Earl Warren: On the Mob's Payroll
Bethell, Tom
Earl Warren: On the Mob's Payroll by Tom Bethell A major conclusion of They’ve Killed the President!,“ by Robert Sam Anson, and The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond,** edited by Peter...
...and beyond doubt Lyndon Johnson, the 36th President of the United States,” and the book is favorably reviewed on the front cover of the Times Book Review...
...What distresses me about Anson’s book is that he seems to be making a conscious effort to capitalize on this distrust, and to extend it further to the Kennedy assassination...
...Grand Jury testimony is secret to protect innocent parties, of course, but why did Garrison have to choose a secret forum in which to conduct what may well have been the most important part of his investigation...
...I can well remember discussions with Louis Ivon, Garrison’s chief investigator, and James Alcock, his chief tiial assistant...
...In 1975, however, Anson published the picture of Oswald once again, raising some of the same criticisms (and one or two new ones), without any mention of the Schiller photograph...
...cried Mark Lane, who has made a career for himself by using Warren Commission material to accuse the Warren Commission of covering up the truth about the assassination...
...Anson, naturally, finds that the CIA and the Mafia had such a motive...
...Here’s what set me off on this...
...Let us see how he proceeds...
...It was generally agreed that all he had done was discredit criticism of the Warren Commissionergo, he must have done so on purpose...
...Disturbingly enough, there seems to have been a kind of intellectual degradation in some quarters recently, which not only permits but even seems to encourage this dismal thinking...
...It is very misleading, and, I think, dishonest...
...I hereby invite Mark Lane and Robert Sam Anson to look into the matter...
...Anson writes: “Behind him and to his right, Zapruder heard an awful roar and felt a bullet whistle past his right ear...
...Now, Garrison had used the very same metaphor, and when I heard Schweiker say it I felt sure that he had been reading Rush to Judgment, the Whitewash series, and other items in the assassination liturgy...
...By now, the conspiracy has grown considerably, of course, in the eyes of the conspiratorialists...
...There were, of course, defects to t h e Warren Commission’s investigation-defects which Edward Jay Epstein spelled out as effectively as anyone in his book Inquest...
...Mark Lane tells the story of a recent appearance at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana...
...Not a bit of it...
...In recent years, what with Watergate and published accounts of wrongdoing by the CIA and the FBI, there has been a spreading distrust of the government, leadership and institutions of the United States...
...Dan Rather sensibly made this point at the end of the recent two-part study by CBS on the Kennedy assassination...
...William Turner’s Rampart’s article was published before the Shaw trial, and presents Garrison’s investigation in positively glowing light...
...It succeeded brilliantly in New Orleans...
...Oh no, Gustavson said in effect, although not in these words, we’re the good guys...
...Get it...
...When Lane asked why the dissenter didn’t want a new congressional investigation, the student replied: ‘I don’t trust Congress.’ ” There’s Schweiker’s problem right there...
...his framers (because many conspiracy theorists have a very sentimental attachment to the notion that Oswald was entirely innocent...
...cried Jim Garrison, the district attorney of Orleans Parish, who launched a new investigation of his own, an investigation predicated upon the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald spent the summer of 1963 in New Orleans and may have there made acquaintances who assisted him in shooting the President...
...He had clearly become an assassination buff, but my fellow-feeling for the man was based on a belief that he probably did not yet realize what a tough nut the Warren Report was, nor how numerous and sincere had been the attempts so far to destroy it...
...This was certainly news to me...
...Back in October Schweiker had remarked in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that the Warren Report is “like a house of cards, it’s going to collapse...
...How are they doing?’ One day after about the fifth time I asked the director’s executive asistant, why this interest...
...Today, some sectors of this community seem to be waving the white flag of surrender...
...And, admittedly, it remains a bare possibility that such a connection could still be revealed...
...One day I even felt sufficiently Gurious about his investigation to go up to Capitol Hill to talk to one of his aides...
...The two pieces about the Garrison investigation, for example, could hardly have been worse chosen...
...They’re professional intelligence people, and by definition professional intelhgence people are liars...
