Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Note: Throughout this book emphasis by italics in quotations has been added by the author unless otherwise indicated.

  *Even the court reporter was a real one, from the federal Eastern District of Virginia. Eagerly anticipating the trial, Judge Bunton told the media, “If Oswald had been tried, any judge would have wanted to do it. It’s going to be just as true to life as they can get it—with the real witnesses and a real jury flown in from Dallas. It’s going to record a lot of what would have developed if, in fact, Lee Harvey Oswald had come to trial.” Bunton explained that the trial would take some liberties with history. “It will be tried in federal court as opposed to state court. At the time that President Kennedy was killed, it was not a federal offense to kill the president. Since that time the law has been changed.” (United Press International, July 17, 1986) The case was tried under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.

  *It is an anomaly that Earl Warren, someone who one would think would be viewed like Caesar’s wife among all sensible people, would be attacked and his integrity impugned by those from all areas of the political spectrum, even by many on the political left, who heretofore had sung his praises for the progressive direction he had taken the court in the area of civil rights. Apparently the Kennedy assassination trumped everything.

  *And naturally, this motivation to uncover a conspiracy, if there was one, applies equally well to the media. As CBS television news anchor Dan Rather has said, “If I could prove Oswald didn’t do it or Oswald didn’t act alone, it would be the greatest accomplishment of my career” (USA Today, February 4, 1992).

  *“In their exploitation of a national tragedy, [the conspiracy theorists] have impugned the character and motives of hundreds of reluctant participants in that disaster. By plain inference they have indicted scores of public servants, from the lowliest cop on the beat in Dallas to the Chief Justice of the United States, for malfeasance bordering on treason” (Roberts, Truth about the Assassination, p.120).

  *Just as the U.S. government, if it had prosecuted Oswald in real life, would not have charged him with conspiring with anyone to kill Kennedy (since the government did not believe he did), the jury in London only dealt with the issue of whether Oswald was guilty or not guilty of murdering Kennedy. However, the issue of conspiracy unavoidably permeated the entire trial. (See later discussion.)

  *A condensed version of the trial was shown in England and several major European countries as well as Australia, and also to a very large national audience on Showtime here in the states on November 21 and 22, 1986.

  *Throughout this book I will be referring to Oswald as Kennedy’s killer, and conspiracy theorists, as well as legal purists, have maintained for years that the only proper way to refer to Oswald is “alleged assassin,” on the rationale that under our system of justice in America, a suspect or defendant is presumed to be innocent until a jury finds him guilty in a court of law. But this invests a power and legitimacy to a verdict of guilty or not guilty that it does not have. A verdict of not guilty, for instance, cannot change the reality of whether or not the defendant committed the crime. That reality was established the moment of the crime, and nothing that happened thereafter can ever change it. If a courtroom verdict could, then if the defendant actually robbed a bank, but the three witnesses who saw him do it were unavailable to testify against him at the trial (e.g., the defendant’s associates had either killed them or threatened them into not testifying), his subsequent not-guilty verdict means he didn’t really rob the bank. In other words, the jury verdict succeeded in doing something that God can’t even do—change the past. Likewise, if someone did not rob a bank, but in a case of mistaken identity he was found guilty, the new reality is that he actually did rob the bank. To those who have challenged my calling Oswald guilty throughout the years by saying he was never found to be guilty in a court of law, I’ve responded that “under that theory, Adolf Hitler never committed any crimes, Jack the Ripper never committed any crimes, and the only crime Al Capone ever committed was income tax evasion.”

  *For example, prominent conspiracy theorist Anthony Summers says, “No professional marksman was able to achieve [what Oswald did] in subsequent tests” (Summers and Summers, “Ghosts of November,” p.98); see also Henry Hurt’s book, Reasonable Doubt, page 8: “The United States government…has never conducted a test in which Oswald’s shooting ability has been matched. The country’s top experts can work the ancient Mannlicher-Carcano rifle bolt with sufficient speed. Those experts can hit a similarly moving target. But no official expert has ever been able to do both at the same time. That feat belongs to Oswald alone—a man of questionable shooting skills.”

  †Even on May 6, 1959, when Oswald was about to leave the Marine Corps, and hence, wouldn’t have had any incentive to fire well, he fired a 191, qualifying him as a “marksman” with the M-1 rifle.

  *However, once evidence made the hypothesis of guilt unavoidable, just as unavoidable was the unconscious partiality toward any piece of evidence, or interpretation of evidence, that supported the hypothesis. This was the one weakness of the Warren Commission, but short of a surgical operation on human nature, I know of no way to avoid such a problem. Fortunately, because the evidence of Oswald’s guilt was so complete and overwhelming, and there simply was no evidence that he acted in concert with others, this weakness of the Warren Commission, which is inherent in any and all investigative bodies, had no negative impact on the Commission’s findings. Only if there were substantive evidence of Oswald’s innocence or substantive evidence of his complicity with others in the assassination, one or both of which the Commission ignored or did not examine objectively, would there be cause to question seriously the validity of the Commission’s conclusions.

