Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Lane’s Rush to Judgment, which was on the New York Times best-seller list for six months, leaves the uninitiated reader convinced that the Warren Commission was a national disgrace, having conspired to keep the truth from the American people. Yet, if the reader checks Lane’s assertions against the evidence produced by the Commission—which few have bothered to do—he or she will find that Lane’s contentions are either distortions or outright fabrications. “I only wish,” Warren Commission critic Harold Weisberg told Mother Jones, the erudite organ for leftist causes, that Lane “were content to steal from others, but he has this urge to invent his own stuff.” Lane, who also thrust himself into the middle of the Jonestown massacre as a lawyer for Jim Jones’s “People’s Temple” in Guyana, and into the assassination of Martin Luther King as a lawyer for James Earl Ray,* and as the coauthor, with Dick Gregory, of the book Murder in Memphis, has become an embarrassment to the Left. For example, in its article on Lane, Mother Jones referred to him as “the Left’s leading hearse chaser,” adding that he was a “huckster” who unfortunately couldn’t be “written off” because “he is, in some disturbing sense, on our side. His story raises some troubling questions for the Left.”15

  In virtually every criminal case, there is only a handful, if that, of really key witnesses against the accused. The Kennedy case was no exception. Yet Lane devotes page after page of his book to persons who had only the remotest connection to the case—including eleven pages to a woman who worked as a bartender in Jack Ruby’s night club over two years before the assassination16—while completely ignoring key witnesses against Oswald.

  For instance, the main issue raised by Warren Commission critics is whether any or all of the bullets fired at the president came from the southeasternmost window on the sixth floor of the School Book Depository Building, where the Commission concluded Oswald was, or from the grassy knoll. Yet there is no mention in any of the 478 pages of Rush to Judgment of Robert H. Jackson, the photographer for the Dallas Times Herald who was in the presidential motorcade. As set forth earlier, Jackson told the Warren Commission that immediately after he heard the three shots, he looked up at the Depository and saw a pair of black men in a fifth-floor window straining to see directly above them. Following this line of sight, he spotted a rifle being slowly drawn back into the southeasternmost window of the sixth floor.17

  Even more astounding is Lane’s failure to mention Johnny C. Brewer, the person responsible for Oswald’s arrest. Recall that Brewer, a shoe store manager, was listening to radio reports on the shooting of the president and the killing of a policeman. As he heard police sirens approaching, he saw a man duck into the entryway to his store with his back to the street. Brewer later told the Warren Commission the man “seemed funny. His hair was sort of messed up and looked like he had been running, and he looked scared.” As soon as the wail of the sirens had receded, the man hurried away and Brewer stepped out on the sidewalk and watched him enter a nearby movie house, the Texas Theater, without buying a ticket. Brewer followed him and had the ticket seller call the police. They swarmed into the theater and after the house lights came on, Brewer pointed out the man he had followed into the theater—later identified as Oswald—and he was subsequently arrested.18 Remarkably, not only doesn’t Lane mention Brewer in his book, he doesn’t even mention Oswald’s arrest.

  After Brewer identified Oswald, the first policeman to approach him was Dallas police officer M. N. McDonald. McDonald testified that Oswald said, “Well, it’s all over now,” and suddenly knocked the policeman down. He drew a revolver and was subdued only after a struggle.19 Lane fails to mention McDonald in his book. In fact, he makes no reference at all to these very incriminating circumstances surrounding Oswald’s apprehension. It is nothing short of incredible that Lane, who finds room in his book for 353 people who he claimed were connected in some way to the Kennedy case, couldn’t find room for a single paragraph on people like Jackson, Brewer, and McDonald.

