Case Closed
Posner, Gerald
and Peter, Paul and Mary. (Okay, I admit I added PP&M just because I don't like them. I also admit I don't have evidence to support the charge—though the three have clearly been conspiring about...
...Incredible as it may seem, the house Mrs...
...When I find one I like I write it down and drop it in a file...
...A co-worker of Lee Harvey Oswald's at the Texas Book Depository told Oswald in which direction the motorcade would be passing the building...
...T he fact is that inexplicable coincidences are seldom sinister—but one can easily make them sound that way—and they often have no meaning beyond what they appear to be at their most superficial...
...Army's M-14 and its bullets travel as fast as and are heavier than the Russian AK-47s...
...Immediately after the shooting of JFK in Dallas, MacNeil, who was a reporter traveling in the motorcade at the time, raced into the Book Depository lobby and asked a man who was running out the door where the telephones were...
...Gerald Posner has written a great book and one that is badly needed in our fractured, suspicious society...
...The FBI concluded it was a very good weapon for assassination...
...You have come to the right place for this lecture...
...I was the director of the Voice of America for almost six years...
...His name was James Jarman...
...In the fall of 1963, not long before the assassination, I had lunch with Melvin "The King of Torts" Belli, who would soon represent Jack Ruby for shooting Oswald...
...He didn't know any other collectors...
...Oswald was a pathetically inadequate, mean-spirited loser...
...At least once we were seen at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown, right above the canal where Cord's ex-wife and JFK's lover was mysteriously murdered...
...Worse, I have been seen having lunch on a number of occasions with Cord Meyer, once a very high-ranking CIA official and the former brother-in-law of Ben Bradlee...
...I met one of his sons once...
...Similarly, I don't know what to do with my coincidences other than savor them...
...I was accused many times of working for the CIA and was also accused of sending coded messages over the air, disguised sometimes as balalaika music...
...Six months later, in April 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald tried to shoot General Walker with the same gun he later used to kill John F. Kennedy...
...Jackie Kennedy's mother, Mrs...
...There was no Odor Newsletter to read and there were no collectors' conventions he could attend...
...I met recently with the TV journalist Robert :MacNeil in New York...
...He was without manners, grace, expressions of simple kindness or decency, or any sense of humor...
...We ate in Jack's restaurant in the financial district of San Francisco...
...If you are like me, a casual reader of JFK assassination stories over the years, you will recall being left with the very opposite impression by the buffs and their fellow-traveling scriveners...
...Mostly, inexplicable coincidences are mostly just inexplicable...
...To this day, some big-game hunters in Africa use the very same rifle for elephant hunting because of its accuracy and power...
...So who am I to flout convention...
...Lee Harvey Oswald listened to the Voice of America when he was stationed in Japan...
...Mark Lane describes it as "inaccurate and slow...
...And why do you think she fled to Paris...
...One of the delicious scenes of modern times was that of terrorized attorneys Charles Garry and Mark Lane crashing through the Guyana jungle trying to escape the Kool-Aid solution being pushed by their client and friend Jim Jones upon his followers in Jonestown...
...Unless you really believe that was J. Edgar Hoover in stack heels and a black taffeta dress toting a sniper's rifle up on the grassy knoll (and if you do, well, hey, I can feel your pain), then Posner will convince you that Lee Harvey Oswald did it all by himself and that Gerald Posner picked the right title for his book...
...What we discussed is not known...
...One thing that occurs is that they could be used to demonstrate the odd circumstances of my own associations over the years and hence draw a reasonable inference that I too played a role in the JFK assassination: • Lee Harvey Oswald's favorite TV show growing up in the fifties, according to his brother Robert, was "I Lived Three Lives," the dramatization of an FBI informant who posed as a Communist...
...I also admit I don't have evidence to support the charge—though the three have clearly been conspiring about something for years...
...Lee Harvey Oswald was wildly pro-Castro...
...You don't think "Jack's" was chosen at random, do you...
...Witnesses said he often tuned in at night...
...A great deal of the fantasy spun by the buffs has derived from the world of coincidence...
...Case closed...
...George Fishbeck—who collected odors...
...ut what about the piece-of-junk B Italian rifle Oswald bought through the mail, the one he used to try and plug Gen...
...One FBI expert is quoted as describing the bullets fired at the president and John Connally as being like "a flying drill...
