by Jim Marrs
An understated case? Consider these points as determined by the committee:
•A conspiracy involving at least two gunmen resulted in President Kennedy’s death.
•Jack Ruby’s killing of Oswald was not spontaneous and Ruby likely entered the Dallas police station basement with assistance.
•The Dallas police withheld from the Warren Commission relevant information about Ruby’s entry to the Oswald slaying scene.
•The Secret Service was deficient in performing its duties in connection with the assassination.
•The FBI performed with varying degrees of competency and failed to investigate adequately the possibility of conspiracy.
•The CIA was deficient in its collection and sharing of assassination information.
•The Warren Commission failed to investigate the idea of conspiracy adequately, partly because of the failure of government agencies to provide the Commission with relevant information.
•Investigation of conspiracy by the Secret Service was terminated prematurely by President Johnson’s order that the FBI assume investigative responsibility.
•Since the military 201 file on Oswald was destroyed before the committee could view it, the question of Oswald’s affiliation with military intelligence could not be fully resolved.
All of these startling conclusions—and this was the “understated case.”
The committee ended by recommending that the Justice Department pick up where it left off and attempt to unravel the conspiracy that led to the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The only action on the part of Justice was the Ramsey panel, which called into question the acoustical evidence of multiple gunmen. The panel’s conclusions were themselves called into question in a peer-reviewed scientific paper published in 2001.
An internal Justice Department memo made public only in 1988 revealed what researchers had suspected all along—despite the findings and requests by the House committee, Justice officials had let the whole thing drop.
It should be noted that in 1999, the King family won a wrongful death civil case in which they claimed King had been the victim of an assassination conspiracy involving the Memphis police as well as federal agencies. This jury verdict affirmed the innocence of James Earl Ray and awarded the King family their sought sum of $100, evidence they were not pursuing financial gain. This groundbreaking story received scant coverage in the corporate mass media.
The Oliver Stone Film JFK
Public awareness of the Kennedy assassination conundrum was expanded worldwide in 1991 with the release of the $40 million film JFK, directed by the already controversial director Oliver Stone.
To understand the movie, one must consider the words of its director. Stone told this author, “I am not making a documentary. I am making a movie.” The film was a Herculean effort, distilling more than a thousand hours of film containing JFK assassination facts and information into slightly more than three hours.
Despite being lambasted as “absurd” and “untrue” by the corporate mass media even prior to its release, the film galvanized both sides of the conspiracy argument. Researchers who had been claiming a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death saw vindication in the movie while lone-assassin advocates held the film up as an exercise in presenting unsupported theories.
The film was based on two primary sources—former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins, his account of the Clay Shaw prosecution, and the 1989 edition of this book, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy.
But Stone was not content to simply use the writings of others. He also organized an entire research team coordinated by Harvard and Yale graduate Jane Rusconi, who studied more than two hundred books on the subject. Rusconi’s team also reinterviewed some of the same people and reviewed the same documents as this author. Interestingly enough, she and her team came to the same conclusions espoused by both Garrison and this author.
Despite a slow start, the film eventually built a huge international audience, which must have created concern within the circles of those who wished the troublesome and unanswered questions about the assassination would simply go away. The response of the mass media was mixed, with news commentators calling it fictionalized trash while movie reviewers gave it high marks.
Preemptive Attacks
Harsh criticism of the film began months even before it was first screened, with the leaking of a first draft. The script went through almost a dozen drafts before being finalized. But this did not slow the media attack dogs. The film was excoriated by the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, and Time magazine. But at least those critics had actually viewed the picture. National Public Radio’s Cokie Roberts, daughter of Warren Commission member Hale Boggs, refused to even view it.
Others were more open-minded. In 2010 Stephen Rosenfeld, senior editorial writer for the Washington Post, noted, “That the assassination probably encompassed more than a lone gunman now seems beyond cavil [quibbling about].”
If there was more than one gunman, it follows that there was a conspiracy of some sort and it follows that the Warren Commission was incorrect. It should follow also that journalists writing about the Kennedy assassination should be more interested in what actually did happen than in dismissing every Warren Commission critic as a paranoid. Yet, from the start, the media has consistently promoted the thesis that Rosenfeld now says is wrong beyond cavil.
The experience of Pat Dowell, film critic for the Washingtonian, provided an example of the break between film critics and corporate bosses. Her review for the January 1992 issue was rejected by her editor, John Limpert, who said he didn’t want a positive review for a film he felt was “preposterous.” Dowell resigned in protest.
In his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert named JFK as Best Picture of the Year, writing, “The achievement of the film is not that it answers the mystery of the Kennedy assassination, because it does not, or even that it vindicates Garrison, who is seen here as a man often whistling in the dark. Its achievement is that it tries to marshal the anger which ever since 1963 has been gnawing away on some dark shelf of the national psyche.”
