Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Posner is even worse, writing what can only be characterized as a distortion and misrepresentation of Odio’s testimony. In his book he dismisses the accuracy of her identification of Oswald as being the man at her door by quoting highly selective testimony of Odio’s, including this testimony of Odio’s when shown a photo of Oswald by Warren Commission counsel: “I think this man was the one in my apartment. I am not too sure of that picture. He didn’t look like this.”77 Sounds like the man at the door might not have been Oswald, right? That’s because Posner omits what Odio said immediately thereafter (on the same line of the transcript) to explain why Oswald did not look like he did in the photo: “He was smiling that day. He was more smiling than in this picture.” But much more importantly by far, Posner doesn’t tell his readers about other photos (even television footage) of Oswald that Odio was shown where she positively identified him as the man at the door. Although Posner expressly tells his readers that “Odio could not positively identify [Oswald] when shown photos during her Warren Commission testimony,” this is simply and categorically not true. When Odio was asked whether one photograph of Oswald depicted “the man who was in your apartment,” she jocularly stated, “If it is not, it is his twin.” When asked, “When did you first become aware of the fact that this man who had been at your apartment was the man who had been arrested in connection with the assassination?” she replied, “It was immediately.”

  Question: “As soon as you saw his picture?”

  “Immediately, I was so sure.”

  Summing up her testimony after Warren Commission counsel asked her, “Do you have any doubts in your mind after looking at these pictures that the man who was in your apartment was Lee Harvey Oswald?” she replied, “I don’t have any doubts.”78 Because this testimony of Odio’s goes in the direction of contradicting Posner’s position that the visitor at the door “was not Oswald” and his larger position of no conspiracy, none of it can be found in Case Closed, and hence, the unsuspecting reader can merrily proceed to the next page, not troubled at all by a very, very troubling witness (Odio).

  One of the favorites of the conspiracy theorists is Rose Cherami. In fact, Oliver Stone started his movie JFK with her story. Cherami (true name, Melba Christine Marcades) was a prostitute and heroin addict who was found lying on the road near Eunice, Louisiana, on the evening of November 20, 1963, two days before the assassination. She said she had been pushed out of a moving car. Bruised and disoriented, she was taken to the nearby Louisiana State Hospital in Jackson, Louisiana, where she reportedly told the attending physician that President Kennedy was going to be killed during his forthcoming trip to Dallas. Now let’s go to Posner. Dismissing Cherami, he writes, “Doctor Victor Weiss, a treating physician, told investigators that he did not hear her say anything about the assassination until November 25th [three days after the assassination].” Posner is clearly implying here that Weiss was in Cherami’s presence before the assassination and she never said a word about the president going to be killed. It was only after the assassination that she said anything to him. In fact, Posner later says that Cherami “made up her story” not just after the assassination, but “after Ruby had shot Oswald.”79 But when we look at Posner’s own citation for this (HSCA volume 10, page 200), we find something quite different: “Doctor Victor Weiss verified that he was employed as a resident physician at the hospital in 1963. He recalled that on Monday, November 25, 1963, he was asked by another physician, Dr. Bowers, to see a patient who had been committed November 20 or 21. Dr. Bowers allegedly told Weiss that the patient, Rose Cherami, had stated before the assassination that President Kennedy was going to be killed.” So, directly contrary to what Posner suggested to his readers, not only hadn’t Weiss seen Cherami before the assassination, but at least reportedly, Cherami had indeed said before the assassination that Kennedy was going to be killed. Cherami can be responsibly dealt with, but certainly not in the way it is done in Case Closed.

  If these examples were isolated, they perhaps would not be worth mentioning, although each one clearly reflects the state of mind and proclivity of the author. But Posner does this type of thing too much to be ignored. The problem with the writings of Posner and the conspiracy theorists is that, as I indicated earlier, unless the reader has all the volumes of the Warren Commission and those of the HSCA to refer to, which perhaps only one out of ten thousand readers would have, how can one possibly know whether what they are reading is true, half-true, or false? In former Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny’s long review of Posner’s book, Case Closed, for the Los Angeles Times on November 7, 1993, he writes that Posner “does not sink as low as his slimiest predecessors on the case (Jim Garrison, Oliver Stone and Mark Lane); he doesn’t knowingly present concoctions as fact. But he does lie down with such predecessor assassination-book writers as Anthony Summers, Jim Marrs and Edward J. Epstein, in that he presents only the evidence that supports the case he’s trying to build, framing this evidence in a way that misleads readers who aren’t aware that there’s more to the story.”* Kwitny’s review would have been more accurate if he had said that Posner “frequently” presents only the evidence that…But it’s a shame that Posner, in his book (which was written in only two years, a remarkably short period for such an immense undertaking), engaged too often in the tactics of the conspiracy theorists, because despite his omissions and distortions he managed to write an impressive work. If his book had been more comprehensive, particularly in the vast area of conspiracy, and, more importantly, had more credibility, the enormous conspiracy community would not have had the ammunition that they have used against him.

