Reclaiming History (229 page)

Even if a coup against Kennedy by powers in America were feasible (and the very thought is repellant to our minds), what Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the Warren Commission in discounting Russian participation in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, though not directly applicable, is instructive: “Although there are grave differences between the Communist world and the free world,…even from their point of view there needs to be some shape and form to international relations, that it is not in their interest to have this world structure dissolve into complete anarchy, that great states…have to be in a position to deal with each other…and that requires the maintenance of correct relations.”
²⁰

What Rusk was saying is that with respect to stable foreign nations (as opposed to, say, banana republics or Third World countries), it is in the best interests of even adversaries to accept the “legitimacy” of their opposition. And what Rusk observed between these stable foreign nations is equally applicable internally. Even though, as with every president, our elected leader has many factions in the country opposed to his stewardship of government, these factions would have many more reasons to accept the continued legitimacy invested in the president by our constitutional process than to embrace fascistic principles that would only ultimately promote the insecurity and illegitimacy of their own positions. Why would they want to live in an environment where in the future their political opposition would likely do the same thing to them as they did to Kennedy? The notion that major federal agencies of government (or even one such agency) would decide to murder Kennedy because they didn’t agree with certain policies of his is sufficiently demented to be excluded at the portals of any respectable mental institution short of an insane asylum.

Because conspiracy theorists believe that once they find a motive, they have found a perpetrator, many books of theirs on the Kennedy assassination devote several hundred pages to a specific group’s motive to kill the president, but remarkably never get around to spending any time on whether Oswald, who all the evidence shows to be the triggerman, had any actual and direct connection to the group, or more importantly, even if he did, whether there is any evidence that the group got him to kill Kennedy for them. These conspiracy theorists get so caught up in their fertile delusions that while they spend entire chapters on arcane relationships of groups like the mob and CIA with various people, groups, and events wholly unrelated to the assassination, many don’t even bother to devote
one single sentence
in their long books to scrutinizing Oswald’s activities during the critical days and weeks leading up to the assassination, an exceedingly important source of information from which to infer the existence or nonexistence of a conspiracy. It’s as if these authors believe there’s no need to connect Oswald to the CIA or the mob, or show that they got him to kill Kennedy for them. If, as I say, they can prove that one of these groups had a motive to kill Kennedy, then,
if
Oswald was the assassin, he
must
have killed Kennedy
for
them. This crazy, incredibly childlike reasoning is the mentality that has driven and informed virtually all of the pro-conspiracy sentiment in the Kennedy assassination from the very beginning.

T
hough many people have not stopped to realize it, the issue of conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination is two-pronged, the first of which can be disposed of in one sentence: since we know Oswald killed Kennedy, we also know that no group of conspirators killed Kennedy and framed Oswald for the murder they committed. You can only frame an innocent person, not a guilty one, so this type of conspiracy has been taken off the table by the conclusive establishment of Oswald’s guilt.

The second issue, and the subject of this Book Two, involves whether Oswald was a part of a conspiracy—that is, did he kill Kennedy for others?

In the following sections on the various groups who have been accused of being behind the president’s murder, the reader will see that none of the conspiracy theories relating to these groups benefit from scrutiny, and that to accept any of them one has to knowingly abandon all conventional notions of logic and common sense. Again, this is not to suggest that there is no such thing as conspiracy to commit murder. It’s just that there is no evidence of such a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination.

I said in the introduction to this book that one of the reasons why everyday Americans believe in a conspiracy in this case is that they find it intellectually incongruous that a peasant can strike down a king, that something more just had to be involved. CBS commentator Eric Sevareid spoke of Americans finding it difficult to believe that “all that power and majesty [could be] wiped out in an instant by one skinny, weak-chinned little character. It was like believing that the Queen Mary had sunk without a trace because of a log floating somewhere in the Atlantic, or that AT&T’s stock had fallen to zero because a drunk somewhere tore out his telephone wires.”
²¹

In explaining that what happened in Dallas was so horrendous, so incredible, so shattering that the American people demanded that the cause or reason for the murder equal the effect, no one, I think, has said it better than William Manchester, the author of the 1967 best seller,
The Death of a President
: “I think I understand why they feel that way. And I think, in a curious way, there is an aesthetic principle involved. If you take the murder of six million Jews in Europe and you put that at one end of the scale, at the other end you can put the Nazis, the greatest gang of criminals ever to seize control of a modern government. So there is a rough balance. Greatest crime, greatest criminals. But if you put the murder of the President of the United States at one end of the scale, and you put that waif Oswald on the other end, it just doesn’t balance. And you want to put something on Oswald’s side to make it balance. A conspiracy would do that beautifully. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence whatever of that.”
²²

It might be productive for the reader to keep Manchester’s words in mind as he or she reads what follows.

