Starve.Org White Noise Usenet Archive: "'A History of Assassination Literature' ..... !"

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/History/Simons_history_of_assass_lit.html
From the Introduction to Art Simon’s :
Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film,
Temple, 1996

Long before the release of the Warren Report in September 1964,
the history of JFK’s assassination was being constructed by the media,
especially the print media. Although occasional questions were raised
about the commission’s procedures, doubts as to the level of
involvement of its celebrated members or concerns about possible links
between Lee Harvey Oswald and agencies of the U.S. government, the
vast majority of mainstream news reports conformed to a story
originally circulated by the Associated Press and United Press
International. That story, constructed within an hour of the
assassination, parts of which would remain intact in the official
government version, maintained that three shots were fired at the
presidential motorcade, all three coming from the Texas School Book
Depository building to the right and behind the president and all
three fired by a single assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald. The alleged
assassin was apprehended one hour and twenty minutes later in the
Texas Theater. However, the account given in early press releases,
stating that the first shot hit Kennedy, the second hit Governor John
Connally, and the third hit Kennedy again, would be changed in the
version offered by the Warren Commission in September of the following
year. Forced to account for one bullet’s totally missing the motorcade
and for the time constraints imposed on Oswald’s alleged firing by the
evidence contained in the Zapruder film, the commission amended the
initial accounts and concluded that one bullet passed through the
bodies of both Kennedy and Connally. This would come to be known as
the magic bullet.
Media attention then quickly shifted for a time from the
logistics of the shooting to the background of the alleged assassin.
Oswald was labeled a Marxist and a psychopath whose brief residence in
the Soviet Union and alleged political affiliations with pro-Castro
Cuban organizations were promoted as signs of implicit guilt. In
December 1963 and January 1964 the FBI report on its investigation, as
well as the work-in-progress of the Warren Commission, were leaked to
elements of the mainstream press, and it was duly reported that both
official groups were concluding what had so far been put forth as the
correct version of events: the lone assassin theory. Time magazine
declared that there was “little doubt of Oswald’s guilt,” and in
February 1964 Life magazine pictured Oswald on its cover with the tag
“Lee Oswald with the weapons he used to kill President Kennedy and
Officer Tippit.” Indeed, three months earlier, on the very day that
Lyndon Johnson appointed the Warren Commission, Life published in its
November 29 issue a photograph taken from the window on the sixth
floor of the School Book Depository. Under the photograph, the
magazine’s text declared that this was the site from which the
assassin had fired the fatal shots. Life seemed in a particularly good
position to construct a history of the event, for it had in its
possession the best photographic evidence: Abraham Zapruder’s twenty-
six seconds of film. The magazine had purchased the film from Zapruder
for an estimated $150,000 and thus had exclusive publication rights to
it. It had taken only a couple of months for the journalistic
community to convict Oswald despite the lack of any thorough or
coherent reconstruction of events.
This conviction, however, did not go totally uncontested. Two
books released in 1964, Joachim Joesten’s Oswald: Assassin or Fall
Guy? and Thomas Buchanan’s Who Killed Kennedy? were the first book-
length studies of the case issued prior to the release of the Warren
Report. Perhaps more important from the long-range standpoint of
commission criticism was a series of articles which began appearing in
liberal or left-wing publications during 1965. Vincent Salandria’s
articles for the January and March issues of the magazine Liberation
raised serious questions about the medical evidence reported by the
Warren Commission. Also in March 1965 Harold Feldman’s article “Fifty-
Two Witnesses: The Grassy Knoll” appeared in Minority of One.
Analyzing eyewitness accounts of the shooting found in the Warren
Report’s twenty-six volumes of evidence and testimony, it produced
quite a different account of what happened in Dealey Plaza. Witnesses
told of shots from in front of the president and of smoke, possibly
gunsmoke, rising from an area near the grassy knoll. A year later,
also writing in Minority of One, Salandria revealed that the FBI’s
departmental investigation had reported, contrary to the commission’s
conclusion, that the nonfatal bullet that had struck Kennedy in fact
had not exited his body. Within a year, the government’s investigation
had been soundly criticized, its investigation made to appear a
composite of contradictory reports.
These and other early alternative analyses reveal several
crucial aspects of the assassination debates. First, many of the
initial counterinquests to critique the government’s version had to
rely solely on the government’s published evidence as a source for
their own investigatory work. It soon became clear that the massive
Warren Report was a text that critics would have to construct and
simultaneously deconstruct. The report ran to almost 300,000 words—
only a summary of twenty-six volumes containing some 20,000 pages of
testimony—yet it was still an incomplete record, its immensity
standing as a bulky monument to the elusiveness of historical
experience. It thus fell to independent investigators to complete the
government’s work. The twenty-six volumes of evidence and testimony
had no index until 1966 when Warren Commission critic Sylvia Meagher
constructed one, a task that took her over a year. Prior to her work,
much of the evidence, especially that which contradicted the
commission’s conclusions, was buried in the narrative chaos of the
unindexed volumes.
Much of the assassination critics’ early work was thus absorbed
in textual analysis of the government’s documents. From this they
learned that, of the over four hundred persons present in Dealey Plaza
the day of the assassination, only around ninety were asked to give
testimony. Their first look at the Zapruder film, as reprinted in
Volume 18 of the commission’s exhibits, suggested to them that
Kennedy’s head had been thrown violently backwards upon impact of the
fatal bullet, a reaction that might point to shots coming from the
front rather than the rear of the limousine. Critics further
discovered that, as published in Volume 18, the two Zapruder frames
immediately following the head wound had been printed out of sequence.
That is, frame 315 had been printed as coming before frame 314, thus
possibly giving the wrong impression as to which direction the
president’s head had moved following impact. These points only begin
to hint at the problems uncovered by the first generation of critics,
but they suggest the areas of inquiry in which persons without any
official investigatory status engaged.