  But this is Mark Lane’s MO. He repeatedly omits evidence damaging to his side. Just one more example among many: Barbara and Virginia Davis both identified Oswald as the person they saw after the Tippit murder crossing their lawn while emptying his pistol. And Ted Callaway and Sam Guinyard both identified Oswald as the man they saw run south on Patton with a gun in his hand right after the Tippit shooting.20 But Lane doesn’t mention Guinyard in his book at all, and only mentions the two Davis women and Callaway in connection with other issues, like whether the Davis women could identify the empty shells that Tippit’s killer had ejected and they picked up (they couldn’t) or whether Callaway’s description of the jacket the killer was wearing was completely consistent with the description given by other witnesses. He never gets around to finding the space to tell his readers that all of these witnesses identified Oswald as the man they saw.21*

  Lane also elevated to an art form the technique of quoting part of a witness’s testimony to convey a meaning completely opposite to what the whole would convey. A perfect example occurs when he quotes part of Jack Ruby’s testimony before the Warren Commission, in which Ruby literally begged Chief Justice Earl Warren to bring him to Washington to give further testimony. “Ruby made it plain that if the Commission took him from the Dallas County Jail and permitted him to testify in Washington, he could tell more there; it was impossible for him to tell the whole truth so long as he was in jail in Dallas,” writes Lane. Lane gives the following excerpt from Ruby’s testimony before the Warren Commission:

  Ruby: “But you [Warren] are the only one that can save me. I think you can.”

  Warren: “Yes?”

  Ruby: “But by delaying, you lose the chance. And all I want to do is tell the truth, and that is all.”22

  The unmistakable implication that Lane seeks to convey is that if Ruby were questioned in Washington, he would divulge the existence of a conspiracy. Yet the very next words that Ruby uttered after “that is all” were “There was no conspiracy.”23 These four words, which completely rebutted the entire thrust of Lane’s contention, were carefully omitted from Rush to Judgment.

  Likewise, in his efforts to prove that the shots that killed President Kennedy were fired from his front rather than his rear, where Oswald was, Lane distorted the truth with half-truths. In his book he writes that “none of the [Parkland Hospital] doctors who examined the President in Dallas observed in the rear of his head a ‘smaller hole’ to which the Commission alluded as the entrance point…Although eight doctors were unable to locate [such a] hole…the Commission apparently felt constrained to insist on the existence of such an entry wound to support its conclusion.”24 In other words, if we’re to believe Lane, there was no entrance wound to the rear of Kennedy’s head, and therefore, Oswald could not have been the assassin. In addition, the Commission had, somehow, later created a wound in the rear of Kennedy’s head to frame Oswald.† But Lane did not tell his readers why the Parkland doctors failed to find an entrance wound in the rear of the president’s head. They testified they never turned Kennedy’s body over because their sole concern was to deal with the immediately visible wounds and save his life.25 Benjamin Franklin, who once observed that “half the truth is often a great lie,” would not have liked Mark Lane.

  Lane also showed no reluctance in taking liberties with the statements of witnesses whose testimony got in the way of his theories. In his book he quotes James W. Altgens, an Associated Press photographer, and another eyewitness, Charles Brehm, as supporting his position that the head shot was fired from the grassy knoll.26 But Altgens told the Warren Commission he believed “the shot came from the opposite side, meaning in the direction of this Depository Building,”27 and told CBS that the shot came “from behind” Kennedy.28 And Brehm told CBS, “I never said that any shot came from here [grassy knoll] like I was quoted by Mr. Lane. [He] takes very great liberties with adding to my quotation.”29

  Lane was so bold and blatant in distorting the truth that he even gives citations to the Warren Commission volu
mes that he knows directly contradict his own arguments. For instance, he states that the Warren Commission’s firearms experts were unable to duplicate on the range what Oswald had done. “Not one of them,” he says, “struck the enlarged head or neck on the target even once.”30 But an examination of the citations given by Lane himself (Commission Exhibit Nos. 582 to 584, Warren Commission volume 17, pages 261 to 262) shows two hits were scored on the head. Obviously, Lane felt free to do something as outrageous as this because he knew only a handful of readers would bother to look up the citations or have access to the twenty-six volumes of testimony and evidence produced by the Warren Commission.