  I can assure the conspiracy theorists who have very effectively savaged Posner in their books that they’re going to have a much, much more difficult time with me. As a trial lawyer in front of a jury and an author of true-crime books, credibility has always meant everything to me. My only master and my only mistress are the facts and objectivity. I have no others. The theorists may not agree with my conclusions, but in this work on the assassination I intend to set forth all of their main arguments, and the way they, not I, want them to be set forth, before I seek to demonstrate their invalidity. I will not knowingly omit or distort anything. However, with literally millions of pages of documents on this case, there are undoubtedly references in some of them that conspiracy theorists feel are supportive of a particular point of theirs, but that I simply never came across.

  Some may say it is petty, perhaps even improper, to criticize others in writing a book about the case. I don’t agree. The Kennedy assassination is a historical event. And when anyone purporting to write the history of the event fabricates, distorts, or misleads about the facts of the case, it is not only advisable but incumbent upon those who subsequently write about the event to point out these lies and distortions. If they do not, the lies themselves will harden in the future into “facts” and millions will be misled. This is precisely what has already happened in this case. After all, if future writers don’t correct the errors and distortions of their predecessors, then who will? If they don’t have the responsibility to do this, then who does? Therefore, if those who follow me find that in writing this book I myself have taken liberties with the truth, I would expect them to bring this to the attention of their readers.

  Another defect I shall studiously avoid in this book—one that characterizes so many authors of books on the assassination—is to falsely suggest to the reader that what he or she is reading is new information that the author has mined from his research. For instance, the reader of Case Closed can only come, from the context, to one conclusion about the section on Failure Analysis Associates’ computer reconstruction of the shooting in Dealey Plaza, and the section debunking all the supposedly mysterious deaths of people associated with the assassination: that the author, Posner, worked with Failure Analysis on its reconstruction and/or commissioned Failure Analysis’s work, and that the author, in his research, had discovered that there were no mysterious de
aths associated with the assassination. But Failure Analysis, a leading engineering and scientific consulting firm with offices worldwide, was commissioned to do its work not by Posner, but by the American Bar Association for a mock trial on the assassination the association conducted in San Francisco at its annual convention in 1992.* Roger McCarthy, president and CEO of Failure Analysis Associates who testified as an expert witness at the trial in San Francisco, told me that Posner “didn’t have anything to do” with their project, and they weren’t even aware he was in the process of writing a book at the time. What particularly troubled McCarthy was that “Posner only presented in his book the prosecution side of our presentation in San Francisco, completely omitting what we presented for the defense, which was important enough to help bring about a hung jury.”80

  Similarly, way back in 1977, sixteen years before the publication of Case Closed, the HSCA thoroughly investigated the entire “mysterious deaths” allegation and wrote of its extensive research and findings discrediting the allegation in volume 4, pages 454–467, of the HSCA’s report to Congress. Yet Posner does not tell his readers this in his book. Show me one reader out of a hundred who read Case Closed who didn’t think that the author was sowing new ground in his section on mysterious deaths.81 These tactics of authors of books on the assassination remind one of Oscar Levant’s observation about Leonard Bernstein: “Leonard Bernstein has been disclosing musical secrets that have been well known for over 400 years.” Many competent and hard-working people have labored diligently in the investigative vineyards of the Kennedy assassination case throughout the years, and this book will pay homage to their work and findings.

  Another, though more benign, feature of the constantly evolving literature on the assassination is the erroneous assertion or implication in book after book that they contain accounts of the assassination from new and previously unknown witnesses, or new revelations from known witnesses. Even the very prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) descended to this type of tabloid rhetoric by announcing in a press release that JFK’s autopsy doctors “broke their 29 year silence” on the case in JAMA’s May 27, 1992, published interview with two of the doctors. JAMA’s obvious intent was for the mass media to headline their stories with the “silence” hook, which they in fact did. To the public, the phrase “breaking one’s silence” can only mean that the person has never written or spoken about the subject before. But testifying for the public record before the Warren Commission, as the autopsy doctors did, and signing their name to an autopsy report that is published for the world to see, would hardly qualify as “silence.” And they were certainly under no obligation to reiterate their position. JAMA’s press release also neglected to mention the fact that two of the three autopsy doctors (James J. Humes and Pierre A. Finck), in 1978, testified before the HSCA—again for public consumption—and the third (J. Thornton Boswell) was interviewed by the House Select Committee staff. And Humes, the main autopsy surgeon, gave an interview on his findings to Dan Rather on national television in June of 1967. I only mention the JAMA deception to point out that if there is misleading sensationalism about this case from the likes of JAMA, one can imagine why it’s only downhill from there.

