But how could witnesses recall a body bag, if there wasn’t one? Elizabeth Loftus is a psychologist who specializes in eyewitness testimony. Loftus says, “No matter how well meaning or how well trained observers are, there are ways to make people see, hear, and even smell things that never were.” Over time, she explains, memory doesn’t fade, it grows. “What may fade is the initial perception, the actual experience of the events. But every time we recall an event we must reconstruct the memory, and so each time it is changed—colored by succeeding events, increased understanding, a new context, suggestions by others, other people’s recollections. We can get people to conjure up details that are pure fantasy.”
When Lady Bird Johnson testified before the Warren Commission, she vividly described ascending and descending a flight of stairs when she went to pay her condolences to Jacqueline Kennedy at the Dallas hospital. But there were no stairs—the two women were on the same floor. Mrs. Johnson had apparently confused this incident with another—when she went upstairs to visit Mrs. Connally.
The first witness who remembered a body bag, Paul O’Connor, told Lifton his story thirteen years after the event. During the intervening time, body bags had been shown repeatedly in newscasts out of Vietnam. In his reconstruction, O’Connor may have transmuted the plastic mattress cover into a body bag, or he may have confused two separate events. Lifton was able to find two other witnesses who “remembered” a body bag and/or cheap casket, but only after he asked them leading questions. For instance,
LIFTON: … was he in any kind of bag or anything, or in a sheet? REIBE: I think he was in a body bag.
Reibe said that his recollection was “vague.”
Lifton knew, of course, that memories fade and that witnesses make mistakes. But he apparently never realized how often witnesses recall images they never saw—nor did I, until I read Best Evidence. This failing leads him into extending the labyrinth of his theory, time after time:
I found O’Connor perfectly credible when he said the throat wound was unsutured when the body arrived. I also found Ebersole credible when he said it was sutured at what he thought was the outset of the autopsy. I thought they made their observations at different times.
Similarly, the chief of surgery at Bethesda recalled seeing an intact bullet “roll out from the clothing of President Kennedy and onto the autopsy table.” Nobody else saw this, and it is beyond dispute that Kennedy’s body was unclothed. Yet Lifton accepted this testimony and used it to build another corridor in his theory. He concluded that the bullet the chief “saw” must have been the same bullet the conspirators had earlier planted on a hospital stretcher in Dallas (before they changed their plans, brought the bullet to Bethesda, then decided to go with their original plan).
In The Mechanism of Mind, Edward de Bono has said, “Ideas must advance and if they miss the right direction they move further and further in the wrong direction.” De Bono was describing the weaknesses of what he calls vertical thinking, which he defined as the sequential development of a particular pattern. As soon as a pattern is recognized, it provides the framework for processing incoming information. The established pattern in fact selects the new information. This method of thinking is extremely efficient when the perceived pattern coincides with reality. But when it doesn’t, it leads to the creation of a myth.
When a perceived pattern is firmly established, alternative explanations are ignored or rejected. If Kennedy was struck from the rear, why was his body propelled backward? Three alternative explanations have been given, none of which violates the laws of physics: (I) Neuropathologist Richard Lindenburg told the Rockefeller Commission that the movement could have been caused by a violent neuromuscular reaction resulting from “major damage inflicted to the nerve centers in the brain.” (2) Physicist Luis Alvarez experimented by firing a rifle into melons wrapped with tape. Each time, the melon was propelled backward in the direction of the rifle. Alvarez cited the law of conservation of momentum—as the contents of the melon were driven forward and out by the force of the bullet, an opposite force was created similar to the thrust of a jet engine, propelling the melon in the opposite direction. (3) In a documentary on the assassination, CBS pointed out that the Zapruder film showed Mrs. Kennedy touching her husband’s left arm at the moment the fatal bullet struck, and that in her shocked reaction she may have caused the president’s backward movement by a pressure on his arm. Any of these explanations, or a combination of any of them, might explain the backward motion.