Before I discuss the enormous issue of conspiracy in the murder of President Kennedy, a very brief history of the conspiracy movement in America with respect to the assassination is in order.

The very first conspiracy theorists consisted, essentially, of two groups. The first included those who love conspiracies and see one behind every tree and everywhere else in modern society. They are, for the most part, culturally paranoid people. To them there is always much more going on below the radar screen than on it, the powers that be are always up to something, and
that something
is always no good. Not infrequently, their charges happen to be true. This group was screaming conspiracy before the fatal bullet had even come to rest, although the first literary shot fired by this group is believed to be Mark Lane’s article, “Defense Brief for Oswald,” published in the December 19, 1963, edition of the
National Guardian
, a libertarian newsweekly.

The other group were not conspiracy lovers per se, but the millions among us who instinctively believe that any really important human event that is concomitantly harmful to the interest of many, including them, is never brought about by just one dirty hand.
*
The automatic and ubiquitous word they employ to express their angst is the anonymous
they
. After employing this pronoun, they usually don’t consume their lives with the issue, and go on to other matters of more immediate concern. The easy reliance on
they
to explain away all manner of major occurrences is not confined only to the man on the street. Thus, in the moments after the assassination, President Johnson would think, “If
they
shot our president, who would
they
shoot next?” And Jacqueline Kennedy cried, “
They
killed my husband.” Suffice it to say that
they
, whoever
they
are, have been responsible for more terrible and cataclysmic events than any group, tribe, or nation in world history.

Although the conspiracy movement throughout the years has had no political agenda, and its adherents run the gamut from members of the Far Left to the Far Right, this was not true at the beginning. Because Oswald was a known Marxist who had defected to Russia and was a pro-Castroite, the belief of many Americans in the wake of the assassination was that Russia, our bitter enemy in the cold war, was behind the president’s death. It probably was no coincidence, then, that the first four
conspiracy
books on the assassination
*
were written by old-line Communists or politically active leftists, the first two expressly seeking to deflect suspicion away from the Soviet Union.
¹

The first conspiracy book,
Who Killed Kennedy?
, was published in London in May of 1964 and written by Thomas Buchanan, an expatriate American Communist living in Paris who began writing a series of popular conspiracy articles titled the “Buchanan Report” for the Paris weekly
L’Express
on February 10, 1964. Per the February 29, 1968,
Congressional Record
, “In 1949 [actually, 1948], Buchanan was fired from the staff of a Washington newspaper [
Washington Evening Star
] for being a Communist party member, and is now a frequent contributor to left-wing newspapers and periodicals.” Challenging the anticipated findings of the Warren Commission, Buchanan, who argued that two gunmen, firing from different directions, killed Kennedy, pointed out in his book that “it seems clear that from the Chinese point of view, as from the Soviet and Cuban, no political advantage could have been anticipated from the death of Kennedy.” He added how ludicrous it was to believe a “plot by leaders of the Kremlin to dispatch a trained assassin to shoot down the only president since Roosevelt they respected.”
²

Joachim Joesten, aka Franz von Nesselrode, Walter Kell, and Paul Delanthuis, a German-born American, wrote the next book,
Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy?
(published in Germany in mid-June 1964, and soon thereafter in America), attacking the Warren Commission’s anticipated findings before its report was published on September 24, 1964. Per the same issue of the
Congressional Record
, Joesten was a “German Communist party member. Joesten’s book was published in this country by the recently defunct publishing firm of Marzani and Munsell,…one of the most foremost publishers of Communist and extreme left literature in America.” Indeed, a copy of some German documents seized by U.S. authorities at the end of World War II contain the statement that Joesten had been a member of the Communist Party of Germany since 1932. A November 8, 1937, memorandum of the Gestapo documents his membership in the party, which was outlawed in Germany at that time.
³

