Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Not the smallest speck of evidence has ever surfaced that any of the conspiracy community’s favorite groups (CIA, mob, etc.) was involved, in any way, in the assassination. Not only the Warren Commission, but the HSCA came to the same conclusion. Moreover, the idea itself overtaxes credulity. The very thought of CIA officials sitting around a conference table at their Langley, Virginia, headquarters, or the heads of the Mafia families gathering at a summit meeting in the Adirondacks, or the captains of industry, like the presidents of General Motors, IBM, Lockheed, and so on, meeting clandestinely with America’s top military leaders (Oliver Stone’s “military-industrial complex”) to actually plot the murder of the president of the United States, is much too far-fetched and preposterous on its face for even a Robert Ludlum novel. But conspiracy theorists, as suspicious as a cat in a new home, find occurrences and events everywhere that feed their suspicions and their already strong predilection to believe that the official version is wrong. However, as Newsweek magazine pointed out, “If any moment in history were to be scrutinized with the obsessiveness focused on 12:30 p.m., November 22, 1963, you could come up with weird coincidences, hidden connections, terrifying portents.”85

  To create something out of nothing requires considerable powers of imagination, and the conspiracy theorists have indeed soared on the wings of their dreams, wishes, and fantasies. As writer Joe Patoski says, “They have accepted all supposed evidence that supports their thesis, no matter how shaky, and ignored all evidence that undermines it, no matter how certain.” Any district attorney or police detective in the country will tell you that contrary to literature and the big screen—where murder cases are eventually all wrapped up neatly—in virtually every criminal case with any complexity to it at all, there are unexplained discrepancies, unanswered questions, things that don’t quite fit. And if these cases were put under the high-powered microscope the Kennedy assassination was, there would be even more. That’s true because of the nature of life. Things don’t happen in life with mathematical precision and in apple-pie order. As Walter Cronkite put it in a June 27, 1967, CBS special on the assassination, “Only in fiction do we find all the loose ends neatly tied. Real life is not all that tidy.”86

  Law enforcement veterans will also tell you that because of the fallibility of human beings, it is routine, for instance, for five witnesses to observe the same robbery yet give five different physical descriptions of the robber, and for even their own experts to make errors (in forensic analysis of blood, hair, fingerprints, etc.) that are caught and proved to be errors by other experts. Ignoring these realities, the almost unwavering modus operandi of the conspiracy theorists in this case has been to focus only on the inevitable discrepancies and inconsistencies arising out of the statements and work of hundreds upon hundreds of people, as if the discrepancies themselves prove a conspiracy, never bothering to tell their readers, number one, what they believe precisely did happen, and number two, what solid and irrefutable evidence they have to prove it. I mean, do discrepancies and inconsistencies add up to life as we know it, or to conspiracy, as the theorists would want us to believe?

  The conspiracy community regularly seizes on one slip of the tongue, misunderstanding, or slight discrepancy to defeat twenty pieces of solid evidence; accepts one witness of theirs, even if he or she is a provable nut, as being far more credible than ten normal witnesses on the other side; treats rumors, even questions, as the equivalent of proof; leaps from the most minuscule of discoveries to the grandest of conclusions; and insists, as the late lawyer Louis Nizer once observed, that the failure to explain everything perfectly negates all that is explained.

  All humans make mistakes. But there is no room or allowance in the fevered world of conspiracy theorists for mistakes, human errors, anomalies, or plain incompetence, though the latter, from the highest levels on down, is endemic in our society. Every single piece of evidence that isn’t 100 percent consistent with all the other evidence pointing toward Oswald’s guilt and the absence of a conspiracy is by itself proof of Oswald’s innocence and the existence of a conspiracy. There is also no such thing for these people as a coincidence. With both feet planted firmly in the air, the conspiracy theorists have created a cottage industry that thrives to this very day, and whose hallmark, with noted exceptions, has been absurdity and silliness. Believe it or not, a conspiracy theory that was floating around in the conspiracy community for a time was that the assassin of JFK was really the Secret Service agent driving the presidential limousine, who turned around in his seat (while his fellow agent in the passenger seat leaned over and steered the car for him) and shot Kennedy at point-blank range. Despite the absurdity of their allegations and the total lack of evidence to support their charges, the conspiracy theorists have not only convinced the vast majority of Americans that the Warren Commission was wrong, but have succeeded in convincing virtually all Americans that there will never be a satisfactory resolution of this case. Indeed, this is even the belief of those who agree that Oswald killed Kennedy and he acted alone. One example of this latter group is Dan Rather, who says that people will be talking about the assassination “a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, in somewhat the same way people discuss ‘The Iliad.’ Different people read Homer’s description of the wars and come to different conclusions, and so shall it be with much about Kennedy’s death.”87 Author Bob Katz seconds Rather when he states what has become the conventional wisdom: “The truth in this case lies buried forever. The unsolved murder of the twentieth century has entered the realm of myth.”88

  But I don’t believe for one moment that the truth in this case has been buried forever or that there has to be substantial questions about this case for thousands of years to come. If I did, I would never have started working on this book, which has consumed so many years of my life. I firmly believe that the evidence in this case enables all sensible people who look at it to be completely satisfied as to exactly what happened.