While the film went to great lengths to reenact the assassination scenes as authentically as possible—at the last moment some old Harley-Davidson motorcycles were located to re-create the motorcade’s police escort—the script prompted complaints of fictionalization by using composite characters and condensing events and dialogue.
For example, in the film Garrison travels to Washington meet with a mysterious “Mr. X,” who gives him insider information regarding the assassination. This character largely represented Colonel Fletcher Prouty, who indeed told these things to Garrison but only long after the Clay Shaw trial. In truth, at the time of the trial Garrison went to Washington to meet with Army intelligence agent Richard Case Nagell. To say Nagell said all this would have been untruthful, just as saying Prouty met Garrison at the time of the trial would have been equally untruthful. So both men were turned into “Mr. X,” who nevertheless spoke the truth.
One unreported event during the film’s shooting in Dallas indicated that Providence was watching over Stone’s production. One day when filming of the motorcade paused, a couple dozen extras who had been standing in the middle of Houston Street moved to the Texas School Book Depository curb to get out of the hot Texas sun. High above them, technicians were mounting a camera on the seventh floor of the building. The Sixth Floor Museum had refused to allow Stone to film from the actual sixth-floor window, most probably because it would have shown that there is no clear line of sight to Elm Street due to evergreen trees in the way. Suddenly a huge glass windowpane came loose and fell down toward the crowd of extras standing on the curb below. Fortunately, a gust of wind caught the pane at the last moment, causing it to slide sideways, crashing into the center of Houston Street, just vacated by the crowd. The pile of shattered glass was quickly swept up and filming continued. Many people on the set, including some of
the endangered extras, did not even realize that disaster had been averted.
Despite acceptance by both film critics and most of the public, the debunking efforts continued well into the next decade. Former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, in his 2007 1,600-page opus on the assassination, wrote the film was “virtually a continuous lie.” He claimed, “JFK, the movie about Garrison’s prosecution of [Clay] Shaw, has caused far more damage to the truth about the case than perhaps any single event other than Ruby’s killing of Oswald, which the American people widely view as an act by Ruby to ‘silence’ Oswald.”
Bugliosi voiced concern that more Americans would believe the CIA-LBJ-Pentagon plot by Stone than the Warren Commission’s lone-assassin theory. Bugliosi even argued with himself over the merits of denigrating the film, explaining, “Serious non-fiction books don’t stoop to the discussion of wild fairy tales, which the movie JFK is.” He nevertheless stooped to trash the film for several more pages, referring to Stone’s sources as “kooks and nuts.”
The prosecutor of Charles Manson made it quite clear in his tome that he felt “the various conspiracy theories [in the JFK assassination] are utterly vapid and bankrupt. . . . Oswald, a lone nut, killed Kennedy and was thereafter killed by another lone nut, Ruby. Two small men who wanted to become big, and succeeded.”
Bugliosi, whose book should have been titled Reclaiming the Warren Commission, offered the same tortured logic as that discredited commission. He wrote that after all the years, there was no credible evidence (emphasis his) of any conspiracy, without justifying his interpretation of “credible.” It would appear that anyone who agreed with his views was credible, while those who differed were not credible.
His work is a classic example of the debate method termed “appeal from authority,” in which fallacious arguments are presented from a real or imagined authoritarian source. For example, he stated there is no evidence of Oswald’s being “seen getting in a car after the shooting in Dealey Plaza” despite noting that two motorists, Roy Cooper and Marvin C. Robinson, supported deputy Roger Craig’s claim of seeing Oswald leave the book depository in a Nash Rambler station wagon. Yet Bugliosi confidently wrote, “In any case, we can be certain he [Craig] was wrong because we already know where Oswald was at the time.”
He also offered the old argument that a conspiracy could not be kept secret. Here, Bugliosi fails to mention that numerous people, from organized-crime bosses to intelligence operatives, have indeed spoken out over the years about a conspiracy or that more than 25,000 government employees were able to keep the atomic bomb Manhattan Project a secret until one was detonated over Hiroshima, Japan.
Historian and education consultant Grover B. Proctor Jr., widely acknowledged as an expert on the assassination of President Kennedy, said, “If Stone’s film, based on the cumulative efforts of many researchers, shows a distrust of and bias against the government’s involvement and the media’s cover-up, there is some justification.” He explained:
Stone has been quoted widely about his attempt in this film to “fictionalize” the assassination, and to create a new mythology of the event. It is a poor, if technically accurate, choice of words. Those most closely wedded to the official version have leapt on this and said, “See? Didn’t we tell you? There is no truth here and he admits it.” However, what he has done is more subtle and literarily permissible than this simplistic response. In “fictionalizing” the story, Stone has collapsed long, laborious facts, witness lists, and theories into one speech or one character, a time-honored device dating to Shakespeare and beyond.
