Perspectives

...Sauvage's comment is a little much-and quite characteristic of his tone throughout...

...Assuredly that makes for a sufficient connection between the rifle and the assassination...

...The sworn testimony heard by the Commission is quite clear that there was no coke bottle...

...Sauvage, however, tries to construct an alibi out of a brief encounter between Oswald and a Dallas police officer in the second-floor lunchroom of the Texas Schoolbook Depository Building within minutes after the assassination...

...And these slight imperfections are outweighed, in his mind, by my "tone...

...He told the man who drove him that he was going to get some curtain rods...

...Very true, but nobody, as far as I know, has ever contested—I certainly did not—that Oswald went to the rooming house...

...Even today, the farthest he will go is to admit that "the interrogation of Marina Oswald, and the Commission's treatment of her testimony, are not the high points of its activities and its services...

...Of course, the possibility that someone else lifted Oswald's rifle and used it is not excluded, but a possibility is not evidence, it is not even, in these circumstances, a basis for surmise...

...I am shocked that for two-and-ahalf years he has found no occasion for criticism in any tone...

...Marina Oswald...

...On these quite reasonable assumptions the timing comes out very nicely indeed...

...Well, the rifle the Dallas police found there was owned by Oswald...

...She said "No...

...I did not see, however, and I still do not see, any reason for doing so...

...Edgar Hoover's observation), though "disassembled" (the Warren Report's speculation), left no oil-stains inside the bag...

...I do not call anybody an assassin...

...and it assumed that the officer, who had to find his way, as he said, through some 500-600 hundred people into a strange building, where his first step was to ask how to get upstairs, was going partly at a walk, partly at a trot, rather than at a headlong, unbroken run...

...He makes some "assumptions," which he believes "quite reasonable," implying for instance that Baker must have lost some time in that "strange building, where his first step was to ask how to get upstairs.' It happens, however, that according to both, Roy Truly, the Depository manager, immediately offered to lead Baker...

...But I was provoked to ask this question, not because Mr...

...No single bit would, to be sure...

...Sauvage's concluding lines in his reply to me...

...Oswald's trip to his wife's home, where the rifle had been kept, the night before the assassination was, I repeat, unusual...

...Earlene Roberts, the housekeeper, saw Oswald "zipping up'- a jacket when he left...

...As I was saying By Leo Sauvage I AM GLAD that Professor Bickel has made up his mind to stop going "easy" on me and has brought himself to reveal a new "astonishing example of Mr...

...The young widow of Lee Oswald,' the story said, "has accepted as a fact that her husband killed President John F Kennedy...

...And then, on February 6, at the end of Marina's four days of secret testimony, the chairman of the Presidential Commission, U.S...

...Again, the Dallas police could possibly have planted Oswald's rifle rather than finding it, but in the absence of some evidence, any evidence pointing to such extraordinary action on the part of the police, this also is a possibility that must be discounted in favor of the probability of normal, if sometimes distraught, pressured and not overly skillful, police action...

...The Commission timed the officer's trip into the building and Oswald's trip downstairs with a stop watch...

...By another explanation one means a good bit more than the idle ventilation of utterly unsubstantiated possibilities...

...But the entire body of this evidence, unless explained in some other fashion, ties Oswald inexorably to the crime...

...Let's say there is a possibility, in spite of all this, that Oswald brought the rifle into the Texas School Book Depository and left it behind there...

...Bickel further insists his interpretation of Oswald's trip to his wife's home, the night before the assassination, despite Marina's startling testimony quoted in the Report (startling because, giving an unwittingly repulsive insight into her own character, it sounds exceptionally true...

...Professor Bickel is shocked by my "tone...

...Professor Bickel does...

...Well, I may have much to learn from Professor Bickel concerning the various possible uses of the English language...

...I sure didn't," and maintained her categorical "No" when assistant counsel Joseph Ball repeatedly asked her whether she had seen a revolver on Oswald, or even whether she had ever seen a revolver in his room...

...Was a rifle left behind in the Schoolbook Depository Building by Oswald...

...I prefer not to...

...Neither did the Chief Justice disclose by whom, in what form and from which sources "the facts presented to her" were presented to her...

...had yet released the slightest evidence supporting the loud but unsubstantiated claims of Dallas officials Wade, Fritz or Curry...

...Sauvage won't accept it, and I don't suppose there is anything I can say that will make him accept it...

...As the professor states, "a possibility is not evidence," and I repeat here what apparently has to be repeated again and again in the Oswald affair as it was in that other Affair, years ago, in France: The burden of the proof falls on the accuser...

...It is therefore up to him to produce evidence, not "idle ventilation of utterly unsubstantiated possibilities...

...I don't suppose he was the world's most rational, calm, deliberate witness on that last day of his life...

