Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  The rifle found on the sixth floor was originally identified as a 7.65 Mauser. Over and over again, conspiracy theorists who believe Oswald was framed actually cite this fact as part of their proof—that is, it wasn’t Oswald’s rifle so he’s innocent and was framed. But one moment’s reflection (one moment more than almost all conspiracy theorists are willing to give) would cause you to ask, If he was framed, why would the framers place a rifle on the sixth floor that was not Oswald’s, one that no one could ever connect him to? And if they didn’t place or plant it there, how could they possibly think they could successfully frame him if they knew a rifle belonging to someone else was found on the sixth floor? Conspiracy theorists never bother to ask and attempt to answer such obvious questions. Instead, they find it so much easier to make a silly allegation and then simply move on—to their next silly observation.

  Another example among countless others: To say, as conspiracy theorists do, that the backyard photo of Oswald, dressed in black with a rifle and revolver, is a composite photo is to also say that Marina Oswald was part of the conspiracy to frame her husband, since Marina says she took the photo. But the notion that Marina was part of any conspiracy to frame her husband for Kennedy’s murder is absurd on its face, so the argument that the backyard photo is a composite “doesn’t go anywhere”—that is, unless you are willing to say that Marina was, indeed, part of said conspiracy. If people want to use such absurdity and illogic as their guide in analyzing the assassination, I submit that they should not have a ticket into the theater of serious debate on the assassination. The price of admission to the debate, as it were, should be sense, not nonsense.

  Not only do the considerable number of conspiracy theories in the Kennedy assassination do violence to the facts and the evidence, but conspiracy theorists, in welcoming as many people and groups as they can get under their tent, are rarely troubled by the fact that many of their theories are incompatible with each other. For instance, if the KGB did it, doesn’t that eliminate the theory that the CIA (sworn enemies of the KGB during the cold war) or America’s military-industrial complex did it? If organized crime did it, doesn’t that eliminate the theory that the Secret Service or LBJ was behind the assassination? I mean, the Secret Service (which is not the CIA) is sitting down with the Mafia to kill Kennedy? Please.

  Indeed, in addition to conspiracy theories being incompatible with each other, conspiracy theorists are so immediately taken by and enamored of events they can’t explain that they blindly find no problem drawing a conclusion of conspiracy that inherently contradicts some other conclusion of theirs. One example among a great many: In his book “They’ve Killed the President!” Robert Anson tries hard to convince the reader that the CIA was not alarmed when Oswald, arriving in Moscow, offered to furnish the Soviets information on U.S. radar, because Oswald was probably working for the CIA (i.e., whatever information he gave the Soviets would be incorrect or valueless). But then, in the very next paragraph, he asks the reader to entertain the possibility that since the Russians had never shot down a U-2 before May 1, 1960, which was seven months after Oswald arrived in Moscow, there may have been a “connection between Oswald, the purveyor of radar secrets, and the Russians’ unaccustomed accuracy.” In other words, Oswald is now working with the KGB. But then remarkably, Anson goes back to suggesting that Oswald was working for the CIA when he says, “The U-2 incident was all the more reason [for the CIA] to question Oswald [which the CIA did not do] on his return to the United States…There would have been no need for the Agency to interview Oswald, of course, if they knew…why he had gone to the Soviet Union, and what he had done there—the things they would have known if he had been one of their agents.”7 So does Anson, then, want us to believe that the CIA had Oswald give the KGB radar information that enabled the Russians to shoot down a CIA agent’s U-2? Not really. Anson, in his eagerness to go on to his next discrepancy, coincidence, unexplained event, et cetera, wouldn’t have taken the time to ask himself that question.

  An absolute staple of the conspiracy community—no, a sine qua non, that without which they could not survive—is the interesting but ultimately unproductive and ridiculous notion that if A knows B and B knows C, then A is meaningfully connected to C, which of course is a non sequitur. In fact, the theorists go beyond the above equation. Not only is A connected to C, but whatever nefarious deed C has done (all the more so with B), A must have done also. (Actually, conspiracy theorists frequently go beyond A-B-C into D, E, and F.) So if Jack Ruby is a friend of Dallas mobster Joe Campisi, and Campisi has underworld connections to New Orleans Mafia chieftain Carlos Marcello, then if they posit that Marcello was behind the assassination, it becomes irresistible to the theorists that Ruby must have been involved with Marcello in the assassination or the cover-up.

