that he advised James W. Rowley, chief of the Secret Service, “that one of the Secret Service agents reportedly had been killed, and [Rowley] stated he did not know this” (FBI Record 124-10012-10167); in a 4:01 p.m. memo to his staff he relayed that after Oswald left the Book Depository Building he “ran into two police officers…a block or two away…and thinking they were going to arrest him, shot at them and killed one of them with a sidearm” (FBI Record 124-10012-10170).

  * Mexico City, at the time, “had the most comprehensive, extensive telephone tap facilities…of any [CIA] station in the world,” said John Scelso, chief of the WH (Western Hemisphere) 3 branch of clandestine operations at CIA headquarters to whom the CIA station in Mexico City reported. There was only one problem, he said. “They had far more material to deal with than they could possibly handle…like ten times.” (HSCA Record 180-10131-10330, Testimony of John Scelso before HSCA on May 16, 1978, pp.4, 17, 58)

  †Most of the trial preparation I did with my witnesses, who were living around the country (Phillips in Bethesda, Maryland), was by written correspondence and over the telephone from my home in Los Angeles, although once we all got to London, I interviewed each of them again in person before the trial started.

  * At the London trial, although I was able to impeach Lopez’s credibility as a witness by other means, I didn’t have his own report to the HSCA, since, as indicated, it wasn’t released to the public until 1996, ten years after the trial. So when Lopez testified on direct examination by Gerry Spence that he had concluded that Oswald “had not” been to the Cuban consulate and Russian embassy in Mexico City and agreed with Spence’s assertion “that there must have been an imposter there,” I didn’t have Lopez’s own report to refute his testimony. However, I did have the conclusion of his employer, the HSCA (HSCA Report, pp.251–252), that it was the real Lee Harvey Oswald at the Cuban consulate and Russian embassy in Mexico City, which I introduced to the jury on cross-examination of Lopez. (Transcript of On Trial, July 25, 1986, pp.877, 894)

  * On cross-examination of Lopez at the London trial, I brought out that he was a young law student without one day of law enforcement investigative experience when he was hired by HSCA chief counsel Robert Blakey, a law professor at Cornell University who met Lopez while the latter was attending law school there. The CIA submitted a formal complaint to the HSCA about Lopez showing up at CIA headquarters in shorts and jeans, and Lopez changed his attire thereafter. Knowing Lopez was a very shaky witness, I deliberately gave him free reign to self-destruct on the witness stand in front of the jury’s eyes, and he gladly obliged. Lopez told the jury he had his own opinion of who actually killed Kennedy and it wasn’t Oswald. “Just for the record,” I asked him, “could we have this chap’s name?” Lopez answered, “No, because I [am] under a secrecy oath [at the HSCA] never to disclose that name.” Unbelievably, Lopez, an otherwise pleasant and intelligent young man, said he and his colleagues at the HSCA received information from “a reliable source” that there was an actual photograph of this person shooting at Kennedy, but they weren’t able to get the photograph, and the FBI and CIA wouldn’t let him and his colleagues question Kennedy’s killer. I said, “You told me [in a pretrial interview] that this fellow was an agent for Castro, the CIA, and the FBI, but none of them knew this, is that correct?” “They probably know it by now, but they didn’t know it back then.” “So you’re a twenty-one-year-old kid out of Cornell, and the CIA, the FBI and Castro are using this guy and they don’t know he is an agent for all three of them, but Edwin Lopez knows?” When Lopez said yes and offered to tell why, I had run out of my allotted time on cross-examination, so I suggested he tell his lawyer, Mr. Spence, on redirect. But Spence, wanting to get Lopez off the stand as quickly as possible before he embarrassed and hurt the defense more than he already had, elected not to ask one single question of Lopez on redirect. (Transcript of On Trial, July 25, 1986, pp.892, 897, 903, 916–919)

  This is but another example of what happened when conspiracy icons in the Kennedy assassination like Lopez, who had never been cross-examined on the case, were subjected to cross-examination at the London trial. Some of the icons, like Jean Hill (who wanted to testify for the defense very badly at the London trial) and Delphine Roberts, were so pathetically bad that the defense in London decided to not call them to the witness stand, period. By the way, I defy anyone to come up with any witness I called to the stand for the prosecution at the London trial who was made to look ridiculous or noncredible on cross-examination. Since none were either of these, I don’t believe you will be able to.

