Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Not one of the above conspiracy “theorists,” and the thousands of others exactly like them, produced for their readers one speck of evidence to support their naked conjecture.

  †Note that peripheral figures in any conspiracy would be more likely to come forward because their limited role would not result in serious punishment—in fact, most likely no punishment at all because of a plea bargain in which they’d have to name higher-ups. And their inducement would be considerable financial rewards (books, TV movies based on their disclosures, etc.). And mere informants, who wouldn’t be exposed to any legally adverse consequences, would only have financial rewards for coming forward.

  * In addition to the representatives of the group or groups (CIA, military-industrial complex, mob, etc.) the conspiracy theorists claim were behind the assassination, these original conspirators would be forced to enlist the cooperation and services of an ever-expanding group of conspirators to help them conceal and cover up their guilt, and what had actually happened, an expansion that would necessarily become bigger and bigger with the passage of time to the point of farce, the number of people required to be a part of the conspiracy ending up in the thousands, with only Yankee Stadium being able to accommodate one of their reunions.

  For instance, if the conspiracy involved the framing of Oswald (as most conspiracy theorists believe), almost every individual piece of evidence against Oswald would itself require the complicity of several people in the conspiracy. Just one example: Firearms experts for the Warren Commission (four experts) and HSCA (five experts) concluded that the two bullets that struck and killed Kennedy were fired from Oswald’s rifle. But if, in fact, Oswald’s rifle wasn’t the murder weapon, this means that the conspirators would have had to approach these nine experts and get them to lie, to say that it was the weapon. Now multiply this additional number of nine people many times over for many other pieces of evidence against Oswald (e.g., fingerprint experts, handwriting experts, witnesses who said they saw Oswald at the Tippit murder scene, the three autopsy surgeons and all the other pathologists who later concurred in their essential findings). Indeed, did the conspirators get Howard Brennan to say he saw Oswald firing a rifle in the sniper’s nest, Dallas police officers to say Oswald pulled his gun on them when they approached him in the Texas Theater, even his wife, Marina, to say she felt positive he had killed Kennedy, and that he had confessed to her his attempted murder of General Walker? Et cetera, et cetera.

  * “Here we were, seven men, I think five of us were Republicans,” Commission member John McCloy said. “We weren’t beholden to [the Johnson] Administration. Besides that, we had our own integrity to think of. You can rely on common sense. And you know that seven men aren’t going to get together, of that character, and concoct a conspiracy, with all the members of the staff we had [one general counsel, fourteen assistant counsels, eleven staff members], with all of the investigative agencies [working under us]. It would have been a conspiracy of a character so mammoth and so vast” (Transcript of CBS News Inquiry: The Warren Report, part IV, June 28, 1967, p.13, CBS Television Archives).

  * Recall that Oswald told his wife he was “tired of living alone,” that he didn’t want her to remain with Ruth Paine any longer, and that if she were willing he would “rent an apartment in Dallas tomorrow” for the two of them and their children (1 H 65–66, WCT Marina N. Oswald).

  †Of course, using this type of “but for” causation, we could say that if someone had bought Hitler’s paintings in Vienna in 1913, perhaps the Second World War would not have taken place.

  * This, in fact, is why he found the repressive Soviet system intolerable. Oswald’s ability to hold down some menial jobs there and here in the United States, where the instructions were minimal and based not on the caprices of his supervisors but on the requirements of the job itself, and where his very survival (food and shelter), as well as that of his wife and children, depended on his employment, cannot be cited as an exception to the aforementioned character trait of independence that Oswald had.

