Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  * Although he couldn’t represent Oswald’s interests before the Commission, Lane continued to be retained by Marguerite, and he and she made several joint appearances together, including one at a New York City town hall meeting on February 18, 1964 (FBI memorandum from Mr. Branigan to Mr. Sullivan, March 13, 1964). Marguerite dismissed Lane as her attorney on April 1, 1964 ( New York Times, April 2, 1964, p.37).

  * Lane’s “attorney-client” privilege and “working papers” arguments were legally indefensible. This is why, I am quite sure, he came up with a completely new legal argument in his book to shore up his legacy on this point; but his new story didn’t hold water either. Lane wrote, “Had the Commission been motivated by an authentic desire to know the truth, surely it would have directed me to give the tape recording up. I was eager to furnish this evidence, but I was reluctant to break the law, for to make and divulge a recording of a telephone conversation may be a violation of the Federal Communications Act,” and Lane said he feared being prosecuted (Lane, Rush to Judgment, pp.181–182). But number one, at the time the Warren Commission asked Lane for the tape, he had already disclosed its contents, and number two, if Lane knew enough about the law to quote the Federal Communications Act (47 USC § 605), then he almost assuredly also knew that under the act it is not prohibited and not a crime for a party to a telephonic communication to tape the conversation, even without the knowledge of the other party, and to furnish this tape and/or divulge its contents to a third party. Such a taping does not involve an “interception” of the telephone message, which would be prohibited by the act. ( Rathbun v. United States, 355 U.S. 107, 110 [1957]; see also U.S. v. McGuire, 381 F.2d 306, 314 [1967])

  * Lane claims he voluntarily decided to turn over his tape to the Warren Commission (“Playboy Interview: Mark Lane,” p.55).

  * I debated Lane three times, the last time in San Francisco in the late 1980s or early 1990s at a California Trial Lawyers convention. Only the first debate, in Boston, was at night, with no limitation on time. The Long Island debate was during the noon recess at the college, as I recall, and there was a time limitation in San Francisco. At our first debate, when I confronted Lane with Jack Ruby’s “there was no conspiracy” omission in his book, he had no answer at all. How could he? Neither did he have any answer for the fact that witnesses whose testimony clearly point to Oswald’s guilt, such as Johnny Brewer and Officer McDonald, weren’t even mentioned in his book. I was surprised at the poor quality of his presentation. It predictably consisted of one misrepresentation of the facts after another, and I had no difficulty exposing these misrepresentations to the audience. Lane, who is very intelligent, did better at the Long Island and San Francisco debates, where he increased the number of allegations and misrepresentations and I had insufficient time to respond to all of them.

  * If Ruby had been involved, as Lane suggests, in a conspiracy with Weissman to murder Kennedy, it is more than highly unlikely that, as we’ve seen is the case, Ruby would have called so much attention to Weissman and his anti-Kennedy advertisement on Friday and Saturday, November 22 and 23, 1963 (WR, p.369). But Lane has never been deterred by such commonsense observations.

  * Jones became so obsessed with the assassination that his small, rundown farmhouse in the countryside near Waxahachie, Texas, overflowing with books on the assassination and with the obligatory movie projector to show visitors the Zapruder film, became the headquarters for his crusade to prove Kennedy was killed as a result of a conspiracy. Caught up in this passion, he neglected his newspaper and in the early 1980s began publishing a conspiracy newsletter, the Continuing Inquiry, for conspiracy buffs. Not infrequently, he would disappear from his newspaper duties for weeks at a time to chase down witnesses and track rumors. Once, he even crawled through a storm sewer beneath Elm Street to prove that Kennedy’s assassin could have fired to Kennedy’s front from a gutter opening on Elm. (Brad Bailey, “The Obsessed,” Dallas Morning News, November 20, 1983, p.55)

  “Penn Jones hated me,” former Dallas assistant district attorney Bill Alexander told me with a chuckle. “He thought I was a member of the killing team that was doing away with Warren Commission witnesses” (Telephone interview of William Alexander by author on December 11, 2001). The diminutive (5-foot-2½-inch) Jones, who fought as an infantry officer at the battles of Salerno and Anzio in the Second World War, was almost assuredly motivated by patriotism in his assassination research. The only problem was that his beliefs were, to be generous, irrational.