When Lee Harvey Oswald’s body was exhumed in October 1981, reexamined by pathologists, and reburied, a conspiracy theory put forward by British author Michael Eddowes was buried with it. In a book called The Oswald File Eddowes had argued that the man killed by Jack Ruby was not Lee Harvey Oswald but a Russian impostor. Eddowes’s theory was never very popular, but since it has now been conclusively disproved, it may serve as an undisputed example of the way a conspiracy theory can go wrong.
There is usually a predisposition toward a certain point of view. The introduction to Eddowes’s book says that the author had suspected Russian involvement even before he began investigating the assassination. When the Warren Hearings and Exhibits were published, Eddowes and several assistants began looking for evidence to support his suspicions—and found it. As it always happens in conspiracy theories, Eddowes ignored the larger pattern of Oswald’s life and zoomed in on some tiny but puzzling anomalies in the record. Just before Oswald left the Marines in 1959, his height was measured twice—once by a doctor—and recorded each time as 5 feet 11 inches. Yet after Oswald was arrested in Dallas, his height was measured as 5 feet 91/2 inches, and the autopsy report later recorded his height as 5 feet 9 inches. Furthermore, at age 6 Oswald had undergone a mastoidectomy, and the Marine medical records noted the resulting scar behind his left ear. But the postmortem on Oswald didn’t mention a mastoidechtomy scar. (In conspiracy theories, people don’t make mistakes.) There was more. Oswald’s brothers noticed changes in his appearance after his stay in Russia: thinner hair, a ruddier complexion, a slimmer build. Asked about this difference, John Pic testified, “I would never have recognized him, sir.” Pic also noticed that, after coming back, Lee referred to him for the first time as his half- brother. Of course, Pic knew perfectly well that the man was Oswald, but on the basis of these inconsistencies Eddowes constructed a theory that the man who returned from Russia wasn’t the young defector but a shorter Russian look-alike who was working for the KGB.
Once this theory was in place, everything else was interpreted to fit it. Oswald’s Marine Corps fingerprints inconveniently matched those of the man killed in Dallas. Undeterred, Eddowes concluded that the KGB must have somehow replaced the authentic Oswald’s fingerprints in the Marine files with those of the Russian. But the results of the exhumation prove that Eddowes was wrong. The team of pathologists unanimously concluded that the body in Oswald’s grave was beyond all doubt that of Lee Harvey Oswald. The dental X rays matched, and they located the mastoidectomy scar the original autopsy surgeons had overlooked.
Although the solutions proposed by Lifton and Eddowes are more farfetched than some, they use the same style of reasoning found in other conspiracy books. All these theories are based on unexplained discrepancies in the record. As in the J. Edgar Hoover analogy, alternative explanations and the overall pattern of the evidence are given little attention, if any.
Significantly, in these books, Oswald is almost always offstage. Lifton scarcely mentions him. Eddowes left him trapped in Russia, not even present at the murder scene. The odd thing is, we never get a good view of Oswald in the other conspiracy books, either. This is their major flaw, for although it is easy to point to anomalies in the mountain of evidence the Warren Commission accumulated, it is something else again to weave those anomalies into a credible scenario that illustrates how a conspiracy might actually have been carried out. The few authors who have attempted to do so have presented stories that are grotesquely improbable.
; In Betrayal, for instance, Robert D. Morrow casts Oswald as an American intelligence agent who was sent to Russia as a bogus defector. On returning to this country, he continued his clandestine work, taking orders from Jack Ruby, the CIA, and an anti-Castro group while working as an FBI informer on the side. Among other things, Oswald was supposedly directed to fire a shot over General Walker’s head and to establish a left-wing reputation by writing letters to the Communist party and making himself conspicuous at an ACLU meeting. On November 22, according to Morrow, Oswald completed his last assignment: bringing his rifle to the Depository and arranging a sniper’s nest on the sixth floor. After neatly stacking a pile of boxes near the window, “Oswald went to the men’s room on the second floor, opened the window slightly, and sat quietly in a stall to wait.” Having explained Oswald’s whereabouts at the critical moment, Morrow now faced another hurdle—Oswald was arrested with the Tippit murder weapon in his hand. How to explain this? As Morrow tells it, an Oswald look-alike shot Tippit with a similar gun, after which the team of conspirators arranged for the gun, bullets, and shell casings to be switched—by Jack Ruby, the FBI, and the Dallas police, respectively.