Proctor summed up the feelings of many on both sides of the conspiracy argument when he concluded, “The Great Debate over the film will rage on for a while, and each side will continue to vilify the integrity, accomplishments, and motivations of the other. But when the smoke has cleared, the questions posed by the film will still be on the table for resolution—not a bad end for a blockbuster Hollywood venture.”
Noting that Stone’s film made public a possibility that most Americans had been afraid to face—that the assassination was the result of a coup by the US military-industrial-intelligence complex—Proctor added, “The chilling thing is that the solution presented by JFK may also be very close to exactly what happened.”
The Assassinations Records Review Board
Whether perceived as ground truth or Hollywood fiction, the film JFK produced enough renewed public interest in the assassination that Congress was spurred into action. The public outcry over the film and sealed assassination records resulted in the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, signed by president George H. W. Bush on October 26, 1992. The act, designed to restore government credibility, called for the creation of a temporary Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB). This independent agency reviewed and later released to the National Archives nearly 5 million pages of once-secret JFK assassination records.
The board began its work in 1994 and finished in the fall of 1998, although the further declassification of government records continued afterward. The ARRB was to be composed of five citizens with a background in history, archives, and the law who were not government employees. They and their staff held high-level security clearances and were able to seek out heretofore classified documents within government agencies. Board members were to have been named within ninety days of passage of the act but there was an eighteen-month delay due to the transition between the Bush and Clinton administrations.
In the executive summary of the ARRB’s final report, this creation of the Establishment nevertheless described the JFK assassination as an “inexplicable act” shrouded in “secrecy and mystery.” The avowed intention of the ARRB was to penetrate this mystery but it failed to produce a solution to the case.
Board member Kermit Hall explained:
The Review Board is a unique and, in many ways, unprecedented institution in American history. . . . Never before has a group of private citizens been given the opportunity to bring some order to the record of one great historical event. The Board, we should remember, is not charged with answering the question of who murdered President Kennedy. It is not running an investigation; it is, instead, seeking to disclose documents in an age of open secrets, an age in which we have come to embrace the idea that openness is to be preferred and that accountability is the touchstone for public confidence in government.
Hall prophetically stated when the ARRB closed shop, it could take ten years before its work could be adequately analyzed and evaluated.
Despite the conclusion of conspiracy by the House committee and the massive amount of documents the board uncovered, Minnesota federal district judge Jack Tunheim, who headed the ARRB, continued to support the Warren Commission by stating that after viewing the available evidence, he had not seen any direct proof to change the verdict that Lee Harvey Oswald committed the act alone.
While most board members have remained coy about their opinions and conclusions based on their ARRB work, at least one staff member dissented from Tunheim’s Warren Commission support.
Douglas Horne’s Discoveries
Douglas P. Horne, the chief analyst for military records for ARRB, wrote more extensively about discrepancies and outright confabulation in the medical evidence, fakery in the Zapruder film, and the deliberate destruction of Secret Service records in his 2009 book set, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.
Horne, who wrote that his work with the ARRB did not begin with the idea of publishing a book, pulled no punches in his five volumes. In his overly detailed description and analysis of his experience on the board, he wrote, “Let me make it clear here and now that I consider the assassination of President Kennedy to have been an action of the state [emphasis his]: the national security establishment made a decision late in 1962 or early in 1963 to fire the President, and it was a broad consensus.”
A former Navy navigator, Horne got to the crux of the case by detailing the tainting of the physical
evidence, both by suppression and by fabrication. He noted:
Once the researcher is convinced that the President was killed by multiple shooters in a crossfire—and through this, understands that he was killed by a conspiracy—the precise details of how that shooting occurred become irrelevant. Of equal or greater importance than understanding that President Kennedy was killed by a crossfire, is understanding that the Federal government covered up the facts of his death, in the most brazen and outrageous manipulation of physical evidence in any murder case in American history.
He added that the mere fact that no one in government has admitted the truth of the assassination is the surest indication that the cover-up was sinister in nature. “If the cover-up had been a benign one, it would have been admitted to, and fully explained, long ago,” he reasoned.
Based on the testimony of Bethesda Naval Hospital technicians and photographers, Horne was able to confirm the claims of author David Lifton that surgery was conducted on Kennedy’s body prior to the official autopsy, the X-rays and autopsy photographs now in the National Archives are not the originals, and JFK’s body arrived in circumstances different from the official account.
Kennedy’s body left Dallas wrapped in a sheet inside a costly bronze coffin, yet arrived at Bethesda in a zippered body bag inside a plain military-style shipping coffin. Horne noted, “The shipping casket and body bag witnesses from Bethesda provide medico-legal proof that the body was intercepted in transit, that its chain-of-custody was broken, and that there was an opportunity to tamper with JFK’s wounds in transit.”
Based on initial reports, including notes made by LBJ’s secretary aboard Air Force One, Kennedy’s body was to have been sent to Walter Reed Army Medical Center rather than Bethesda. Horne explained: