Deleted Scenes

Praise from a Future Generation, my 2007 book about the first generation critics of the Warren Report, is due as an e-book this fall. I’ve spent part of this summer making a series of mostly tiny corrections to it.

Since its publication, I've only looked at portions of the book. But now, as I slog through it cover-to-cover, I have chanced upon a deletion I was not previously aware of.

It is, admittedly, a rather inconsequential deletion. It was made in Chapter 20, “The Meeting.” The original manuscript has a paragraph or so describing how an early critic named Lillian Castellano telephoned Sylvia Meagher on October 3, 1965, just as a meeting of some East Coast critics got underway in Sylvia’s apartment. “It was quite a coincidence you should have called,” Sylvia said in a letter to Lillian a few days later.

That paragraph is not in the book. When I read the published version recently I didn't even notice right away; I only noticed when spot-checking the end notes. The citation for the Meagher quote above is still there!

Why the publisher chose to make the deletion in the first place is a mystery. I see no good reason for the cut. What it saves in word-count is negligible. Naturally, this discovery has me wondering what else might have been deleted that I never noticed.

If you read my book, you're already in a tiny minority. If you read my book and this blog, you're in an even tinier minority! I don't plan to lobby for any restorations in the e-book. But I would like to at least make a record of the deletion, even if only a handful of people see it.

The deleted material should have been on page 254. (The undeleted citation, erroneously entered as note 27, is on page 526.) Here's a .jpg file of the manuscript:

Kennedy Assassination Jokes: A Supplement

Last April I made a post here called Kennedy Assassination Jokes, a whimsical item recounting the lighter side of assassination criticism.

It just occurred to me that I left out one of my favorite examples.

Renatus Hartogs was a New York shrink who examined Lee Harvey Oswald when Oswald was a truant teenager in the 1950s. Though a decade had since elapsed, this was good enough for the Warren Commission to call him as an expert witness. Hartogs dutifully told the Commission that the teenage Oswald was "dangerous," even though his contemporaneous report did not say that.

Cashing in on his Commission appearance, Hartogs co-authored a book about Oswald called The Two Assassins. In it Hartogs said, among other things, that the letters in Oswald's pseudonym, Alek J. Hidell, could almost be re-arranged to form "Jekyll-Hyde." (The pseudonym lacked two instances of the letter y.)

Sylvia Meagher called The Two Assassins "a contemptible piece of garbage." In a published review, she noted that the letters in the name "Renatus Hartogs" could themselves be re-arranged to these phrases: "Trash outrages," and "Strange Authors."

Meagher dreamed up a third anagram, but her editor insisted it be cut: "Thor's Great Anus."

Haiku

I want to tell the

Truth, and I can't tell it here.

I can't tell it here.

– Jack Ruby (to Earl Warren)

Forthcoming e-book: a little more

The approximate target date for the e-book version of Praise from a Future Generation is this fall.

That's it, so far. Just, "this fall."

The plan is for me to read through the existing book and mark it up with any corrections I might want to make, more than three years after its original publication. I've already begun this and expect to finish no later than the end of summer.

For the most part, I'm making little changes most wouldn't even notice. A dash becomes a semi-colon, for example.

But I'm also adding some new material. Not a lot – but stuff that probably should have been there all along. For example, there was, at the invitation of the House Select Committee, a meeting of seven or eight WC critics in 1977. This included four of the people I wrote about in Praise.

I've got a long HSCA document pertaining to this meeting. "For the most part," a staffer summarized, "it was agreed by the researchers that our number one priority must be to focus on the Warren Commission."

I'm also replacing some stuff about Mary Ferrell with some better stuff about Mary Ferrell. I interviewed her a few years before her death and she described to me how she learned of the assassination. But I subsequently found a better description in a letter Mrs. Ferrell wrote to Sylvia Meagher, and I shall use that description for the e-book.

There's other little stuff. Just enough, I suppose, for me to call the e-book a "revised second edition" with a clean conscience.

Mary Ann Moorman

Mary Ann Moorman, an eyewitness to the assassination of President Kennedy who took a famous picture of that killing, appeared recently at an antiques mall about half an hour from where I live.

As I understand it, her May 24th appearance had something to do with selling the original of her famous picture (left). She agreed to participate in a live webcast interview. This was considered a pretty big deal, because she never testified to the Warren Commission way back when, and has granted very few interviews in the years since. Mrs. Moorman was among those closest to the presidential limousine when the assassination occurred.

Naturally I had to be there. I phoned the antiques mall and reserved myself a place in the audience.

Now, a few weeks later, I still haven't satisfied myself on the question, why? Why would she travel all the way to Colorado – she still lives in the Dallas area – to be interviewed in, as it turned out, a nondescript building along a cheerless frontage road running parallel to a freeway on the outskirts of Denver?

Mrs. Moorman during the interview, with
replica of her original camera.

And yet she did. The interview lasted about an hour, and took place on a cramped set adjacent to a refreshment area. One of the most interesting things to come out of it was her statement that when she took the picture, she was standing in the grass behind the curb in Dealey Plaza, not in the street, as some believe she did.

This is an important question to some, who have detected the notorious "Badgeman" image in the murky background shadows of her picture. Verifying where she stood when she took it is critical to establishing its legitimacy.

Her position on the grass has been confirmed by a photo analyst who used a technique called Reverse Projection Photogrammetry to recreate her picture and substantiate where she stood.

•

I made extensive notes of this interview. They're somewhat lengthy, but I reproduce them here:

Mary Ann Moorman, the amateur photographer who took one of the most famous pictures of the assassination of JFK, appeared at an antique mall in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, just west of Denver, on the evening of May 24, 2011.

Her appearance was for an Internet-based video program hosted by Gary Stover, an antiques enthusiast. Stover hosts a weekly webcast on iantiques.com, which is described as a social networking site for dealers, collectors, and antique enthusiasts.

I first heard about this event in early May. I only live about half an hour away, so I telephoned the antique mall, the Brass Armadillo, to arrange to be there for Moorman’s show. After I asked some very specific questions, they said they’d have Stover give me a call.

Something about this event seemed odd to me. Mary Ann Moorman lived in Dallas at the time of the assassination. That’s a long time ago – she could have relocated to the Denver area. I asked Stover when he called back, and he said no, she still lived in Texas.

(As I understand it, a dealer associated with iantique.com met Mary Moorman by chance five or six months ago in Texas. She is interested in selling the original Polaroid print of her famous photo, which she still has all these years later. And so they made arrangements to get her up to Colorado for an Internet interview. Last night’s interview dealt almost exclusively with Moorman’s experiences in November 1963, so the linkage between that and the sale of this historic photo is a little unclear to me. I’m sure there is some behind-the-scenes stuff I’m not privy to.)

Whatever the case, I showed up last night around 5:45. The Brass Armadillo Antiques Mall is located in a rundown area on a street that is parallel to Interstate 70. This cheerless setting seemed all the gloomier because of a steady rain that fell most of the day.

I found my way to the area where the interview would take place. The Brass Armadillo is a big building, raw and mostly unfinished, partitioned into sections where individual antique dealers sell their stuff and cut their deals.

The interview took place in a refreshment area, where during regular business hours stuff like soda and hot dogs are sold. There were a few tables and chairs but not many. An unlikely place for a live show, but probably the best spot available.

So I headed toward this refreshment area. Even as I noted the cramped setting, and the TV lights and cameras, I saw a woman seated at a small round table scribbling away. On closer inspection I saw she had a stack of 5x7 prints of the Moorman photograph, and that she was signing each one. And she turned out to be Mary Moorman.

I introduced myself and she smiled pleasantly. We shook hands. But I could see I was interrupting and did not want to be a nuisance. Quickly I learned these signed prints were being sold for two dollars.

I thought: is Mary Moorman reduced to this? Selling prints of her famous photo for two bucks apiece? I don’t think so; each print had a Brass Armadillo sticker on back, so it was probably some special arrangement she had agreed to. Anyway, I bought one.

I left her then, and found a place to situate myself. The Stover Hour has been webcasting JFK-themed shows for the entire month of May, and the Moorman appearance was the highlight.

There weren’t many places to sit and I wound up standing for the whole thing. I did find a ledge to put my stuff down, and also lean against as I scribbled copious notes.

Gary Stover’s interest in the JFK case is genuine, and he seems to have a good grasp of what can be a very complex set of issues. As the program began, he had a Polaroid camera that was the same model as the one Mary Moorman used. It isn’t clear to me what happened to hers. It may be at the Sixth Floor Museum, or it may have just got lost over the years – I’m not sure.

They talked a lot about the camera and her familiarity with it. “We were not a photographic-type family,” Moorman said. “We just snapped pictures.” Stover asked a series of somewhat technical questions I didn’t really care about. He used the phrase “retro-fit light kit” several times, and asked whether the frames on Polaroid film were numbered. Moorman wasn’t sure.

Next they talked about the familiar story of how Moorman and Jean Hill arrived at Dealey Plaza together. (This story is told in detail in Richard Trask’s Pictures of the Pain, and I won’t belabor it here.) It was drizzly when they first arrived, but Jean Hill of course wore a bright red raincoat mainly to attract the attention of a Dallas Police Officer she was dating.

Mary Moorman said she knew a number of Dallas cops from her high school days, including Officer Glen McBride. McBride rode one of the lead motorcycles that day, a few blocks ahead of the Presidential party, and Moorman took his picture. Stover asked where she was standing when she took the McBride picture. She replied that she stepped into the street for this photograph.

She said she also stepped into the street to take a picture of George Lumpkin, another cop friend who rode a motorcycle about half a block in front of the motorcade’s lead car.

Finally the presidential limousine turned from Houston onto Elm. As it neared the two women, Jean Hill called out, “Hey Mr. President!” or something like that. Mary Moorman raised her camera; as she took the picture she heard what she called “a sound,” followed by two more in quick succession. Firecrackers, she thought.