  * The Warren Commission, to check on the possibility of a conspiracy in the assassination, ordered an extremely thorough investigation of Oswald’s finances by the IRS and the FBI, covering the period June 13, 1962, when he returned from the Soviet Union, up through the date of his arrest on November 22, 1963. Inquiries were made at banks in New Orleans, Fort Worth, Dallas, Houston, and Laredo for any record of a checking, savings, or loan account or a safe-deposit box in the name of Oswald, any of his aliases, or members of his immediate family. No such account or safe-deposit box was located. The FBI did find one bank account of Oswald’s prior to the subject period. Before he left for the Soviet Union, and while he was stationed at the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro, Oswald opened up a savings account at the West Side State Bank in Fort Worth with a deposit of $200.00 on December 8, 1958. Interest of $3.00 was credited to the account on June 3, 1959, and the account was closed on September 14, 1959, with the amount on deposit at the time being $203.00. Telegraph companies were also checked for the possibility of his having received money orders. Also, personnel at all locations where Oswald was known to have cashed payroll and unemployment checks were queried as to the possibility of his having cashed other checks. Further inquiries were made at Oswald’s places of employment, at his residences, and with local credit associations, hospitals, utility companies, state and local government offices, post offices, employment agencies, et cetera, for any evidence of Oswald being in possession of extra money. Nothing turned up. And Marina testified she knew of no sources of income her husband had other than wages and unemployment compensation during this period. The Commission’s investigation of Oswald’s income and expenditures during this period was so comprehensive and precise that, remarkably, the amount its investigators and accountants estimated Oswald had on November 22, 1963, turned out to be within $19.00 of what he actually had. They found that Oswald received a total of $3,665.89 in cash during this period from wages, unemployment compensation, loans, and gifts from friends, and they estimated his expenditures to be $3,501.79, leaving a balance of $164.10. At the time of Oswald’s arrest, he had, we know, $13.87 on his person and had left $170.00 behind for Marina at the Paine residence. (WR, pp.328, 745; 1 H 82–83, WCT Marina N. Oswald; see also, for example of inquiries into Oswald’s finances, CE 1135, 22 H 114–115; CE 1141, 22 H 126–151; CE 1164, 22 H 215–222; Oswald’s Fort Worth bank account: CE 1150, 22 H 180)

  One amusing incident in the Commission’s effort to find out where every penny came and went with Oswald was when staff member Richard Mosk called Time magazine to double-check on his $3.87 yearly subscription. A subscription employee asked Mosk, “Where is Mr. Oswald now?” (Gest, Shapiro, Bowermaster, and Geier, “JFK: The Untold Story of the Warren Commission,” p.38)

  * Oswald’s 1962 federal income tax return listed a total income of $1,354.06, $727.81 in wages from Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall and $626.25 from Leslie Welding Company; $57.40 in withholding tax was deducted from his wages. But even this $57.40 represented a significant amount of money to Oswald. He attached to his return a letter in which he said that in view of his having two dependents in 1962, “I believe if you check your records…you will find I should get a substantial refund from the taxes taken from my wages for fiscal 1962.” (CD 107, pp.38–39, January 13, 1964) Though it wasn’t much, Oswald did receive a 1962 income tax refund check from the federal government for $57.40 on April 2, 1963 (CE 1165, 22 H 224).

  * Wounding rather than killing one’s adversary is also militarily advantageous in that the wounded soldier requires, at an absolute minimum, at least one other soldier to take care of him, thus removing two of one’s enemy from the battlefield.

  †Most police departments use soft-point bullets, principally because they don’t want their bullets to pass through the body of the intended target and kill innocent people nearby (1 HSCA 378).

  * Per Gary Mack, curator at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, the building i
s no longer there, the Woodhall Rogers Freeway going right through the old location (Interview of Gary Mack by author on March 14, 2002).

  * Silencing Oswald by driving him to his execution after he left the Book Depository Building would have made infinitely more sense to the conspirators than waiting until he was in police custody to do so. With Oswald heavily guarded, they’d have to know it would be much more difficult and problematic that they’d be able to get close enough to Oswald to kill him, and even if they did, they’d know this second hit man of theirs would himself be immediately apprehended and grilled by the authorities.

  * The argument that Ruby later told the Warren Commission he did not have his revolver that night, that he had lied when he said he did to save his life (how?) (5 H 205, 14 H 553), is unavailing. Not only is it likely he did, since this was his first story, but even if he didn’t, if he had been given the assignment by the mob to kill Oswald (obviously as soon as possible before further interrogation of Oswald continued) he would have been armed that Friday night.

  * Ruby’s killing of Oswald not only is no evidence that Ruby silenced Oswald for the mob as so many people believe, but actually is further evidence of no conspiracy in the assassination. Such an act by Ruby would have been extremely unwise for any group of conspirators, and this fact would have been very obvious to them. As I argued to the jury in London, “By having Ruby kill Oswald, they would be increasing the peril of their own apprehension” (Transcript of On Trial, July 25, 1986, p.1049). Since the killing took place right in front of over seventy Dallas law enforcement officers, the conspirators could be 100 percent certain that Ruby would be arrested immediately and grilled thereafter. Secondly, the conspirators would also know that if Ruby was unsuccessful in his effort to shoot Oswald (or even if he did succeed but Oswald managed to survive because of immediate medical attention), then they’d have to worry not just about one, but two people talking. And at that point, what possible reason would Oswald have for continuing to protect those who were behind his act once he learned they had tried to murder him? Even if we were to assume the optimum, that the conspirators somehow knew that Ruby would succeed in killing Oswald immediately, what would they gain by eliminating one conspirator (Oswald) when in the process they would automatically be turning over a new conspirator (Ruby) to the authorities? And let’s not forget that the conspirators had to know (the thought would have had to have entered at least one of their minds) that by having someone kill Oswald, a great many people who were not even thinking of a conspiracy in the assassination would be now, thinking that a group of conspirators may have been behind Oswald’s act and they decided to silence him. How could any conspirators possibly believe that drawing attention to the possibility of a conspiracy would have helped them?

  * Not according to New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, who believed that elements of “the intelligence community” (primarily, he says, “individuals in the CIA’s covert operations apparatus”) were behind Kennedy’s murder. “As soon as the non-participating elements in the intelligence community saw that a coup d’etat had occurred, they moved quickly to support the official story. Motivated in some instances by self-preservation and in others by a belief that Kennedy had brought the assassination on himself by compromising too often with the Soviets, the remainder of the government—from high elected officials to heads of departments and agencies—lined up to add their solemn voices to the growing chorus chanting the great lie.” (Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, pp.324, 331) Can you imagine that, folks, “the remainder of the government”? If most conspiracy theorists had just one tiny speck of common sense about the assassination inside their brain, it would be extremely lonely.

  * Although having nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination or his prosecution of Ruby or even his long career as a criminal prosecutor, ironically another case, and a civil one at that, has been more responsible for the fame of Wade’s name, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court abortion case of Roe v. Wade. In 1969, a Texas woman, unmarried and pregnant and using the pseudonym Jane Roe, filed a class-action suit in a federal court against Wade, seeking an injunction prohibiting Wade’s office from enforcing the Texas law that made abortion a crime. Wade resisted and the case finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in a 7-2 ruling, struck down the abortion laws of Texas and Georgia (a companion case to Roe was also heard by the court) and legalized abortion throughout the land.

  †Alexander referred to himself as the “chief prosecutor since…I put the prosecution’s case together. Henry Wade, of course, being the district attorney, sat in on it” (Sneed, No More Silence, p.542, interview of Bill Alexander).

  * Howard told the media he had handled at least thirty-five capital cases “and I’ve never had a client executed” (New York Times, November 26, 1963, p.15). But the trial lawyer hasn’t been born who can get thirty-five life sentences (or aquittals) in thirty-five cases where the DA was seeking the death penalty—at least not in Texas. Indeed, it’s very unlikely that the coarse-tongued Howard, who was married to a woman who had shot and killed her lover, had even tried anywhere near thirty-five capital cases. Dallas prosecutor Jim Bowie said, “Tom Howard defends whores and pimps [and] does it damn well.” (Wills and Demaris, Jack Ruby, pp.83, 85)

  * When Wally Weston, a comedian who worked at Ruby’s Carousel Club as the master of ceremonies, went to visit Ruby in jail, he said the first thing Ruby said, and with a smile, was, “I got balls, ain’t I, baby?” Weston responded, “Yeah, Jack, and they’re going to hang you by them, too.” (Transcript of “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” Frontline, PBS, November 16, 1993, p.42)

  †Reportedly, the first big-name lawyer the Ruby family sought before Belli was the legendary Houston criminal defense attorney Percy Foreman. But Foreman wanted a guarantee of $75,000, which the Rubys were unwilling to pay, and additionally, he rubbed Earl Ruby the wrong way. (Aynesworth with Michaud, JFK: Breaking the News, p.171; “Good-by Belli,” p.19) I’ll never forget an appearance I had on The Merv Griffin Show years ago with Foreman, when Foreman told an open-mouthed Griffin, “Merv, all my clients are poor. They’re either poor when they walk in the door, or poor when they walk out. I take everything they have,” whereupon he proceeded to enumerate what he took. I don’t remember exactly what that included but I vaguely recall his saying their home, paintings on the wall, motorcycle, and so on.

  ‡ Everything about Belli, his clothing, his words, his lifestyle (he was married six times), even his law office, fell into this category. About the last he said, “Some say my office at 722 Montgomery Street looks like a gold-rush whorehouse, but actually it’s a museum of my life and travels. San Franciscans love to gawk in the windows. And the Gray Line has the office on one of its tours” (Belli with Kaiser, Melvin Belli, photo section).

  * Pronounced “Bell-eye” “not Belli” as in one’s belly, he would lecture any members of the media who, perchance, were among the few who hadn’t heard his name pronounced before.

  †Belli, often called the “Father of Demonstrative Evidence,” started to popularize this method of presenting evidence to a jury in the early 1940s in San Francisco. His theory, undoubtedly true, was that in addition to telling a jury what the evidence was, if you could let them see and feel the evidence, even taste or smell it, your chances of favorably reaching the jury were enhanced.

  * In fact, the New York Times had observed that Ruby’s shooting of Oswald “marked the first time in 15 years around the globe that a real-life homicide had occurred in front of live cameras…The Dallas shooting [was] easily the most extraordinary moments of TV that a set owner ever watched” (New York Times, November 25, 1963, pp.1, 10).

  * Before Belli’s doctors examined Ruby, Dallas assistant DA Bill Alexander, who had known Ruby on a friendly basis for many years, took Dallas psychiatrist Dr. John Holbrook into Ruby’s cell the day after he shot Oswald to examine Ruby. At a later bail hearing for Ruby, Alexander testified that when Ruby asked him, “Shall I talk to him, Bill? What would you do?”
he said, “Jack, all we want is a fair, square psychiatric evaluation of you. If you’re nuts, you ought to go to the state insane asylum, and if you’re all right, we are going to have to prosecute you. I would talk to the man.” In response to Ruby wondering if he was “getting into some kind of trap,” Alexander testified he said, “No, Jack. I wouldn’t let any friendship go down the drain just to mess you around.” (Belli with Carroll, Dallas Justice, pp.58–59) (Alexander told me that on the stand he had “cleaned up a little” what he told Ruby. He said he actually told Ruby, “Jack, if you’re crazy you need to go to the insane asylum. And if you’re not crazy, we’re going to try to burn your ass.” Alexander also denied telling Ruby of their friendship. “I knew Ruby for ten or twelve years,” he told me, “but we weren’t friends. Never had a cup of coffee with him. Never went to his club. I used to bump into him at sporting events and around town. What I told Jack was ‘I’ve known you too long to fuck you.’” [Telephone interview of William Alexander by author on December 11, 2001]) When Alexander was asked on the stand if, in fact, the very next day, after conferring with Holbrook and being assured that Ruby was not insane, he told the press that he intended to prosecute Ruby for murder and ask for the death penalty, Alexander answered, “I sure did.” (Belli with Carroll, Dallas Justice, p.59; after conferring with Holbrook: Kaplan and Waltz, Trial of Jack Ruby, p.60)