Most conspiracists wisely eschew the narrative method. My point is that the wild implausibilities in Betrayal are implicit in every other conspiracy book. If the others seem more persuasive, it is largely because they do not present a scenario of the events, but simply point to one suspicious-looking anomaly after another. The reader will understand the difficulty these writers have sidestepped if he or she tries to invent a story that explains why an innocent Oswald went to Irving for “curtain rods,” left his wedding ring behind the next morning, brought a package into the Depository, and so on. Because the evidence against Oswald is strong, any detailed reconstruction that argues a frame-up will inevitably sound less plausible than one that argues his guilt.
It is not surprising, then, that most conspiracists now concede that Oswald was at least involved in the assassination. But they contend that he was the instrument of others, typically a renegade element of U.S. intelligence, anti-Castro activists, or the Mafia. This hypothesis also lacks a credible story line, mainly because its proponents imply that Oswald was either a closet right-winger who participated willingly or a gullible Marxist who was tricked into it. These writers turn aside the plentiful evidence about Oswald’s politics and nature and create, by implication, a different person entirely. As before, Morrow made the problem explicit when he tried to illuminate Oswald’s motivations for his “intelligence work”:
If Oswald had any misgivings about the things he was asked to do he put them aside, pleased to be gainfully employed and able to do things for Marina. Bizarre as some of his assignments were, he cooperated without question.
This is not Lee Harvey Oswald, but a fictional character.
Virtually every argument the critics make looks weak when its hidden implications are stated openly. For example, many writers suspect that someone impersonated Oswald at the Cuban Embassy. In 1978 Consul Azcue insisted that the man he dealt with “in no way resembled” the president’s accused assassin. But to accept this, one must assume the following. The impostor presented a photograph of Oswald for the visa application and forged his signature. Silvia Duran didn’t notice that the picture looked nothing at all like the person who handed it to her. Duran and Alfredo Mirabal were mistaken when they later identified the applicant as Oswald. Back in Dallas, someone forged Duran’s phone number in Oswald’s notebook.
One might be able to swallow this story, however improbable, were it not for Oswald’s November 9 letter to the Soviets in Washington—in which he talked about his run-in with the Cuban consul. Ruth Paine and Marina observed him writing this letter, and Ruth found a copy of it lying on her desk later that day. One is faced with two incredible alternatives: either Ruth and Marina were involved in the forgery/impostor scheme, or Oswald wrote about events that happened to his impersonator. As might be expected, the conspiracists say little, if anything, about the November 9 letter. Anthony Summers mentions it, but he omits entirely Oswald’s reference to the Cuban Embassy. To do otherwise would have made his impostor theory sound ludicrous.
The conspiracists’ methods produce a surreal world. Every discrepancy is interpreted as a crack in the official stone wall through which one may glimpse the ugly truth of what happened. Behind the wall are disconnected scenes, each with its own set of conspirators. On close examination, many of these scenes evaporate.
On November 24 one of the policemen who arrested Oswald at the movie theater, N. M. McDonald, told a reporter, “A man sitting near the front, and I still don’t know who it was, tipped me the man I wanted was sitting in the third row from the rear.” Robert Sam Anson takes this statement to mean that a stranger in the audience stood up, “fingered” Oswald, and then quietly slipped away. Typically, this interpretation evokes a striking mental image: a conspirator materializes. But in fact, there was no mystery man. McDonald later recognized his informant as Johnny Brewer, the shoe store manager who had followed Oswald after noticing his suspicious behavior. It was Brewer who pointed him out, as he testified.