Stover pointed out that by the time Moorman took her famous picture, two shots had already been fired, according to the Warren Report: one that missed, and another, the second, that wounded JFK. Yet Moorman said the shot as she took the picture was the first she heard. So here is evidence of five shots. (Jean Hill, in her WC testimony, said she heard four to six shots.)

Why did Moorman and Hill pick that particular location? Stover asked. “I think God has a plan for everyone. We wandered all over green grassy spots. Why we chose that one, I don’t know... It was providence I took that picture.”

He asked whether she stepped into the street to take that picture, as she had to take the pictures of the two cops. “I’m pretty sure I stepped back just on the very edge of the curb to get on the grass,” she replied.

(I found this rather ambiguous. Did she step back after taking the photo? Or did she take it from the curb? After the Stover Hour ended I had a chance to put this question to her again, and she told me then that she took the picture from the curb. She noted that between the limo and the motorcycle cops there wasn’t a lot of room in the street; it wasn’t safe.)

Stover asked her whether she noticed the limousine slowing down. Yes, she said; it slowed almost to a stop. She clearly heard Jackie Kennedy’s cry, “My God, he’s been shot!” She had no sense of where the shots originated from. Neither, she said in response to another question, did she see evidence of shots having hit the sidewalk or turf; nor was she hit by any debris.

When the shooting stopped, she said, there was a brief stillness. This is when Jean Hill testified she saw a man resembling Jack Ruby run from the TSBD area toward the railroad bridge area. Mary Moorman did not see this man.

People began running up the grassy knoll area, Moorman said, and Jean Hill took off across the street in this direction. Hill had the Polaroid fixative, which she called a gel, and so it was not applied to the photo right away. (I don’t know how soon it needed to be applied. When I was a kid my parents had a Polaroid camera and I recall they usually put this goo on it right away, rolled from a plastic cylinder over the photograph.)

While Jean Hill was gone – and she was only gone a few minutes, Moorman said – Moorman was approached by a man she later learned was Jim Featherstone of the Dallas Times-Herald. 

“Someone told me you took a picture,” he said to her.

“Yes, I did.” Moorman was crying at this point. She showed him the picture and he said, “Come with me. We’ll go to the press room.” He wanted Moorman and Hill, who soon returned, to go with him to the press room in the Criminal Courts Building, conveniently located on Houston Street there in Dealey Plaza.

Jean Hill, in her WC testimony, portrayed Featherstone as almost sinister in insisting they accompany him to the CCB, where both women ended up spending most of the afternoon. Moorman does not recall it that way. And this wound up being one of the themes that Stover followed for the rest of his show: the differences in the recollections of Moorman and Hill.

This, I have to say, bothered me. I understand that many consider Jean Hill a problematic witness. I have not read The Last Dissenting Witness and don’t have a firm opinion on her one way or the other. But Stover seemed like he wanted to use Moorman in order to discredit Jean Hill – and that didn’t sit well with me. Jean Hill, for better or worse, gave sworn testimony while Moorman never did, apart from a Sheriff’s statement given on 11-22. And Jean Hill is dead and thus not able to defend herself. Much of this boils down to one person’s word against another’s.

Stover asked a lot of questions about what Moorman might have seen. Yes, she and Hill both saw that Honest Joe’s Pawn Shop truck. (He kept calling it Uncle Joe’s...my recollection is Honest Joe’s.) No, Moorman said, she did not see a Nash Rambler, let alone a Rambler that might have picked up LHO or a lookalike. (I don’t know how the Rambler fits into John Armstrong’s work.) No, she didn’t see an epileptic guy shortly before the motorcade arrived in Dealey. She didn’t see the Babushka lady.

Moorman completed her story of the afternoon of November 22. Sheriff Decker made an appearance in the press room, learned that Featherstone had taken Moorman’s photo (which wound up on the newswires), and demanded he retrieve it. She got it back in minutes. Moorman and Hill both made several phone calls, and at one point Moorman ran outside to get a newspaper. A cop stopped her on her way and said, “You can’t leave yet!” but she knew this cop, too – Wiseman – he let her continue to a newspaper box, buy an Extra edition of the paper, then come back to the press room. Not long after that she and Hill both gave their depositions.

Not long after the assassination Shirley Martin, an early critic of the Warren Commission, reported telephoning Jean Hill:

Before the interview I forwarded a PDF of this to Stover, and he asked Moorman about it. “I was never afraid,” she said. Any threatening calls? “No, absolutely not.” Stover seemed a little smug about this, like he’d just punctured another of Jean Hill’s stories.

Anyway it wasn’t long after giving the depositions that Moorman and Hill were finally allowed to go home.

Why, Stover asked, did you not testify before the Warren Commission? She had scheduled a time to testify, she replied. But before it happened she hurt her ankle when she jumped off the back deck of her house. The ankle wasn’t broken, just twisted, perhaps sprained – it was painful to get around. She contacted a WC representative, said she couldn’t make the scheduled time, and never heard from them again.