  I want to assure the readers of this book that I commenced my investigation of this case with an open mind. But after being exposed to the evidence, I have become satisfied beyond all doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy, and beyond all reasonable doubt that he acted alone. I am very confident that the overwhelming majority of objective readers of this book will end up feeling the same way.

  As one gets further into this book and starts to learn more about Oswald, it will become increasingly obvious that if any group such as the CIA or organized crime had wanted to kill the president, the unreliable and unpredictable loner and loser Lee Harvey Oswald would have been the last man on earth whom it would have entrusted with such a monumental undertaking.

  Any reader of this book has to be struck by three things, one of which is its abnormal length.* In defense of its length, in addition to the point I made previously that conspiracy theorists have transformed Kennedy’s murder into the most complex murder case ever, I would remind the reader that more words have been written about Kennedy’s assassination than any other single, one-day event in history. Obviously, more words have been written about Christ, but not about his life and death, since so very little is known. Instead, they have been written mostly about the ramifications of his life and death and their profound influence on history. The scope and breadth of issues flowing from the Kennedy assassination are so enormous that typically authors write entire books on just one aspect of the case alone, such as organized crime, or the CIA, or Castro, or Jack Ruby, or Oswald’s guilt or innocence in Kennedy’s murder, or the murder of Officer Tippit, or the prosecution of Clay Shaw in New Orleans for Kennedy’s murder, or the mind of Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Warren Commission, et cetera, et cetera.

  When looked upon in the above light, and with my objective being to compress the essence of the vast and limitless words and literature on the assassination into one single volume, one could possibly say about the seemingly inordinate length of this book, “Is that all you have to say, Mr. Bugliosi?” On the other
hand, I suspect that at some point in their reading of this book, many other readers will say to themselves, “Why does he [yours truly] keep piling one argument upon another to prove his point? He’s already made it twelve ways from Sunday, so why go on?” To those readers I say that the Warren Commission also made its point, and well, over forty years ago, yet today the overwhelming majority of Americans do not accept its conclusion that Oswald acted alone, a great number not even believing he killed Kennedy. Hence, the overkill in this book is historically necessary.

  What about the companion CD-ROM of endnotes numbering 954 pages? With forty official volumes, 933 books, and literally hundreds of millions of other words written in newspapers and magazines about the most important murder case in our history, one of my very biggest tasks for you, the reader, was to separate the wheat from the chaff out of the virtually endless allegations, controversies, and issues surrounding the case. I believe I have done this, and it is this wheat, as it were, that constitutes this very long book.* The endnotes are for the following people: those lay readers who want to know more about a matter in the main text; conspiracy theorists and serious, longtime students of the assassination; and scholars and future historians. To put the material presently in the endnotes into the main body of the text would have substantially slowed down and interrupted the flow of the narrative and interfered with the average reader’s enjoyment of the book. And if the truth be told, and the reader promises not to tell, I had a big inducement to put whatever I could in an endnote. Since the book is already uncommonly long, and therefore heavy, whatever I could put in an endnote helped enable me to put out a book that wasn’t prohibitively long and unmanageable.

  Readers might be interested to know that I commenced my work on this book following the London trial in 1986. So I have been working on this book for twenty-one years. Most of the early years were devoted to research, reading, and writing, not interviewing witnesses to fill in the holes, which I did do much of to supplement my continuing reading, writing, and research in later years.

  Finally, I believe readers will also be struck by the incredibly rich cast of diverse characters who people the Kennedy assassination saga, characters who would rival those in the most inspired of fiction, including that of Shakespeare. I don’t read fiction but I’ve been told that most prominent novelists really only have four or five characters who keep reemerging, in different clothing, in their various stories, whereas Shakespeare allegedly had more than twenty disparate characters. I can assure the readers of this book that within its pages they will meet many extremely fascinating people in addition to President Kennedy himself and his wife, Jackie, not the least of which, you will find, are Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara are among the many others.† Conspiracy author Paris Flammonde said it well when he observed that the dramatic personalities in the Kennedy case were among “the most extraordinary ever to stride, slink, and flee across the stage of greater human events…, and like the pageant of characters” in “Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, almost all enter as enigmas and most are hardly more understandable when they depart.”89 Longtime JFK assassination researcher Bill Drenas connects these characters with the unbelievable twists and turns in this story when he says, “If you sat down and tried to write something that was this interesting about a presidential assassination, you couldn’t do it. It’s the most fascinating story ever told. That’s why people will never stop talking about this case.”90

  Though the president’s murder happened in Dallas, Texas, the long journey you the reader are about to embark on will take you to many other places—New Orleans’s colorful and steamy French Quarter, a hotel room in Moscow, the beaches of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, and the roiling waters of the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam; from a mob hangout in Chicago to the little town of Stanley, North Dakota; a park bench in Central Park and bullring in Mexico City to the anti-Castro–laden streets of Miami’s Little Havana; and so on. Though a good portion of the subject matter will be complex, sometimes even arcane, I hope I will have infused even these areas with enough interesting and understandable narrative to keep your interest throughout this very long and circuitous journey.