  Here are just two examples representative of literally thousands of A-B-C (and D, E, and F) situations that the conspiracy theorists set forth in their books: Conspiracy author Peter Dale Scott believes that Dallas oilmen, Jack Ruby, and J. Edgar Hoover, along with many others, may have been part of a conspiracy to murder Kennedy. In support of this, he writes, “A businessman told the FBI that Ruby had once introduced him to Dallas businessman E. E. Fogelson and his wife, Greer Garson. Fogelson was a member of the ‘Del Charro set.’ This was a group of Texas millionaires who frequented [Texas oilman] Clint Murchison’s resort, the Hotel Del Charro, near Murchison’s racetrack, the Del Mar, in La Jolla, California. Clint Murchison and some of his associates would pay for the annual racing holidays of their good friend J. Edgar Hoover.”8

  Clay Shaw (like thousands of American businessmen who traveled to foreign countries and agreed to submit reports once they returned providing information that might be of interest to the CIA’s nonclandestine Domestic Contact Service) wrote in reports dated June 14, 1949, and June 29, 1951, that while in Nicaragua he “heard General Somoza’s cattle monopoly bitterly criticized by businessmen in Managua,” and while in Buenos Aires he was told that “Juan Peron and Evita are each jealous of the other’s power and that they maintain separate and independent political organizations.” Conspiracy author William Davy, who believes Clay Shaw was involved in Kennedy’s assassination, writes, “Curiously, both Somoza and Juan Peron were patients and friends of Shaw’s close associate, Dr. Alton Ochsner…Ochsner is best known for his association with Ed Butler and the Information Council of the Americas, or INCA…INCA was composed of several members of the New Orleans elite. These included…Eustis and William B. Reily. The Reily family owned William B. Reily & Co., makers of Luzianne coffee. It was at Reily’s where Oswald found work as a machine greaser in the summer of 1963.”9

  Under this infantile reasoning in which guilt by association is elevated to an art form, one should watch whom one has dinner with. If A, a surgeon, is friendly and has frequent dinners with B, the president of a major corporation, then if B ends up embezzling millions from his corporation, A must have been involved too.

  Just for example, Dallas police officer Joe Cody, a friend of Jack Ruby’s, said, “Yes, Jack knew the Campisis [Joe, whom some believed to be a Dallas organized-crime figure, and his brother Sam], and I’d seen them together on numerous occasions. Jack ate out there at the Egyptian Lounge [owned by the Campisis]. Sometimes Joe Campisi would sit with him. If I came in, I’d sit with Jack Ruby and Joe Campisi. We all knew each other well.” So since Cody was friendly with Campisi and it turns out Campisi with Marcello, if Marcello had Kennedy killed, I suppose Officer Cody must have also been involved, right? Better yet, a friend of Ruby’s, Pat Morgan, told a Ruby biographer that one night Ruby took him to a big “Italian Night” party “that all the important people of Dallas attended. He took me over and introduced me to [Dallas] Mayor [Earle] Cabell and to Judge Joe B. Brown, who later tried his case. They [Cabell and Brown] were sitting with Joe Campisi.”10* So now, apparently, since we’ve connected Cabell and Brown with Campisi, and Campisi with Marcello, they must have also been in on the plot to kill Kennedy.r />
  And if you want an even closer connection to Marcello, Dallas County deputy sheriff Al Maddox says, “One day I was in Joe Campisi’s office and he called Carlos [Marcello] on the phone and I talked to Carlos on the phone.” I reckon that makes Maddox just dead in the water guilty, along with Marcello, of Kennedy’s murder.11

  How about this: Although there is no credible evidence that Campisi was a mobster (see section on Jack Ruby and organized crime later in text), it is known that Joe Civello (not Joe Campisi) was head of the Dallas Mafia, whatever there was of it. Indeed, Civello, who knew Ruby, was present at the Mafia summit meeting in Apalachin, New York, in November of 1957, which was also attended by Florida Mafia chieftain Santo Trafficante, whom a considerable number of conspiracy theorists believe was behind the assassination. Yet Dallas police sergeant Patrick Dean volunteered to HSCA investigators that even though he knew of Civello’s background, he was a dinner guest one night of Civello’s “at one of them Italian get-togethers when they have, you know, a big dinner.”12 Since Civello was connected to Trafficante, and Dean was a friend of Civello’s, maybe Dean was in on the alleged plot to murder JFK, right?

