In March of 1975, Geraldo Rivera’s Good Night America show on ABC national television showed millions of Americans, for the very first time, the Zapruder film and the head snap to the rear. As I indicated earlier, this created, overnight, a whole new wave of Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists demanding that the federal government—not a clearly irresponsible and inept local DA in New Orleans—order a new investigation. The climate in Washington was heating up: the Rockefeller Commission, also in 1975, revealed that the CIA had trespassed beyond the margins of its jurisdiction (limited to gathering foreign intelligence) and had infiltrated and spied on anti–Vietnam War dissidents here in the United States; and the Church Committee in 1976 found that U.S. intelligence agencies (for years one of the main suspected conspirators behind the assassination) had engaged in clandestine foreign operations that most Americans considered far beyond the moral and ethical pale (most prominently the CIA’s effort, with organized crime no less, to murder Cuban premier Fidel Castro). With so much accumulated cynicism about national affairs spawned by Watergate and the Vietnam War, the conspiracy movement finally received enough institutional support to get the investigation of the assassination reopened. The result was the HSCA’s inquiry from 1977 to 1979, which found that the president “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”21
But the HSCA’s conclusion never had the effect on the American public that had been anticipated, a public that already believed in a conspiracy and had no comprehension of the highly sophisticated acoustic basis for the HSCA’s conclusion. The committee’s nebulous conclusion, in which it named no group or individual as being responsible for the assassination, and then proceeded to seal much of its own documentation, proved to be unsatisfying to the conspiracy theorists, who were hungry for redder meat. Conspiracy theorist Gaeton Fonzi said that the HSCA’s investigation was “simply not broad enough, deep enough, ambitious enough, nor honest enough.”22
Though the HSCA’s conclusion never gave the conspiracy movement much of a boost, most television specials, which had started in the 1960s, continued to trumpet the conspiracy theory. And between 1978 and 1990 the cottage industry the assassination had created also continued, without letup, to churn out books and magazine articles, the most notable of which were Anthony Summers’s Conspiracy and David Lifton’s Best Evidence in 1980 and Henry Hurt’s Reasonable Doubt in 1985,* all three of which remain prominent in the conspiracy genre and have devotees to this very day. Summers’s Conspiracy regurgitated almost every conspiracy theory and allegation that had previously been propounded, but in a more literary and less strident fashion. The book got good reviews from the mainline press and mostly gave the reader a mass of suppositions and innuendos, each pointing toward a conspiracy that even the author seemed to distance himself from for the most part, accepting just enough to leave the reader with a sense that there couldn’t possibly be this much smoke without the fire of conspiracy. Lifton’s book, which also got good reviews and sold even better than Summers’s tome, argued that the conspirators had enlisted the work of surgeons to rearrange the bullet wounds in Kennedy’s body to frame Oswald. The book was meticulously researched but so far out in its theory that most responsible conspiracy theorists (perhaps an oxymoron) felt constrained to reject it because of its lack of feasibility. Hurt’s Reasonable Doubt was a fairly reasonable analysis of the assassination from a conspiratorial perspective, but loses its way when Hurt makes the centerpiece of his book a “confession” to the assassination by a patient in a mental hospital.
Three other best-selling conspiracy books in the 1980s, all in 1989, were Jim Marrs’s Crossfire, a low-brow version of Summers’s Conspiracy; High Treason, by conspiracy hawker extraordinaire Robert Groden and his more accomplished coauthor, Harrison Livingstone, which argued, among many other things, that the autopsy photos were altered; and Mafia Kingfish, by John H. Davis, claiming that Mafia don Carlos Marcello was behind JFK’s murder.
