Reclaiming History (370 page)

†Recall that other than Oswald’s Carcano and the three expended shells from the Carcano being found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, no other weapon, or even shells from another weapon, were found or seen anywhere else in Dealey Plaza.

^*
Just one further observation about the .38 caliber revolver that was used to kill Tippit: As we know, many conspiracy theorists allege, without any evidence to support their allegation, that Oswald’s Carcano rifle was planted on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building by those who, they claim, framed Oswald for Kennedy’s murder. But what about the .38 caliber revolver? Oswald himself admitted during his interrogation that after the shooting in Dealey Plaza he went back to his rooming house and got the revolver, the same one he had on his person at the time of his arrest at the Texas Theater. Do conspiracy theorists want us to believe that the framers of Oswald stole Oswald’s revolver from him after he left his rooming house with it, murdered Tippit with the revolver, and then between the time of Tippit’s murder and Oswald’s arrest at the theater somehow got that revolver back into the hands of Oswald, where it was at the time of his arrest? But look, anything is possible.

^*
Since you can’t frame a guilty person, what I’m about to say is unnecessary, but one of the very first thoughts I had when I started preparing for the London trial, I ended up articulating for the jury in my final summation. The backdrop is that my opposing counsel, Gerry Spence, was suggesting to the jury that Oswald was framed by sophisticated people; and there were the two facts that although Oswald was a good shot, he was not an expert rifleman, and though the Carcano was a decent rifle, it was not a great rifle. I argued in my final summation to the jury in London, “I ask Mr. Spence, if the conspirators who [supposedly] framed Oswald were so sophisticated and intelligent, wouldn’t they make sure that the person they framed was someone whose skill with a rifle was absolutely beyond question, and wouldn’t they also make sure that the person they were seeking to frame possessed a modern, expensive rifle that unquestionably had the capacity to get the job done? Wouldn’t they have to know, in advance, that failing to do either one of these things would automatically raise a question about whether the person they were seeking to frame was guilty, and therefore be self-defeating? You don’t have to have a PhD in logic to know this. Even someone with not too much furniture upstairs would know this. Mr. Spence can’t have it both ways. If the people who set Oswald up were so sophisticated as to come up with this incredibly elaborate conspiracy—I mean, to the point where they had people, according to Mr. Spence, who could superimpose Oswald’s head on someone else’s body, they had imposters down in Mexico City, and so forth—if they were that bright, why weren’t they intelligent enough to know the most obvious thing of all? That you don’t attempt to frame a man of questionable marksmanship ability who possesses a nineteen-dollar mail-order rifle?” (Transcript of
On Trial
, July 25, 1986, pp.1056–1057)

^*
One frequently hears that “it is impossible to prove a negative.” But this, of course, is pure myth. In some situations, as in the murder of President Kennedy, it is impossible, but in many situations in life it is very easy. For instance, in a criminal case where a defendant says he did not commit the robbery or burglary, or what have you, because he was somewhere else at the time, the prosecution routinely proves the negative (that he was not somewhere else) by establishing through witnesses, fingerprints, DNA, or sometimes even film, that he did commit the crime and was not where he said he was at the time it happened.
On an even more obvious level, if someone were to say, “I have [or do not have] pancreatic cancer,” medical tests can disprove this (i.e., prove the negative), if such be the case.
In the Kennedy case, I believe the absence of a conspiracy can be proved to a virtual certainty.

^*
For instance, in the Kennedy case, if a brilliant man like Great Britain’s Bertrand Russell, a towering figure in the field of mathematical philosophy and intellectual thought (whose fourth wife, Lady Russell, never forgave a friend who said on television that Russell did not outshine Plato), can say with conviction that “an innocent man [referring to Oswald] was framed and gunned down” (Lewis, “Tragedy of Bertrand Russell,” pp.30, 32), you know the idiocy over this case has not discriminated against any mental category of people.

^*
A far more mundane reason may simply be that the masses, trying to make some sense out of events that are not to their liking, find that a conspiracy theory they can easily understand or adopt, and which fits a bias of theirs, often explains things very well.

