Was Sirhan Sirhan On the Grassy Knoll?
Bethell, Tom
Was Sirhan Sirhan on the Grassy Knoll? by Tom Bethell My most vivid recollection of Jones Harris is that he always wore a straw hat. Even indoors he seemed to prefer to keep it on. That, and...
...They expect all the pieces to fit perfectly -everyone’s recollections to be completely consistenthardly realistic when one is dealing with humans...
...My answer is that he was no crazier than a lot of other people I’ve known...
...The lunch went off smoothly, with the whole topic of the assassination-perhaps on the “don’t-le t ’s- talk-shop” principle - rather pointedly ignored...
...And interviewed in a recent issue of Rolling Stone, Norman Mailer says: “I have come around again to the thesis that Marilyn [Monroe] was murdered...
...After studying this assassination for a long time an analogy finally occurred to me, but I soon found that it did not appeal to conspiracy theorists...
...I remember once having dinner with Jones in the Pontchartrain Hotel in New Orleans and outlining this and other difficulties concerning the “second Oswald” theory...
...Perhaps this is misleading...
...The Realist, a once-amusing monthly put out by Paul Krassner, devotes an entire issue to Mae Brussell’s “Conspiracy Newsletter” (How I do remember her from my Garrison days...
...his chief investigator, Louis Ivon, told me...
...Or vice versa...
...In the end, I believe, the play was lost...
...The conspiratorialist, on the other hand, can perceive a conspiracy on no evidence at all...
...or perhaps Garrison retrieved it...
...Is the earth round or flat...
...He could all but hypnotize his audience...
...Popkin argued that Garrison might have something, so let’s wait and see...
...For them it was precisely the blank puzzle-the tabula rasa_that was so much fun to play around with...
...she was obviously proud of her comprehensive and multi-colored chart-which at first (and subsequent) glance seemed to link everyone together like those flow diagrams showing the hierarchies of power in a complex General Motors...
...He worked for James Garrison 1967-68...
...What, then, could disprove it...
...It was never entirely clear to us in the D.A.’s office whether this was meant to be the same conspiracy as Shaw’s or a separate one...
...Consider another famous case...
...By the end of the evening I think Garrison had more or less convinced everyone that Jenkins was involved...
...whereas the Copernican model-ellipses-is simple...
...It is an important principle of philosophy (although one little valued in assassination conspiracy circles) that the simple explanation should be preferred to the complicated one...
...I was in charge of the files in the case...
...Nowadays, I notice, left-wingers discuss the conspiracy of the Rockefeller family in the same way...
...The paradigmatic base is that of the two rival models of the solar system: do the sun and planets go around the earth...
...Uh-huh,” he said...
...I rented a camera...
...I am inclined to think as a result of this one encounter, and reading his magazine, that Silvers himself is not a conspiratorialist...
...There is no “discovery law” in Louisiana, which means that the prosecution (us) can introduce surprise witnesses into the trial without forewarning...
...I knew all about propinquity because I had done some so-called investigation in that field during an earlier trip to Dallas...
...One day he looked up at me from his city directory and said: “Sooner or later, because people are lazy, you catch them out on propinquity.’’ He also wrote two memos entitled “Time and Propinquity, Factors in Phase TWO,” which are, I should think, classics of their kind...
...Later I read in The New York Times that Jones married a Vanderbilt and at the reception described himself to a Times reporter as a “freelance researcher.’’ That is exactly what he was when I first met him...
...He proceeds to discard the entire “lone assassin” puzzle as a result, and proposes a new one involving a conspiracy...
...True conspiratorialists are on neither the left nor the right, but are united on some other dimension entirely...
...Needless to say, Garrison’s people were not anxious for the man’s eccentricity to emerge in testimony, and thus wanted the defense to have as little time as possible to uncover it...
...It raised eyebrows even in New Orleans...
...It was one of those affairs with a telescopic lens about a foot long...
...Some of the salesmen at the automobile agency had told me they thought Lawrence had mentioned something about having been in New Orleans at some point...
...After hours of driving through the mountains in a snowstorm we reached Charleston...