But by the second half of the 1980s, interest among the general public in the assassination and the conspiracy aspects of it was definitely on the wane. One reason, writer Pete Hamill pointed out, is that by 1988 “an entire generation had come to maturity with no memory at all of the Kennedy years; for them, Kennedy is the name of an airport or a boulevard or a high school.”23
That all changed in 1991 with Oliver Stone’s successful movie JFK, which introduced a whole new generation of young Americans to every hoary conspiracy argument and theory that had been around for years, dressing them up in a well-done fantasy movie with marquee Hollywood actors like Kevin Costner and Joe Pesci to sell the conspiracy psychedelic nostrum as the solution to the question of who was behind Kennedy’s murder. Millions of Americans were again talking about the assassination, particularly its alleged conspiratorial ramifications. The national interest the movie ignited actually led to the passage by Congress of the JFK Act in 1992 and the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) to implement the JFK Act’s mandate to release to the American public every previously sealed document “related” to the assassination.
The conspiracy theorists and assassination researchers had a field day from 1994 (when the ARRB became operational) to 1998 (when the ARRB closed its doors), poring over the thousands of newly released documents at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., hoping to find that one document which would confirm all their deepest suspicions and finally solve the mystery, in their minds, of the assassination. Coming away completely empty-handed did not deter them in the least. For example, on the fortieth anniversary of the assassination, in November of 2003, no fewer than ten additional books were published by the theorists (e.g., The Zapruder Film; The Great Zapruder Film Hoax; Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK; and the Triangle of Death, a book that actually alleges that South Vietnam was behind the assassination).
I see no end in sight. The notion of a plot to murder the president has provided a rich pasture for the minds of conspiracy theorists to frolic in. The beat will continue, with wide-eyed initiates joining the conspiracy community and attending its yearly conventions in Dallas after “discovering” some document or argument on the Internet that convinces them that the official version was all wrong, owing to either gross incompetence or intentional suppression of the truth. Because a little knowledge, as we all know, is dangerous, and because there are always grizzled conspiracy theorists willing to share with these neophytes their madcap theories and all the misinformation they have accumulated through the years* and to guide them through the conspiracy thickets, the conspiracy movement will continue, as an old Indian treaty provided, “as long as the water flows and the wind blows and the grass grows.”
If I can be so presumptuous as to throw the conspiracy theorists a bone, it would be to say that with the exception of a few charlatans, the overwhelming majority of them definitely have above-average intelligence and are dedicated, patriotic Americans who sincerely believe there was a well-orchestrated conspiracy in the assassination that has been covered up by those walking the marbled corridors of power in our own government. And they fervently want to right this egregious wrong and bring about justice. In their search for justice, they have unearthed much information on the assassination that the authorities missed. But it is also undeniably true that in their uncontrollable zeal to achieve their goal, most of these otherwise honorable people have knowingly and intentionally distorted the official record, under the notion, I suppose, that the end justifies the means.
With the exception of the occasional pro–Warren Commission book, there has been no equivalent of the network of conspiracy theorists to support the findings of the Warren Commission. As author Gerald Posner notes, “When the commission disbanded, the members failed to arrange to defend their work or answer questions.”24 Warren himself, who always was averse to public relations, decided to let the work of his commission and its report stand on its own, like a Supreme Court decision.25 From the publication of the Warren Report in 1964 forwa
rd, Warren Commission assistant counsel David Belin was virtually the lone regular voice on radio, TV, and print to rebut the relentless deluge of conspiracy advocacy, and that continued up to 1993, when Posner published his best-selling book Case Closed and very ably joined Belin, as did, even earlier, the very literate Max Holland, preventing the theorists from having the airwaves all to themselves. And former president and Warren Commission member Gerald Ford, on those occasions when he has spoken out, has proved to be an impressive defender of the conclusions reached by the Commission. But for the most part, the Commission members, even when they were still alive, rarely deigned to comment on the charges of the critics, obviously believing, like their chief, that their report spoke for itself, and to respond would only dignify the charges. As indicated, in late 1966, Life, one of the most influential magazines in America at the time, joined the critics in its November edition by calling for a new inquiry. Of the seven Commission members whom the New York Times went to for a response to the Life piece, six were “unavailable for comment.” Only Allen Dulles bothered to answer, saying tersely, “I find there is nothing new or startling in this Life article—except the conclusions.”26
So the conspiracy community, a potent and formidable body through the decades, has by sheer force of numbers clearly dominated the debate in front of a national audience, one which apparently hasn’t minded hearing, for the most part, only one side of the story.
