Final Disclosure
Belin, David W.
D avid Belin's Final Disclosure purports to be "the full truth about the assassination of President Kennedy," but the first thing to be said about the book is that it contains absolutely nothing new...
...If there is anything we need to know about Oswald, it is whether he acted alone, as the Warren Commission would have it, or was involved in somesort of conspiracy...
...The evidence accumulated by the Warren Commission in these matters is almost as strong as Belin thinks it is—though here, too, he refuses to acknowledge some disturbing evidence to the contrary...
...But for anyone interested in learning more about the dreadful events of November 1963, Final Disclosure is an almost total waste of time...
...To these he adds material from the Rockefeller Commission report, which has been in the public record since 1975, and from the House Assassination Committee report, which was published in 1979...
...Kennedy the anguish of appearing at Oswald's trial (Ruby also did it, in his words, "for the Jews of America...
...But Belin ignores practically all of it and focuses instead on the one or two points where the committee or a particular author turned out to be wrong...
...But Belin is satisfied with Ruby's assurances to his rabbi, and the rabbi's assurances to Belin, that Ruby had no hand in any conspiracy...
...Indeed, Belin raises just that question at the very end of the book...
...As gamesmanship, that's a pretty clever way to play...
...From the beginning there were grave doubts about these and other conclusions of the Warren Commission...
...To be sure, he makes a nearly unassailable case for Oswald's guilt as the murderer of Officer Tippit and as at least one of the gunmen who fired at President Kennedy...
...The bare-bones conclusions of the Warren Commission can be easily summarized: First, that Oswald acted alone in shooting Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit (who was killed in a shoot-out at a downtown theater less than an hour after the assassination...
...Well, that's one way to come to a conclusion about a central issue in an assassination inquiry...
...This is because Belin devotes almost half his book to discussing the CIA's misdeeds, includingits involvement in a variety of efforts to assassinate Castro...
...But the rest of Final Disclosure, far from clearing away other doubts about the commission's report, only intensifies them...
...Having served as counsel to the Warren Commission and as executive director of the Rockefeller Commission of CIA Activities Within the United States, Belin merely offers a reprise of the Warren Commission findings, which have, after all, been in the public record since 1964...
...The Warren Commission never asked and no one to this day has a clue...
...Now, given Oswald's apparent devotion to Castro, and given his still-mysterious trip to Mexico City that same month, it is not entirely "sensationalist" to wonder whether there might not have been some connection between the two men...
...O ne last uncontroverted fact, which the House Assassination Committee was able to adduce but which Belin passes over in silence: three hours after the President's death, the always-broke Jack Ruby showed up at his bank—where the balance in his business account was only $246 with $7,000 in large bills stuffed in his pockets...
...Does this mean anything...
...In fact, Belin's treatment of accounts that differ from the Warren Commission report borders on the hysterical...
...Castro, who might have taken umbrage and thus sicced his admirer, Lee Harvey Oswald, on President Kennedy, a possibility that, alas, we shall never be able to explore, thanks to the well-intentioned but violent intervention of Jack Ruby...
...Secret Service agents blocked the call...
...and second, that Jack Ruby acted on impulse in killing Oswald, in order to spare Mrs...
...Were there three shots—the number fired from Oswald's rifle—or more than three, as some witnesses claimed...
...But according to Vincent Marchetti, a former high-ranking CIA official, Naval Intelligence in those years operated a secret training facility for phoney defectors to the Soviet Union...
...But it would have been more compelling if the Warren Commission had accepted Ruby's desperate plea to be allowed to go to Washington "to tell you the truth'a plea that Chief Justice Warren personally rejected on the curious grounds that "it could not be done...
...There is a great deal more of this sort of thing, as I reported in these pages back in October 1981—high-quality investigative material developed by the House committee and by independent researchers such as Summers and Thompson...
...For example, how could Oswald, an indifferent marksman, have been so murderously accurate with two of his three shots, fired at a moving target from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building...
...Belin chooses to ignore it...
...How could a Karl O'Lessker, a senior editor of The American Spectator and adjunct senior research fellow at the Hudson Institute, is a member of the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission...
...And another among the scores of intriguing facts: on the night he was arrested, Oswald tried to call a number in the Raleigh, North Carolina, area...
...Meagher and Summers he mentions only once, and that in connection with the murder of Officer Tippit, while Thompson's important work he ignores altogether...
...More disturbing, he weighs none of the evidence that has been found concerning Oswald's other possible associations—some of them bitterly anti-Castro...
...And Belin discovers, to his own great satisfaction, that the Warren Commission was absolutely dead solid perfect in its conclusions—the only admissible reservation being that the CIA concealed from the commission its ongoing efforts to assassinate Dr...
...Other, more sober theories suffer from the great defect (as Belin points out) of coming into being only by omitting inconvenient facts...
...Most egregious, in my view, is his refusal to consider Anthony Summers's remarkable investigative reporting on Oswald's movements and associations...
...single bullet have exploded the President's head and still retain enough velocity to pass through Governor John Connally's body—and then later be found in a pristine state...
...T hese are only a few of the multi- ./ tude of issues that have plagued all efforts to reach a consensus on the assassination...
...And what of the possibility that Oswald and/or Ruby acted as agents for other parties—Cuba or the Mafia or the CIA, or some combination of them...
...You won't learn about these matters in David Belin's "full truth about the assassination" because they weren't in the Warren Commission report...
...and certainly any competent lawyer (and Belin is a very good one) would recognize the tactic...
...Or what about the fact that in 1960, when Oswald was living in the USSR, no less a figure than J. Edgar Hoover sent a memorandum to the State Department's security office warning that "there is a possibility that an impostor is using Oswald's birth certificate...
...Everyone who has ever proposed an alternate theory he labels an "assassination sensationalist," a phrase he uses unfailingly throughout the book...
...D avid Belin's Final Disclosure purports to be "the full truth about the assassination of President Kennedy," but the first thing to be said about the book is that it contains absolutely nothing new about the assassination...
...19.95 Karl O'Lessker THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 45 Oswald's own one-man pro-Castro operation was headquartered in the same small building that provided offices for two violently anti-Castro organizations...
...But Belin has nothing to say about them...
...Still others, however, are not so easily dismissed, and these Belin handles by ignoring them...
...But he considers not one shred of evidence beyond what the Warren Commission turned up...
...Thus such careful investigators as Sylvia Meagher (Accessories After the Fact), Josiah Thompson (Six Seconds in Dallas), and Anthony Summers (Conspiracy) are lumped together with such undeniable "sensationalists" as Mark Lane, George O'Toole, and David Lifton, among many others...
...Not all of Summers's findings may be correct, yet even if only some of them are, they are enormously suggestive...
...and FINAL DISCLOSURE: THE FULL TRUTH ABOUT THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY David W. Belin/Charles Scribner's Sons/249 pp...
...And he cites Castro's warning of September 1963 that if those efforts didn't cease, he would order retaliation against America's leaders...
...Where did he get the money...
...There is no record of his knowing anyone there...
...So peculiar have been some of the circumstances—the disappearance of Kennedy's brain and crucial notes from the autopsy, for instance, or the unaccountable sums of money which Oswald had from time to time—that theories have sprung up (and been published) that would do credit to Robert Ludlum...
...For example, consider the fact that Oswald's employer during his New Orleans days, in the spring of 1963, was a wealthy backer of the Crusade to Free Cuba Committee...
...Alternative accounts have held that Oswald was, in his own words, "a patsy," who might even have been impersonated for some time prior to the assassination—the so-called Second Oswald theory...
Vol. 22 • April 1989 • No. 4