I had also emailed Stover a question about whether Moorman ever had any lingering effects from witnessing the assassination – any sleeplessness or nightmares, any flashbacks, whatever. No, she said, she had not. “God took care of me.”

On the night of 11-22-63, sometime after midnight – around 12:30, she said – the doorbell rang at her home. Two FBI guys were there asking to see the photo. They showed their ID, which Moorman said she was able to verify. She turned over the picture, they wrote out a receipt – scrawled it out on a piece of scratch paper, was the impression I got – took the photo, and returned it a few days later.

After that, she said, the CIA took the photo and returned it, as did the Secret Service, and the FBI again. Each agency left a receipt, apparently scrawled out like that first FBI receipt – “It was nothing official.”

The second time the FBI returned it, Moorman said, the picture had its notorious thumbprint.

In answer to another question, she said that while UPI sent out the picture worldwide on the day of the assassination (with her permission), and gave her a photo credit, she never sold the rights to it.

She jumped forward a few years after this. She mentioned Gary Mack and Jack White becoming interested in the picture, studying its background, making blowups, and finding the so-called “badgeman” image. “That was interesting,” she observed.

In 1965, David Lifton first discovered other possible human-like figures in the picture’s background. [Here's more.] He brought these to the attention of Ray Marcus, and the two of them identified five areas of interest by the late spring of that year. Mary Moorman did not mention these and it wasn’t clear to me whether she was aware of them (just as it has never been clear to me whether #2 man and Badgeman are one and the same).

Moorman said that the Sixth Floor Museum had the original print in a vault for about 15 years, “for safekeeping.” It is no longer with them; she has it stored in another vault somewhere. Its condition, she says, is “good,” although she concedes it has faded somewhat. “You can still see ... what’s there,” she said.

There is some dispute about this, but I'll address it in another post.

She said that yes, she is interested in selling the original photo, but she gave no indication how much she would like to get or thought it might be worth. Its historical value is certainly on her mind, though. “I would like for it to be put in a museum somewhere, for its historical [value]...it really is a part of history.”

In answer to a question, Mary Moorman said she has never profited from the assassination.

She did not see Oliver Stone’s JFK. She was asked to participate in it but declined. One reason, she said, is that Jean Hill was an advisor on the film and Moorman didn’t want any conflicts with her.

What are her thoughts on the assassination? “I don’t think it’s final...the government can hide a lot...I believe there is a whole lot more to the story than has been told.”

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After the webcast ended, there was a reception. Most in the small audience (I’d estimate 25-30 people) hung around for it. I got a chance to speak with Mrs. Moorman again and ask a few questions, like clarifying (or attempting to clarify) where she was when she took her picture.

I also wanted to ask her about a snippet of Jean Hill’s testimony, about “We have three shots...” I actually read a quote I’d written into my notes. Jean Hill told the Warren Commission: “They keep saying three shots ... I said, ‘I know I heard more... He said, 'Mrs. Hill, we heard more shots too, but we have three wounds and we have three bullets, three shots is all that we are willing to say right now.”

Mrs. Moorman said she had no recollection of that.

E-book: Praise from a Future Generation

Some very witty wag once defined a liberal as someone whose interests aren't at stake.

This applies to more than just politics.

On one of my other blogs, I railed against e-books and e-readers. Now the shoe is on the other foot.

My publisher recently contacted me to see if I would like to prepare an e-book version of Praise from a Future Generation, my account of the "first generation" critics of the Warren Report. A conventional hardcover version appeared in October 2007.

I would very much indeed like to prepare an e-book version, I replied. And suddenly my interests are at stake.

I still don't care for Kindles, and all the other e-readers out there on the market. But I can't deny the realities of the marketplace. According to an item I saw in the paper recently, Amazon says they are now selling more e-books than printed books, including books for which there is no electronic edition.

This development gives me an opportunity. There are some little grammatical errors throughout the print version of the book, and in the months ahead I'll be ferreting out and correcting as many as I can. And I'll be adding some new material, too. Not a hell of a lot, but some stuff that should have been there all along, and maybe enough to justify calling the e-book a revised, second edition.

There is no formal publication date yet. Probably sometime in the fall, I'm told.

By the way...that witty wag who defined liberals also defined conservatives: in their case, as those with two perfectly good legs who refuse to walk forward.

Kennedy Assassination Jokes

There aren’t many laughs associated with the Kennedy assassination. This is as it should be.

Of course, there are always those undeterred by matters of taste. Too, humor can be a defense mechanism. So naturally there is a lighter side to the issue.

Mark Lane, for example, wondered why the Warren Commission's Hearings and Exhibits included the dental records of Jack Ruby's mother (Vol. XXII, p. 395, right). Those wouldn't be relevant, he quipped, even if Ruby had bitten Oswald to death.

In introductory material to her comparative study Accessories After the Fact, Sylvia Meagher related this: "It has been said jokingly that the Dallas police are not so bad – look how quickly they caught Jack Ruby."