...Such a unified theory would, of course, not only represent a great breakthrough but would constitute, in a sense, a move in the direction of greater simplicity: instead of four loners, we would have one mastermind...
...Perhaps I should arrest ,him...
...He had arrived in New Orleans on one of his frequent investigative jaunts with Richard Popkin, professor of philosophy at the University of California in San Diego and the author of a highly implausible book called The Second Oswald, which may be briefly summarized as follows: In the course of its investigation, the Warren Commission produced evidence that Lex Harvey Oswald was in two places at once-manifestly impossible...
...Her plan was for us simply to knock on Lawrence’s door and pose as reporters writing a book about the assassination...
...After calling in, my day’s work done, I would usually visit my ultra-conservative friends in Dallas-in their case so ultra that they had at one time been members of the Minutemen...
...Oh,” he said, “I expect I’ll go back to my earlier studies...
...To believe the earth is flat one must also believe that a large number of people are working assiduously to deceive our minds, and it is, in the end, just so much simpler to conclude that this conspiracy does not exist...
...The analogy is that of the jigsaw puzzle...
...Hunt, Paramilitary Organizations, Edgar Eugene Bradley, Jack Lawrence, the Minutemen, LBJ, and many, many others...
...There was another fellow in the Dallas White Russian community called George Bouhe, who knew de Mohrenschildt, who knew Oswald...
...After a day or two of this, Garrison would usually retire into the sauna baths of the New Orleans Athletic Club for several days at a stretch...
...The paranoid personality believes in a conspiracy that is directed against himself...
...He had also worked in the automobile dealership where the “second Oswald” put in one of his ghostly appearances...
...The Round Earth Conspiracy The extraordinary complexity involvedthree Oswalds !-is a fundamen tal characteris tic of conspiratorialist reasoning...
...If one puts these “pieces” together on the hypothesis of a lone assassin, one finds that most of the pieces fit quite well, and only a few pieces have to be discarded (e.g...
...Oswald had been befriended by one...
...Making the Simple Complex First a word about how it all ended for me...
...Jim Garrison, my boss, once saying that we didn’t even have a sample of Jones’ handwriting...
...It’s certainly in my background (by the time I was 16 I had read just about all there was to read about the Loch Ness Monster, for example), and it no doubt contributed to my interest in the Kennedy assassination...
...Both Novel and Dulles smoked pipes, and for some reason, Garrison was amusing himself that day by imagining their photos side by side in the papersboth of them solemnly smoking pipes...
...one might say...
...If he had a rival in this regard it could only have been Mrs...
...Jones replied perfectly seriously, “There were three Oswalds, you know...
...He was quite willing to talk to us, and as he did so his wife dandled a baby in her lap...
...Garrison saw Kennedy assassination conspiracies high and low...
...I know I have spoken here of “left-wing” conspiracies and “rightwing” conspiracies, but this is misleading...
...Oh, he was involved all right,” another would answer with the same confidence with which one might assert that he had brown hair...
...But the point about Watergate is that there was plenty of evidence of conspiracy almost from the word “go...
...When I met her in 1967 she must have been laboring for months, or years, in her Carmel retreat, for she arrived loaded with weighty parcels and packages of documents precariously knotted together with string, and she proceeded to unfold a chart that more than covered my entire desktop...
...I think it must have been around that time that I began to give serious consideration to the possibility that Oswald shot the President all alone and unaided...
...No matter...
...I imagined Silvers might be concerned to know whether his splashy cover story on Garrison was on target-or all wet...
...The plan, therefore, was to get pictures of - Jack Lawrence to show to our witnesses in New Orleans (some of whom were remarkably adept at ma king identifications, especially if they had narcotics or other charges hanging over their heads), and thenwho knows-a third conspiracy to assassinate the President might well be in the works...
...This supposed murder, Mailer believes, night have become “larger in its seeming implications than Watergate”-had it been discovered...
...I have right-wing friends, for example, who discuss their allencompassing conspiracy of the Elders of Zion like that...
...Yet the conspiratorialists will believe anything rather than believe this...