  We’ve already seen in this book examples of Mark Lane’s remarkable ability to get people to change their original story to one favorable to his position; their memories suddenly improve after they speak to Lane. Here’s one more for the record: As referred to earlier, Union Terminal Company employee James L. Simmons was one of several people atop the railroad overpass at the time of the shooting in Dealey Plaza. On March 17, 1964, he told the FBI he thought the shots came from the Book Depository Building, and he came down off the overpass and ran to the Depository Building.31 But over two years later, in the lovin’ arms of Lane, Simmons, unbelievably, said he thought the shots came from “the wooden fence” on the grassy knoll and so he immediately ran behind the fence after the shooting.32

  Nothing, however, exposes Lane’s tactics more than his treatment of Helen Louise Markham, who picked Oswald out of a police lineup and identified him as the slayer of Officer Tippit. Lane has always sought to convey the impression that he is a crusader for truth and justice, while the Warren Commission conspired to suppress the truth about the Kennedy assassination. Lane accused the Warren Commission of leading witnesses, putting words in their mouths, and trying to force them to give the testimony it wanted. He states that “the leading questions regularly and persistently asked by counsel for the Commission added up, in my opinion, to an improper effort to develop a favorable record—that is to say, a record consistent with Oswald’s guilt.”33 But nowhere does the Warren Commission come anywhere close to what Lane did with Mrs. Markham, a thirty-nine-year-old waitress with an eighth-grade education.

  In sworn testimony before the Warren Commission, Lane related that Mrs. Markham had given him a description of the man who shot Tippit that was completely at odds with that of Oswald. “She said he was short, a little on the heavy side, and his hair was somewhat bushy.” Oswald, he pointed out, was of “average height, quite slender, with thin and receding hair.”34 The Commission later asked Mrs. Markham if she had ever given such a description to Mark Lane. “No sir,” she replied, “I don’t even know the man.”35

  As it turned out, she had talked to Lane on the telephone, Lane identifying himself as Captain Fritz of the Dallas Police Department.36 When the Warren Commission called Lane back to testify, it was only after being pressed by questions from Warren Commission counsel that he made it known that the conversation with Markham had been tape-recorded. When the Commission requested the tape, Lane vigorously, but ultimately unsuccessfully, resisted efforts to make it available.

  Rankin: “Do you have any writing from Mrs. Markham in connection with the interview that you referred to in your testimony?”

  Lane: “Any document which Mrs. Markham wrote?…I have nothing that she signed or that she wrote.”

  Rankin: “Do you have anything that you made up yourself from any interview with her?”

  Lane: “Yes, I do.”

  Rankin: “Do you have that with you?”

  Lane: “No, I do not.”

  Rankin: “Will you describe that document? Is it a paper or a tape recording, or what form does it have?”

  Lane: “It is a tape recording.”

  Rankin: “Was the tape recording made by you?”

  Lane: “I think we are now moving into an area where I would prefer not to answer questions, quite frankly…I think that the Commission [is] aware of the fact that I have an attorney-client relationship existing.”37

  The legal theory Lane spun for the Commission was as exotic as some of the allegations of conspiracy he has promoted. As indicated, Lane had originally been retained by Marguerite Oswald to represent the interests of her son before the Warren Commission hearings, but since Oswald was not a defendant in a criminal proceeding, the Warren Commission declined to permit Lane to represent Oswald.38* Lane said that the interview of Mrs. Markham was made pursuant to his attorney-client relationship with Marguerite Oswald and that this relationship would prohibit him from turning over the tape to the Commission, even though he had already testified to the contents of the tape. Moreover, he argued, the tape was the equivalent of “working papers of an attorney,” and the U.S. Supreme Court had spoken of the sanctity of these papers, protecting them from being disclosed.

  Rankin: “Mr. Lane, could you tell us whether there was anyone else present at this interview with Helen Markham that you recorded?”

  Lane: “I don’t believe that I said I recorded it.”