...I don’t know whether this charge has yet been made, but I can see how it might be, considering that Garrison interrogated Marina Oswald, Ruth Paine, John Rene Heindel, and other key witnesses in the secrecy of the Grand Jury, and their testimony has never been made public...
...But this doesn’t bother Anson...
...This did nothing to help our case against Clay Shaw, which was based on a conspiracy with Oswald...
...What is one to think when Power Shift, a work of almost fathomless vulgarity by Kirkpatrick Sale, discusses the Kennedy assassination in such terms as “Cui bono Dallas...
...But subsequent interviews with other former cadets suggested that Oswald was not in the class at the time Ferrie instructed it, and not one former cadet could recall that Ferrie and Oswald knew one another...
...Further investigations into these matters are needed, Wicker believes, “because so much doubt exists in the public mind in each case...
...that incriminates Lee Harvey Oswald...
...He paused and thought for a minute...
...Tom Bethell is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...He describes Abraham Zapruder, who filmed the assassination with an 8 mm...
...Anson gives us, instead, a chapterful of nudges and insinuations-the overall effect being to make the unwary reader very suspicious of the probity of the government’s inquiry...
...Not much chance o‘f anything...
...cried perhaps 20 other conspiracy-see kers...
...and because, until these doubts are substantially laid to rest, lurid suspicions of coverup, c o l l u s i o n , conspiracy, corrup tion-even treason- will cont inue to poison political life and-limit confidence in the integrity, of government...
...But there’s no problem there, reasons the conspiratoridist, because if there was a conspiracy (and this really is how these people think) and these powerfully placed people didn’t point out the conspiracy, it must have been because they were a part of it...
...Anti-authoritarians no doubt exist in Russia, too, but we are not likely to hear from them...
...The lies, the cover-ups and the footnoted innuendos have come from t h e c r i t i c s of .the Warren Co m m is ion-those assassinologists and conspiratorialists who have perceived an ever-enlarging . conspiracy spreading outwards like an ugly stain from the events in Dallas on November 22, 1963...
...Evidently there was, and still is, something highly dissatisfying to the public mind about,these.findings, so that wit& two years a number of books began to appear challenging them...
...The White Flag But this does not mean that we should allow our critical standards to be lowered in considering the evidence about the assassination, or in considering some of Anson’s absurd theoriese...
...Black is white, white is black...
...Garrison’s methods where so outrageous, his assertions so preposterous, that reasonable people not only wanted to have nothing to do with them, but were repelled by the case which seemed to have started it all...
...So the conspiracy continued, and grew larger...
...That was four months ago...
...No credible evidence ever existed that any two of Garrison’s three alleged conspirators even knew one another...
...Yes, we’ll make a note about trying to get the Marina Oswald and Ruth Paine testimony from the Orleans Parish Grand Jury...
...He says of the Garrison investigation that “never before had any authorities taken seriously the notion of a conspiracy in the assassination...
...CBS, NBC, and The New York Times spent a small fortune, but they ‘ didn’t come up with a damn thing...
...g. accounts by James Kirkwood and Edward Jay Epstein-one cannot but suspect that the motive of the editors is deliberately to present slanted material-the “slant” being, again, to hint that Garrison was mixed up with the Mafia and may have been, all along, their lackey...
...The conspiracy is going to get bigger and bigger, I thought...
...What Anson does is to present Ruby’s unsavory connections in such a way as to hint, suggest, slyly nudge the reader in the ribs...
...They would deny it...
...Seemingly all the hands in the hall went up...
...You realize what the conspiracy theorists will say...
...The 14-minute tape was released, and Ruby reiterated that there had been no conspiracy, he had not known Oswald, no one had told him that Oswald was about to be moved from the basement, and, as Ruby reflected, if he hadn’t taken an illegal turn as he drove downtown, “I would never have met this fate, because the difference in meeting this fate was 30 seconds one way or the other...
...He told me that a few years ago the then-CIA director Richard Helms used to hold morning meetings, and “this was back during the Garrison trial, and the Director expressed a great deal of concern regarding the trial...