The people doing the digging were not, for the most part,
experienced in working with government records, but ordinary folk who
simply wanted to know what had happened. Perusing the twenty-six
volumes, we found accounts of what was seen and heard in Dealey Plaza
mentioned nowhere in the Warren Report.
The process was slow and laborious, like learning the names and
locations of numerous extra on a huge movie set. Though the FBI could
easily have made a complete compilation while memories were still
fresh, this was not done. Consequently. the historical record was
pitifully incomplete.

Motivated by a range of factors—grief, skepticism, confusion—a
network of unofficial investigators, journalists, and what would
become known as assassination buffs began collecting newspaper
articles pertaining to the assassination. As contradictions and
complexities grew, so did their research into the case. In a June 1967
article on “The Buffs” for the New Yorker, Calvin Trillin wrote:

By the first week in February [1964], Shirley Martin, a housewife
who then lived in Hominy, Oklahoma, had driven to Dallas with her four
children to interview witnesses. Lillian Castellano, a Los Angeles
book-keeper who thought that reports on the wound indicated that the
President must have been hit from the front, had studied a picture of
the Dealey Plaza area, discovered what seemed to be a strategically
placed storm drain in front of the motorcade, and called that fact to
the attention of a local news commentator, The Los Angeles Times, the
Warren Commission, and anyone else she could think of who might be
investigating what had happened.

Within months, this circuit of critics had privately assumed the
responsibilities of the federal government in a series of independent
and concerted efforts which ultimately resulted in a full-scale attack
on the official account of the president’s death. In the process, the
role of author and interpreter of history became the focus of a
protracted struggle. Certainly this struggle was not new. Certainly
individuals—among them, historians and journalists—had long before
constructed historical records outside of or in conflict with state
practices. But rarely had such a debate over issues of historiography—
questions of method or claims to authorship or problems of
interpreting evidence—been waged so publicly, nor had its ideological
tenor been so dramatically demonstrated across a diverse range of
public media. The assassination debates forced into the nation’s
headlines the crucial questions later articulated by Michel Foucault:
“what is an author? what are the modes of existence of this discourse?
where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?
An inquisition into the government’s methodology was an
immediate by-product of the earliest independent research. In this
category the most notable works were Edward Jay Epstein’s Inquest and
Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash. The former, begun as a master’s thesis at
Cornell University, conducted a study of the Warren Commission’s
procedures and argued convincingly against the image of a thorough and
efficient official investigation. A number of mainstream publications
were moved to credit Inquest, and their sanctioning of Epstein’s work
appeared to signal improving conditions for Warren Commission critics.
Yet the mild acceptance of Epstein’s book can probably be attributed
to its limited scope. Epstein was, for the most part, content to
critique the processes of the commission and did not seek to indict
the integrity of its members or argue for any countertheory of
assassination. Indeed, in his introduction to Inquest, journalist
Richard Rovere commended Epstein for not taking part in the “shabby
‘demonology’” of the other critics who argued that the commission had
intentionally suppressed evidence.
Weisberg’s Whitewash can be neatly juxtaposed to Epstein’s book.
Weisberg was clearly one of those “demonologists” to whom Rovere
referred. Employing the commission’s records against itself, Weisberg
argues in this, the first of his many books on the assassination, that
Oswald could not have committed the crimes of which he was accused.
But, unlike Epstein, Weisberg could find no one to publish his
research, no one to confer on it even the look of scholarship. After a
fourteen-month period and rejection from sixty-three U.S. publishers,
Weisberg produced the book himself, admitting in its preface that the
work appeared in “the least desirable of all forms.” He was referring
to the typewritten appearance of the manuscript, a form that, however
undesirable, aptly characterized the marginalized status of Weisberg’s
work.
The alternative voices were indeed marginalized during the two
years following the assassination, for despite the development of the
buff network and the appearance of articles in left-leaning journals,
the overwhelming tendency of the mainstream press was to support the
Warren Commission’s conclusions. Support came in many forms. As
mentioned, periodicals with a wide circulation hammered home the lone
gunman theory months before the Warren Report was released. When the
report was released, Life, Newsweek, Time and the New York Times
hailed its findings. In its issue of September 28, 1964, the New York
Times printed a forty-eight-page supplement carrying the report and
subsequently collaborated with two other publishers to issue it in
both hard and soft cover. In the introduction to these editions,