Before getting into an examination of the various conspiracy theories alleging specific conspirators (e.g., CIA, organized crime, Castro, etc.), I feel a separate, short chapter should be devoted to the aforementioned Mr. Lane, the original granddaddy of all conspiracy theorists, whose misleading and deceptive ways have resonated down through the years, to one degree or another, with nearly all conspiracy theorists who came thereafter.
In addition, I want to clear the table of three separate allegations, which, if true, by their very nature compel the inference of a conspiracy, even though no group of conspirators is specifically named.* The three sections on these allegations are titled “The Second Oswald,” “Mysterious and Suspicious Deaths,” and “David Lifton and Alteration of the President’s Body.” But first, Mark Lane.
Mark Lane
Mark Lane, the Pied Piper of conspiracy theorists, was the New York lawyer retained by Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, to represent her son’s interests before the Warren Commission, a representation that the Commission did not allow. Through his lectures and best-selling 1966 book, Rush to Judgment, Lane has been by far the most persistent and audible single voice in turning the American people against the Warren Commission’s conclusions. (Only New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, by his prosecution of Clay Shaw for Kennedy’s murder, and Hollywood producer Oliver Stone, by his movie JFK, have been more famous and had more of a temporary impact, but they were relatively ephemeral stars in the conspiracy constellation.) Over the last forty-plus years, Lane has given at least several thousand speeches on the case, mostly to large and enthusiastic college audiences. To give you just a small representative sample of his college appearances, in a trip to the San Francisco Bay area for a few days in March of 1964, in addition to several other speeches, Lane spoke at San Jose State College on March 16, Oakland City College on March 17, San Francisco State College on March 18, University of California at Berkeley on March 21, and a high school, Garfield High in Berkeley, on March 22.1 He blanketed the entire nation like this for years. And he was so effective, and his charges so serious, that the Warren Commission asked the FBI to monitor all his public appearances in this country, which the bureau proceeded to do.2
Former Dallas Morning News reporter Hugh Aynesworth, who in December of 1963 furnished Lane with copies of witness statements he had taken in the case because he thought Lane wanted to be a legitimate devil’s advocate for Oswald, now says ruefully that Lane “almost single-handedly invented the lucrative JFK conspiracy industry.”3
In addition to being the most persistent and audible voice among conspiracy theorists, Lane has clearly been the most influential of all those who have championed the theory of conspiracy—so much so that the New York Times said “an examination” by the paper “determined that much of the information on which Congress decided to reopen its investigation” of the assassination of Kennedy came from Lane: “Mark Lane, the author and lecturer, provided the House subcommittee [HSCA] with most of its ‘new leads.’” The Times said that Lane had confirmed to them “that he was the primary force behind the formation” of the committee, and the paper added that “according to members of the committee staff, Mr. Lane’s books, theories and private investigations provided the ‘working manuals’ for the inquiry.”4
I was an early witness to Lane’s unsettling effectiveness with audiences. Back in December of 1964, I attended a debate at the University of California, Los Angeles, between Lane and Joseph A. Ball, who had been one of the principal lawyers for the Commission. Initially, a majority of the thousand or so people present were plainly skeptical of Lane’s claim that Oswald had been framed. But like a human pinwheel, Lane threw off a string of loosely connected challenges to the Commission’s findings and created the implication of a cover-up without presenting any theory of his own. Ball found it a hopeless task to refute all of Lane’s scattershot allegations, and many members of the audience were obviously left wondering why this or that point had not been adequately refuted. By the end of the evening, sympathy had clearly shifted toward Lane—and away from the Commission’s verdict. In fact, hisses could be heard when Ball spoke. Assistant Warren Commission counsel Wesley J. Liebeler says that Lane’s antics remind him of “an old legend about frogs jumping from the mouth of a perfidious man every time he speaks. These frogs representing the lies leap out and you have to run in all directions to grab them. It’s just incredible to listen to him. If he talks for five minutes, it takes an hour to straighten out the record.”5