A story told by Summers conjures up another spooky image. A switchboard operator at the Dallas jail named Mrs. Troon has said that on the evening of November 22 two law officers—apparently Secret Service men—arranged to listen in on a telephone call they expected Oswald to make. After they took their positions in an adjoining room, the switchboard lit up. Troon and fellow operator Mrs. Swinney plugged in, after alerting the eavesdropping agents. Troon continued, “I was dumbfounded at what happened next. Mrs. Swinney opened the key to Oswald and told him, ‘I’m sorry, the number doesn’t answer.’ She then unplugged and disconnected Oswald without ever trying to put the call through. A few moments later Mrs. Swinney tore the page off her notation pad and threw it into the wastepaper basket.” Troon retrieved the page as a souvenir—it listed a Raleigh, North Carolina, number and a name spelled “Herty” or “Hertig.” So far as the record shows, Oswald had no such acquaintance and had never set foot in North Carolina.
But Summers pointed out that during the year Oswald defected, naval intelligence was reportedly training several dozen young recruits to be sent to Eastern Europe in hopes the KGB would spot them as potential agents. The major training base was said to be at Nag’s Head, North Carolina, which Summers notes is in “the same general area” as Raleigh. In fact, they are 201 miles apart.
And yet, how quickly one sees a connection: “Herty” may have been Oswald’s naval intelligence officer. Furthermore, since neither the agents nor the Dallas police reported this attempted call, there must have been a cover-up.
Hurtling along this conspiracy track, one might not notice that Troon’s story makes no sense. Why would Swinney hang up on Oswald? Why didn’t the agents rush in to demand an explanation, or confiscate her note? Her behavior and theirs are inexplicable—unless the caller was not Oswald, but some other prisoner who was about to tie up the line. Assume that, and the rest falls into place. The caller may have given his name and Troon missed it. Realizing her mistake, Swinney aborted the call and threw away the note—which was of no interest to the agents. Oswald’s strange phone call wasn’t reported because it didn’t occur.
Human errors needn’t be momentous to generate an elaborate plot. Summers turns one word into a sinister link between Oswald and army intelligence. After questioning him in August 1963, the New Orleans police sent a report to the army’s regional headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, where a file was opened on Oswald as a potential “counter-intelligence threat.” Eight years later word leaked out that the army had been routinely collecting data on thousands of American “subversives.” After a furor in the press, the Department of Defense ordered that all civilian files—no exceptions—be destroyed. In 1973, army records say, a civil service file clerk in San Antonio marked Oswald’s dossier for destruction, together with many others. The available evidence, including statements from witnesses who
had seen the file, indicates that his dossier contained what one would expect: newspaper clippings about his defection, Marine records, copies of FBI reports. Nevertheless, the destruction of the file aroused the direst suspicions.
Shortly after the assassination, the army officer in charge, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Jones, telephoned the FBI in Dallas and, with Oswald’s file open in front of him, volunteered the information he had. FBI records show that he described “A. J. Hidell” as an associate of Oswald’s—which is what Oswald had told the New Orleans police. The investigation soon established, however, that “Hidell” was actually an alias.
In 1978, fifteen years later, Jones explained the file’s history to the Assassinations Committee, which found him to be a credible witness. But Summers thought it was significant that, during his testimony, Jones said that “A. J. Hidell” had been listed in his records as Oswald’s alias. Summers pounced on this inconsistency because Oswald’s only known use of the name as an alias was in purchasing his pistol and rifle through the mail. “If Jones’ testimony is correct,” Summers concludes, then the army may well have learned of these weapons purchases months before the assassination—either by monitoring Oswald’s post office box or through “some human informant, conceivably Oswald himself.” He suspects that the file was destroyed because it would have revealed Oswald’s dealing with army intelligence.
One has to look twice to notice that the only clue to this clandestine relationship came from the man who would necessarily have been a central figure in the cover-up. If Jones lied to the FBI in 1963, it was to conceal the army’s knowledge of Oswald’s alias. When he prepared to face the Committee, is it probable that he would have overlooked this crucial detail? More likely, the word “associate” came from the New Orleans police report and Jones later misremembered “Hidell” as Oswald’s alias because that fact had been firmly established long before.
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