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.

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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."

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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.

JFK: The Lincoln Parallels

First, a disclaimer. I am not an authority on the Lincoln assassination. Not even close.

But close your eyes for a moment and imagine I'm some bigmouth in his cups, down at the end of the bar. (Never mind that you can't read if you close your eyes.)

I've noticed an odd parallel between the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.

There's an old Ann Landers column about curiosities between the two assassinations. You've probably seen it: Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln. Both secretaries warned their boss not to attend what turned out to be a rendezvous with death. Both slain presidents were succeeded by men named Johnson, and blah blah blah.

Cue the creepy music.

I'm not talking about the Ann Landers stuff.

No, I'm talking about similarities that to me, at least, suggest a pattern.

Historians know no more than the information made available to them, and for many years the United States War Department kept the records on Lincoln's assassination locked in files marked "secret."

This quotation is from a 1959 book called The Web of Conspiracy, by Theodore Roscoe. It was the first thing in that book to really get my attention. Readers familiar with the JFK case know that classifying much of the evidence "secret" is precisely what happened after the Warren Commission concluded its work in 1964.

Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged Kennedy assassin, was of course shot down by Jack Ruby a few days after the assassination. No trial.

In the Lincoln case, John Wilkes Booth escaped the scene of the crime and evaded authorities for about twelve days, before finally being cornered and killed in a Virginia barn.

Yet in this instance, there was a trial. Not only did Booth have co-conspirators who were captured alive; they carried out coordinated attacks on several other government officials, including Vice-President Andrew Johnson, at nearly the same moment Booth was killing Lincoln.

This is sometimes overlooked. We learn, of course, about Booth shooting Lincoln. But these other crimes are downplayed, as is the fact of conspiracy. I don't think I learned there was a Lincoln conspiracy until my teen years, and only then because I had a book of historic photographs. It included pictures of the execution of four of the eight conspirators (above).

The other four received prison sentences.

Although trial proceedings were published at the time, the Bureau of Military Justice sat on a great deal of conspiracy information, and the Army chiefs refused to release much of the data on the assassination and the pursuit of the conspirators. Not until the mid-1930s were pertinent War Department records placed in the public domain.

 The mid-1930s!

Why were these records suppressed for so long? Theodore Roscoe argued that within, say, twenty-five years of Lincoln's killing, no Civil War-era intelligence secrets could have been compromised.

What could be compromised was the security of a myth, or the reputation of an institution, or the concealment of some figure or group who had been party to a heinous crime.

Roscoe continued:

The military censors had a field day with the Lincoln murder case. From the outset [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton held that many of the facts relating to the assassination were "not in the public interest." Eventually so much of the truth was tampered with that no one could learn the truth. Thus an immense deception was imposed and a stupendous crime was covered...

Today the cover-up is conceded by at least one Government agency which tells us in its official literature that "confusion and mystery" cloak Lincoln's assassination and "we probably shall never know all the facts"...

Does any of this sound familiar? So much of the truth was tampered with that no one could learn the truth.

I'm seeing some definite parallels between Lincoln and JFK. It is tempting to conclude that the similarities reveal a model for the clandestine removal of a president of these United States, but I think that would be reckless.

And anyway, I'm just the loudmouth drunk down at the end of the bar.

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Most of the material presented here comes from a single source: The Web of Conspiracy, by Theodore Roscoe (Prentice-Hall, 1959). I turned to Wikipedia for a few factoids, such as the location of Booth's death.