Within a few months after the assassination, Lane, who had been elected to the New York State Assembly in 1960, served one year, then lost in the Democratic primary for Congress in 1962, founded his Citizens’ Committee of Inquiry on the assassination, which had headquarters in a little office on Fifth Avenue in New York City and was staffed by student volunteers. Every night for several months he gave a rousing speech on the assassination at a small Manhattan theater he had rented, Theater Four on West Fifth Street.6 Lane was the slickest and most voluble of the early left-wing group of writers, and the KGB (per copies of documents from KGB files spirited out of Russia by a KGB defector in 1992) even contributed two thousand dollars, through an intermediary whose association with the KGB Lane was probably unaware of, to Lane’s efforts. Five hundred dollars of it paid for his trip to Europe in early 1964 to spread his conspiracy gospel,7 where, unlike the United States, political assassinations resulting from a conspiracy, rather than a lone gunman, are the rule rather than the exception.
It was a heady time for Lane. He was welcomed into Left-leaning European intellectual circles, particularly after he was interviewed by, and received the backing of, the French magazine Les Temps Modernes, Jean-Paul Sartre’s publication. Noted British philosopher Bertrand Russell headed up the London branch of Lane’s inquiry, calling his group “The British ‘Who Killed Kennedy?’ Committee.” Fourteen of the fifteen members of the committee were Oxford or Cambridge University graduates listed in Britain’s Who’s Who, including Oxford University professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, who became very taken with Lane and who, twenty years later, would be deceived by a peddler of Hitler’s forged diaries into declaring they were authentic.8 German Communist Joachim Joesten dedicated his 1964 book, Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy?, to Lane, proclaiming that nothing, including the “police-state tactics of the FBI,” could sway Lane “from doggedly pursuing the truth.”
Lane’s travels were not limited to England and France. On April 5, 1964, he appeared at the convention of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers in Budapest. Allegi
ng that Kennedy’s killer was still at large and that U.S. authorities were engaged in a massive cover-up, he “called for an international commission of jurists to investigate the assassination.”9 Two days later he called a press conference in Rome condemning the “silence” of the American press in covering up the problems with the assassination.10 Lane also made public appearances in Denmark and Czechoslovakia in the course of his seventeen-day swing through the continent.11
Lane’s appearances even caused concern at the U.S. State Department. An internal memo from Kampala (capital of Uganda) said that Godfrey Binaisa, Uganda’s attorney general, had attended the Budapest conference and was telling the press in Uganda it was “likely” Oswald was killed as a result of a conspiracy involving the “U.S. Army, Government, and big business who were opposed to policies that Kennedy stood for.”12 There is no record of Lane speaking in Poland, but based solely on his December 1963 National Guardian article, “Defense Brief for Oswald,” which appeared before Lane even went to Europe, a cry for help was sent to the U.S. State Department in Washington by a department representative in Warsaw, who complained that the Polish press was giving major attention to Lane’s charges of a cover-up, and urged “VOA [Voice of America] review” of the article to “refute Lane’s claims which are widely published and accepted here.”13
At home in the states, Lane did everything possible to stir up a national effort to challenge the Warren Commission’s work. He had told a New York City audience on February 18, 1964, that “we’re putting together citizens’ committees of inquiry in every city in the country,” adding that the national office was currently functioning in the city, and he asked all persons in the audience who believed in his message to fill out cards in the hall of the auditorium after his speech.14
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