...This disinclination on Jones’ part to write anything down was most uncharacteristic of conspiratorialistsa deliberately convoluted word I have coined-most of whom were, as far as I could tell, highly prolific memo and letter writers...
...I was therefore worried about what to say to Silvers if-as I expected-he leaned across to me during lunch and asked me in a “between you and me” sort of way: does Garrison really have anything or not...
...Perhaps, by saying some thing about my memories of when I was connecte d with this bizarre investigation, I can shed some light on the apparently revived interest in conspiracies...
...That is what is wrong with the Langman-Cockburn critique of the Robert Kennedy assassination as published in Harper’s...
...Absolutely anything that happens tends to confirm their belief that the conspiracy is working...
...And working for Jim Garrison, as I then was, on his ill-fated Kennedy assassination investigation, I met most of the conspiratorialists of those years...
...The argument about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays,” he replied...
...Lawrence told us that he was beginning to suspect a conspiracy...
...True, most of them were under the impression that their phones were tapped-in fact many of them declared that they “kne,w” it-a fact which always struck me as being more wishful thinking than anything else...
...I should explain that I was not entirely looking forward to ths encounter, because by this time Potkin had published in The New York Review a second and, I thought, untenable article, which sought to still the raging press criticism of Garrison on the grounds that Garrison had not yet had his day in court...
...Thus both literacy and illiteracy tend to confirm the theory...
...That was unlikely, we decided, although it remained difficult to discern one scrap of evidence on which Bradley had been charged with the crime of the century...
...Reconstructing the assassination, as the FBI did, by interviewing a large number of people, is like reconstructing a picture by putting together a large number of jigsaw puzzle pieces...
...Vidal, in his discussion of E. Howard Hunt’s writings, demonstrates this tendency...
...He displayed great acumen in wriggling free of both indictments...
...After a while it became clearer and clearer that he had no case at all against Clay Shaw, the man he had charged with conspiracy to assassinate the President (Shaw, incidentally, died of cancer in New Orleans last year...
...Silvers was a perfect gentleman and didn’t ask me any embarrassing questions...
...it was unimportant, after all, compared to the joy of discovering linkages, connections, and overlaps...
...Once, for instance, he not only entertained the dubious proposition that all the residents of the 4900 block of Magazine Street in New Orleans (where Oswald had briefly rented an apartment) were CIA agents, living in “safe houses” owned by the CIA, but even seemed to convince some of his followers for a while that it was true...
...The suggestion that the imperfeq interlocks-whether of ballistics evidence or eyewitness . recollection-in any way imply an assassin other than Sirhan Sirhan is, I feel, remarkably foolish...
...I think I can hear someone saying at this point, “But sometimes there really are conspiracies...
...Uh-huh...
...In this instance Garrison was preparing to put on the stand a witness who, apart from testifying that he had heard Shaw discussing assassinating Kennedy, was under the impression that the government stole into his house from time to time and substituted “dead ringers” for his children, who then spied on him...
...The slaying is that of John Kennedy, and the “link” is alleged by members of something called Assassination Information Bureau, “based in Cambridge, Mass...
...The conspiratorialist, of course, likewise believes in a conspiracy, but the characteris tic feature of his conspiracy is that it benefits the conspirators to the detriment of the nation as a whole...
...Name two people in New Orleans and Garrison could “link’, them...
...All’s well that ends well, however...
...I will cite just one other examplean article by Gore Vidal in the December 13, 1973, issue of The New York Review of Books about the writings of E. Howard Hunt...
...I remember he took us into a back room where he showed us a shelf of blue-colored paperback books of the ‘type put out by very conservative publishing houses...
...To foil the government, he periodically fingerprinted his children...
...I was quite touched that he brought it over for my perusal...
...In the most extreme case- the Fla t-Earther- the conspiracy is trumped up as a means of enabling him to believe what he wants to believe, namely, the existence of a flat earth...
...Two such friends are almost bound to live in the same block, or even know each other...