^*
For conspiracy theorists, all discrepancies, contradictions, anomalies, et cetera, are suspicious, and are the heart and soul of the conspiracy movement. In their universe, everything proceeds perfectly and there is no such thing as human error, incompetence, coincidence, or failure of memory. There are no innocent, benign explanations for anything.
With respect to contradictions, a godsend to all conspiracy researchers, eyewitness authority Elizabeth Loftus writes, “If a hundred people were to see the same automobile accident, no two reports [of this] would be identical” on all the details (Loftus,
Eyewitness Testimony
, p.153). This reality of human cognition, that different people see and hear the same event differently, has proved to be the richest of troves for the scavenging Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists. Author Quentin Reynolds writes in his book
Courtroom,
“No two persons will give the same account of an incident they both witnessed. They will paint a door black, blue and green, and give more varieties of weather for the same day than the weather bureau does for all the days of the year. They vary the time of the day by minutes or hours. They differ in their measurement of space by inches, feet and miles” (Reynolds,
Courtroom,
p.186). As psychologist and philosopher William James said, “Whilst part of what we perceive comes from the object before us, another part always comes out of our mind.”
Warren Commission counsel David Belin points out that because our eyes are not perfect cameras that can recall exactly what took place in a matter of seconds, “if you get two conflicting stories with two witnesses, you can imagine how many arise when there are hundreds of witnesses to a sudden event, as there were in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Almost anyone who wants to concoct a theory can find one or two witnesses who might support his theory” (Belin,
Final Disclosure
, p.14).
A substantial majority of the conspiracy community is also extremely gullible, believing every story they hear without bothering to check it to see if it is accurate or makes any sense. As long as the story helps their theory, they buy it. They would improve the quality of their research appreciably by simply embracing rule number one of the journalistic profession: “If your mama says she loves you, check it out.”

^*
Morgan added, “I don’t think he knew these people [Cabell and Brown] except to shake hands with—but he knew them all at least that far. He used to say to me, ‘You know, Pat, considering my background, it’s really amazing I have come so far’” (Wills and Demaris,
Jack Ruby
, p.43).

†To dilute the connection even further, Ferrie was not an investigator for Carlos Marcello. He was an investigator for lawyer G. Wray Gill, and Gill had Ferrie work on an immigration lawsuit against Marcello in which Gill was representing Marcello. Also, there is no credible evidence that Ferrie was ever a boyhood friend of Oswald’s or was with Oswald in the summer of 1963. But even if these assertions were true, so what? They certainly don’t add up to a conspiracy to commit murder.

^*
Or we’ll say, “What a coincidence,” or “What are the odds of this happening?” But in the world of conspiracy theorists, happenstance and coincidences don’t exist. What appears to be a random coincidence is really always complicity. Indeed, perhaps the only coincidence they will acknowledge is that the words
coincidence
and
complicity
each start with the letter
C
and each has four syllables.

^*
It has to be noted that along with the allegation of planted evidence, the other main conspiracy argument conspiracy theorists have made over and over again is that much of the evidence against Oswald was forged or tampered with by the authorities. But not once have the theorists ever proved this allegation. Yet, the very group always shouting forgery and tampering has been caught on many occasions forging documents to make its point in the assassination debate. (See endnote discussion.)

†Millions of Americans through the years have mouthed these or similar beliefs. Here’s just one example, from President Kennedy’s own longtime personal secretary, no less: In an October 7, 1994, letter to Richard Duncan, a high school teacher in Roanoke, Virginia, who had inquired of her state of mind vis-à-vis the assassination, Evelyn Lincoln wrote, “It is my belief that there was a conspiracy because there were those that disliked him and felt the only way to get rid of him was to assassinate him. These five conspirators, in my opinion, were Lyndon B. Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the mafia, the CIA, and the Cubans in Florida” (Duncan sent me a copy of the letter on January 23, 1997).
This mind-numbing phenomenon is actually more the rule than the exception with everyday people who watch events from afar. At a reception following a speech I gave around the time of Princess Diana’s fatal car crash in Paris, a fifty-ish, well-coiffed woman with a doctorate in psychology told me, without batting an eye, that the Royal Family was behind Princess Di’s death. How, I inquired, had she come to this rather startling conclusion? “If Di married Dodi and had a son, the son would be half Arab and might someday become king, something they couldn’t abide.” “Oh, I see,” I said, fighting back a smile. I certainly had no difficulty picturing the Queen Mother and her family, aghast at such a possibility, deciding that “Di had to go,” and Prince Philip, perhaps, making the arrangements by calling in someone the family normally employs to “take care” of such problems.

