The new book, JFK and the Unspeakable, contains a fresh interview that brings even more credence to the “double Oswald” scenario. Author Jim Douglass tracked down a fellow named Warren (Butch) Burroughs, who was running the concession stand at the Texas Theater where Oswald was apprehended. He says Oswald came in sometime between 1:00 PM and 1:07 PM, which is several minutes before Oswald supposedly shot and killed policeman J.D. Tippitt seven blocks away. Burroughs sold him popcorn at 1:15 (the very moment of Tippitt’s slaying).
Most stunning of all was Burroughs’s revelation that, a few minutes after the cops came rushing in to surround Oswald and half-drag him out the front of the theater, a second man who “looked almost like Oswald, like he was his brother or something,” was arrested and taken out the back of the theater.20
Burroughs wasn’t the only witness to this. Bernard Haire, who owned Bernie’s Hobby House two doors east of the theater, had also seen police bring “a young white man ... dressed in a pullover shirt and slacks” out the rear door of the theater, where he was driven off. Told that Oswald had been brought out the front, Haire was bewildered and said “I don’t know who I saw arrested.”21
You’ve also got witnesses at the Book Depository building seeing Oswald walk out the front and get driven off in a car, and more witnesses seeing him go out the back and take a bus. There are more witnesses inside the building who claim to have seen Oswald in two places at once. So there’s quite the possibility that both of them, Lee and Harvey, were in the book depository at the same time.
My hunch is that they were both part of a false defector program that James Angleton and his friends in counterintelligence were running out of the CIA. While Harvey was over in Russia, Lee was working with anti-Castro Cubans in Florida planning to bump off Castro (he was seen by a number of people down there at the same time). Harvey, the wimpy-chinned one in the photographs, was married to Marina. Lee, the thick-necked one, was used to set up Harvey. I believe it’s Harvey laying in the grave, and whatever happened to Lee, I have no idea.
In Armstrong’s book, there’s also the matter of the two mothers. Apparently the real Oswald mother was quite an attractive tall woman, but then you’ve also got short, dumpy Marguerite. What proves to me that she was a fraud? In one interview she gave, she had Lee’s birthday wrong. I don’t know of a woman who’s ever given birth to a child that can’t remember the day.
I can’t end this chapter without a few words about the national media’s role in the cover-up.22 The very first dispatch out of Dallas on November 22, 1963, came from the Associated Press: “The shots apparently came from a grassy knoll in the area.” That was the news in most of the early reports, though it was soon replaced by the Texas School Book Depository.
Dan Rather, who was a local newsman in Dallas at the time, was the first journalist to see the 20-second-long “home movie” taken by dressmaker Abraham Zapruder. Rather then told a national TV audience that the fatal shot drove the president’s head “violently forward,” when the footage showed just the opposite! Later on, in his book The Camera Never Blinks, Rather defended his “mistake” saying it was because his watching the film had been so rushed.
But nobody could question this at the time, because Time-Life snapped up the Zapruder film for $150,000—a small fortune back then—and battled for years to keep it out of the public domain. The Life magazine publisher, C.D. Jackson, was “so upset by the head-wound sequence,” according to Richard Stolley, who was then the magazine’s L.A. bureau chief, “that he proposed the company obtain all rights to the film and withhold it from public viewing at least until emotions calmed.”
We didn’t find out until 1977, when Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame wrote a piece for Rolling Stone on “The CIA and the Media,” why we should have been upset about C.D. Jackson. Bernstein explained: “For many years, [Time-Life founder Henry] Luce’s personal emissary to the CIA was C.D. Jackson, a Time, Inc., vice president who was publisher of Life magazine from 1960 until his death in 1964. While a Time executive, Jackson coauthored a CIA-sponsored study recommending the reorganization of the American intelligence services in the early 1950s.” He also “approved specific arrangements for providing CIA employees with Time-Life cover. Some of these arrangements were made with the knowledge of Luce’s wife, Clare Boothe.” (Mrs. Luce was a member of the Committee to Free Cuba, and right after the assassination started putting out information connecting Oswald to Cuba—information she received from a group of CIA-backed Cuban exiles that she supported. The CIA still won’t release its files about that group.)
Life published a story headlined “End of Nagging Rumors: The Critical Six Seconds” (December 6, 1963), that claimed to show precisely how Oswald had succeeded in hitting his target. Supposedly based on the Zapruder film, the magazine said that the president had been turning to wave to someone in the crowd when one of Oswald’s bullets hit him in the throat. But guess what? That sequence is nowhere to be seen in the film.
From the get-go, Oswald was damned as guilty by the media. The headline in the New York Times: “Career of Suspect Has Been Bizarre.” In the New York Herald Tribune: “Left Wing Lunacy, Not Right is Suspect.” In Time magazine: “Evidence Against Oswald Described as Conclusive.”