Joesten, in his book, concludes that Oswald “never was a genuine Communist who looked upon Soviet Russia as the Fatherland of the Oppressed,” as he claimed, but was simply “masquerading as a pro-Communist.” What Oswald was, per Joesten, was “an FBI agent provocateur with a CIA background and connections” who was a “perfect fall guy, a scapegoat” in the assassination, which was orchestrated by “some officials of the CIA and FBI, as well as some Army figures such as General Walker and reactionary oil millionaires such as H. L. Hunt.”
⁴

The next two conspiracy books on the assassination,
Whitewash
and
Rush to Judgment
, did not have any kind of political orientation and were not written by Communists, but by, as assassination researcher Johann Rush says, “leftists sympathetic to Marxist ideology.”
⁵
The first of the two authors, Harold Weisberg, self-published
Whitewash
in August of 1965 after, the author says in the book’s preface, it had been rejected by sixty-three American publishers over a fourteen-month period and eleven publishers in eight foreign countries.
⁶
The Dell edition of
Whitewash
was published in 1966. Per the same February 1968 issue of the
Congressional Record
, Weisberg “was earlier, in 1938, discharged from his investigator post on the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee ‘for giving confidential matter to the
Daily Worker
, the leading Communist newspaper in the country.’ In the summer of 1947, Weisberg was fired from his post with the U.S. Department of State along with nine others for known association with agents of the Soviet Union.”
Whitewash
is more about a conspiracy by the authorities to cover up the truth about the assassination than it is about the conspiracy to commit it.

The last of the “original four” books was Mark Lane’s
Rush to Judgment
, published in 1966.
*
It accuses the Warren Commission of so many misdeeds and suggests so many things (e.g., one or more shots came from the front, Ruby knew Oswald, Oswald may have been framed) that a gullible reader has no choice but to infer the existence of a conspiracy. The aforementioned
Congressional Record
says about Lane, “He has a long and curious involvement with a host of extreme left-wing causes and is a well-established spokesman for leftist ideology…Lane is a former executive secretary and national board member of the National Lawyer’s Guild, a cited Communist front…This past year he was a member of the Committee of Sponsors for a Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade dinner. The brigade is also a cited Communist front.”

Though Lane’s
Rush to Judgment
, to this day the biggest-selling book on the assassination, was the main spark igniting a strong (as opposed to merely visceral) belief in many Americans that there was a conspiracy behind the death of the president, the real genesis of what we think of as the conspiracy movement, and that which has persisted to this day, probably began back on November 23, 1964 (eight weeks after the Warren Report was published), when the Government Printing Office started to sell the twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission over the counter at its office in Washington, D.C., for seventy-six dollars a set, mostly to the media and private researchers. A total of 1,340 sets were sent free to libraries around the country.
⁷
As conspiracy theorist David Lifton says, “A small but hardy band of individuals [including Lane and Weisberg], sometimes called the ‘first generation researchers,’ began going over [the volumes] with a fine tooth comb.”
⁸
And there were many others, some not working with the volumes, all from various walks of life ranging from lawyers (Vincent Salandria), farmers (Weisberg), graduate students (Lifton), and small businessmen (Raymond Marcus), to a Hominy, Oklahoma, housewife (Shirley Martin), a Dallas legal secretary (Mary Ferrell), a researcher at the World Health Organization in New York City (Sylvia Meagher), a Los Angeles bookkeeper (Lillian Castellano, who also later became a major RFK assassination researcher), the wife of a Beverly Hills stockbroker (Marjorie Field), a radio host in Carmel-by-the-Sea (Mae Brussel), and a small-town Texas newspaper publisher (Penn Jones Jr.). Most were idealistic, patriotic men and women who sincerely believed that the official version of the assassination was a lie. Convinced that a vigorous and promising young American president had been cut down by malevolent forces whose interests were dangerously adverse to those of the average citizen, they were willing to consecrate their lives in an attempt to shine a bright, prosecutorial light on these dark forces and reclaim America from them. If it is true, as they say, that one man can make a difference and that passion changes the world, then someone like Martin, the Oklahoma housewife who got in her car and drove down to Dallas with her four children in tow and knocked on the doors of Dealey Plaza witnesses to interview them with her pad and pencil, represents the type of commitment and flame that, in confluence with other currents, can change the status quo.