journalist Harrison Salisbury wrote: “No material question now remains

unresolved so far as the death of President Kennedy is concerned. The
evidence of Lee Harvey Oswald’s single handed guilt is overwhelming.”
In December, the newspaper copublished an edition entitled The
Witnesses, a selection of testimony from the commission hearings. For
its part, Life turned over editorial space to state authorship in its
issue of October 2, 1964, running a story entitled “How the Commission
Pieced Together the Evidence—Told by One of Its Members,” Congressman
Gerald Ford. Like Salisbury, Ford concluded that the commission’s case
was airtight: “there is not a scintilla of credible evidence to
suggest a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. The evidence is clear
and overwhelming. Lee Harvey Oswald did it.”
For roughly three years the politics of affirmation held out
over the politics of critique. But it is important to note that the
historiographic struggle that had been launched, the public debate
over the politics of interpretation, was not confined to contest
between the mainstream powerhouses of American publishing, in concert
with the government, and the occasional leftist muckraker. Rather, the
details of the assassination debates permeated every journalistic
genre, its subject matter appropriated by a range of specialty
publications. The debate over the conduct and findings of JFK’s
autopsy was sustained in the Journal of the American Medical
Association and the American Journal of Physics. The psychology of the
case was considered in such periodicals as Journal of Personality and
Psychiatric Quarterly, the latter reporting on the reactions of
“emotionally disturbed adolescent females.” Warren Commission
procedures and conclusions were analyzed in scores of university law
reviews, supermarket tabloids, and local newspapers throughout the
country. And the various print media accounts were constantly tracked
in Editor & Publisher and Publishers Weekly.
Then in late 1966 and throughout 1967 the public print debate
underwent a transformation, a crucial phase in its history
characterized by growing public interest in the arguments of the
Warren Commission critics. The general acceptance of Epstein’s efforts
in Inquest played a role in this, as did the appearance of Mark Lane’s
Rush to Judgment in 1966. By this time Lane had been on the case for
three years, and much of his public exposure (and self-promotion) had
come by way of the campus lecture circuit. His book, in essence a
defense brief for Lee Harvey Oswald, relied heavily on interviews with
eyewitnesses who were either never called before the commission or
whose testimony about possible gunmen on the grassy knoll contradicted
the evidence privileged by the Warren Report. Though widely criticized
by the popular press at the time and subsequently assailed by other
critics for its own omissions and contradiction, Lane’s book was
enormously influential, staying on the New York Times bestseller list
for six consecutive months.
1967 brought the publication of the two most thorough attacks on
the commission until that time: Sylvia Meagher’s Accessories After the
Fact and Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas. Meagher had been
carrying out a sophisticated attack on the commission for several
years, primarily in Minority of One, and her book’s merciless
refutation of commission findings became a model for subsequent
critics. Thompson’s work, much of it devoted to a detailed analysis of
the physics and logistics of the shooting in Dealey Plaza, came from a
somewhat more inside position. As a consultant for Life, Thompson had
access to the magazine’s original print of the Zapruder film as well
as to the color transparencies produced from it. Over the course of
repeated viewings, he began to construct an alternative theory of
assassination. Thompson’s hypothesis of a three-assassin conspiracy
found a trace of mainstream acceptance when an excerpt of his book ran
as a cover story for the December 2, 1967, Saturday Evening Post. Its
cover headline declared: “Major New Study Shows Three Assassins Killed
Kennedy.”
The Post’s declaration was perhaps not as daring as it might
seem, for at the end of the previous year Life claimed to have had a
radical change of opinion. Its cover story for November 25, 1966,
called out: “Did Oswald Act Alone? A Matter of Reasonable Doubt.” Life
had asked John Connally to review the Zapruder film, and the then-
governor of Texas repeated his claim that he and Kennedy, contrary to
the commission’s findings, had been hit by separate bullets. The
magazine did allow a rebuttal in the same issue from commission member
and magic-bullet author Arlen Specter, but the editors now appeared
little convinced by his defense of the Warren Report. The article
concluded with the magazine suggesting that a “new investigating body
should be set up, perhaps at the initiative of Congress.” In fact,
Life had planned to undertake new research efforts of its own, and the
November 25 issue was to be but the first of a series of investigative
reports. Ironically, the editors of Life’s sister publication, Time,
chose their issue of the same date to question the efficacy of further
assassination probes. Noting “there seems little valid excuse for so
dramatic a development as another full-scale inquiry,” Time referred
unflatteringly to commission critics as “hawkshaws,” “amateur
Sherlocks,” “cocktail party dissenters.” and a “cult of parlor
detectives.” The two magazines eventually found common ground, and the
planned Life series was killed.
The New York Times began and then aborted its own investigation
in late 1966 under the direction of Harrison Salisbury. Permission to
travel to North Vietnam to report on the war in Southeast Asia took
Salisbury from the assignment, and the project was scrapped by the
beginning of 1967. However, the Times saw fit to comment on the
emerging skepticism surrounding the Warren Commission’s work. Its
remarks warrant a close reading because they aptly characterize a
position staked out by elements of the mainstream press at the time.
In an editorial headlined “Unanswered Questions,” also from November
25, 1966, the paper commented:

There are enough solid doubts of thoughtful citizens, among the shrill
attacks on the Warren Commission, now to require answers. Further
dignified silence, or merely more denials by the commission or its
staff, are no longer enough.

We have come to this conclusion not because of any of the specific
charges brought by the dozens of books, TV shows and articles about
President Kennedy’s assassination but because of the general confusion
in the public mind raised by the publication of allegations and the
many puzzling questions that have been raised.

Since the whole purpose of the commission’s appointment and mission is
being eroded a little at a time by the clamor, it would seem the
commission itself has the most to answer. Certainly, it should be
given a chance.

Its members and staff, in varying degrees, of course, have full
knowledge—or should have—of the investigations, evaluations and
decisions that went into the report. Until they have spoken, the
demands for special Congressional committees, foundation studies and
inquiries by prestigious people seems premature.