But comic attempts are made at the speaker's peril. In 1964 Vincent J. Salandria briefly and informally questioned Arlen Specter, when the latter was feted by the Philadelphia Bar Association for his work with the Warren Commission. 

Salandria told Specter that the Commission had a duty to demonstrate the shooting performance it attributed to Oswald could be duplicated.

"He asked whether I would have them kill a man," Salandria recalled. "The joke fell upon ears which detect no humor in murder."

Now, with the passage so much time, we can get away with more than we could in 1964. Which brings me to Bill Hicks.

Bill Hicks was an 1980s and 90s-era comedian known for a popular stand-up act. He made numerous appearances on late night talk shows and seemed poised to break out to greater things when cancer killed him in 1995.

Hicks had an interest in the JFK case and expressed it sometimes during his act. (In the video below, he obviously references the Sixth Floor Museum, though calls it something else.)

#5 Man

As this is written, the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination is less than three years away. It is safe to assume a great deal of media attention will be given to this event.

Most of it, it is equally safe to assume, will be given over to propping up the lone gunman scenario. I anticipate the weaknesses in this scenario being glossed over, and the correct (i.e. conspiracy) point of view ridiculed and dismissed, even though the lone nut nonsense has been discredited many times over.

When it comes to the JFK case, the major corporate criminals of the last not-quite-half-century include Time-Life and CBS. These entities, who in theory act in the public interest, have aided and abetted covering up the truth, and there has been nothing accidental about it.

In this post, I shall briefly present a case study: the deliberate suppression by CBS of a potentially important piece of evidence.

•

In 1967, Warren Commission critic Raymond Marcus was contacted by CBS and asked to lend his expertise to a new examination of the Warren Report. He initially agreed, but nearly pulled out after seeing an article in a Boston newspaper. That article began:

The documentary would not air "unless it sheds new light on the report, weakening the arguments of those who criticize it," the article went on, citing a CBS spokesman.

The program's bias was perfectly obvious, so when Marcus next spoke with CBS, he said he had changed his mind. But his CBS contact replied, "Some of us here are trying to do an honest job, and if those of you who have important information don't cooperate with us, you're just guaranteeing that the other side wins."

So Marcus stuck with it.

CBS had approached Marcus because of his areas of expertise, which included the Zapruder film, the so-called "magic bullet" (CE 399), and several pictures. These pictures included the Mary Moorman photograph of the assassination.

Note how the numeral 5 appears directly above cop's helmet (image courtesy Ray Marcus)

Marcus had been working on a detail of this photo since 1965, when David Lifton brought it to his attention. The two men identified five details they thought might reveal possible assassins (above). Both considered the fifth and final detail the most promising.

In time Lifton became more interested in the research that resulted in Best Evidence, but Marcus kept working on detail #5.

Marcus elicited expert opinions supporting his growing view that the #5 man detail really was one of JFK's assassins. Perhaps most compelling was the observation that "You don't need an expert to tell you that's a man."

•

The #5 man detail was among the materials Ray Marcus brought to the attention of CBS as it prepared its 1967 special.

Admittedly, the #5 man detail is murky; is not, as Mark Lane observed, "of the quality a portrait photographer might boast." So when Marcus showed his Moorman work to the documentary's producer he included, for comparison purposes only, an unrelated news photograph of a man shooting civil rights activist James Meredith from ambush. The producer examined both photos, and at one point incorrectly referred to #5 man as "the man who shot Meredith."

The reference was telling. He could not have made this erroneous identification if he did not first see a human figure in that #5 detail.

CBS New Inquiry: The Warren Report was broadcast in four parts in June 1967. Much of the third part was devoted to attacking New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, whose assassination investigation had been made public earlier that year.

Marcus had provided Garrison with the same Moorman photos he had provided CBS. Garrison told correspondent Mike Wallace that photographs existed showing the assassins.

Wallace incorrectly stated that this near full-frame Moorman photo was "a hazy blowup of an area from a larger picture." Needless to say, CBS had the resources to show much clearer images. The zoom did not even center above the motorcycle cop's helmet, where the #5 man detail is.

But showing such details may not have weakened the arguments of those who criticized the Warren Report.

After the documentary had broadcast, its producer said, "Nothing would have pleased me more than to have found a second assassin. We looked for one and it isn't our fault that we didn't find one. But the evidence just isn't there."

This is, according to CBS, the man who wasn't there.

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The newspaper excerpt is from The Boston Herald-Traveler, reproduced in #5 Man: November 22, 1963, by Raymond Marcus.

Let Justice Be Done

Let Justice Be Done, William Davy's groundbreaking study of the Jim Garrison investigation in the late 1960s, is now available in Kindle/e-book format.

First published in 1999, Let Justice Be Done offered new documentation of a relationship between Clay Shaw, the target of Garrison's prosecution, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

You don't need a Kindle to read the new version, Davy says. "Just download the Kindle reader app for free from my Amazon site."

Let Justice Be Done documents "a more than casual relationship between Shaw" and the CIA. Shaw's reports to the Agency (as a "domestic contact") began as early as 1948, and continued into the 1960s.