  * Kilgallen was best known for her daily newspaper column, “The Voice of Broadway,” and for starring on the popular television show What’s My Line?, which had a seventeen-year run on CBS.

  * Sam Ruby, one of Jack Ruby’s brothers, told the Warren Commission that while Ruby was in custody, “his mental condition has deteriorated very rapidly. He keeps saying that people are being killed in the streets and he hears screams in the building of people being slaughtered” (14 H 501). Another brother, Earl, told the Commission, “As of now, he [Jack Ruby] don’t even think I’m alive. He thinks they killed me and my family, my children” (14 H 428).

  †In his distinguished career as an investigative reporter, Aynesworth was nominated six other times for this prize and was a finalist five times. “I’m kind of the Susan Lucci of investigative journalism,” he chuckles. He was the only reporter to have been at all four major scenes of the assassination: in Dealey Plaza at the time of the shooting; the Tippit murder scene shortly after Tippit was killed; the Texas Theater when Oswald was arrested; and the police basement when Ruby shot Oswald. (Telephone interview of Hugh Aynesworth by author on January 11, 2000)

  * The first conspiracy theorist to raise the issue of impersonation was Léo Sauvage in an article in Commentary in the spring of 1964. The Warren Commission treated all of the unlikely or impossible Oswald sightings as either cases of mistaken identity or deliberate falsehoods.

  * On November 23, 1959, Mosby, from Paris, wrote a condensed version of the long interview that was sent out over the wires to hundreds of newspapers throughout the land, and apparently a few (e.g., New York World Telegram, November 24, 1959, p.9) erroneously typed up “North Dakota” instead of “New Orleans,” furnishing fuel for the Stanley, North Dakota, myth. Oswald’s brother Robert informed the FBI his brother Lee had never lived in North Dakota. (FBI Record 124-10010-10361, Letter from J. Edgar Hoover to SACS Phoenix, Dallas, Minneapolis, December 20, 1963)

  * Unless, as some theorists believe, the impersonator was also the actual killer of Kennedy, in which case the conspirators would have had an even more implausible task to meet: find someone who not only looked almost exactly like Oswald but also was willing to kill the president for them.

  * Before he recanted his story, the thoroughly discredited Deslatte had come up with an unnumbered (making its validity impossible to check) price quote sheet dated January 20, 1961, with the name “Oswald” written on it by him in the upper right corner. Each Ford truck, if sold, would sell for $2,088.32. Interestingly, Friends of Democratic Cuba Inc. was an anti-Castro group incorporated in New Orleans on January 6, 1961, whose board of directors included the right-wing Guy Banister (see later text for discussion on Banister) and whose vice president was one Gerard F. Tujague, the owner of a New Orleans shipping company whom Oswald worked for as a messenger boy between November 10, 1955, and January 14, 1956, when he was sixteen. Tujague knew and remembered Oswald (10 HSCA 134, note 64; CE 2227, 25 H 128), so if the group, for whatever reason, wanted its purchaser of the trucks to use a fictitious name, Oswald is a name that was not unfamiliar to at least one member of the group.

  * The Austin Selective Service files listed fifteen Oswalds in the state of Texas.

  †The only possible exception doesn’t quite rise to the dignity of an Oswald sighting. Mrs. Lovell T. Penn, who lived with her husband on a farm near Dallas, Texas, told the FBI on December 2, 1963, that on October 6, 1963, she saw three men in her cow pasture. One had a rifle and was firing it. When she
threatened to call the police, they left. Although she took down the license plate number on their car, she threw it away. She made no reference to Lee Harvey Oswald being one of the three men. Two days later the FBI interviewed her again and this time she said the man with the rifle “might have been Oswald.” (CE 2944, 26 H 406; CE 2449, 25 H 588) Penn located one spent shell, a Mannlicher-Carcano cartridge case, that the man with the rifle had fired, but after tests the FBI concluded it could not have been fired from Oswald’s Carcano because of “differences in firing pin and breech face marks” (CD 205, p.182).