  * The CIA moved its headquarters from downtown Washington, D.C., to Langley, Virginia, on September 20, 1961, although John McCone, the first CIA director to occupy Langley headquarters, didn’t move in until November 29, 1961. However, the CIA, in testimony by its agents and in other ways, has continued to refer to its headquarters as being in “Washington,” Langley-assigned agents even saying they are stationed in “Washington.” In fact, to this very day, the mailing address for CIA headquarters is “Washington, D.C., 20505.”

  †Phillips told me (as he said in his book) that the CIA case officer at the Mexico City station who was in charge of Soviet operations (he couldn’t recall his last name, but said his first name was Craig) was the first person at the station who became aware of Oswald seeking to go to Russia ostensibly by way of Cuba. Craig, Phillips said, should have routinely cabled CIA headquarters in Washington asking for a file check on Oswald.

  *Per a CIA memorandum, three photos of the unknown American male were taken by CIA cameras in front of the Soviet embassy around “12:17 hours” (12:17 p.m.) on October 1, 1963; five photos of him, in the same location, around “11:32 hours” on October 4, 1963; and two photos of the same male in front of the Cuban embassy on October 15, 1963. The CIA turned over all ten photographs to the FBI in Mexico City on the afternoon of the assassination. According to the CIA, “CIA did not have a known photograph of Oswald in its files before the assassination of President Kennedy either in Washington or abroad.” (CIA Document 1993.6.29.13:15:59:560410, pp.2–4, Undated draft of CIA memorandum re: Garrison Allegations Re CIA Photograph in Warren Commission Report—The Facts, JFK box OSW17, vol.5, folder IV, National Archives)

  †Garrison and others believe the CIA was behind the assassination and that Oswald was working for the agency as a member of U.S. intelligence, yet it framed him for the assassination as its patsy. But there’s a problem with this. If Oswald was actually working for the CIA, why would it bother to send an Oswald imposter to the Cuban consulate and Russian embassy to make Oswald look like a leftist or Marxist in league with the Cubans and Russians just prior to the assassination? Instead of sending an imposter to Mexico City to set Oswald up for the assassination, why not send Oswald himself to these places? But if, for whatever reason, the CIA wanted to send an Oswald impersonator, obviously it would have to send someone who looks very much like Oswald, right? Since the photos that the CIA took of its Oswald impersonator (the one it supposedly used to help frame Oswald) clearly show that he bears no resemblance to Oswald, wouldn’t this only serve to defeat the CIA’s whole impersonation, frame-up scheme?

  *Elvis sightings have been reported in forty out of the fifty states. For instance, he’s been seen, since his death, on a parachute ride at a carnival in Denton, Texas; ordering food at a Burger King in Philadelphia; living in a secluded cabin in Orlando, Florida; listening to a rock band in a bar in Riverhead, New York; in a hotel lounge in Atlanta, Georgia; in a 1969 Plymouth with Colorado tags in Tennessee; and at a laundromat i
n East Lansing, Michigan. Author Gail Brewer-Giorgio compiled all the evidence of Elvis still being alive in her 1988 book Elvis Alive, which remarkably got up to number eight on the New York Times best-seller list. With all these sightings, many Elvis fans are all shook up, believing the King of Rock and Roll is still among us. Following Brewer-Giorgio’s August 6, 1988, appearance on Fox TV’s Late Show, viewers were asked to call in and vote whether Elvis was alive or dead. Of 30,000 calls, more than 25,000, or 84 percent, believed Elvis was not dead. (Karen Ridgeway, “Fans Say Elvis Is Popping Up All Over,” USA Today, August 16, 1988)

  *“I never got married,” Lifton told a reporter in 1993, because “there always came a point when the woman realized I was more interested in the president’s body than in her body” (Solomon, “True Disbelievers,” p.96).