The dual position straddled by much of the press is captured in
the extraordinary second paragraph of this editorial. The Times,
reluctant—indeed unwilling—to give credit or credence to commission
critics or assassination buffs, nonetheless articulated a position
clearly persuaded by the accumulated strength of their arguments. The
paper was quick to draw a distinction between the so-called public
mind and the dreaded “books, TV shows and articles” that had been
instrumental in the construction of the “public mind.” Published
allegations and puzzling questions appear to have an invisible source,
one that the paper was unable to recognize amidst the “general
confusion.” The editorial called not for a new investigation, that
being the cry of the “shrill attacks,” but for a clarification from
the commission as to its decision-making procedures. But a curious
phenomenon accompanied this call. In a chronological breakdown, the
editorial was written as if the Warren Commission were still at work,
as if the investigation were ongoing. The last paragraph cited above
ended: “The Warren Commission itself is composed of leading members of
Senate and House and responsible citizens, headed by the respected
Chief Justice.” Yet the commission had released its report to the
public over two years earlier, its official investigation long since
ended. It might thus be argued that in a rather strange way the
commission critics had been so successful at perpetuating what had
(and perhaps should have) been the government’s investigatory efforts
that the Times unconsciously legitimized the critics’ work by speaking
of the commission’s investigation in the present tense. Effacing the
critics by denying them any role in their viewpoint, the editors
succeeded at becoming lost in their own ellipses; 1964 and 1966
become, if not interchangeable, then at least somewhat collapsible.
The editorial’s demand for answers combined with its reservations
about the premature nature of a new inquiry amounted to a call for
procedural closure. As the assassination case grew more complex during
1966 and 1967, this was perhaps the only kind of stopgap request that
was at all fit to print.
Although a Louis Harris poll taken in 1967 found that 70 percent
of Americans still believed Lee Harvey Oswald was guilty, 54 percent
now though the Warren Commission had left “a lot of unanswered
questions about who killed Kennedy.” Amid growing public skepticism
and increasing criticism of the Warren Report in mainstream
publications, William Manchester’s The Death of a President was
serialized in Look and sold as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
Manchester was the only assassination author to have access to and
approval of the Kennedy family, and the conclusions he offered
essentially agreed with the Warren Commission’s findings.
Far more important to the course of the assassination debates,
however, was the news of an emerging investigation being undertaken by
the district attorney of New Orleans, Jim Garrison. Garrison charged
Clay Shaw, a prominent businessman and director of the New Orleans
International Trade Mart, with taking part in an assassination
conspiracy with several anti-Castro Cubans who were former CIA agents.
Although the trial did not get under way until February of 1969,
Garrison had as early as 1967 set about publicizing his investigation
and enlisting the eager assistance of assassination critics. His
efforts were accorded sympathetic press coverage, most notably
Ramparts’ issue of January 1968. But as media scrutiny increased, the
flimsy nature of Garrison’s case and the questionable legal tactics he
employed were slowly revealed. Attacks on the New Orleans
investigation came from traditional Warren Report defenders like Time
and Newsweek as well as from critics Meagher and Epstein. Garrison
succeeded in getting the Zapruder film exhibited in the courtroom, and
his Cuban conspiracy leads would be pursued by subsequent researchers.
But Shaw’s acquittal, after the jury deliberated just fifty minutes,
along with the overall ineptness of Garrison’s investigation, for the
most part succeeded in undermining the general credibility of
assassination conspiracy theorists, setting back efforts to renew
either state or federal government inquiries. The New Orleans debacle
continued for some time as both an embarrassment and a cautionary
reminder for commission critics. Garrison, himself subsequently
acquitted of federal bribery charges, helped perpetuate the media-
manufactured image of the assassination buff as paranoid self-promoter
in search of political ghosts. In the shadow of the Garrison trial,
the early 1970s contributed little in the way of assassination
literature, and what quiet dialogue did continue circulated through
more specialized publications. Magazines such as Computers and
Automation applied computer technology to the photographic evidence,
and information was regularly published for the buff network, such as
the list of the secret Warren Commission documents deposited in the
U.S. Archives.
However, this retreat did not signal wholesale retirement for
assassination critics. Indeed, the murders of Robert F. Kennedy and
Martin Luther King, Jr., served to fuel the passion and frustration of
critics displeased with the official government handling of both
cases. One direction they took was to organize the loosely connected
network of part-time investigators, writers, and researchers who had
independently amassed files of documentation. In 1968 attorney and
former Senate committee counsel Bernard Fensterwald formed the
Committee to Investigate Assassinations (CTIA). Intended as an agent
for the pooling of assassination research, the interviews and randomly
collected clues, the leading theories and thousands of press
clippings, CTIA also sought to lobby for new congressional action.
More grassroots in its formation and activities was the
Assassination Information Bureau (AIB). Officially incorporated in
1974, the AIB had its origins several years earlier in the activities
of journalist Bob Katz. Katz, working through correspondence with
Richard Sprague, a New York computer analyst, and with graphics
assistance by Robert Cutler, initiated a set of presentations entitled
“Who Killed Kennedy?” After some successful local appearances in the
Boston/Cambridge area and through the arrangements of a Boston booking
agency, Katz, now joined by several other Cambridge-area researchers,
delivered his presentation at college campuses across the country.
When not on the road, the AIB outlined a political agenda for citizen
action, a program designed to pressure a new congressional
investigation, which included information packets with text and slides
for community organization around the topic of political
assassination. Despite their investment in grassroots efforts, the AIB
saw success in terms of federal government action. In an article from
1975, the AIB stated: “It was, and remains, the contention of the AIB
that private citizens could not themselves answer in full the question
of who killed JFK—and indeed we should not be in a position where it
is even our responsibility.” Among the AIB’s most significant
achievements was “The Politics of Conspiracy,” a three day conference
held at Boston University in January 1975 where over 1,500 people
heard presentations from some of the most well known assassination
critics.