At the beginning, with the exception of the researchers who did their work at the National Archives, and therefore knew of each other’s existence, most researchers around the country, working out of their kitchen, living room, or local library, and not knowing of the others, felt all alone. But here and there, through word of mouth or an occasional article, they learned who their soul mates were, and the “discovery that they were not alone struck most of the buffs as monumental. They finally had someone to
talk
to.”
⁹
It wasn’t too long before these amateur “detectives,” trying in their mind to educate the vast American public about a crime they perceived to be much greater than a lone nut killing Kennedy,
*
networked into a community of researchers, meeting at their homes and elsewhere, and excitedly exchanging their findings by phone and letter. They even helped each other with their work, such as furnishing documents and editing each others’ writings. What undoubtedly brought them closer together in spirit is that their group was small and they were facing a monolithic establishment that scorned them.
†
Also, as Josiah Thompson observed, the Kennedy case became an “obsession,” and “there’s a fantastic way in which the assassination becomes a religious event. There are relics, and scriptures, and even a holy scene—the killing ground. People make pilgrimages to it.”
¹⁰

Apart from the few who would write an entire book about the case (e.g., Josiah Thompson, Mark Lane, Harold Weisberg) or the occasional article in a prestigious publication(e.g., Richard Popkin’s 1966 attack on the Warren Commission in the
New York Review of Books
), most needed a non-mainstream home for their articles and essays, since the mainstream press, for the most part, didn’t believe in a conspiracy, and still doesn’t to this day. They found it in a small, alternative magazine,
Minority of One
, a monthly operating out of Passaic, New Jersey, which started to include articles by conspiracy theorists who became known as “The Philadelphia School” of theorists because most of its members, like lawyer Vincent Salandria and Gaeton Fonzi (editor of the
Greater Philadelphia Magazine
), were from Philadelphia. Though the conspiracy theorists would later branch out and find other homes, such as
Ramparts
magazine (which replaced
Minority of One
in 1967 as the principal journalistic voice of the conspiracy movement) and periodicals of their own (such as the
Decade
series, which ended with the
Fourth Decade; Continuing Inquiry; Assassination USA; Conspiracy Newsletter; Investigation; Coverups!; JFK Honor Guard; Echoes of Conspiracy; Prologue; Grassy Knoll Gazette; Kennedy Assassination Chronicles; Probe
; and
JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly
) that catered exclusively to those interested in the assassination and its various conspiracies theories,
Minority of One
was the first magazine to routinely publish articles propounding the conspiracy theory. Its most important early one (in the March 1965 issue) was “Fifty-two Witnesses: The Grassy Knoll” by Philadelphia schoolteacher Harold Feldman, who examined the testimony of Warren Commission witnesses and reported (erroneously) that most thought the shots came from the grassy knoll. The article was published as a small book that same year by Idlewild, an alternative-press San Francisco publishing house.

By 1965, the relatively small but unflagging, energetic, and resourceful band of Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists were raising such a ruckus that former Warren Commission assistant counsel Joseph Ball became concerned and called Chief Justice Warren. “Chief, these critics of the report are guilty of misrepresentation and dishonest reporting,” Ball lamented to Warren. “Be patient,” Warren replied. “History will prove that we are right.”
¹¹

The year 1966 was an important one in the history of the conspiracy movement, with the number of conspiracy theorists starting to multiply like bacteria, the original band of lonely doubters now looking more like a small army.
¹²
In addition to producing a great number of pro-conspiracy and anti–Warren Commission articles in newspapers and magazines, the theorists came out with a spate of conspiracy books, including Edward Epstein’s
Inquest
(more an assault on the internal workings of the Warren Commission, with hints in the book of a second gun, and hence, conspiracy), Léo Sauvage’s
Oswald Affair
(original French edition in 1965), Richard H. Popkin’s
Second Oswald
, Penn Jones’s
Forgive My Grief
, and Joesten’s second book on the case,
Oswald: The Truth
.
*
Moreover, the passage of the Freedom of Information Act in 1966 guaranteed almost perpetual oxygen to the movement, allowing theorists—after being put through the hoops by federal agencies—to get their hands on many previously sealed Warren Commission documents.