Eminentoes/Who Killed Mark Lane?
Mysak, Joe
EMINENTOES WHO KILLED MARK LANE? by Joe Mysak In the year 2038 or thereabouts, the National Archives will release volumes of testimony and miscellaneous evidence on the assassination of John F....
...If you've read one, you've read them all...
...But King was not there...
...In short, Lane's entire political career was so much chin music...
...In 1970, Lane's involvement with the anti-war movement, and Jane Fonda, produced Conversations With Americans, more specifically with 32 Vietnam veterans (many deserters) "trained in torture tactics...
...He took part in the defense of the Chicago 7, and wrote a slim volume entitled Chicago Eye-Witness, a bleak tale of Daley's police state...
...In the New Republic, Alexander Bickel called the author "ingenuous," and his work "trivial and tedious...
...This was the first in Lane's oeuvre, which is explained by the accretion, or Coral Reef, theory...
...In 1960, as an assemblyman from Manhattan's Tenth District, he was already talking a good show, warning about the dangers of the police state in America and booming all the leading liberal causes of the time with the self-righteousness of a reformer and uplifter...
...For Lane, names and dates change, but the story remains the same: a concoction of conspiracy teased from reflections on memento mori...
...He and Ray made it before this group, and into prime-time television...
...Most recently, while in Jim Jones' employ, Lane conducted some interviews under the pretense that he was a magazine reporter...
...Mother Oswald was enjoying a certain celebrity, and Lane brought her along to beam in the spotlight with him...
...During the election campaign of 1962, however, it was a case of the sniffer sniffed...
...The publishers assured us that the book would show "the bankruptcy of our moral coin...
...But that is where the story begins...
...He was, in fact, a lecturer...
...All this on a bright red dust-jacket...
...He is "not above the dirtiest kind of innuendo," and is "among our causes for worry...
...But this time the critics attacked...
...Some say he does it all for money...
...This was not the first time Lane had had trouble with the truth...
...Members of the anti-war movement turned away in disgust, saying Lane had given the movement "a bad name...
...He was a "ghoul," "vile," "amoral," a "sensation-monger...
...it turned out that he owed $415 for 19 traffic summonses, an accumulation of some three years...
...Carl Rowan, meanwhile, is "America's most influential black journalist...
...Yet even the New York Times called the book "irresponsible, and based on inaccurate and unchecked evidence...
...The ogre J. Edgar Hoover is described in terms of " dictatorship," " pathological hatred, " and "obsession...
...Fans were astounded when, against all odds, Lane emerged from the jungle unscathed while a congressman, newsmen, and 900 members of the People's Temple perished...
...Legal Zealot...
...A Citizen's Dissent was a book on his first book, well-larded with references to "my fellow countrymen" and the blushes of a debutante at the slightest sign that somebody, somewhere, was paying attention...
...Many think that with his knack for acquiring miles of newsprint Lane would make an excellent pol...
...When he does surface from the muck to take a case, it is usually to defend real conspirators: plots to overthrow the government, to blow up the Statue of Liberty, to take back land at Wounded Knee...
...And the angel Ray, currently in residence at the Brushy Mountain Penitentiary, "is an intelligent and articulate man not without a sense of humor...
...Lane is a lawyer whose heart lies in investigative journalism of the most sordid variety...
...The FBI, CIA, and local police figure prominently as villains...
...He claims to have been a professor while in Washington...
...Others say he lusts only for publicity...
...It was not...
...Mountebank...
...The tone is typical: shrill, paranoid, heavy on fictional devices denoting doom...
...Lane decried what he considered the Warren Commission's mendacity, and our "steady march to 1984...
...in 1968 he was drafted as the vice-presidential candidate for the Freedom and Peace Party (not to be confused with the California-based Peace and Freedom Party, which nominated Eldridge Cleaver for President...
...It won't matter if he has departed these shores for more infernal regions...
...Still others claim Lane is out to do some serious mischief...
...He walked away from the political ring muttering about our "steady drift toward nuclear annihilation...
...Lane followed his literary debut with A Citizen's Dissent, in which Mark Lane replies to the defenders of the Warren Report, to the press and communications industry, to the Establishment intellectuals and commentators, and tells the often grim story of how his dissent was almost silenced...
...no doubt he has the necessary introductory manuscript stashed away in a vault, next to his millions...
...He once remembered having been arrested in a civil-rights march with Martin Luther King...
...Lane's conspiracy obsession began shortly afterward with Rush to Judgment, a critique of the Warren Report...
...This was undoubtedly Lane's finest hour, although the Committee eventually decided that Ray's story and Lane's defense were all hogwash...
...Lane raised all the issues which were to make his reputation-the Grassy Knoll, the Puff of Smoke, the Flying Piece of Skull, the Zapruder film-and the book became a bestseller...
...Up until the Jonestown fracas, Lane had been working as a paparazzo of the dead...
...Lane is a master of the nit-pick, the greatest living purveyor of isolated, inconsequential facts...
...Needless to say, he is now Joe Mysak, a free-lance writer living in New Jersey, is captain of the Cran-ford AC softball team...
...Now Lane says he knew all along that Jones was a manic-depressive with a death-wish, and that Jonestown was nothing but a concentration camp...
...The law is indeed a harsh mistress...
...Which means that Mark Lane will have another book spinning up the best-seller list, if anyone still cares...
...furiously scribbling away on a book...
...Dismayed, Lane turned to politics again...
...Later he was in Chicago when the Democratic National Convention blew up...
...Code Name "Zorro," the book on the King assassination, was like all of Lane's conspiracy theories...
...Lane claimed that Jonestown was a socialist Utopia...
...A rival claimed that Lane had committed "scofflaw acts that would not be tolerated in a Tammany hack...
...He was almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations...
...On the ropes, Lane went down when stories of a sex fling with a pair of prostitutes appeared, alluding to (among other things) some bizarre photographs of Lane in action...
...Regardless, Mark Lane continues to die for our sins and to write his books...
...Lane's running mate was Dick Gregory...
...Lane's critics are talking disbarment...
...It was not...
...He had formulated a rich theory about the Martin Luther King assassination and had taken on the defense of James Earl Ray...
...Before the end came at Jonestown, Lane whipped Jones into a frenzy, telling him that the United States government was out to get him...
...Lane toured the country, appeared on countless talk shows and college campuses, and even gave daily gun-toting lectures at an off-Broadway theatre...
...Lane, as Bickel saw it, had built his case perniciously, finding conspiracy in innocuous facts...
...Lane's latest locus criminis was Jonestown, Guyana...
...It turned out that in several cases Lane's sources were faked...
...by Joe Mysak In the year 2038 or thereabouts, the National Archives will release volumes of testimony and miscellaneous evidence on the assassination of John F. Kennedy...
...Charlatan...
...For sure, Lane is no Darrow...
Vol. 12 • August 1979 • No. 8