^*
Fourteen years before Stone’s movie came out, another Hollywood director made light of what Stone would take so seriously. In his 1977 picture
Annie Hall
, Woody Allen has his character Alvie ask Allison, “How is it possible for Oswald to have fired from two angles at once?…I’ll tell you this. He was not marksman enough to hit a moving target at that range. But if there was a second assassin, that’s it.” Allison responds in exasperation, “Then everybody’s in on the conspiracy—the FBI, CIA, J. Edgar Hoover, and the oil companies and the Pentagon and the men’s room attendant at the White House?” Alvie: “I would leave out the men’s room attendant.”

^*
Indeed, a national Gallup Poll that started on the day of the assassination and continued through November 27 showed that the first instinct of most Americans was that Kennedy had died as a result of a conspiracy, 52 percent believing “some group or element was responsible,” 29 percent believing the “assassin acted on his own,” and 19 percent being “uncertain.” As indicated in the introduction to this book, this sentiment was reversed the following year with the publication of the Warren Report, a September 1964 Harris Poll showing 55.5 percent of Americans believing Oswald acted alone, 31.6 percent believing he had accomplices, and 13 percent being unsure.

^*
The very first book written on the assassination was the little-known
Red Roses from Texas
by the British author Nerin E. Gun. Published by Frederick Muller in London in February 1964 (and by R. Julliard in France), before the Warren Report came out, it wasn’t a conspiracy book at all, over half of its 208 pages not even dealing with the assassination, but with the short period leading up to it. And the assassination part of the book is more a series of claims gathered from rumors, newspapers, tabloids, and newspaper articles on the case (since testimony before the Warren Commission was in private and, as indicated, not yet published). Many were inaccurate, such as that a doctor examining President Kennedy at Parkland Hospital found a bullet on his stretcher; that Dallas deputy sheriff Buddy Walthers found a “fourth bullet” in the grass near the Triple Underpass; that Oswald was not advised of his constitutional rights and not allowed to telephone a lawyer; that the presidential limousine shot down the Stemmons Freeway toward Parkland Hospital at 100 miles per hour. (Gun,
Red Roses from Texas
, pp.111–112, 127, 204–205; see also CE 2580, 25 H 851–852) Because it is the first book on the case, and because it is so rare, I’m told a copy of
Red Roses from Texas
is worth $750.

^*
Another book published after
Whitewash
but before
Rush to Judgment
has been erroneously classified by some as a conspiracy book, but it is not. Sylvan Fox’s
Unanswered Questions about President Kennedy’s Assassination
, published in October of 1965, is merely a very superficial critique of the Warren Report. After asking boilerplate questions like what was Oswald’s motive in killing Kennedy, and how many shots were fired in Dealey Plaza, and from what direction, the author, who posits the possibility of conspiracy, concludes that the only certainty in the case is that “Oswald participated in the assassination of President Kennedy, either alone or in concert with others.” (Fox,
Unanswered Questions about President Kennedy’s Assassination
, pp.24, 44, 192)

^*
The early conspiracy theorists were encouraged and abetted by the Russian press and intellectuals across the water, such as Britain’s Hugh Trevor-Roper, Bertrand Russell, and Arnold Toynbee—even London’s conservative
Daily Mail
editorialized on November 27, 1963, that “facts can be produced that a right-wing plot against the President had caused his death”—as well as French publications like
Le Figaro, L’Express
, and
Le Monde
, France’s leading paper.