The Skeptics Revived
By the time of the B.U. conspiracy conference, the question of who
killed JFK had reemerged on the national agenda, and commission
critics had gained new momentum. Indeed, a number of factors mark 1975
as a watershed year for the investigation. Commenting on a three-day
assassination seminar at the University of Hartford, the New York
Times noted that critique of the Warren Commission “is said to be the
hottest topic on the college lecture circuit.” The topic had most
definitely returned to the newsstand and bookstore. The most
significant titles were Robert Sam Anson’s They’ve Killed the
President and the paperback edition of Thompson’s Six Seconds in
Dallas. Anson had been writing about the assassination for several
years, his most important articles appearing in New Times, for which
he was a national political correspondent. His book both neatly
summarized the salient features of the case up to his writing and
argued for consideration of a Cuban/CIA/Mafia conspiracy. The release
of Thompson’s book was significant for the legal victory it
represented. In 1967 Life had sued Thompson, Bernard Geis Associates,
and Random House to prevent publication of the book with reproductions
of the Zapruder film, charging that Thompson had in fact stolen parts
of the film. Denying the charge, Thompson had his book published that
year with charcoal reconstructions of the key Zapruder frames. Eight
years later, after a victorious suit against Time-Life, Thompson saw
his book reissued with reproductions from the Zapruder film.
A number of magazines also turned their attention back to the
case. Detailed studies appeared in Rolling Stone and New Times, and
many of the arguments pro and con conspiracy were briefly summarized
in an issue of Skeptic. In its September 1975 issue, the Saturday
Evening Post devoted its cover story to the commission critics,
profiling nineteen of the leading assassination researchers and
printing a brief “Bibliography for JFK Buffs.” It was at this time
also that assassination literature found its way increasingly into
soft-core pornographic magazines. The interconnections between the
assassination debate and issues of pornography will be taken up in a
subsequent chapter. For now it is worth noting the appearance of
numerous articles, both multipart series and forums, in magazines such
as Penthouse, Playboy, Swank, Gallery, and Playgirl.
The Zapruder film’s appearance in Thompson’s reissue and Anson’s
book was accompanied by widespread screenings elsewhere. AIB college
presentations had been supplemented by fifth- and sixth-generation
bootleg prints. But in 1975 Robert Groden, a New York photo optics
expert, completed years of working with Zapruder’s film, producing a
high-quality, image-enhanced print with crucial sections, primarily
frames of Kennedy’s head wounds, slowed and magnified. Groden’s print
was exhibited at the AIB Boston conference in January 1975 and then on
March 6 and March 27 of that year, for the first time to a national
audience, on the ABC broadcast “Goodnight America” with Geraldo
Rivera. Groden would later show his print to federal lawmakers,
testify before the Rockefeller Commission, and serve as a consultant
to the House assassinations committee.
The exhibition of Groden’s print aided researchers and
intensified calls for a new investigation. In October 1975, the New
York Times reported that Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania had
publicly declared that the Warren Report was “like a house of cards;
it’s going to collapse.” The paper then noted that two congressional
committees, the Senate’s Schweiker-Hart Select Committee on
Intelligence and the House’s Edwards Committee, would be opening
inquiries into federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies’
performance during the Warren Commission’s investigation. The Times
piece was characteristically schizophrenic on the subject, labeling
critics a “curious mixture” of dignified doubters and an “irrational
enclave.” Nonetheless, by December 1, 1975, the Times was again moved
to editorialize on the persistent skepticism concerning the
commission’s findings. Hoping for a “restoration of the government’s
reputation,” the paper called for a congressional investigation to lay
“out all the now-sequestered evidence” and to “establish the extent of
the cover-ups.” As with its editorial of November 25, 1966, cited
above, the Times withheld credit from commission critics: “The most
powerful arguments for doing so [reopening the case] come not from any
of the veteran assassination buffs, but emerge from the secret
recesses of the FBI and the CIA themselves.”
In fact, the House, Senate, and Rockefeller Commission inquiries
into the activities of the FBI and CIA reflected, if not directly
followed, the broadening focus of Kennedy assassination critics.
Furthermore, these inquiries marked various points where the
overlapping terrains of the assassination debates and other political
debates became especially obvious. Clearly the JFK inquests always
shared a relationship with adjacent political issues, most notably the
cold war questions circulating around Oswald’s identity and his ties
to Cuban interests, the Soviet Union, and various FBI contacts. But
whereas during the early and mid-1960s the government sought to
suppress these questions, by the mid-1970s, it sought at least in part
to expose the connections between conspiracy speculations surrounding
the assassination and the more widespread activities of American
intelligence organizations.
Indeed, three years prior to the new congressional action and
prompted in no small measure by the revelations of Watergate, writers
who had focused primarily on an alleged Dallas cover-up expanded their
research and widened the scope of their critique. Staking out this
broader arena, the AIB noted in one of its position papers:

The discoveries set in motion around Watergate and the great
aftershocks of Chile and Cointelpro have crystallized public awareness
of the realities of power politics in the United States. We are at one
of those moments when a providential convergence of events opens a
window and shows us the treacheries involved in the struggle for state
power. It is more possible today for masses of Americans to understand
the need for a new framework of political thought which coherently
situates these murders in an overall perspective on American politics
during the Cold War. “Who Killed JFK?” ought to be a leading slogan of
the whole Bicentennial period.