  *At the beginning of Lifton’s immersion in the Kennedy assassination and before he started to write his book focusing on the alteration of the wounds, he had an equally grand theory: that the grassy knoll assassins installed an artificial tree on the knoll prior to the assassination, and camouflaged snipers fired at the president from it. Lifton then magnified, up to twenty times, photos of the trees and shrubbery on the knoll. In the greenery, he saw “several forms which he [interpreted] as assassins firing at the motorcade. One of them looks as if he is wearing a Kaiser Wilhelm helmet. Others wear electronic headsets and man periscopes and machine guns on a platform operated by hydraulic lifts. One of his imagined finds resembles General Douglas MacArthur” (Lewis, Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report, pp.145–146). From this auspicious beginning, Lifton launched into his theory and a book that is paradoxically scholarly yet ridiculous.

  *As author Jim Moore very logically surmises, Humes was most likely “unprepared for the massive head wound Kennedy had suffered” (Moore, Conspiracy of One, p.97 footnote). Most people would have been. Therefore, a spontaneous, incorrect assessment is understandable.

  †Dr. Michael Baden told me that “since we know what incisions were made to the president’s body at Parkland and by the autopsy surgeons, the photographs and X-rays taken at the time of the autopsy clearly show that no additional incisions were made anywhere on his body after it left Parkland and prior to the autopsy at Bethesda. That’s flat and categorical.” Baden added that his forensic pathology panel’s interviews with the Parkland doctors and autopsy surgeons helped to corroborate this conclusion by his panel. (Telephone interview of Michael Baden by author on January 8, 2000)

  *Lifton asserts in his book that “it would hardly be possible to implement” the scenario he describes “without the involvement of some Secret Service personnel.” He doesn’t even speculate why Secret Service agents, who are trained to literally “take a bullet” to save a president’s life, would want to be part of a conspiracy to murder him. Was anyone else involved? Lifton says a “sophisticated appraisal of the evidence must force one to the conclusion that there was a plot involving the executive branch of the government…Some government officials must have been recruited into the plot.” (Lifton, Best Evidence, p.697) Since the president heads up the executive branch, apparently some of Kennedy’s own underlings decided to murder him. Lifton doesn’t say who these people are or why they’d want to murder their chief.

  †Gerald Posner, in his book Case Closed, writes that the president’s casket “had an air-lock mechanism that, when turned, hermetically sealed the lid on the casket. It was sealed at Parkland. Aboard Air Force One it had been strapped to the floor. To get the body out, the conspirators would have had to unstrap the coffin and unscrew the lock, allowing the unit to unseal itself. After removing the President’s body, something of similar weight would likely have to be placed inside, so people handling the casket would not notice it was too light. Finally, the casket would have to be resealed and strapped back into its original position” (Posner, Case Closed, p.298). The reason I have footnoted the above is that Posner gave no citation as a source for this. Though there was a device on the bottom of the casket that “automatically pins a coffin to the floor of a modern hearse,” and “there was a catch which released the lock,” this device may have been damaged and become inoperable after JFK’s aides, who “didn’t see it,” forcibly removed the casket from the hearse when they lifted it onto Air Force One at Love Field (Manchester, Death of a President, p.308).

  *When did Air Force One land at Andrews Air Force Base? Although Lifton was very meticulous in trying to nail down every detail to the nth degree, he was uncharacteristically imprecise (particularly since time is of the essence in his madcap scenario) when it came to answering this question. Indeed, on page 681 of his book he quotes one Secret Service agent as saying the plane landed with the body at Andrews at 6:05 p.m., but later on the same page, and without quoting a source, he has the plane landing moments before 6:00 p.m. and the body arriving at Walter Reed hospital for alterations, thirteen miles away, at 6:05 p.m. On page 690 he quotes Marie Fehmer, Lyndon Johnson’s personal secretary, as noting on a piece of paper that the plane landed at 5:58 p.m. The latter time is the same time that a different Secret Service agent had the plane landing. (CE 1024, 18 H 757) UPI’s Merriman Smith, on the flight, records the plane landing at 5:59 p.m. EST (United Press International, Four Days, p.33).