  Vincent Bugliosi

  January 2007

  Los Angeles, California

  BOOK ONE

  Matters of Fact What Happened

  Four Days in November

  Author’s Note: All times noted throughout this chapter are derived, when possible, from reliable sources (e.g., Dallas police radio recordings, television videotapes with times on screen). When not, times are inferred from the unfolding events and the totality of witness statements. This methodology is necessary because the time estimates given by, for instance, a single witness would often change every time the witness was interviewed and nearly always be in conflict with those given by other witnesses. All of this, of course, is normal and to be expected. I believe the following chronology to be the most accurate reconstruction to date. Throughout this chronology, the times, unless stated otherwise, are those of Central Standard Time.

  Friday, November 22, 1963

  6:30 a.m.

  Marina Oswald awakens in the dark. This late in November the sun doesn’t rise until seven, even as far south as Irving, Texas. The young Russian woman, born Marina Nikolaevna Prusakova, is still tired from an uneasy night. She and her American husband, Lee, argued the night before, not as intensely as usual, but unpleasantly enough, particularly as they hadn’t seen each other for nearly two weeks. And their newborn, Rachel, awoke twice, as babies will.

  Lee usually woke up before the alarm went off, but this morning he didn’t, sleeping through the sound, and Marina awakened him about ten minutes later. In the other bedroom Marina’s friend Ruth Paine, the owner of the house, is still asleep with her kids.1

  Lee has changed a lot in the two and a half years since Marina first met him at a dance at the Palace of Culture in Minsk, the capital city of the Soviet province of Byelorussia. She was only nineteen then, he was twenty-one and just a few months out of the U.S. Marines. Marina thought him to be very well dressed in his gray suit, white shirt, and white tie.2 When she found out later that he was an American defector to the Soviet Union, it only increased her attraction to him. She still finds him good looking, in some ways even more so since he has been losing weight and some of the babyish plumpness of cheek that made him look a bit like a chipmunk. At five foot nine inches and less than 150 pounds, Lee is rather small of build. But he’s wiry, and his hands and arms are unusually strong. He is hardening into a man, and Marina is still Lee’s woman, despite his crazy imagination. Honestly, some of his ideas would make the cat laugh. He told her not long ago that in twenty years he would be the “prime minister.”

  The lingering squabble from the night before is nothing out of the ordinary. They have been bickering from the first day of their marriage, and Lee isn’t above hitting her when he loses his temper. They quarrel when they live together, they quarrel when they live apart. Marina has plenty of reason to want to live apart, but now he wants her to come back to live with him. He wants to take an apartment near his job, in Dallas, so they can all be together again—quite a turnaround from the pressure he had been putting on her to return to the Soviet Union, unless he is just trying to manipulate her again for some hidden reason of his own. Marina can never be quite sure. She knows she will eventually have to go back to him—she can’t presume upon the hospitality of Ruth much longer—but she isn’t ready yet. She is particularly outraged that Lee has been living in Dallas under an assumed name—more of his foolishness. She doesn’t even know where in Dallas—some cheap furnished room somewhere, she supposes—and it was more or less an accident that she found out about the phony name at all.

  Lee didn’t come out to Irving last weekend. He didn’t call her either. Perhaps he was angry because she had asked him not to come. Ruth, an intellectually inclined Quaker, was having a birthday party for her daught
er on Saturday, her estranged husband Michael would be there, and Marina felt Lee’s presence would be an intrusion on what ought to be a family day.

  Then on Sunday, baby June, their two-year-old, was playing with the telephone dial, and Marina, perhaps feeling a little guilty, impulsively asked Ruth to call Lee. After seventeen months in the United States, Marina still doesn’t speak English, so she had Ruth call for her. The man who answered the phone told Ruth that no one by the name of Lee Oswald lived at that number. Neither she nor Ruth knew that he was living there under an assumed name, and when he finally did call on Monday, Marina let him know she was furious that he was up to his childish tricks again. He got very angry and ordered her to remove his name and phone number from Ruth’s address book. She said she wouldn’t, and they argued about it. He claimed he did it because he didn’t want the landlady to know his real name. She might, he said, read in the paper that he had defected to Russia. He told her he also didn’t want the FBI to know where he lived because his contacts with the bureau were unpleasant. He never did tell her what name he had registered under at the rooming house.3

  She is further aggravated by the fact that Lee came out to Irving last night—Thursday—instead of Friday, in violation of their understanding with Ruth. Lee is allowed to come out on Friday evening and stay over the weekend, but this week he’d come out a day early, which he had never done before, claiming he’d gotten “lonesome for my girls.” But he wanted more, begging her to come live with him again, in Dallas, with their two girls.4