Some critics saw in the Watergate cover-up a reflection of the
same explanations used to defend the commission’s work a decade
earlier. The refrain of concerns about national security and the
sensitive operations of intelligence were once again raised to
guarantee federal silence about possible government wrongdoing.
Assassination theorists thus began to see their efforts against the
wider backdrop of conspiracy and state-sanctioned criminality. Their
public discussions began to include the deaths of Martin Luther King,
Jr., and Malcolm X and scrutinized the FBI’s Cointelpro operations,
the secret counterintelligence programs mounted to undermine the Black
Panthers and the work of the New Left. Moreover, attention turned
toward elaborating the perhaps conspiratorial interrelationships
between covert government operations, foreign politicos, and organized
crime. These investigations repeatedly revealed the joint involvement
of CIA or former CIA operatives, former members of the Batista
government ousted by Castro in Cuba, and figures prominent in the
world of organized crime. What slowly emerged was a bureaucracy of
criminals whose activities included foreign and domestic narcotics
sales, campaign financing, money laundering (in Cuban exile-owned
Florida banks through which funds for the Watergate break-in were
funneled), and the attempted overthrow or assassination of foreign
heads of state. The result, a criminal musical chairs with the same
players—E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, Bebe Rebozo, Richard Nixon, and
a score of top and second-echelon mob figures—with a twenty-year
history of covert activity, led assassination critics to argue that
the conspiracy and cover-up they identified with the Dallas killing
was not some phantasmagoric exception to government affairs but
conduct more like business as usual.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was
established in September 1976 with a four-part prescription for
investigation:

1. Who killed Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.?
2. Was there evidence of a conspiracy in either assassination?
3. What was the performance of government agencies in protecting each
man?
4. With respect to cooperating with earlier investigations, was there
a need for new legislation regarding assassinations?

In his introduction to the HSCA, Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey,
while noting the lobbying efforts of assassination critics, credited
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and its report of April
1976 with supplying the impetus for creating the HSCA. But the
thirteen years of persistent investigation by the private network of
assassination critics was in large part responsible for this new
congressional probe. The critics’ efforts, combined with the general
criticism of American policies and institutions and the erosion of
public confidence in government affairs fueled by the antiwar movement
and the Watergate scandal, had served as catalysts for the government-
sponsored self-critique of the mid-seventies.
What, then, were the critics’ major accomplishments?
Assassination critics did not solve the case or uncover
incontrovertible evidence pointing to the guilty parties. They did,
however, call into serious question the efficacy of the government’s
work, exposing its imprecise methods and the general negligence of its
investigation. They democratized the inquiry through demands for
access to classified material and forced the most powerful news media
to reconsider their blanket endorsement of the government’s discourse,
whether cloaked in the rhetoric of national security, the authorial
privilege of those sitting on the commission, or the sanctity of
federal law enforcement agencies. Assassination critics wondered in
print and on the airwaves whether sectors of the government were not
in fact the source of criminality—either through obstruction of
justice or, according to some, through orchestrating the assassination
itself.
More specifically, commission critics appeared to create
reasonable doubt about the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald. They made a
strong case that three bullets could not have been fired by one man in
the firing time established by the Zapruder film and still account for
the wounds and the bullet that missed. They established a range of
contradictions and errors in the official autopsy. They gave voice to
dozens of eyewitnesses who were not granted space in the Warren Report
and whose observations did not corroborate the commission’s findings.
They brought forth evidence of Oswald’s contact with the FBI prior to
the shooting, as well as his possible links to anti-Castro Cubans, and
linked Jack Ruby with key organized crime figures who had both motive
and means to assassination the president. Amid these and many other
questions, the HSCA undertook its study with the eager assistance of
some of the most visible assassination researchers.
Yet the mild government self-critique sustained by the HSCA and
the pronouncements of its Final Report hardly suited most critics.
That report, issued on July 22, 1979, offered a contradictory
interpretation of the considered evidence, one that both affirmed much
of the Warren Report yet took issue with its primary conclusions. On
the one hand, the HSCA concluded that “the Warren Commission conducted
a thorough and professional investigation into the responsibility of
Lee Harvey Oswald for the assassination.” But it also stated: “The
Warren Commission failed to investigate adequately the possibility of
a conspiracy to assassinate the President.” Indeed, despite the
overwhelming degree to which its report supported the Warren
Commission’s findings, the HSCA concluded that, based on the available
evidence, “President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a
result of a conspiracy.” The crucial evidence for the HSCA, uncovered
by three Dallas-based assassination buffs, was a recording of Dallas
police radio transmissions in Dealey Plaza the day of the shooting.
Acoustics experts called in by the committee conducted recordings
during a reconstruction of the assassination in Dallas and compared
their results with the tape from November 22, 1963. They concluded
that four shots were recorded on the original police dictabelt and
that the third shot most likely came from the grassy knoll in front of
the presidential limousine. However, the HSCA was unable to identify
any of Oswald’s alleged coconspirators. Furthermore, it sought to
counter other conspiracy theorists by concluding that the available
evidence negated suggestions that anti-Castro Cubans, organized crime,
or elements within the U.S. government were involved in the
assassination.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations was the last of the
government-sponsored probes into JFK’s death, but it did not mark
closure for the debate. Warren Commission critics continued their
research in two directions: one focusing on the alleged involvement of
organized crime, the other on complicity of U.S. agencies, the FBI and
Secret Service. G. Robert Blakey and Richard Billings’s The Plot to
Kill the President in 1981 and then David Scheim’s Contract on America
in 1989 put forth the mob thesis. Blakey, who had been chief counsel
and staff director for the HSCA, and Billings outlined the
government’s covert employment of major crime figures in various plots
to overthrow Castro. Involved were kingpins Sam Giancana, John
Roselli, Santos Trafficante, and Carlos Marcello. The theories vary
somewhat, but the general outline follows this pattern: the mob had
worked in various ways for John Kennedy during his run for office and
then during his administration. It had rigged the election results in
Chicago and in Texas to assure his victory, and it believed he was an
ally in mob efforts to oust Castro. By some accounts, the most
important factor was that his friends in organized crime had afforded
the president a steady supply of women, many of them Hollywood
hopefuls. What angered mob bosses was that the president had paid
these favors back with a weakening commitment to Cuba and a full-scale
Justice Department attack on organized crime led by Attorney General
Robert Kennedy. Lee Oswald, whose bizarre life had brought him into
contact with various New Orleans racketeers, was set up to take the
fall, his silence guaranteed by a contract with long-time petty hood
Jack Ruby.
Criticism of government law enforcement agencies, especially the
FBI, had been part of the anticommission literature since the
assassination. David Lifton’s Best Evidence culminated this critique
with a sincere yet bizarre and frequently confusing indictment of the
Secret Service in 1981. Lifton laboriously detailed the development of
his investigation over a fifteen-year period, which focused on the
president’s autopsy. Examining the evidence supplied by doctors’
testimony, the autopsy and x rays of Kennedy’s body, and reports
compiled by various government bureaus, Lifton argued that the
president’s body had been surgically altered sometime between his
arrival at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas and the official
autopsy conducted at Bethesda naval hospital in Washington, D.C. This
alteration, he suggested, was the most efficient way for a Secret
service-engineered conspiracy to cover up the “best evidence” and lead
all subsequent investigations down the wrong path.