One CIA document refers to a covert security clearance for Shaw. Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti told Mr. Davy that such a clearance indicates Shaw worked for Clandestine Services, possibly its Domestic Operations Division – "one of the most secret divisions within the Clandestine Services."

Garrison charged Shaw with taking part in a conspiracy to assassinate JFK. From the beginning Shaw maintained his innocence, and indeed a jury rapidly acquitted him. Though he was arrested and charged in 1967, the trial did not take place until 1969. William Davy shows how, between arrest and trial, the defense benefitted from an unprecedented media blitz in support of the accused, and how the prosecution was infiltrated and compromised after Garrison's investigation became public knowledge. It now seems plain, with years of hindsight, that Jim Garrison never stood a chance.

The e-book edition of Let Justice Be Done contains the complete text of the original, which is now out of print.

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Hear William Davy interviewed on Black Op Radio March 17, 2011. (Click on the link and find Show #518.)

A Certain Type of Book

Any major world event will, in time, attract the interest of historians and other professional analysts. We expect this. We expect them to sift through the record, official and unofficial, and tell us what it all means.

The assassination of JFK is a case in point. It is unique, though, in that it has always attracted a disproportionate number of non-professionals. Historically it has been the non-professionals who have found serious flaws in the government's lone nut thesis, and argued against it. And it has been the professionals, the historians and journalists, who by and large have endorsed it.

Estimates vary on how many books have been published on the assassination. They range from many hundreds into the thousands. I doubt very much there is an accurate tally. There may have been at one time, but with the advent of print-on-demand and other means of self-publication, a tidal wave (dare I call it a title wave?) has engulfed us.

Most of these books, and certainly the best, have been written by the non-professionals.

From time to time I see lists of what various writers consider the best books on the subject, usually in the form of a "top ten" list. I have crafted one of my own. Like all such lists, it is highly subjective. Any one entry is likely to provoke sharp disagreement.

I present my list below. But first, I've also assembled a list of really bad books about the JFK assassination. They may or may not be the worst. In fact, several of them are quite literate, and thus might be convincing to those unfamiliar with all of the evidence. This is a great danger to the truth. Uninitiated readers enter the landscape at their peril.

So here are some really bad books about the JFK assassination, presented in no particular order.

1. Case Closed, by Gerald Posner
2. Reclaiming History, by Vincent Bugliosi
3. Mrs. Paine's Garage, by Thomas Mallon
4. Eyewitness to History, by Howard Brennan (with J. Edward Cherryholmes)
5. Death of a President, by William Manchester
6. The Day Kennedy was Shot, by Jim Bishop
7. The Truth About the Assassination, by Charles Roberts
8. The Scavengers and Critics, by Richard Lewis and Lawrence Schiller
9. Final Disclosure, by David Belin
10. Conspiracy of One, by Jim Moore
11. With Malice, by Dale Myers
12. The Warren Report

Some really good books about the JFK assassination:

1. JFK and the Unspeakable, by James W. Douglass
2. Accessories After the Fact, by Sylvia Meagher
3. Conspiracy, by Anthony Summers
4. The Last Investigation, by Gaeton Fonzi
5. Rush to Judgment, by Mark Lane
6. On the Trail of the Assassins, by Jim Garrison
7. A Citizen's Dissent, by Mark Lane
8. Let Justice Be Done, by William Davy
9. The Bastard Bullet, by Raymond Marcus
10. Spy Saga, by Philip Melanson

My lists are rather arbitrary, and I'm probably overlooking a few titles I would include if I gave it serious thought. But if I haven't read a given book, I haven't included it. I don't consider either list the very worst or the very best. Such is the nature of a subjective list.

Also, there are pro-conspiracy books that, in my opinion, are not of much value (if any). But that's another list for another time.

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Some of the titles on these lists of books, good and bad, are worth additional commentary. See, for example, my review "Bugliosi's Book" elsewhere on this blog. I'll have some comments on some of the other titles in the not-too-distant future.

Mrs. Paine's Mirage (Or, How I Learned to Hate Mrs. Paine's Garage)

Mrs. Paine's Garage, published back in 2002, is an unfortunate little book. I have a distant connection to it, one that I regret.

In July 2001 its author, Thomas Mallon, sent me an email introducing himself. He briefly described his project – a sympathetic look at Ruth Paine, a figure in the JFK assassination – and asked if I could put him in touch with Mrs. Shirley Martin, who had known Mrs. Paine many years before.

Mallon had apparently Googled Mrs. Martin and found no contact information. But the Internet, in its infinite thoroughness, linked my name to hers, presumably due to some research I was then conducting. So I wrote to Mrs. Martin about Thomas Mallon, and she agreed to talk to him.

Thomas Mallon's motives for undertaking a book about Ruth Paine are unknown to me, and I won't speculate on them. But I find it hard to understand how he could write Mrs. Paine's Garage without playing at least a gentle form of devil's advocate with his subject. Such a role, which some would consider the writer's duty, might have elicited valuable information that would have greatly enhanced the resulting narrative, even if he stuck to what I am convinced was a preconceived conclusion.