  Because this is the most investigated case in world history, any witness (unless someone credible eventually gives testimony of the alleged conspiracy) who has not come forward by now is immediately suspect. Likewise with a known witness who suddenly comes forward with new and vital information. The incontrovertible fact is that the FBI, Secret Service, Warren Commission, and HSCA, as well as police, authors, journalists, historians, private investigators, and an army of ferocious amateur sleuths, have worn the evidentiary terrain in this case all the way through to China. Virtually every important witness has testified under oath, some several times. All important witnesses and almost all of the very peripheral, unimportant ones have already been interviewed. Therefore, as indicated, absent a member of one of the innumerable alleged conspiracies coming forward, the only likely remaining revelations about the case are in the area of new interpretations and analyses of existing evidence. This is not to suggest that these necessarily reduced possibilities render additional inquiry insignificant. Further analytical examination of the case can serve to either strengthen or weaken the official position on the issues of Oswald’s guilt and conspiracy, which is of no small moment. As suggested earlier, we are, after all, dealing with the most consequential murder in American, perhaps world, history. To the argument that unless one can reveal some new, critical evidence about the assassination, there’s no need to write another book about it, I would respond with the question, why write a book analyzing the New Testament, inasmuch as two thousand years later no one is about to come up with any new evidence on the life of Jesus? Indeed, no one has come up with anything new for two thousand years. Even the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in Jordan in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds, are mostly pre-Christian in origin. Yet scholarly books interpreting the New Testament are written every year.* And in terms of volume, there’s infinitely less to interpret in the four short Gospels, for example, than in all the vast literature and evidence surrounding the assassination. Reinterpretation of the evidence in the Kennedy assassination will be a never-ending process, and interpretation and analysis are the very heart of this book.

  The supreme irony about the Kennedy assassination is that although belief in a conspiracy knows no ideological or political boundaries, most conspiracy theorists I have met look up to Kennedy and his legacy, and many revere him. How very odd, then, that so many of them have virtually dedicated their lives to exonerating the man who killed their hero. To counter the incontrovertible evidence pointing to the guilt of the person who cold-bloodedly murdered Kennedy, they come up with extraordinary and often ludicrous arguments. They defend Oswald with a protective passion normally reserved only for one’s immediate family. Indeed, in their mind, everyone (any person or group will do, for them) other than Oswald is responsible for Kennedy’s death. Obviously, the primary motivation of the conspiracy theorists is not to defend Oswald but to attack the Warren Commission, but in the process they go completely overboard in defending Lee Harvey Oswald the person.

  But the very best testament to the validity of the Warren Commission’s findings is that after an unrelenting, close to forty-five-year effort, the Commission’s fiercest critics have not been able to produce any new credible evidence that would in any way justify a different conclusion.

  No Warren Commission critic is more venerated by the conspiracy community than the late, legendary Harold Weisberg. Nor has any been remotely as prolific; Weisberg wrote an astonishing eight books on the case. By common consensus, Weisberg did more research on the assassination and accumulated more documents pertaining to the assassination (sixty file cabinets containing a quarter of a million pages as a result of a great many Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] requests and thirteen separate FOIA lawsuits)82 than any other human. His farm home in Frederick, Maryland, was a mecca to which nearly all serious conspiracy theorists eventually visited to pay homage and browse through his voluminous Kennedy-assassination basement library. As his friend and fellow researcher James Tague said, “Harold spent over 35 years, often seven days a week, in his quest for the truth in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”83 Always believing there was a massive federal effort to “whitewash” (the title of his first book on the assassination in 1965) the facts of Kennedy’s murder for the American public, and to prevent researchers like himself from finding out what really happened, Weisberg writes on the last page of his third book on the assassination (Oswald in New Orleans) that for the first time he saw “the shadow of a happy ending.” Till the end, he still believed that there was a conspiracy in the assassination, but candidly acknowledged to me in 1999, after devoting much of his life to the case, that “much as it looks like Oswald was some kind of agent for somebody, I have not found a shred of evidence to support it, and he never had an extra penny, so h
e had no loot from being an agent.”84

  The vast conspiracy community, which disbelieves everything in the Warren Report except the page numbers, should (but won’t) be influenced in their thinking by such a dramatic admission from their most esteemed titan,* one who relentlessly, obsessively and, as opposed to most of his peers, honestly put every aspect of the case under a microscope for almost four decades. Instead of spending literally thousands of their hours “seeing” traces, hints, and ephemeral shadows of a conspiracy from plain and unambiguous conduct and events, they should realize, as painful as it may be to them, that sometimes things are exactly as they appear to be, and nothing more. Even Sigmund Freud—celebrated for his ability to find the hidden meaning of dreams—noted that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.