  *Whenever I hear someone say the Warren Commission investigation was superficial, I immediately know that the person has never read or worked with the twenty-seven volumes of the Commission, and is just parroting hearsay from some other person who also hasn’t read or worked with them.

  One of the deficiencies of the Warren Report and its supporting volumes is that although there are two separate name indexes, there is no subject index. In 1966, Sylvia Meagher eliminated that problem with her Subject Index to the Warren Report and Hearings and Exhibits, an absolutely invaluable reference work for anyone studying the assassination. In 1980, in collaboration with Gary Owens, she published her Master Index to the J.F.K. Assassination Investigations, which is a name and subject index to the Warren Report and volumes as well as the HSCA Report and volumes.

  †Ninety-four witnesses gave testimony before members of the Warren Commission. An additional 395 were questioned under oath by members of the Commission’s legal staff, 61 gave affidavits, and 2 gave statements. (WR, p.xiii) As Time magazine said, “That is surely not a record of investigators refusing to listen to witnesses who might disturb their eventual conclusion” (“Who Killed J.F.K.? Just One Assassin,” p.32). Nearly all of the ninety-four witnesses gave their testimony at the closely guarded headquarters of the Commission in Washington’s Veterans of Foreign Wars Building. Some of the additional 395 were also flown in to give their depositions before Warren Commission assistant counsels, although most depositions of witnesses were taken outside Washington, D.C. (See Warren Commission volumes 1–15; Telephone interview of Richard Mosk by the author on September 8, 2005; closely guarded: “Warren Commission Report,” Time, p.48)

  ‡And the case will continue to be investigated and examined and analyzed for years and years to come. Indeed, in testimony before the Warren Commission, Richard Helms, the CIA’s head of covert operations, said, “I assume the case will never be closed” (5 H 124). And FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told the Commission, “So far as the FBI is concerned, the case will be continued in an open classification for all time” (5 H 100).

  *Obviously, it is those most familiar with the facts of the case who have the most problems with Posner’s scholarship. G. Robert Blakey, the chief counsel for the HSCA, wrote, “Li
ke [Mark] Lane, Posner often distorts the evidence by selective citation and by striking omissions. Although Posner is not as disdainful of the truth as Lane, his book is a mirror image of Lane’s ‘Rush to Judgment’” (Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, November 15–21, 1993, p.23).

  *I was asked by Chicago lawyer Michael Stiegel, representing the litigation section of the American Bar Association (ABA), to prosecute the case, but declined, because unlike the docu-trial in London, none of the actual Warren Commission witnesses testified. The witnesses were actors and employees of Failure Analysis. Further, the length of the trial was only five hours, not nearly enough time to get into the case. Prominent American trial lawyers represented each side of the case, including John W. Keker for the prosecution and David Boies for the defense. The August 10, 1992, ABA trial resulted in a hung jury, seven for conviction, five for acquittal. The only other serious mock (an oxymoron?) trial of Oswald I know of in addition to the London and ABA trials was on April 1, 1967, at Yale Law School. The six-hour trial used Yale law students as lawyers and witnesses, though medical testimony was given by some doctors. The jury of educators, theologians, executives, and housewives couldn’t reach a verdict, and deadlocked at six for conviction, six for acquittal. (New York Times, April 2, 1967, pp.1, 37)

  *There’s even, since 1985, a “Jesus Seminar” of seventy-five prominent New Testament scholars with advanced theological degrees who analyze, write about, debate, and eventually cast their vote for one of four levels of authenticity (ranging from “Jesus definitely said or did it,” to “Jesus didn’t say or do it”) that each feels a particular Gospel passage has.

  *Just two examples among many of the high esteem with which Weisberg is held in the conspiracy community: The aforementioned Robert Groden, the author of several conspiracy books, said before Weisberg’s death that “there is no man living today who knows more about the work of the Warren Commission and the FBI on the assassination, or whose writings on the case have so successfully withstood all challenges to their accuracy, than Harold Weisberg” (1996 reply brief by Groden in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, p.11, Robert Groden v. Random House, The New York Times, and Gerald Posner, Docket 94-9100). Walt Brown, one of today’s leading conspiracy theorists, has written books on the assassination and publishes the foremost monthly magazine for conspiracy devotees, JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly. Speaking of Weisberg’s death on February 21, 2002, Brown wrote that Weisberg was the “dean” of all Warren Commission critics and his “mentor.” He added that “everyone who ever had even a passing interest in the concept of conspiracy owes a massive debt of gratitude to Harold…He was a living history of the documentation of the most significant event of the 20th Century.” (JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly, April 2002, pp. 18, 21) Weisberg’s power and reach in the conspiracy community were such that fellow Warren Commission critic and conspiracy theorist Harrison E. Livingstone, himself a prolific and noteworthy writer in the conspiracy genre, but one who resented Weisberg’s fame and adulation, said that for years and years, “if he [Weisberg] damned something, it was lost. If he praised something, which was rare, then it or the person became an object of worship” (Livingstone, Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, p.505).