...The very next day, January 27, the Warren Commission announced in Washington that Marina Oswald would be the first witness to appear before it...

...Instead, on January 8, the wire services spread throughout the world a story attributed to the "business adviser" Marina Oswald had somehow acquired while being in the "protective custody" of the Secret Service...

...By January 8, 1964, no official agency in the U.S...

...I say in my article that whatever else the Commission may or may not have established, and however important the questions it has unfortunately left open, it nevertheless satisfactorily tied Oswald himself to the assassination...

...Thus, abandoning all pretense of having valid arguments to submit to a doubting world, the United States offered instead a crude exhibition of Soviet-style propaganda made all the more intolerable by a dash of Hollywood syrup...

...Why "so-called...

...Sauvage's indiscriminate abuse" which he "forbore" from quoting in his Commentary article...

...Oswald was not only seen in the Schoolbook Depository Building, but at the relevant time and in the relevant place in the building, and he left other traces there...

...3076 (Patrolman Baker's affidavit of September 23, 1964, with the hand-written words "drinking a Coke" crossed out...

...Perhaps some of his Commentary readers will ask him at least how he can label an issue "peripheral" when it admits but one of two answers: Either the FBI was unable to find a 12" x 9" clipboard in a place which was supposed to have been searched with a fine tooth-comb, in which case nobody has the right to invoke against Oswald the argument that the FBI found no evidence against anybody else...

...I forbore, for example, from quoting this astonishing example of Sauvage's indiscriminate abuse: "For weeks the world waited for the United States to account for the Dallas investigation," by producing acceptable proof of Oswald's guilt...

...The ballistics evidence goes not only to the whole bullet found in Parkland Hospital, about which some legitimate questions can be raised (although the issue, it seems to me, is only whether this bullet hit President Kennedy or Governor Connally, not whether it played any role at all in the assassination), but also to fragments of another bullet found in the Presidential limousine...

...But it is a dangerous delusion to jump to the conspiratorial hypothesis on the basis of no evidence other than that it proved the correct hypothesis in the Dreyfus case...

...I must add, however, that Sauvage has the Commission making the officer walk throughout the reconstruction...

...But there is corroborating evidence that he did in fact go to his rooming house, and the Dallas police took the revolver from him-that's what I meant by red-handed-when they arrested him...

...Once again, however, my "tone" is of no importance, for this is not a literary discussion...

...Professor Bickel also charges that I have spent "inordinate time and space on such peripheral issues as, for example, the so-called clipboard mystery...

...It assumed that Oswald did not run, but walked-presumably in an effort not to attract too much attention to himself...

...The interrogation of Marina Oswald, and the Commission's treatment of her testimony are not the high points of its activities and its services, but Mr...

...Chief Justice Earl Warren, appeared before the press to comment publicly on that secret testimony...

...But on page 134 the Report rejected the same testimony, on the same point, because "the disassembled rifle was too long to be carried in this manner...

...Sauvage's reply shakes this statement...

...It had been kept in a place to which Oswald had access and to which he made a special trip the night before the assassination, and there is not a shred of evidence connecting the rifle to anyone else...

...But the Warren Commission began by hearing Mrs...

...I did wonder, in my article, "why an otherwise responsible newspaperman would wish to go to such lengths in order to avoid facing up to so much of the truth as we can be fairly confident we know...

...If the clipboard episode is not a mystery to the professor, I would have liked to hear his explanation...

...or the clipboard was placed there after the search, in order, as the Warren Report accepts it in its chapter on "The Assassin," to provide "additional testimony linking Oswald with the point from which the shots were fired.' What else is there in the "entire body" of evidence which, according to Mr...

...Finally, let me say that I did not wholly fail to appreciate the drama of Mr...

...The Chief Justice still did not disclose on what basis Captain Fritz had trumpeted from Dallas—and the F B I had leaked from Washington—that the case against Oswald was indeed "a cinch...

...and because on the basis, quite simply and solely, of a sophomoric estimate of what the average segregationist might have expected John Kennedy's future racial policy to be, Sauvage indulges his desire for symmetrical history, offering the reader of his book the fantasy that the assassination was the work of a racist conspiracy...

...Oswald was in the habit of going home only for weekends...

...Professor Bickel, naturally, skirts my questions concerning Oswald's alibi...

...Oswald, Mr...

...We are arguing about the revolver, professor, not the house...

...I see from his reaction ("Professor Bickel and the Warren Commission," NL, November 7) that I have annoyed him, as I feared I might...

...I irritated Sauvage by remarking in my article that, after all, Oswald was caught red-handed with his revolver...

...Sauvage spends inordinate time and space on such peripheral issues as, for example, the so-called clipboard mystery, but because he is able to bring himself to say flatly that he finds "nothing to show that Oswald was the assassin of President Kennedy...