...Jones Harris, the son of Broadway producer Jed Harris and actress Ruth Gordon, seemed to know personally everyone you had ever heard of in New York, and it was through him that, in swift succession, I had lunch with New York Review editor Robert Silvers, dinner with Norman Mailer, and tea with Lady Jean Campbell, Lord Beaverbrook‘s granddaughter and Norman Mailer’s third wife...
...Lawrence was indeed at home-something I had gambled on...
...In fact, a famous conspiracy trial has just been successfully prosecuted in Washington, D.C...
...If they live at opposite ends of the city, get a list of friends of each...
...In the office I was known by the inappropriate code name of Sam Spade-one of Garrison’s jokes, I think...
...There is, I feel sure, something in the psyche in addition to a love of puzzles that contributes to the conspiratorialist make-up, but perhaps it would be folly to speculate on this...
...Maybe They’re All In It Together Another common feature of conspiratorialist thinking is that their theories are, one way or another, irrefutable...
...Can you imagine the headlines...
...Shortly before the West Virginia trip Salandria came to New Orleans and in front of Garrison’s entire assembled staff-and to their dismay-urged the D.A...
...Usually they would be in the back room-studying city directories...
...Other assassination buffs I know have flying saucers as a second string to their bow...
...An eminently sensible and practical woman, she had brought along an Instamatic camera...
...Nevertheless, I always considered Jones a charming fellow, and he demonstrated the first quality of conspiratorialists that I want to bring out: their love of complexity...
...City directories are indispensable tools for conspiratorialists...
...Reading through all this and other material-some of it by, or dealing with, the same people I knew backin my Garrison days-has brought to mind some of my weird experiences with the Jolly Green Giant, as Garrison was called by friend and foe...
...But typically, the next day Garrison had forgotten all about it...
...Three Gunmen on the Grassy Knoll About this time Jones also introduced me to Lady Jean Campbell, then a New York correspondent for the London Evening Standard, who, shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy, had traveled on investigative expeditions to Dallas with Jones Harris...
...Almost invariably in these cases Garrison would have forgotten all about it anyway and moved on to some other “area”, such as the “involvement” of H.L...
...Ivon, one of the most laconic and non-committal men I have ever met, answered...
...What If Nixon Were “Involved...
...I wasn’t quite sure if I should hide in the laurel bushes and try to peer into the Bouhe dining room, or what...
...The Martin Luther King case has received the attention of Ron Rosenbaum in The Village Voice, in an article devoted primarily to expounding assassination buff Harold Weisberg’s view that James Earl Ray was “framed...
...To accept the simple explanation, he feels, is just simple-mi n de d. Some how conspiracy theorists seem, above all, determined never to be accused of being naive...
...Before leaving D.C...
...Some of them, 1 later heard, automatically relegated me to CIA status...
...I believe so, but I can’t be sure), she came to Washington, where I was then...
...Who Shot Robert Kennedy...
...Because there is no absolute and fixed point in space, it is possible to argue the question...
...A little work with the city directory turned up the fact that Bouhe once lived opposite . . . Jack Ruby...
...The background was this : Jim Garrison was by this time getting hungry for arrests, an appetite which was then being encouraged by a Philadelphia lawyer named Vincent .Salandria...
...That, of course, is all a part of the scenario: “they” did that, too...
...Tell the boss I checked out that lead-nothing to it...
...Gore Vidal gives this impression in his condescending reference to “most Americans being quite at home with the batty killer who acts alone in order to be on television...
...In retrospect, its denouement was enlightening...
...Presto...
...By then he was playing around with another scenario, ths one involving Allen Dulles, who was thought certainly to be “involved...
...The boss was interested...
...Putting Together a New Puzzle In the case of the assassination of President Kennedy there is practically no evidence whatsoever of a conspiracy, and by far the most plausible (and simplest) hypothesis is that a single, unaided assassin-Lee Harvey Oswald-shot the President...
...It delineated in copious detail the relationships among the White Russian community in Dallas...
...of conspirators who (we are led to suppose) did not have the best interests of the United States at heart...
...Sam Spade here,” I said...