  * Ryder’s credibility was weak enough without author Gerald Posner distorting Ryder’s statement and testimony. In Case Closed, Posner dismisses Ryder’s tale, writing that “subsequent investigation found that…the gun store tag was in [Ryder’s] handwriting, not in Oswald’s” (Posner, Case Closed, p.214 footnote), implying that Ryder attempted to lead authorities to believe that the handwriting was Oswald’s. But Ryder, in his very first interview with the FBI on November 25, acknowledged he had written the name” Oswald” on the tag (CE 1325, 22 H 523, FBI interview of Dial D. Ryder on November 25, 1963). Worse, Posner goes on to say that Ryder “refused to take a polygraph” (Posner, Case Closed, p.214 note). The opposite is true. The only polygraph issue that arose was limited to whether Ryder had or had not given the details of his story to a Dallas Times reporter, which Ryder denied. The reporter offered to take a polygraph test and Ryder testified that “I’m not one to volunteer for anything, [but] I’ll take the thing if you want me to take it” (11 H 238).

  * Payroll records at the Book Depository Building show that Oswald worked continuously at the Depository from October 16 up to the time of the assassination, working full eight-hour days (8:00 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., with lunch from 12:00 to 12:45 p.m.) Monday through Friday, not missing one day of work. (The payroll records erroneously credited Oswald with a full day’s work on November 22, 1963. In view of what happened at the Depository that day, this type of error is more than understandable.) Conspiracy theorists have made much of the fact that since the Depository employees did not punch a time clock, there’s no way to know if Oswald was absent from work for a few hours here and there. But this ignores the fact that Book Depository Building supervisors kept fairly close tabs on their employees, making “a notation” if the employee was present at the start of the workday and another notation if he was still at work at the end of the day. Further, the supervisors reported to the payroll department any absence during the day for a period longer than that authorized (such as for lunch), and the time was deducted from the employee’s pay. (CE 1334, 22 H 537; CE 2454, 25 H 601–602) No evidence has ever emerged from anyone at the Book Depository Building that Oswald was absent from work at any time during the period between October 16 and November 22, 1963.

  * As we have seen, the Irving Sports Shop impersonation and furniture store sighting of Oswald simply “don’t go anywhere.” Yet conspiracy theorists predictably aren’t cognizant of this fact. For instance, conspiracy theorist Michael Kurtz, who believes it was the real Oswald at both places, condemns the Warren Commission for not accepting the stories of Ryder and the two middle-aged women, saying this was a “rejection of evidence” (Kurtz, Crime of the Century, pp.147–148). But Kurtz doesn’t bother to ask the obvious question, “evidence of what?” Even if it were Oswald at both places, what would this prove?

  * It should be noted that contrary to popular belief, a polygraph does not show whether or not one is telling the truth, only whether he believes he is; that is, the test, if it is accurate (which law enforcement feels it normally is when administered by a competent operator), measures the presence or absence of deception from the physiological response (breathing, pulse, perspiration, etc.) to the questions. Sociopaths (those who have no conscience or feeling of guilt or contrition for what they have done) often are able to lie on the test without the lie being betrayed by a physiological response.

  * Marina told the FBI that her husband never told her he had seen or spoken to anyone about buying a car (CE 1403, 22 H 780, FBI interview of Marina Oswald on December 16, 1963). But since Oswald was notoriously secretive about everything in his life, not too much weight can be given to this.

  * Unless—and this is a real possibility that the conspiracy theorists should start writing books about—there was a group of conspirators out to frame the conspirators who were framing Oswald.

  * Two of the aforementioned witnesses said that “Oswald” came to the range with a companion, one saying the companion was around five feet nine inches (10 H 393, WCT Sterling Charles Wood), and the other saying he was a “tall boy” (10 H 381, WCT Garland Glenwill Slack). Several witnesses noted a bearded man at the range and one witness thought the man and Oswald were together, but the bearded man (one Michael Murph) was located by the FBI and found to have no connection to Oswald (CE 2897–2898, 26 H 350–351).