...We are therefore supposed to put these two points together in our minds in some way-Warren Commission sloppiness and government wrongdoing-and come up with the conclusion that Kennedy was assassinated by elements within his own government...
...Cover-up...
...Mafia Lackey I think the time has come to say that the Warren Report, in its central conclusions about Oswald and Ruby (both acted alone) will stand up, and that this central core of the report can more aptly be compared to a rock than to a house of cards (and a rock upon which opportunists have founder ed) . As I say, most of the new researchers tend to have no idea of the vast amount of inquiry that has already gone into this, nor of the great journalistic triumph it would be for one of the news organizations to establish a conspiracy...
...Well yes, we’re getting to see the classified material in the National Archives, but we can’t copy it...
...The Warren Commission failed to establish, or assert, a conspiracy...
...and today] nothing is impossible, no undertaking unthinkable...
...Garrison, too, could very well be accused of covering up” the truth, just as the Warren Commission was...
...He thought that the Report and its conclusions would quickly fade away and disappear without a trace once he raised his voice, but he never came close to challenging its conclusions...
...Yes, you could say Senator Schweiker has become one of the buffs...
...And what were the circumstances of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy...
...As a result of this and other evidence (or, rather, lack thereof), I am convinced that Ferrie and Oswald never knew one another...
...At first, superficially, it may appear to be nothing more than a desire to avoid seeming naive...
...In these books there was no hint that the Commission’s work had been so extensive...
...The investigation was rushed to completion before the 1964 election, and it is undoubtedly true to say that the Commission did not pursue some leads very vigorously-notably the alarming possibility that Oswald, at some point, either before, during, or after his visit to Russia, might have had some minor connection with an intelligence agency...
...But ultimately he discredits them, so he, too, is part of the conspiracy...
...Here’s what Garrison had said at the beginning of his investigation: “The key to the whole case is through the looking glass...
...The footnoted innuendo, until Anson’s book came out, had been Mark Lane’s specialty, but Anson has now also mastered the technique...
...The Warren Commission did a thorough job of investigating Ruby’s rather unedifying background and associations, but could find no evidence suggesting a conspiracy...
...That seems like a good idea...
...Actually, I have a fellow-feeling for Schweiker, as I am sure Jim Garrison must also...
...further undermine the credibility of our institutions...
...Earl Warren: On the Mob's Payroll by Tom Bethell A major conclusion of They’ve Killed the President!,“ by Robert Sam Anson, and The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond,** edited by Peter Dale Scott, Paul H. Hoch, and Russell Statler, two new books dealing with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, is that the investigation should be reopened...
...I don’t want to be cryptic, but that’s the way it is...
...Well, you’ll have to talk to the subcommittee about all the interoffice memos and so on being released, too...
...A confluence of forces, including organizkd crime (especially its Southern branch), the defense industry (especially its Texas components), the oil industry...
...That its intelligence agencies have spied on thousands of citizens, opened their mail, monitored their conversations, probed their private lives...
...And guys like Ferrie had been engaged in the Bay of Pigs and they didn’t want this kind of thing surfacing...
...A Matter of 30 Seconds . In fact, even some assassination conspiracy theorists don’t believe there was anything more than met the eye to the Ruby episode...
...Yes, it will probably all be made public in the long run...
...Critics suggested that the shadows on Oswald’s face and on the ground did not look right...
...And don’t forget the news media...
...Now comes the new congressional investigation by Senator Richard F. Schweiker of Pennsylvania, who heads a subcommittee of Senator Frhk ‘Church’s Select Committee to investigate intelligence activities...
...Here is another example, illustrating how the techniques currently being used by the Warren Commission critics are reminiscent of the techniques used by Joe McCarthy: “One way or another, ” Anson writes, “all the major figures connected to the assassination are also linked to the Agency and the mob...
...Oh, you can argue it differently in court,” Garrison said magnanimously, with a wave of the hand...
...I talked to Troy Gustavson, Schweiker’s aide...