The Thirty-Year Debate
For the most part, then, the assassination literature of the
eighties turned away from the mechanics of Dealey Plaza to consider
other aspects of the alleged conspiracy. The evidence of photos,
acoustics, and eyewitnesses had for now been exhausted of their
capacity to supply researchers with anything new. Perhaps, believing
that logistical analysis of the shooting either had been sufficiently
discussed in other works or had reached an impasse, assassination
critics focused on those aspects of the case that, even twenty years
later, were still unfolding.
Yet the release of Oliver Stone’s JFK in December 1991 returned
attention to the specifics of the shooting while simultaneously
insisting on a theory of conspiratorial motive. What is ironic about
the impact and the overwhelming public discussion generated by JFK is
that its narrative put forth the six-shot “secret team” thesis, long
believed by some critics to be the least credible of propositions.
Furthermore, its story centered on Jim Garrison and the New Orleans
conspiracy trial, perhaps the single most undistinguished moment in
the history of the investigation. Stone’s film resuscitated interest
in critiques of the magic bullet theory and, as Chapter 10 will
discuss, returned to a reliance on the epistemological certainty of
filmic evidence. Moreover, it presented JFK as dove rather than as
cold warrior, a reading of Kennedy’s foreign policy to which liberal
conspiracy theorists clung, insisting that escalation in Vietnam was a
product of the assassination and the work of Kennedy’s successor. JFK
served to introduce yet another generation to many of the issues
surrounding the assassination debate. It is significant within the
scope of this chronology because it is the only commercial film to
propel the investigation further and to highlight, if not generate,
additional critical literature.
Stone’s film also generated considerable backlash; the
mainstream press met its release by telling readers that the film was
not to be believed. Indeed, while breathing new life into
assassination inquiries, JFK’s all-encompassing conspiracy theory
brought sharp skepticism back upon itself. By the thirtieth
anniversary of JFK’s death, a curious situation had come to
characterize the assassination debates. Warren Commission critics
found themselves working together in an atmosphere of renewed energy,
an atmosphere of well-attended semiannual conferences, a growing list
of new publications, and the release of previously classified
government files. And yet their public identity was coming under
renewed indictment from the airwaves and pages of the major media, in
large part due to the publication of Gerald Posner’s Case Closed.
Touted as the book that “Finally proves Who Killed Kennedy,” Case
Closed relied less on brilliant analysis than on shrewd timing. With
its release conveniently coinciding with the media-saturated
anniversary, Posner’s book was granted breakthrough status when in
fact it frequently reiterated analysis that had circulated for years.
Posner summarized various interpretations of the Zapruder film,
arguing that, contrary to the readings offered by conspiracy critics,
the visual evidence showed that Lee Harvey Oswald had ample time to
fire three shots and inflict all the wounds. Posner attempted a theory-
by-theory rebuttal of thirty years’ worth of anti-Warren Commission
literature and was granted considerable media approval for his
efforts. Armed with Posner’s book, the mainstream press could strike
an investigatory pose while embracing the Oswald-as-lone-assassin
theory.
Indeed, the nineties’ version of the critical duality
articulated during the sixties by the New York Times editorials was
enunciated most clearly by Newsweek in its issue of November 22, 1993.
There had been a cover-up, the magazine told its readers, but not the
one Warren Commission critics had suggested. “The real cover-up,” to
borrow the article’s headline, was that “the U.S. government did not
try very hard to unearth the truth about the assassination of JFK.”
Implying that this was somehow an original thesis produced after
considerable research by themselves, the Washington Post, and CBS, the
magazine suggested that it was the “frenzied week” of high-level
government scrambling that “led to 30 years of conspiracy theories.”
As for arguments generated by Warren Commission critics, the magazine
psychoanalyzed these as the products of children in search of “a
grander design” to compensate for the notion that one man could force
such tremendous “historical transformation.” Although assassination
critics could take heart that the case remained on the national
agenda, not since the days of their earliest efforts had they also
been subjected to such widely circulated ridicule.
The recycling of imagery and arguments occasioned by the release
of JFK and the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination draws
attention to a crucial characteristic of this subject matter: its cell-
like quality, its propensity to be transformed and constantly
reconfigured. This quality has constantly, and perhaps ultimately,
frustrated critics and the wider public in their attempts to
narrativize and lend coherence to these historical events. Let me be
more specific. The assassination debate has expanded and contracted
throughout its thirty years as texts of all kinds have become
available for analysis. Myriad factors have contributed to the sense
of flux surrounding the assassination debates: the release of the
Warren Commission’s documents to the public, the sealing of evidence
donated to the National Archives by the Kennedy family; the purchase
and limited publication of the Zapruder film by Life magazine, the
sale and exhibition of bootleg copies of the film, the report issued
in 1968 by a special medical panel appointed by Attorney General
Ramsey Clark to review the sealed autopsy photos, the revelations
concerning secret government activities reported by various
congressional committees, and perhaps most importantly, the steady
release of classified government materials made possible by commission
critics’ persistent use of the Freedom of Information Act.
And there is more: the untimely deaths, especially within the