  * Per Tippit’s wife, Tippit voted for Kennedy in the 1960 election, and those who knew him said he seemed to have no interest in politics (CE 2985, 26 H 486–488).

  †The above discussion would be academic if Oswald, as some believe, had been walking west on Tenth Street before the Tippit confrontation, and changed his direction, possibly when he spotted Tippit’s police car driving eastbound on Tenth toward him. (See discussion in endnote section.) If, indeed, Oswald’s original direction was westbound on Tenth, the Redbird Airport, as well as Ruby’s apartment at 223 South Ewing Street, both of which were to the east of Tenth and Patton (Walker’s home, at 4011 Turtle Creek Boulevard, was to the northeast), would be eliminated as Oswald’s intended destination.

  ‡ As discussed in detail in the Oswald biography, Oswald was living in New Orleans throughout the months of July and August and most of September in 1963.

  * In his book Live by the Sword, Russo quotes FBI agent Jim Hosty telling him in 1994 that the FBI investigation revealed there was a plane revving up at Redbird (Russo doesn’t mention a time for this) that took off around 3:00 p.m. Hosty told Russo, “We ran [the investigation] out but it got nowhere.” And the air traffic controller at Redbird, Louis Gaudin, told Russo about three well-dressed people flying out of Redbird in a Comanche-type aircraft somewhere between 2:30 and 3:00 p.m. on the afternoon of the assassination, returning forty minutes later with only two occupants, and being met by a part-time employee at the airport who was moonlighting (in the afternoon?) from the Dallas Police Department. (Russo, Live by the Sword, pp. 308–309) Gaudin told the FBI on March 7, 1963, that the plane took off between 2:00 and 2:30 p.m. (Smith, JFK: The Second Plot, p.279). But I thought the assassination happened at 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963. A plane departing a full two to two and a half hours later wouldn’t be that suspicious, would it? I also thought that Redbird Airport was a functioning municipal airport in November of 1963 and actually had planes departing and landing all the time. When they did, under what theory is this suspicious or unusual?

  * Oswald’s autopsy report gave his height as five feet nine inches (CE 1981, 24 H 7).

  * One advantage of being a conspiracy theorist is you don’t need any evidence to support your charge. Theories and speculations will do. Eddowes said, “My theory [nothing else, folks, just a theory, no evidence] is that…the KGB had substituted a forged print card in the FBI fingerprint files [which contained Oswald’s Marine Corps prints], the forgery substituting the imposter’s prints in place of [Oswald’s]” (Eddowes, Oswald File, p.139).

  * Fifteen people witnessed the examination, including the four team members, four doctors who assisted them, three lawyers and their assistants, and a court reporter ( Dallas Morning News, October 5, 1981).

  * We know that people observing the same person or event can almost be expected to give different descriptions. Here, although Duran recalled the American at the consulate to have light blond hair, Azcue recalled the very same man to have dark blond hair (3 HSCA 136). Oswald himself described his hair color as “medium brown” (WR, p.614). As to Duran’s descript
ion of Oswald as being around five feet six inches and 125 pounds, Oswald’s autopsy report, as previously indicated, reads he was five feet nine inches. His “estimated weight” was 150. (CE 1981, 24 H 7) The estimation of weight seems high. At the time of his interrogation following the assassination Oswald himself gave his weight as 140 pounds (WR, p.614). Virtually every photo of Oswald shows him to be of slight frame. See photo section for a picture of the slender Oswald taken in front of the New Orleans Trade Mart in August 1963, the month before he went to Mexico City. Marina felt he looked like a “skeleton” during this period (McMillan, Marina and Lee, p.460). Alfredo Mirabal Diaz, a Mexican consulate employee, recalled Oswald as being “a rather small man, medium height or somewhat less, narrow shoulders” (3 HSCA 177).