...What are we to think, for instance, when David Anderson, who is an editor of theNew York Times magazine, is not restrained, in reviewing Anson’s book, from making the following remarkably misleading comment in the New York Times Book Review: “It adds up to a powerful piece of journalistic scholarship that can only prove helpful to a confused public...
...As is by now perhaps well known, Garrison did nothing to disturb the Warren Commission’s central findings...
...And in fact it is highly suggestive that its central conclusionsthat Oswald and Ruby acted alone-have stood up under so much scr’utiny and so much attack...
...What astounded (and appalled) us was that we were unable to find one person in New Orleans who had known Oswald and who had not been interviewed by the FBI, and interviewed within about a week of the assassination...
...What makes it so hard to know what happened is that you’re struggling to find the real focus in the mirror...
...The FBI did establish that Oswald had been in a Civil Air Patrol unit at approximately the same time as Ferrie was instructing that unit, when Oswald was about 15 years old...
...this was hardly unusual for a nightclub owner in Dallas...
...So the conspiracy is enlarged...
...Then came the Rockefeller Commission to investigate the CIA, which ‘ would also investigate ‘‘posgble CIA involvement in %he assassination of President Kennedy...
...by conundrumpuzzlers, flying saucerites, Loch Ness monstrosities, Bermuda triangulators...
...He says that he only wants to get at the truth, but deep down you get the feeling that his real motive is to undermine the credibility of our institutions still further...
...He seemed to think the jeering would come from the Warren Commission’s supporters...
...How does he feel about it now...
...But in his testimony before the Warren Commission, Zapruder merely said that the shots sounded as though they came from behind him...
...I asked Schweiker’s aide...
...In fact, the details of the timing of Ruby’s arrival in the basement where he shot Oswald made it all but impossible that he was in collusion with anyone...
...But it is only in our society (the one they rail against) that these individuals are given such freedom and such platforms from which to proclaim their views...
...Another reported associate is Clay Shaw, like Ferrie an identified agent...
...But the show had to go on, so to speak, and so Clay Shaw was brought to trial and prosecuted with testimony that was no doubt perjured, and eventually acquitted...
...In response to this criticism, Lawrence Schiller and Richard Warren Lewis, the authors of The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report, returned to the same location and photographed John Cappell there, on March 30, 1967...
...One of his close friends in New Orleans is David Ferrie, an identified agent who also works for the mob...
...or the notion that one can make any progress in “solvmg” the assassination by finding out who had a “motive” for killing Kennedy...
...Today many of the worst suspicions have become fact...
...It includes now Garrison, his staff, and Anson further implies, some Mafia henchmen who were no doubt, messengers in this between the CIA and their puppet, Garrison...
...What is one to think when an article by Milton Viorst outlines a vague, woolly, paranoid CIA-MafiaKennedy assassination theory reminiscent of Anson’s, and Viorst, it turns out, is not some college sophomore but the chairman of the board of directors of the Fund for Investigative Journalism...
...I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that,” he said...
...a good deal of “doublethink,” is necessary to support this position, but needless to say the theorists are up to it...
...Logic is not Anson’s strong suit...
...Now, in the first place, neither Garrison, nor anyone else ever established that David Ferrie was a “close friend” of Lee Harvey Oswald...
...I would say that that statement is now tempered by the realities of what we’ve seen...
...Details didn’t concern him...
...Time magazine and Newsweek no doubt don’t want to seem naive, either, and yet they have consistently repudiated a Kennedy assassination conspiracy (and commendably so, in view of the pressures they are under to “play up” to public opinion), as have the new departments of The Washington Post and The New York Times...
...The theory here seems to be that if a lie is told often enough, people will eventually believe it...
...But what about Ferrie and Shaw having been “identified” as agents...
...He was staying up late, probably barricading himself in bed with the Warren Report’s 26 volumes, underlining, dog-earing pages, threading through the maze, turning back, worrying, never quite arriving at the center, at that House of Cards...
...Garrison did allege that Lee Harvey Gswald had entered into a conspiracy with two men, David ‘Ferrie and Clay Shaw, and after Ferrie and Oswald were both dead Shaw was charged with conspiracy to assassinate the President...