  *Indeed, if this book (including endnotes) had been printed in an average-size font and with pages of normal length and width, at 1,535,791 words, and with a typical book length of 400 pages, and 300 words per page, this work would translate into around thirteen volumes.

  *At some point, of course, my writing on this case had to come to an end. Since the production and lead time for this outsized book was several months, and advance copies were scheduled to be sent out to reviewers on March 1, 2007, that point was in early November of 2006, when the book was in final galley form and my editor informed me that no further writing by me about new allegations being made in the case would be possible, only corrections to the galleys, or a very short insert here or there for clarification or other necessary purposes. So I was unable to respond to any book or other publication on this case that was published after early November of 2006.

  †One character, for example, and there are many others, is so interesting that when Warren Commission counsel called him to testify about his relationship to Oswald, counsel became so captivated by the man and his story that counsel just listened to him, even telling the witness at one point, when the witness, on his own, started talking about Oswald, “I want to get to that,” but “first” he wanted to hear more of the man’s background—that part of the witness’s testimony consuming over twenty pages of small print in a Commission volume.

  *It was not the most expensive and plush suite in the hotel. That was the Will Rogers Suite on the thirteenth floor, normally going for $100 a night, but rejected by the Secret Service because there was more than one access to it. So LBJ and Lady Bird stayed in that suite. (Gun, Red Roses from Texas, p.24)

  †Twenty-eight Secret Service agents accompanied the president on his trip to Texas (HSCA Report, p.228).

  *The Texas School Book Depository Company had two buildings: an administrative office and storage area at 411 Elm Street (at Houston), and a warehouse four blocks north at 1917 North Houston (between Munger and McKinney). Parking lot 1, designated for “employees and publishers,” was located across the street from the warehouse (Frazier parked there). Parking lots 2 (“company officials and customers”) and 3 (“publishers and managers”) were located on the west side of the Depository Building.

  *Presidential historian Robert Dallek, the first scholar to examine Kennedy’s medical records on file at the Kennedy presidential library in Boston, reported in 2002 that Kennedy had nine previously undisclosed hospital stays between 1955 and 1957 and took a substantial amount of medication during his presidency on a daily basis. Included on the list were painkillers for his back, steroids for his Addison’s disease, antispasmodics for his colitis, antibiotics for urinary-tract infections, antihistamines for allergies, and, on at least one occasion, an antipsychotic for a severe mood change that Mrs. Kennedy believed was brought on by the antihistamines. According to Dallek, three doctors were treating Kennedy, including the famous “Dr. Feelgood,” Max Jacobson, who was giving him amphetamine shots during his first summit with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Although Dallek suggested that Kennedy and his advisers had recklessly deceived the public by not telling voters in 1960 just how sick he really was, Ted Sorenson, one of Kennedy’s closest advisers, and reporter Hugh Sidey, who followed Kennedy from 1957 to 1963, denied that the president’s medication kept him from performing his duties. Both reported that the president never faltered during the grueling 1960 presidential campaign, one that left them, and everyone else, absolutely exhausted. Sidey wrote that the newly released medical records were indisputable, “but they don’t give the whole picture and do leave the impression that Kennedy was little more than a chemical shell ready to self-destruct. I have my doubts. John Kennedy was a strong, determined President partly handicapped by a weakened body. But he was never an invalid.” In 1970, long before Dallek’s revelations, Kennedy’s two closest assistants, Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers, wrote of Kennedy’s “tireless energy and stamina which wore out everybody following him on an average eight-hour day of campaigning.” (Lawrence K. Altman and Todd S. Purdom, “In J.F.K. File, Hidden Illness, Pain and Pills,” New York Times, November 17, 2002, pp.1, 28; see also Dallek, Unfinished Life, pp. 213, 262, 398–399, 471; Lacayo, “How Sick Was J.F.K.?” pp.46–47; Sidey, “When It Counted, He Never Faltered,” pp.46–47; Peggy Noonan, “Camelot on Painkillers,” Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2002, p.A12; O’Donnell and Powers with McCarthy, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, p.116)

  *The Dallas Morning News, Texas’s largest circulation daily at the time, with a readership of over a quarter of a million, was no friend of JFK’s, its editorials consistently being anti-Kennedy because of the right-wing inclination of its publisher, E. M. “Ted” Dealey. Indeed, in a White House me
eting in the autumn of 1961 between Kennedy and a contingent of Texas media leaders, Dealey bluntly told JFK, “You and your administration are weak sisters,” adding that the country needed “a man on horseback to lead the nation, and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.” (Aynesworth with Michaud, JFK: Breaking the News, pp.6–7)

  *Ultimately, 447 Dallas police officers were used on specific assignments associated with the president’s visit, 178 of them assigned to the motorcade route. The biggest assignment (one would think inappropriately from a priority standpoint) was to the Trade Mart, where 63 were assigned to work the parking area outside and 150 under the command of a deputy chief were to provide security inside. (King Exhibit No. 5, 20 H 464)