...and for those who believe in an all-pervasive CIA conspiracy, the fact that the CIA itself is presently being investigated by government agencies is bound to become an integral part of the conspiracy itself...
...Somewhat presumptuously, I feel, Vidal asks at one point: “Since it is now clear to everyone except perhaps Earl Warren that Oswald was part of a conspiracy, who were his fellow conspirators...
...For a while I kept it in my big filing cabinet along with the files on Lee Harvey Oswald, Clay Shaw, Robert Kennedy (a suspect until his death), the CIA (always known as “the company”), H.L...
...True enough...
...At one point he had himself indicted by the Orleans Parish Grand Jury and charged with the state version of the federal crime...
...So I went to the Bouhe address, and there was the house-opposite the Ruby house...
...Surprisingly, his mother was with us at the table...
...Had two entirely separate gangs opened fire simultaneously in Dealey Plaza...
...Shortly thereafter Garrison did in fact arrest one Edgar Eugene Bradley on the West Coast, charging him with the same crime as Clay Shaw’s-conspiracy to assassinate the President...
...1,000 miles away contemplating arresting him...
...He was certainly sane enough at the time when, shortly after losing interest in the Kennedy affair, he was twice charged with federal crimes...
...Had to be,” a third would add knowingly...
...Later I heard that Garrison and Bradley became good friends, and the D.A...
...How much appeal these arguments have to Bob Silvers, the editor of the journal in which both Vidal’s fairly recent article and Richard Popkin’s “Second Oswald” theory were published, I have no way of knowing...
...He permitted Lady Jean to snap a picture, which came out fine and which was happily not “identified” back in New Orleans...
...I asked...
...Thus, it is argued, the Copernican model is true...
...Mark Lane, the author of Rush to Judgment, was also present...
...Most of the conspiratorialists I knew were not paranoid...
...After one such recuperation he returned to my office with a brief one-act play he had written about a zany king who held court wearing roller skates...
...Somewhat to my surprise, I recently heard from a reliable source that Jones Harris is still at work on assassination theories...
...Clarke’s in New York, where the big event was to meet and lunch with Bob Silvers...
...If two people live near one another, say within four or five blocks, it’s suspicious...
...to go on making more and more arrests before “they” took over the country entirely...
...Garrison, I think, was annoyed by how little notice the press took of the Bradley arrest, and so, like an addict who finds his previous dose insufficient, he demanded more...
...Garrison was in some ways a left-wing ideologist (he used to pride himself, for example, on his refusal to discern a Communist conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination, and he mocked J. Edgar Hoover’s obsession with Communism, saying that Communists were like unicorns, everyone had heard of them but nobody had ever seen one...
...Sure, I said...
...His puzzle has, perhaps, the advantage of not having bad joints, but at the expense of the uieces themselves...
...1 remember having dinner once with Garrison and a few others at a French Quarter restaurant in late 1967...
...However, I couldn’t help reflecting that in his case his ideas were not entirely paranoid...
...Brussell reminded me of Margaret Rutherford playing amateur detective in a British thriller...
...Hunt (whose code name was “Harry Blue”-for “true blue”) in the assassination...
...The link...
...There you have an Oswald-Ruby link based on propinquity...
...It is possible to argue that it is flat and yet maintain an appearance of rationality...
...the conspiratorialist suffers only incidentally as a result of the conspiracy he perceives...
...What were they about...
...And two Jack Rubys,” he added for good measure...
...I am persuaded that most conspiratorialists share this love of puzzles, conundrums, mysteries, and the unexplained...
...Garrison would spend hours poring over the New Orleans phone book, totally absorbed by it...
...But your average conspiratorialist sees little merit in the argument from a standpoint of simplicity...
...That was in 1967 and 1968...
...these books proved to his satisfaction that there was some kind of leftist conspiracy in the United States...
...Vidal’s article makes for amusing reading, but it is clear that he, too, is enmeshed in the nets of conspiratorialism...
...But, unfortunately, the pieces don’t quite fit exactly...
...A Flat-Earther, for instance, is likely to tell you that the moon landings never really took place, that NASA is collaborating with the CIA to deceive the Russians and the American people...