...A careful and detailed examination of this phenomenon might be worth undertaking, although, lest this seem like a call for one more investigation, perhaps it might be prudent to add that this examination could well be left to the psychiatrists, and confined to the privacy of their offices...
...I think it can honestly be said that Garrison did not turn up one scrap of information relevant to the assassination not already known to the FBI or Warren Commission...
...But there is more to...
...There is, I suggest, a disingenuous element in some of the recent attacks on the Warren Report, and Robert Sam Anson’s book seems to fall into this category...
...Cryptic...
...It is a collection of material most of which has been previously published...
...By definition, also, then, we have an allegation that logically cannot be refuted...
...They’re a part of it, too...
...Run It Down the Flagpole Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the unfolding and apparently neverending Kennedy assassination saga is that the subject does seem,to attract those iridividualsT&d there kem to be more and ‘more of .them every year-who give every impression of being driven by a markedly destructive urge: the Allard Lowensteins, the Tom Wickers, the Mark Lanes, the Robert Sam Ansons...
...But here they are encouraged to speak up, and the climate of opinion recently has been such as to permit a confusion between these negative anti-authoritarians and those who have more constructively exposed wrongdoing...
...So the media barons, the captains of indus&ry, they were all clearly a part of the oonspiracy...
...Behind Zapruder, and to his right, was the grassy knoll...
...At the time of Garrison’s investigation, and since, several news organizations spent enormous sums of money, and endless mm hours, on the Kennedy assassination...
...Years back...
...Soon enough, the conspiratorialists got to work: Cover-up...
...he was acquitted two years later, and all serious, or even half-way serious, students of the case agree that Shaw was, iri fact, innocent...
...he said nothing about feeling a bullet whistling past his ear...
...The Washington Monthly, March 1975), the subject didn’t seem to merit much more than ridicule, but in the last year so many lies have been told, so many “cover-ups” have been perpetrated, so many innuendos have been “documented” with footnotes, and we have, in some quarters, witnessed spch a degradation of our intellectual life, that the time...
...has clearly come to drag the whole thing out into as public a forum as possible...
...Ferrie himself denied knowing Oswald...
...And David Belin, a former staff lawyer for the Warren Commission, was counsel to the Rockefeller Commission...
...There are some pieces with pretensions to scholarship, although in many instances it is a very biased, distorted, polemical scholarship...
...I called up Marchetti to find out how he got hold of the information that Shaw and Ferrie were “agents...
...Anson knows that the read has been, as it were, softened up by the Watergate and CIA scandals, and so now he can be dealt this dishonest hand, too, and the reader probably won’t know the difference...
...The revelation, when it came, as it slowly but surely did, was privately demoralizing to Garrison’s staff...
...The disingenuous conspiratorialist has encouraged this confusion, and the unprecedented freedom within the society he so deplores has been his principalally...
...We seem to be expected to lower our critical standards to do this...
...And there were all these coincidences...
...Good luck to Senator Schweiker...
...If the investigations continue, and with each new investigation, the new investigators themselves are subsumed into the conspiracy, the conspiracy thus getting larger and larger, I think it will finally become clear that what we are dealing with here is not merely an attack on the Warren Commission...
...He wants to link Oswald to the CIA, and he is willing to use Ferrie and Clay Shaw to do it, even though he has already insinuated that Garrison’s investigation was “disinformation” designed to sabotage the conspiracy seekers...
...It took me back in time to see some of the Warren Commission volumes lined up on a shelf, and one or two of those old assassination books, no doubt being busily thumbed and rethumbed...
...Secondly, as both Anson and others in the assassination field have told us over and over, government wrongdoing has been a reality in recent years...
...Jim Alcock, who had to try the case, was so worried by this that he mentioned it to Garrison...
...The source material for these criticisms was furnished in large...
...At this time I was a storm trooper, remember, so I didn’t say anything about it...
...Ruby was a nightclub owner in Dallas with numerous friends in the Dallas police department, and with underworld connections, too...