Here’s what media critic Jerry Policoff later had to say: “Thus, the press’ curiosity was not aroused when a 7.65 caliber German Mauser mutated into a 6.5 caliber Italian Mannlicher-Carcano; or when the grassy knoll receded into oblivion; or when an entrance wound in the President’s throat became an exit wound (first for a fragment from the head wound and then for a bullet from the back wound); or when a wound six inches below the President’s shoulder became a wound at the back of the neck. The press was thereby weaving a web that would inevitably commit it to the official findings.”
Three months before the Warren Report appeared in September 1964, the New York Times ran a Page One exclusive: “Panel To Reject Theories of Plot in Kennedy Death.” They then printed the whole report as a 48-page supplement, and collaborated with Bantam Books and the Book-of-the-Month Club to publish both hardcover and paperback editions. “The commission analyzed every issue in exhaustive, almost archaeological detail,” according to reporter Anthony Lewis.
The Times also put together another book, The Witnesses, which contained “highlights” from testimony before the Warren Commission. All these were aimed at shoring up the lone-gunman notion. In one instance, a witness who reported having seen a man with a rifle on the sixth floor had other portions of his testimony eliminated—namely, that he’d actually seen two men but been told to “forget it” by an FBI agent. Witnesses like Zapruder, who believed some of the shots came from in front, were left out entirely.
Life magazine devoted most of its October 2, 1964, issue to the Warren Report, assigning commission member (and future president) Gerald Ford the job of evaluating it. In 1997, the Assassination Records Review Board would release handwritten notes by Ford, revealing that he had misrepresented the placement of the president’s back wound—raising it several inches to suggest he’d instead been struck in the neck—in order to make it fit the theory that a single bullet had hit both Kennedy and Connally. Otherwise, the entire lone-assassin notion would have collapsed.
That same issue of Life underwent two major revisions after it went on sale. One of the articles was illustrated with eight frames from the Zapruder film. But Frame 323 turned out to contradict the Warren Report’s conclusion about the shots all coming from the rear. So the issue was recalled, the plates broken and re-set (this was all pre-computer), and Frame 313 showing the president’s head exploding became the replacement. A second “error” forced still another such change. When a Warren Commission critic, Vincent Salandria, asked Life editor Ed Kearns about this two years later, Kearns wrote back: “I am at a loss to explain the discrepancies between the three versions of LIFE which you cite. I’ve heard of breaking a plate to correct an error. I’ve never heard of doing it twice for a single issue, much less
a single story. Nobody here seems to remember who worked on the early Kennedy story... ”
And so it went. Skeptics of the Warren Report were often labeled “leftists” or “Communists.” After Mark Lane’s book Rush to Judgment and Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas came out in 1966 questioning the official version, and became best-sellers, the New York Times decided to conduct its own investigation. One of its unit, Houston bureau chief Martin Waldron, later said they’d found “a lot of unanswered questions” that the paper then wouldn’t pursue. “I’d be off on a good lead and then somebody’d call me off and send me out to California on another story or something. We never really detached anyone for this. We weren’t really serious.”
Life magazine also took a fresh look at the case. “Did Oswald Act Alone? A Matter of Reasonable Doubt,” an article in the November 26, 1966 issue was headlined. A reexamination of the Zapruder film, the magazine said, had reached the conclusion that the single-bullet theory didn’t hold up and a new investigation was called for. This was to be the first of a series of articles but, in January 1967, editor Richard Billings says he was informed that “It is not Life’s function to investigate the Kennedy assassination.” That was the last time they’d challenge the Warren Commission’s findings. Billings resigned from the magazine and took a job with a newspaper in St. Petersburg, Florida. In 1967, led by Dan Rather, CBS News did a four-part study that again upheld the Warren Report. Warren Commission member John McCloy was the network’s behind-the-scenes advisor.
Another decade went by before the Bernstein piece in Rolling Stone showed just how strongly these news organizations were all tied to the CIA. “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.,” Bernstein wrote. “Over the years, the [CBS] network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA.... A high-level CIA official with a prodigious memory says that the New York Times provided cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966.”
Bernstein’s article began by describing how Joseph Alsop, a leading syndicated columnist, had gone to the Philippines in 1953 to cover an election, at the CIA’s request. It would be Alsop, transcripts of President Johnson’s taped telephone conversations later revealed, who first urged LBJ to form the Warren Commission to answer any unresolved doubts about the assassination. “Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters,” Bernstein wrote. “Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries.”
The article went on: “James Angleton, who was recently removed as the Agency’s head of counterintelligence operations, ran a completely independent group of journalist-operatives who performed sensitive and frequently dangerous missions; little is known about this group for the simple reason that Angleton deliberately kept only the vaguest of files.”
Among the CIA’s most valuable relationships in the 1960s, Bernstein continued, was a Miami News reporter who covered Latin America named Hal Hendrix. He regularly provided information about individuals within Miami’s Cuban exile community. He was the conduit through which the CIA passed word to then-Senator Kenneth Keating that the Soviets were putting missiles in Cuba in 1962, and got awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Missile Crisis. On the afternoon of the assassination, another reporter, Seth Kantor, has said that Hendrix provided him considerable yet-unrevealed information about Oswald’s history—including his supposed defection to Russia and his activities with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The setup seems to have been “on,” and it involved the media.