...I did not imagine he would want to go on maneuvering Oswalds and Rubys around in his mind indefinitely...
...Directory Assis tame In assassination circles, one of the main linkage factors is what Garrison loved to call “propinquity...
...Mrs...
...for him it is a personal matter...
...His answer was illuminating...
...Then came the irony I savor to this day...
...and I ended up betraying Garrison to Shaw’s attorneys...
...Lady Jean arrived and we drove off to the mountains in a rented car...
...One fears, however, that, just as Einstein discovered insurmountable obstacles in his efforts to unify the theories of gravity and electromagnetism, the obstacles in Jones’ path will ultimately prove impossible to overcome...
...But the description of the paths followed by the planets if they encircle the earth is very complex...
...My knowledge of how to use it was only approximate, and, as I fiddled about with the contraption trying to make it work, I remember thinking how sorely I lacked the expertise of the “Agency” boys over at Langley whom Garrison was always expatiating on, and who, no doubt, had me in their surveillance at that very moment and were lauglung their heads off...
...That, and the fact that he never would write anything down on paper...
...Garrison had such a vivid imagination that he was the acknowledged master of this type of colloquy...
...What if Walter Jenkins were involved,” Garrison said at one point and then proceeded to elaborate on this scenario...
...Hey, what if so-and-so was involved...
...Nonetheless he was always on good term with conspiracyminded right-wingers, and they with him...
...by Tom Bethell My most vivid recollection of Jones Harris is that he always wore a straw hat...
...Now, seven years later, there seems to be a widespread return to the same vein of conspiracy thinking, mostly dealing with the possibility that one or another of the assassinations in recent years was committed at the instigation Tom Bethell is a writer based in New Orleans...
...the only problem is that the resulting theory starts to look very complicated compared to much simpler alternatives readily at hand...
...Slaying, Watergate Link Claimed,’’ says a headline in an issue of last month’s Dallas Times Herald...
...Mailer’s explication of what the motive of the murderers might have been is as convoluted as the word conspiratorialist...
...Sound familiar...
...The Watergate coverup was a conspiracy, and has probably occasioned the revived interest in conspiracies, just as the “credibility gap”of seven years ago played a part in arousing interest in conspiracies then...
...Mae Brussell, author of the aforesaid “Conspiracy Newsletter,” and one of the more delightful visitors to my cubbyhole office in New Orleans...
...holding up his hands to indicate the space they would fill...
...But paranoia was not their problem...
...Some times I think that this trip to West Virginia was one of the few useful thing I accomplished during my period with Garrison...
...There are bad joints here and there (occasioned by faulty memory as much as anything else), and it is these that the conspiratorialist seizes on...
...As it turned out, my fears were groundless...
...Although most, if not all, of this contradictory evidence was either fleeting observation or from unreliable witnesses, and thus could be dismissed as cases of mistaken identity (it would be surprising if some such evidence did not emerge in the Course of SO wide-ranging and wellpublicized a case), Poplun chose to postulate that there were two Oswalds...
...Ruby was dead by this time, and Bouhe might have been too, for all I knew...
...His pre-trial maneuvering was particularly innovative...
...second Oswald” pieces...
...But I do know that not long after Jones Harris mentioned his “Three Oswald, Two Ruby” theory, he took me to lunch at P.J...
...It was quite clear to Jean Campbell and myself that his “in~~lvementi”n the assassination was non-existent...
...There really was a reckless D.A...
...Garrison himself (who in some ways was not a typical conspiratorialist: he was too frivolous about it all and sometimes had a most atypical sense of humor about his theories) was a master linker-upper, perhaps the best in the business...
...Today he is doing well as a defense attorney, and I’m sure that the whole subject of assassinations has completely faded from his mind...
...His plan was to win a speedy acquittal for himself in a compliant state court and then claim “double jeopardy’’ when the federal trial began...
...Garrison, I think, was not entirely pleased with my negative report, but his staff, which was beginning to get fed up with filing charges against unknown individuals in various parts of the country, was delighted...