  Remarkably, even sensible, intelligent people, such as HSCA chief counsel Robert Blakey, who personally believes Marcello was behind Kennedy’s assassination, unthinkingly invoke the buffs’ A-B-C reasoning to support their position. On Frontline’s 1993 show “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” Blakey said, “When you find David Ferrie, who is an investigator for Carlos Marcello, being a boyhood friend to Lee Harvey Oswald, and with him that summer, and with Carlos Marcello at that very point in time, you have an immediate connection between a man [Marcello] who had the motive, opportunity, and means to kill Kennedy and the man [Oswald] who killed Kennedy.”13 What?!?†

  Although common sense alone should tell conspiracy theorists that knowing someone or even being friendly with him is no evidence of a connection to his criminal activity, that you have to show the two were involved with each other in the same enterprise, there is another fascinating phenomenon that the conspiracy theorists must be aware of but seem determined not to acknowledge. I’m referring to the curious but undeniable reality that virtually any two people chosen at random can be connected to each other by the interposition of a very small number of mutual friends or acquaintances. For instance, although most readers of this book don’t know and haven’t ever met President Bush, they might very well know someone who knows him, or know someone who knows someone who knows him. Hence, most of us are only two, three, or four intermediaries removed from the president of the United States. This reality is the reason why most of us, at one time or another, meet someone new in a distant city or country and discover we have mutual friends or acquaintances. And what do we all say at these moments? “It’s a small world.”*

  Indeed, a Harvard-sponsored study in 1967 exploring the theory that all of us are connected by no more than a few people (the so-called six-degrees-of-separation theory) asked this question: “Given any two people in the world, person X and person Z, how many intermediate acquaintance links are needed before X and Z are connected?” Although the study never answered that question definitively with reference to the entire world, the implied answer was “not very many,” the Harvard study citing another study by a group of workers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for its finding that although there is “only about one chance in 200,000 that any two Americans chosen at random will know each other, amazingly, there is better than a 50-50 chance that any two Americans can be linked up with two intermediate acquaintances.” The Harvard empirical study found that on the average, only five intermediate friends or acquaintances were needed to link up any two Americans chosen at random.14

  I have frequently told juries in cases I prosecuted that they should take their human experience with them into the jury room when they deliberate on the issue of the defendant’s guilt, that they didn’t have to leave these experiences at the door. Likewise, conspiracy theorists should use their human experience and common sense in addressing the issues in the Kennedy case rather than their pet A-B-C theory.

  There are several other ways in which the conspiracy community operates in defiance of logic and common sense. A few: Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists are constantly scavenging for something, whether in the eighteen thousand pages of the Warren Commission volumes or anywhere else, that supports their theory. If they find it, they embrace it as the absolute truth even if it is inconsistent with the overwhelming weight of the evidence, including physical, scientific evidence—indeed, even if there are twenty other pieces of evidence showing that their point is wrong. And if someone rejects their “truth” as being erroneous or fraudulent, they simply accuse them of being part of the cover-up or groveling apologists for the Warren Commission.

  Also, as former Warren Commission assistant counsel W. David Slawson put it, they love to “prove” their version of events occurred by “showing that it could have happened that way, without offering any evidence that it actually did.”