  Rankin: “Was it recorded by someone else?”

  Lane: “I decline to answer any questions because the questions you are asking clearly are not for the purpose for which this Commission has been established.”

  Rankin: “Can you tell us who was present at the time of this tape recording of Helen Markham?”

  Lane: “I am not going to discuss any working papers in my possession.”

  Representative Ford: “Did you know about the tape-recording being made?”

  Lane: “I decline to answer that question.”

  The man who has railed for years about the Warren Commission’s refusal to be open and frank with the American public about the facts of the assassination couldn’t have been less open and more obstructionist himself when he appeared before the Commission; he was, in fact, far more uncooperative than any of the other 551 witnesses the Commission interviewed or took testimony from.

  Ford: “Do you believe Mrs. Markham is an important witness in this overall matter?”

  Lane: “I would think so.”

  Ford: “In order for us to evaluate the testimony she has given us and what you allege she has given you, we must see the information which you have at your disposal.”

  Lane: “I have told you precisely under oath what Mrs. Markham has said to me.”

  Rankin: “Are you unwilling to verify [what she has told you] with the tape recording that you claim you have?”

  Lane: “I am unable to verify that because of an existing attorney-client relationship.”

  Rankin: “Can you tell us where the tape recording was made?”

  Lane: “I can tell you, but I will not tell you.”39

  The above testimony of Lane took place on July 2, 1964. Chief Justice Warren pointed out to Lane that he had already told the Commission (in his previous testimony on March 4, 1964) what was allegedly said in the tape-recorded conversation. “Now, if you testified concerning it then, why can’t you now tell us all the circumstances surrounding that? Why is your privilege any different now than it was then?” Lane responded that since the time he testified to the tape’s contents, Mrs. Oswald, over his strong objection, “instructed me not to discuss the entire Markham situation at all.”

  If Mrs. Markham said on the tape what Lane said she did—that is, give a description of Tippit’s killer that did not match Oswald—why would Oswald’s mother instruct Lane to suppress this evidence that could only be helpful to her son?

  Rankin pointed out to Lane that under the law, if one comes “before any body, the Commission or any court, and purport[s] to disclose part of a matter [here, Lane’s testimony as to what Markham allegedly told him], I know of no law that permits you to withhold the rest.”* But Lane wouldn’t budge. The Commission’s frustration with him is evident from this remark by the chief justice: “Mr. Lane, you have manifested a great interest in Lee Harvey Oswald and his relationship to this entire affair. According to you, Mrs. Markham made
a statement that would bear upon the probability of his guilt or innocence in connection with the assassination. Mrs. Markham has definitely contradicted what you have said, and do you not believe that it is in your own interest and in the interests of this country for you to give whatever corroboration you have to this Commission so that we may determine whether you or she is telling the truth…? You say that you have a recording, but you refuse to give it to this Commission.”40

  Lane finally gave up the tape after being given a promise of immunity from prosecution.41* The transcript of the tape, revealing Lane’s gross and tawdry effort to put words into the mouth of Mrs. Markham, shows why Lane desperately sought to prevent the Commission from hearing it.

  Lane: “I read that you told some of the reporters that he [Oswald] was short, stocky and had bushy hair.”

  Markham: “No, no, I did not say this.”

  Lane: “You did not say that?”

  Markham: “No sir.”

  Lane: “Well, would you say that he was stocky?”

  Markham: “Uh, he was short [the autopsy report on Oswald gives his height as five feet nine inches].”42

  Lane: “He was short?”

  Markham: “Yes.”

  Lane: “And was he a little bit on the heavy side?”

  Markham: “Uh, not too heavy.”

  Lane: “Not too heavy, but slightly heavy?”

  Markham: “Uh, well, he was, no, he wasn’t, didn’t look too heavy, uh-uh.”

  Lane: “He wasn’t too heavy. And would you say that he had rather bushy…kind of hair?”

  Markham: “Uh, yeah, uh just a little bit bushy, uh huh.”