...It was he who brought it up, not us...
...of its members, a geologist named George de Mohrenschldt-suspicious ! And don’t forget Oswald’s wife was Russian...
...The Multi-Colored Link-Up Test Turning quickly away from psychiatry, I must now say something about the conspiratorialist’s love of links and connections...
...Garrison’s plan was to have Dulles arrested along with Gordon Novel, a former employee of Garrison’s who had absconded with some potentially damaging evidence against his former boss...
...Awkward fact that, because much of the diary is illiterate...
...Harper’s inquires on its cover, and the accompanying article by Betsy Langman and Alexander Cockburn suggests that the answer may not be just old Sirhan Sirhan...
...Eventually I gave up on the whole thing and phoned New Orleans collect...
...Jones Harris, rather than drop back down to the simple and perhaps rather “naive” hypothesis of one Oswald, tries to rescue the shaky two-Oswald theory by adding on another Oswald...
...My mouth must have fallen open...
...I can only say that in my case, at the time in which I was’ prepared to believe in an inimical and anonymous “they” who clandestinely ran the country, I was, for various reasons, frustrated in my endeavors...
...would visit him on his frequent peregrinations to the West Coast-a curious turn of events, but c’est la vie...
...staying, and we went off together on our rather hilarious (as it now seems) trip to West Virginia in fruitless search of Kennedy’s killers...
...A lot of people have asked me if I think Garrison was crazy...
...Moreover, in the end all were prepared to agree that the spectral “they” who controlled the nation were inimical to left and right alike...
...Jones Harris was one who remains in my mind...
...When I discovered that Garrison was indeed planning to put this man on the witness stand (as he in fact did, indicating better than anything else the shortcomings of his case), I decided that the time had come to turn the necessary information over to Shaw...
...A large and imposing woman, she sat at the opposite end of the table from Garrison...
...I was dispatched to West Virginia to interviewand above all to photographone Jack Lawrence, who had been in Dallas on the day of the assassination...
...On that score, I remember D.A...
...If they live closer, they are “linked...
...A week or two after having tea with her and Jones Harris in her East Side apartment (was there some arcane Shakespearean talk over tea...
...At one point he argues that Arthur Bremer’s diary was not written by Bremer because it is too literate...
...In ths instance the criterion of simplicity acts as a final court of appeal in the establishment of truth...
...his puzzle is, in reality, a blank, to be filled in largely by his own imagination...
...Lawrence had left work early on the morning of the assassination-he told the FBI he had gone home to rest-and had even parked his car somewhere in the area of the nowinfamous “grassy knoll” bordering Dealey Plaza...
...In 1973 he ran again for reelection as D.A., but narrowly lost, mainly because he didn’t bother to campaign...
...How well I do remember the interminable conversations about whether this or that person was “involved...
...This is worth mentioning because it brings out another aspect of conspiratorialism: normal ideological labels do not apply to true conspiracy believers...
...I once went to a lecture given by a member of the Flat Earth Society, and it was surprising how similar his reasoning was to that of the various conspiracy theorists I have known...
...When conspiracy discussions really got going, the ideological bent of the participants was cheerfully overlooked...
...Linking people together is the very essence of the conspiratorialist’s work...
...For my perfidy I was charged by Garrison with “unauthorized use of movable goods,” a charge that was never brought to trial and has since been dropped...
...Would I “check out” this link...
...Oh, Jim, I think that’s a wonderful idea,” his mother said...
...Be that as it may, my jigsaw puzzle analogy made little headway with Jim Garrison and the conspiratorialists in his entourage...
...He is reported to be-wrestling with a sort of “unified field” theory, linking most of the assassinations of recent years...
...Some time after this meeting with Jones, I asked him what he was going to do when the Kennedy assassination mystery began to pall on him...
...I have mentioned paranoia...
...I promptly fell into disfavor with Jones Harris and other conspiratorialists...
...Philosophers like to point out that any belief, more or less, can be sustained if the believa is willing to encrust his belief with enough assumptions...
Vol. 7 • March 1975 • No. 1