The cover-up still does. After the House Assassinations Committee concluded late in 1978 that the president “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy,” the New York Times buried the story—“Experts Say That Second Gunman Almost Certainly Shot at Kennedy”—on page 37, right alongside the classified ads. Later, a Times editorial said that the committee seemed “more interested in inflaming than informing.” And whenever there were intimations of conspiracy in the media, the finger pointed elsewhere—like a CBS documentary, “The CIA’s Secret Army,” which strongly hinted that Fidel Castro had ordered Kennedy’s murder in retaliation for the attempts on his own life.
When Oliver Stone’s movie JFK came out in 1991, the strongest attacks came from news outlets and journalists “with the longest records of error and obstruction in defense of the flawed Warren Commission inquiry.”23 Are we surprised? They’ll cheerlead for Posner’s and Bugliosi’s books, but I’ll bet you a free lunch they’re not going to be reviewing this one anytime soon.
WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?
One lesson we can take away from the tragedy in Dallas is that the federal government shouldn’t be allowed to supersede state and local laws, when it comes to having an “official” investigation into events as momentous as a presidential assassination or a terrorist attack. We also need to pay close attention to how our big media stopped doing their job as the eyes and ears of our democracy, refusing to acknowledge that something might be going on beyond a “lone nut” assassin. The pattern of denial continues, and we the people must demand thorough investigation and honest, unbiased information.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ASSASSINATION OF MALCOLM X
THE INCIDENT: Malcolm X was gunned down, execution-style, while giving a speech inside the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, on February 21, 1965.
THE OFFICIAL WORD: His killers were Black Muslims loyal to Elijah Muhammad, who was involved in a power struggle with Malcolm X.
MY TAKE: Malcolm X was set up to die by elements of the CIA and FBI, who had him under constant surveillance and were afraid that he and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. might form an alliance.
“It’s a time for martyrs now. And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country. I’ve learned it the hard way—but I’ve learned it. And that’s the significant thing.”—Malcolm X, talking to his friend Gordon Parks, two days before he was killed.1
Let me start with my perception of Malcolm X when I was growing up. I was terrified of him. He was this black man with an “X” attached to his name. The TV announcers portrayed him as some crazy revolutionary who wanted to kill every white man on the planet and take control. It was only when I read his autobiography in the late Eighties or early Nineties, and learned more about him and what he went through, that I came to look upon him as one of my heroes.
Sure, he’d gone the wrong way a couple of times in his life and there was a time when I probably should have feared Malcolm. But in the end, he was a brave, good man who had the ability to grow and change. After being as low as you could go, he was saved in prison by turning to religion through the Nation of Islam. Later, that became his prison and he had to break free again. He went to Mecca and had that huge transformation and admitted he was wrong, that we shouldn’t segregate by color. Then to have him return to America and shortly thereafter be gunned down and silenced, I think did a terrible disservice to humanity.
I was wrestling in Atlanta when I first read The Auto biography of Malcolm X. I remember I was so moved by it, that I went out and bought one of those beautiful ball caps that had the “X” on it, standing for Malcolm X. I would wear that hat while taking the train downtown to the TV studio. Of course, it’s predominantly black people that ride the rail in Atlanta. They’d kind of give me a double-take, like they didn’t know what to think. As Jesse the Body, I could get away with it. People knew I could take the most bizarre positions and make them look normal. But I’d always chuckle to myself to watch the reaction of black people seeing this big white guy wearing a Malcolm X cap. I often sat and thought, do they think I’m just
naïve and stupid? Or do they maybe think I know and understand, and there’s a reason I’m wearing it? Because I’m a bit of a revolutionary myself, who can relate to him, in a humble way.
Malcolm X was only 39 when he died in a hail of shotgun and pistol fire, executed inside the Audubon Ballroom after giving a speech in Harlem. Clearly, by some of the things he said in the last month or so of his life, Malcolm knew it was inevitable. He told Alex Haley, who worked with him on the autobiography, that he didn’t believe he’d live to see the book published. And he didn’t. He was murdered on February 21, 1965, only a little more than a year after JFK’s assassination. Since the gunmen were all part of the Black Muslims, and loyal followers of Elijah Muhammad, it was pretty much accepted that Malcolm X was the victim of a bitter feud between the two leaders. Today, we know that what happened on that Sunday afternoon was a whole lot bigger than that.2
After his pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm was no longer preaching what some had called his “message of hate.” He’d already broken away from Elijah Muhammad, who was an advocate for a separate black state. He was forming alliances with revolutionary leaders in Africa and elsewhere—even making friends with Che Guevara, another of my heroes—and talking about civil rights as a human rights issue that the United Nations should take up. It looked like Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. might even come together in a powerful alliance. I can imagine there were people in high places, like J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, who didn’t want that to take place. And I could certainly see where the status quo might decide, “This isn’t going to happen, and we’re going to make sure of that.”
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