As it developed, there was no devil's advocacy, and consequently no real depth to Mrs. Paine's Garage. Mr. Mallon accepts the official story of the JFK assassination and, it follows, the official story of Ruth Paine and her role in that cataclysmic event.

That role, in sum, is that Ruth Paine was, in 1963, a good-hearted Quaker woman who happened to befriend Lee and Marina Oswald at a critical juncture in their lives. She allowed the pregnant Marina and one daughter (soon two) to live with her in suburban Dallas while misfit Lee dreamed the dreams of the perpetual loser, finally exacting a psycho-sicko revenge on society by murdering President Kennedy.

Thomas Mallon refers to Ruth Paine as "a vessel of disinterested kindness." Others see Mrs. Paine in a different light.

Ruth and her husband Michael "maintain a delicate balance between intimacy and distance as concerns Lee Harvey Oswald," wrote researcher Barbara LaMonica in 1995. "They exploit their role as intimate when they want to condemn Lee, and take on the mantle of being expert witnesses as to his character, and how violence-prone he was, and how capable he was [for committing] the assassination. But they conveniently distance themselves from him when they want to avoid scrutiny."

After his arrest, a desperate Lee Oswald telephoned Mrs. Paine from jail and asked her help in contacting a lawyer named John Abt. "I was quite stunned that he called at all or that he thought he could ask anything of me – appalled, really," Ruth testified to the Warren Commission.

Yet she did, in fact, try to contact John Abt on Oswald's behalf. Asked by the Warren Commission whether she informed Oswald she had been unable to reach him, this vessel of disinterested kindness replied, "I made no effort to call the police station."

Sylvia Meagher was herself appalled, really, by this admission. "Her failure to notify Oswald that she had been unable to reach Abt, so that he would realize the urgency of obtaining legal assistance elsewhere, is unforgivable," she wrote in Accessories After the Fact.

There is more about Ruth and Michael Paine, a lot more – but this is already getting long, so I need to get back to Mallon's book.

There are portions of Mrs. Paine's Garage which I find downright deceptive. In a footnote on page 57, Thomas Mallon cites an "assassinaton legend" that on November 22, 1963, Ruth Paine greeted Dallas Police officers with the words, "Come in, I've been expecting you." These officers had come to search Mrs. Paine's home several hours after the assassination, and the Paine garage yielded a trove of evidence damning Lee Oswald.

As Jerry Rose noted in a 1990 article in The Third Decade, the arrival of the cops at the Paine house was not, in and of itself, suspicious; Oswald listed the Paine address on his employment application to the Texas School Book Depository. It's her greeting that seemed so odd, even to the police. When they arrived at the Paine home, Lee Oswald had not yet been publicly identified as an assassination suspect.

In any case, Ruth Paine firmly denies the greeting attributed to her, telling Thomas Mallon, "I was not expecting them and I did not say that."

Maybe she didn't. But the allegation is not a "legend," which my dictionary says is an unverifiable story handed down by tradition. No, it comes from the testimony of one of the cops, Dallas Police Detective Guy F. Rose, who before he made it raised his right hand and swore that what he was about to say was the truth and nothing but. Maybe Detective Rose perjured himself. But this is not a legend, it is sworn testimony. And maybe it is true.

It is worth mentioning that Shirley Martin, who is now deceased, later told me that after making contact with her, Thomas Mallon said some things to her that may not be true. Shirley said he told her that he would be able to quote her letters to Ruth Paine in his book, whether Shirley gave him permission or not.

This is almost certainly false. Writers are strictly governed by what they can quote without permission. It is a matter of intellectual property. From what Shirley told me, Mallon at very least exaggerated how much he would be able to quote, and he probably knew better. This is a big reason why his smelly little book is on my list of the worst ever published on the JFK case.

"I hope," Shirley Martin said, "he is not another Posner."

He wasn't, but not for lack of trying. Mrs. Paine's Garage was duly published, and excerpted in The New Yorker, and lauded by the usual media sluts. It appears, finally, to have sunk into a well-deserved oblivion.

Bugliosi's Book

(2006)

One must assume that Vincent Bugliosi is honest, and that his new book on the JFK assassination is likewise honest. Reclaiming History is Bugliosi's long-awaited entry into the war of words over what really happened to John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

This is a massive book, so massive that the publisher, W.W. Norton, elected to put all of its end notes and other source notes onto an accompanying CD-ROM. At more than 1,600 pages, Reclaiming History gives the appearance of a comprehensive and minutely detailed study of the crime that shook the world four decades ago. Bugliosi says he devoted twenty years to his book. I'm devoting about twenty minutes to writing this essay.

Vincent Bugliosi, of course, is the former Deputy District Attorney from Los Angeles, best known for prosecuting Charles Manson and members of his murderous "family" some thirty-five years ago. Bugliosi's resulting book Helter Skelter (written with Curt Gentry) became a best seller, and according to the press materials accompanying Reclaiming History is the best selling true crime book of all time. Bugliosi has since written several other true crime books that have also been best sellers.