  The dreadful illogic and superficiality of the conspiracy theorists’ modus operandi has inevitably resulted in the following situation: Though they have dedicated their existence to trying to poke holes in the Warren Commission’s findings, akin to a defense attorney in a criminal trial trying to raise a reasonable doubt of the defendant’s guilt in the jury’s mind, they have failed abysmally to tell us (if the Warren Commission was wrong) what actually did happen. In other words, other than blithely tossing out names, they have failed to offer any credible evidence of who, if not Oswald, killed Kennedy. Nor have they offered any credible evidence at all of who the conspirators behind the assassination were. So after more than forty years, if we were to rely on these silly people, we’d have an assassination without an assassin (since, they assure us, Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy), and a conspiracy without conspirators. Not a simple achievement.

  To elaborate further on this point, the conspiracy theorists claim to have found a million problems with the Warren Commission’s conclusions that Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone, but not one of them has ever offered a coherent and logical alternative theory as to what did happen. All they can do is point out that such and such a group had a motive; claim that Oswald was a poor shot; allege that Oswald left the Book Depository Building after the shooting in Dealey Plaza because he probably sensed he was being framed; and so on. Their charges, which they have repeated in book after book, usually citing each other as the primary source, could be condensed and put into a thousand-page book titled Discrepancies, Supposed Coincidences, and Unanswered Questions. However, the totality of what they have written, with any semblance of credibility, as to what precisely did happen would fill only a page or so of a companion book, if that. And if that is all that the conspiracy community can produce after more than forty years, shouldn’t they be finally asking themselves if the reason why they have failed to come up with anything is that nothing exists? Not even Houdini could pull a rabbit out of the hat when there was no rabbit in the hat.

  But telling the conspiracy theorists they have failed doesn’t phase them at all. In fact, it’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull. They are so tenacious and desperate to prove a conspiracy that out of their ranks came a book, published in 2002, that actually contained a purported official CIA internal document in which the CIA confesses to the murder and implicates the FBI and Joint Chiefs of Staff as co-conspirators. In that book, Regicide, conspiracy theorist Gregory Douglas claims that Robert T. Crowley, a former CIA assistant deputy director of plans, gave him the document in 1996 with the understanding that it not be published in his lifetime (Crowley died in 2000). Crowley said he was part of the conspiracy, but he apparently had no fear that Douglas would turn on him for fame and fortune, in which case he’d be prosecuted, convicted, and most likely executed. Crowley also apparently didn’t mind his surviving family and descendants having to live with the infamy that he had helped orchestrate the murder of Kennedy
. After all, it was important to this nation’s history that all Americans know what happened. That is why Crowley didn’t give the explosive document to publications with a small circulation like the New York Times, Time, or Newsweek, but to Douglas, who had the document published in his book by a giant, international media conglomerate, the Monte Sano Media company of Huntsville, Alabama, which, by the way, isn’t listed in the phone directory.

  Either Douglas (true name, Peter Stahl) is a fraud, or the person who forged the document is. Apart from the obvious insanity that the CIA would confess in writing to the assassination, the document, dated December 22, 1963, and referenced “Operation Zipper,” has no “To” or “From” line, no signature or even signature block, and is not even labeled or stamped “Top Secret” or any other level of confidentiality. You see, the CIA, like Crowley, wanted the world to know its agents had killed Kennedy. One wonders why the agency never called a press conference to announce its having murdered him. Laughably, the forger of the document couldn’t even get his grammatical tenses to be consistent. In the first paragraph of the document, he writes, “The removal of the President and the Attorney General from their positions because of high treason has been determined”—that is, the assassination hasn’t taken place yet. (That murder is contemplated is made clear in paragraph 4, which reads, “Removal by impeachment or other legal means is considered unfeasable [the forger had a spelling problem and no dictionary at his side] and too protracted,” and paragraph 5, which reads, “Therefore, an alternative solution has been found to effect this removal.”) But paragraph 7 of this very same document reads, “This operation, codenamed ZIPPER, was under the direction of James Angleton of the Agency, assisted by Robert Crowley and William Harvey, also of the Agency.” The forged, internal CIA document* is now suddenly in the past tense, speaking about the assassination that has already taken place, and uproariously informing its CIA readers that Angleton, Crowley, and Harvey are members of the CIA.15 Can you imagine that, folks? The CIA has confessed to Kennedy’s murder! And in writing!