...I'm like the fellow I knew in Los Angeles—a TV weatherman named Dr...
...The rifle was as accurate as the U.S...
...Oswald, of course, had been a normally accomplished shot in the Marine Corps...
...Ben's first wife was a sister of Cord Meyer's wife Mary, and Mary had an affair with JFK, even smoked dope with him at the White House...
...Oswald once worked at a U-2 base and lived in the USSR when Powers's spy-plane was shot down...
...I was in the stag line at the coming-out party for Janet Auchincloss, Jackie Kennedy's half-sister, in Newport a few years before the assassination...
...El...
...The man pointed them out...
...The four-power sight needed "virtually no adjustment" at a distance of less than 200 yards...
...He was an "avid" VOA listener when he lived in the USSR...
...He was a piggish, self-pitying cracker whose closest friend described him as a "semi-educated hillbilly," none too bright...
...He had trapped hundreds of them in bottles (with labels like "Field of Rye after the Rains, Coalinga, CA 1972"), but he was damned if he knew what to do with them...
...I once had responsibility for the running of Radio Marti into Cuba, a major irritant to Castro and his government...
...Nearby diners were unable to overhear the conversation, but I was seen handing Meyer a paper of some kind...
...Wading through buff literature is an exercise in coincidence-gathering—connecting one disparate dot to another and demonstrating that they all have some meaning...
...I have purchased a number of canes from and often visited with Billy Rau, ostensibly an antique dealer, at 630 Royal Street, New Orleans...
...are too many to be genuine and must therefore be conspiratorial in origin...
...Kennedy bought after leaving Harriman's is about a half-dozen houses down from mine on the same side of the street and directly across from Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn's place...
...Anson says that the MannlicherCarcano rifle, with its four-power telescopic sight, is called the "Humanitarian Rifle," apparently because the Italian Army couldn't hit a pizza parlor door at twenty feet with it...
...He was also a zealous leftist who talked endlessly about the plight of the working class when he wasn't beating the tar, so to speak, out of his wife for sneaking a puff on a cigarette...
...When you read the details of his sluggish existence, the murder of a president seems reasonably within his capabilities...
...News and World Report did a cover story, concurring with Posner's findings that a review of the evidence points conclusively to the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone...
...But buffs ignore how remarkably easy it is to make connections between people, institutions, and events across generations, professions, class lines, and geographic distance in this country...
...My partner on the Ocean City police department in the summer of 1962 was James Jarman...
...Admittedly they appear to be different people—but who can be certain...
...Gerald Posner's Case Closed knocks the buffs and the loonies for a loop...
...Billy Rau's whereabouts at the time are not known...
...Later MacNeil identified the man as Lee Harvey Oswald...
...I collect coincidences...
...Robert Sam Anson, a writer generally regarded as less certifiable than Lane, ridicules the rifle, too...
...The house where Jackie Kennedy lived after the JFK killing, 3038 N Street, is directly across the street from mine and is still owned by the widow of Averell Harriman...
...It was at 570 Royal Street that Lee Harvey Oswald got into the heated debate with anti-Castro activist Carlos Bringuier...
...I was standing near General Edwin Walker in Oxford, Mississippi, in the fall of 1962 when he was arrested for inciting a riot...
...Whatever jokes might come to mind about the Italian Army, the fact is, as Posner neatly demonstrates, the rifle was deadly accurate, and with a four-power scope almost anyone would have performed as a marksman...
...Auchincloss, owned the house one block up 31st Street from my garage in Washington...
...Edwin Walker a few months before JFK' s killing...
...The book has been the subject of much positive ink in the American press since it was released in the fall, all of it deserved...
...U-2") Powers in Los Angeles and was seen talking with him at least twice at cocktail parties before his mysterious death in a helicopter...
...The star of this early show was Richard Carlson, my namesake and an actor whose AFTRA dues were regularly sent to me when I worked for ABC-TV in Hollywood...
...I knew Gary ("Mr...
...This seems to be acceptable conduct, and I can't recall anyone objecting to this weird McCarthyism in the mainstream press...
...Besides, a political animus against figures like E. Howard Hunt has caused many leftist buffs to force him and others they don't like into the public lineup of suspects...
...Buffs believe that the coincidences around the assassination and around the cast of hundreds who were connected in some fashion to Dallas or Kennedy or Oswald or Ruby et al...
Vol. 26 • December 1993 • No. 12