  *On November 26, 1963, J. H. Stover Jr., commanding officer at the U.S. Naval Medical School, sent a letter to all interested parties that “you are reminded that you are under verbal orders of the Surgeon General, United States Navy, to discuss with no one events connected with your official duties on the evening of 22 November–23 November 1963. This letter constitutes official notification and reiteration of these verbal orders. You are warned that infraction of these orders makes you liable to Court Martial proceedings under appropriate articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” This order of silence was lifted for the HSCA inquiry by Secretary of Defense Harold Brown in 1978.

  †This is not quite the type of situation where a follow-up question can be, “How would they know to ask you this if you didn’t tell them what you knew?” because a considerable number of other people were present at the autopsy, and a witness like O’Connor could say, “I assumed they already knew since many other people saw the same thing.”

  *I am here to report that years later I came into possession of another HSCA document containing an interview of O’Connor conducted by HSCA investigators at an earlier time, August 25, 1977, in which O’Connor did tell them that there was “nothing left in the [president’s] cranium but splattered brain matter” (HSCA Record 180-10107-10448, p.2). O’Connor, in London, had apparently forgotten he had told HSCA investigators this earlier and hence did not correct me during my cross-examination of him. Though my misleading cross-examination of him in London was unintentional on my part—only being in possession of his 1978 interview—I owe him an apology, which I am herein giving. But the point also has to be made that he did not reiterate (as he might be expected to do about such an incredible discovery [no brain] that meant so much to him) his observation when he was interviewed in 1978. Even before acquiring the 1977 interview, my overall sense of O’Connor is that his unquestioned error about the president’s brain being gone was more the result of confusion than duplicity on his part. His recollection of what took place on the night of the autopsy is very poor, to say the least. Just one more example: in the aforementioned 1978 interview he told the investigators that the autopsy surgeons had not done “a Y incision,” but we know they did (CE 387, 16 H 982).

  *I can see bloody sheets being peeled off the president’s body, but how do you peel off a body bag?

  *Ruby probably had less than four minutes to get to the police basement. The time clock that stamped the money order and receipt rotated on a minute-to-minute basis. (13 H 224, WCT Doyle E. Lane) So the actual time the transaction was completed would have been somewhere between 11:17:00 and 11:17:59.

  *A Dallas police detective, C. N. Dhority, testified before the Warren Commission that during the Sunday-mornin
g interrogation session of Oswald, “I don’t think Mr. Holmes talked to him too much” (7 H 155). Dhority may be correct only in the sense that the interrogation covered a whole range of issues and matters, and Holmes probably only participated in the portion of it dealing with Oswald’s post office boxes. But as to the latter, not only do we have Holmes’s testimony that he asked the many questions dealing with the post office boxes, and not only would he be the one to naturally ask those questions, not anyone else, but also Captain Fritz testified, “Mr. Holmes did most of the talking to him [Oswald] about the boxes” (4 H 229).

  *Author Gerald Posner makes the good observation that if there was such a conspiracy, and the morning’s events before the shooting were only contrived to “provide Ruby” with the “defense” at his trial that his murder of Oswald wasn’t premeditated (which would actually protect the conspirators more than Ruby, since lack of premeditation would only save Ruby from a sentence of death, not a conviction of murder, whereas lack of premeditation would mean Ruby hadn’t conspired with anyone, conspiracy necessarily involving premeditation), the conspiracy would include “Karen Carlin, whose plea for money took [Ruby] to the Western Union office…, George Senator, for confirming the Carlin story…, postal inspector Harry Holmes, for delaying the transfer with his questions, police chief Curry and Captain Fritz, for selecting the basement…, Lt. Rio Pierce, for driving his car up the ramp a minute before Oswald was taken from the jail; and Officer Vaughn, for turning his back when Ruby walked down the ramp” (Posner, Case Closed, p.397 footnote).