first five years, of a number of potentially crucial witnesses or
interested parties, the discovery of the Dallas Police’s dictabelt
with the recording of the shots; the circulation and analysis of the
hundreds of photographs taken just before, during, or after the
shooting; and the ever-mounting and often contradictory personal
testimony of a variety of individuals, from autopsy doctors to
hospital personnel to sources within organized crime. As the years
passed and the assassination texts multiplied or were resituated,
subsequent critical studies were forced to summarize (or attempt to
summarize) the debate’s ever-shifting signifiers. Approaching the
various books and articles about the case became a matter of wading
through a network of direct or implicit cross-references to other
significant texts, both literary and photographic. By the late
seventies, a general index to the assassination literature was almost
needed even for initiated readers to engage with the discussion. This
complexity perpetuated a process that seemed to take critics further
and further from the assassination itself, such that much of the
literature ultimately appears to map not so much the event itself as
the surface of its representation.
This persistent yet haphazard development of the investigation
reflects one of its fundamental tensions: its simultaneous movement
toward and denial of closure. Both defenders and critics of the Warren
Report sought a solution to the crime and an end to the debate; they
sought the kind of narrative closure that could transform the
assassination into a coherent event and a knowable history. But for
commission critics this desire was complicated by efforts to deny
closure. They refuted arguments that insisted the murder had been
solved, even resisting while building upon the alternative conclusions
put forth by other critics. Their repeated scrutiny of the
photographic evidence and their constant struggle with the government
over the declassification of documents, while ultimately aimed at
closing the case, engendered a position that was suspicious of endings
and encouraged postponement.
The investigation’s tendency to expand and contract, as well as
its internal tensions around closure, demand a self-consciousness with
respect to my own work. This chronology of assassination literature is
already a slip in the direction of seamlessness. My account is
constructed as a partial map because the assassination debates are so
densely layered that some contours need to be sketched at the outset.
But even these contours are too distinct; the mapping process is at
once accurate and misleading. Somehow the reader needs to keep this in
mind: the ebb and flow of critique and defense, of investigation and
analysis, was neither smooth nor precisely patterned, and the topic I
am isolating was not made up entirely by the public appearance of
various texts.
Indeed, the debate circulated and intensified in private, the
range and complexities of the literature matched by the scope and
varied involvement of its readers. Individuals came to these works at
different times, through softcover editions years after the release of
the hardcovers, for example. The appearance of certain books or
articles at a certain time did not mean that public opinion or
involvement ran parallel to these publications. It is essential to any
elaboration of the assassination debates to note the debates’ more
private components, their life among the unpublished, their impact on
individuals for whom the aftermath of the assassination became
everything from a weekend hobby to a full-time obsession.
Like other groups engaged in acts of social contestation during
the 1960s, assassination critics and buffs established and worked
though local channels, challenging and appropriating roles
traditionally left to official public agencies. Some left the
professions for which they were trained or modified their occupations
to study the assassination full or part time. Others became amateur
researchers into the activities of government agencies or trained
themselves in media analysis so as to better critique the government’s
version of events. In so doing, these individuals and groups struggled
along different fronts than other political movements during the
period. Yet, like those other movements, assassination critics did
seek a reversal of forces, did struggle over the positions that
underwrote political power. The assassination debates, defined once
again, appear as more than the sum of a set of texts, verbal or
imagined, but as something less stable or unified; they are a series
of shifting arrangements and positions, textual, personal, temporal,
political. My own language here is clearly influenced by Foucault’s
discussion of “effective” history, and it is useful at the end of this
introduction once again to consider the assassination in the context
of his remarks:

An event, consequently, is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a
battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation
of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who
had once used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows
lax, the entry of a masked “other.”

The active quality of Foucault’s language—reverse, usurp,
appropriate, turn against—should condition our understanding of the
assassination debates. So, too, should his shift in focus from a
single agent—decision, treaty, battle—to wider fields of activity,
such as forces, power, and the uses of vocabulary. The debates cover
an ever-growing range of practices and histories. Had the government’s
account of the assassination gone uncontested and all the subsequent
questions never been raised, the case would still have involved a
complex process; multiauthored in its codification in image and
narrative; still constituted by gaps and silences; circulated by the
entire field of ideological state apparatuses. The commission critics,
however, splintered the forces that mediated the event and the
government’s account of it. They elevated this process to a level at
which its mechanisms of construction, its gaps, silences,
contradictions, and representational strategies, became acutely
visible. They thereby subjected this history to a radical re-
visioning.