Why did the former prosecutor decide to tackle the Kennedy assassination? "Over 95 percent of the books on the case happen to be pro-conspiracy and anti-Warren Commission," he says. "So certainly there is a need for far more books on the other side to give a much better balance to the debate."

Well, maybe. But what was the purpose of the Warren Report? Sylvia Meagher once observed that if the Report cannot stand on its own – if it requires additional books to prop it up – that in itself is "a total default" to its critics. In Bugliosi's case, it may be a double fault. For sheer bulk, Reclaiming History is nearly twice as long as the 888 page Warren Report it defends.

Taking Bugliosi's numbers at face value, there are still plenty of books attempting to legitimize the Warren Report, and they are typically welcomed with great praise by the mainstream media. To name just a few, Gerald Posner's Case Closed, which appeared at the time of the assassination's thirtieth anniversary, was featured prominently in U.S. News and World Report and Posner was all over the boob tube for months. Commission member Gerald Ford published a book on the case, Commission attorney David Belin published two, and Arlen Specter devoted many pages to defending the Report in his 2000 memoir. William Manchester was contracted by the Kennedy family to write a book on the assassination before the Warren Report was even published. Jim Bishop wrote a book that did not question the official story. Richard Warren Lewis and Lawrence Schiller proved two heads aren't always better than one in a book attacking the critics. And Jim Moore published a pro-Commission book in 1989. (Commission attorney Wesley Liebeler announced he was writing, but never completed, a book on the case. And former Yale University professor Jacob Cohen also announced but never published a book defending the Warren Report.)

And then there are the television networks. The electronic media convicted Oswald the weekend of the assassination and has never let up in the forty-something years since. CBS has produced multiple documentaries supporting the official story, as have NBC and ABC. Don't even get me started on Time-Life. Methinks Vince Bugliosi's protestations are without merit.

Spoiler alert! I'm going to give away the ending to Reclaiming History. Like the butler in a hackneyed murder mystery, Oswald did it. "Oswald," Bugliosi writes, was "an emotionally unhinged political malcontent who hated America [and] was as guilty as sin."

And that, really, is about all you need to know of Vincent Bugliosi's book. But I'll add that one of his objectives is to deconstruct and debunk every theory offering an explanation to the assassination – every one, that is, but the lone nut theory. If Bugliosi's comment on Lee Oswald intrigues you, or if you like to read everything on this case, then by all means spend the fifty dollars that is the book's suggested retail price. Otherwise, hang on to your money.

In spite of Bugliosi's explanation for why he wrote Reclaiming History – what he sees as a dearth of books supporting the official account of the assassination (again, why wasn't the Warren Report adequate?) – I can only understand his undertaking of a project such as this in the context of an ideological war. Oswald, after all, "hated America," Bugliosi says. In a section of his book describing the earliest Commission critics, he emphasizes their politics, which were mostly, but not exclusively, left-leaning. The first published book on the assassination, Bugliosi writes, was by "an expatriate American Communist living in Paris." Another early author was "a German Communist party member." The next two books were written by "leftists sympathetic to Marxist ideology." This is fifties-style red baiting, and if such criticisms are valid, then it is equally valid to argue that Vincent Bugliosi, as a former big city prosecutor, is a thoroughly entrenched Establishment figure who is parroting the party line, and summoning his considerable rhetorical skills in an effort to bully skeptical readers and reassure others.

As noted at the outset, this commentary is not really a review of Reclaiming History; I have not read the book in its entirety and do not intend to. Its point of view is plain as day, and taking the time to dissect and expose its fallacies is, for me, an errand of too few returns. I leave that necessary chore to others.

But in the interest of full disclosure, I must note that I am the author of a forthcoming book related to these matters. Praise from a Future Generation is the story of the early, "first generation" Warren Commission critics. Documents released by the Assassination Records Review Board show that the activities of virtually every one of these critics were monitored to some degree. I will briefly describe just one example, and leave it to the reader to decide whether Bugliosi's characterization is fair and impartial.

The "German Communist party member" Bugliosi refers to is Joachim Joesten, the author of Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? Bugliosi happily acknowledges (on p. 990) that his sources on Joesten include, via the Congressional Record, Gestapo documents seized by British authorities at the end of World War Two. Copies of these Gestapo records were provided to the Warren Commission by then-CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms. One of these Gestapo documents, translated by the CIA, was a memorandum from 1937 stating that while living in Copenhagen, Joesten published an article in a French newspaper warning of Germany's military threat to Denmark. So Joesten's life work includes opposing Hitler, and in Reclaiming History, Vincent Bugliosi relies on documents prepared by Hitler's Nazi regime to pass judgment on his political reliability. This, I think, is just a tad questionable.

But, one must assume that Vince Bugliosi is honest, and Reclaiming History represents his true feelings on the Kennedy assassination. His motives, surely, are pure as the driven snow.