...Actually, as I read the testimony, the reconstruction was at a walk outside the building, to allow for the crowd that was present on the day of the assassination, but at a trot inside the building...

...On January 26, Marina herself was brought by four Secret Service men to a Dallas TV studio, where she declared in front of the cameras: "I don't want to believe, but I have to watch facts, and facts tell me that Lee shot Kennedy...

...He suggests that Dreyfus would still be rotting on Devil's Island had I rather than Emile Zola been the last resort of his defenders in Paris, in 1898...

...Actually, I went easy on Mr...

...This is indeed what the Warren Report implies on page 135, on the basis of Wesley Frazier's testimony...

...He did return the next morning with a package, and while in the estimate of the witnesses who saw it, it did not seem long enough to contain the disassembled rifle, it was an unusual package, which Oswald carried as one would carry such a package if it did contain a disassembled rifle...

...As for being "caught red-handed" in the cinema, Bickel admits that "nobody testified very clearly to the exact sequence of events during the scuffle that attended the arrest...

...Sauvage has one other bone to pick with me...

...What matters, in this case, is whether or not the widow of the slain suspect performed the part I said she played...

...This impressively shows that what Oswald had on his mind that night was neither the obsessive wish to kill President Kennedy nor a practical necessity to disassemble and wrap up the Mannlicher-Carcano...

...I had said "there is not a shred of proof that Oswald picked up a revolver at the rooming house...

...Nobody testified very clearly to the exact sequence of events during the scuffle that attended the arrest, but again, one has to gratuitously impute conspiratorial motives to the Dallas police and assume that they produced the revolver out of thin air, in order to cast doubt on Oswald's reported admission...

...I willingly admit that I could have expressed my reaction more diplomatically...

...She stated," Warren said, "that while she did not like to believe her husband killed President Kennedy, the facts presented to her since the assassination would not permit her to reach any other conclusion...

...Sauvage's way of dealing with all this evidence is to take each single bit of it and ask whether it would suffice to send a man to the chair...

...Bickel does not like the way I talk about Marina's part in the Oswald affair, as indeed he does not like my "tone throughout...

...Bickel answers "there is corroborating evidence that he did in fact go to his rooming house...

...The lesson of the Dreyfus case is unquestionably that justice sometimes miscarries, and that conspiracies to help it do so are not unknown in the most civilized of societies...

...Bickel finally takes comfort in the information that Oswald carried the package "as one would carry such a package if it did contain a disassembled rifle...

...Bickel, "ties Oswald inexorably to the crime...

...Sauvage thinks, could not have got down there from the sixth floor in time to meet the officer just as the latter was running past the lunchroom on his way upstairs...

...This was one of the stories coming out of Dallas in those awful, disordered first days...

...That's good company even to be excluded from...

...There were no curtain rods, and no indication that Oswald had any need for curtain rods...

...Well, I don't know why Oswald denied owning the rifle...

...He wants to know why I believe Oswald's reported admission to the Dallas police that he went to his rooming house and picked up a revolver he owned, when during the same interrogation by the Dallas police Oswald steadfastly denied ownership of his rifle...

...All the Chief Justice did was repeat officially, and almost in the same language, what Marina Oswald had already announced on television: her conclusion" that her dead husband was guilty...

...Nothing in Mr...

...PERSPECTIVES Leo Sauvage and the Warren Commission By Alexander M. Bickel In an article in the October Commentary, in which I was quite critical of the Warren Commission's Report on the assassination of President Kennedy, I reviewed, among other books, Leo Sauvage's The Oswald Affair...

...Bickel believes that the rifle was left behind by Oswald because it was brought in by him in the "unusual package" which the witnesses called a grocery bag...

...Furthermore, Bickel puts all the "500-600 people," estimated to have been in the streets and on the plaza around the building, right into the path of Baker between the curb and the entrance...

...I pass a question Sauvage raises about whether Oswald was holding a coke bottle when seen...

...Sworn" or not "sworn,' will he consider reprinting, together with his explanation, Commission Exhibit No...

...But the lie would make sense if Oswald expected to be seen the following morning carrying a longish package, consistent with both a disassembled rifle and curtain rods...

...He then proceeds to explain that one can say Oswald was "caught red-handed" because to say otherwise would mean to "impute conspiratorial motives to the Dallas police...

...they also described it as much shorter than the package discovered —at an undisclosed moment—in the open space near the window, and the "well-oiled" rifle (J...

...Professor Bickel at least explains what he "meant by red-handed" when he declared that "Oswald was caught red-handed with his revolver...

...Well, I will be more precise...

...Baker said he "ran straight to the entrance," and the famous Altgens photograph taken at the moment of the assassination shows there were perhaps a dozen people on the sidewalk in front of it...