...I’ll never forget one day Garrison had gone on television and said that Lee Harvey Oswald was innocent...
...and it is certainly folly to even hint that such news organizations, , which would gladly get rid of a President, would demur at exposing the fate of another...
...These are the harmless ones...
...But I think he still stands by that...
...Considering the matter further, one is finally forced to the conclusion that there are, in any society, a good many individuals who naturally have, or who later mysteriously develop, a strong anti-authoritarian bias-a bias a‘gainst any order, any institution, any stability, any society...
...Anson, in a footnote, says that this comes from a “telephone interview with Victor Marchetti, June 25, 1975...
...Some documents were “classified,” however, which meant that they were not made available to researchers...
...What about that statement-the Warren Report will collapse like a house of cards...
...This is intellectually very cheap stuff...
...Then comes Jim Garrison, and at first the conspiratorialists all love him, because he cries Conspiracy...
...Garrison would make public statements saying what a “fraud” the Warren Commission had been, but this is not what those of us actually engaged in the investigation thought...
...They’re a part of it, too...
...I wasn’t interested in the Kennedy assassination then, so I didn’t pay much attention...
...And, one senses Mr...
...The assassination conspiracy teain included, if one is to credit Anson’s innuendos, elements of the CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas police (the latter to explain how Jack Ruby was able to shoot Oswald...
...it is an attack on our sanity, an attack mounted, in some instances, by the partly deranged: the half-witted scholars who believe that tiny discrepancies imply a cover-up...
...When Lane asked if there were any dissenters a lonely hand appeared...
...Random House/Vintage, 1976...
...I figured Schweiker was in trouble...
...here, -of purse...
...But later, when I got interested, I remembered...
...Even Treason By how much have our critical standards become untuned when Tom Wicker, an associate editor of The New York Times, announces the platform of his favorite unannounced candidate for President-someone who would look into the following questions: How did Ford get to be President...
...What would one make of a Watergate book published after the Ervin hearings in which one read: “According to Sam Ervin, a critical witness was John Dean...
...After this setback the Warren Commission critics thought things over for a while and came up with a brand new theory: Garrison was a part of the conspiracy...
...How are they doing down there?’ he would ask...
...It’s singularly difficult, twelve years after a crime has been committed...
...Cover-up...
...Why is this...
...measure by, the Government Printing Office, in the f o p of 26 volumes of testimony and exhibits...
...No,” said Marchetti, “because they’re liars...
...Moreover, an extensive investigation of Ferrie and Shaw failed to provide any evidence to support the charge, which is made by Victor Marchetti, who is known to be motivated by animus against the CIA...
...Thanks to the trial, it would be years before they would again...
...Two reversible mirrors...
...He writes, for instance, that “according to Garrison, one of his critical witnesses was a 25-year-old insurance salesman named Perry Raymond Russo...
...A decade ago,” Anson writes, “there was only the gnawing feeling that something was terribly wrong...
...He’s present for all the depositions-an unqualified buff, you could say...
...Ruby went to Cuba briefly in 1959 and considered opening a casino there...
...At the end of his talk he asked the 6,000 students listening to him how many favored a new investigation...
...The recent Pen tagon Papers-W at ergate-CIA Age of the Expose has had the effect of making persistent belief in any ‘‘0 f ficial” explanation seem like childish gullibility...
...As David Beh has effectively pointed out in a recent issue of the National Review, Anson’s principal technique is the cover-up-the failure to include most of the evidence...
...Americans now know things about their government that, only a few short years ago, seemed the product of the worst paranoid delusions...
...In fact, there is really no evidence that Oswald knew Ferrie at all, and it is my belief that he did not...
...He says that “the conclusion some critics of the Warren Commission reach is that the pictures are forgeries, with Oswald’s head cropped atop another man’s body...
...Would any of the other people there corroborate this...
...the Far Right...
...Meanwhile, it takes a certain mental alertness to reali,ze, finally, that Anson himself comes up with no evidence at all linking any of these hoodlums from Ruby’s past to the assassination or to the shooting of Oswald...
...And you really need two reversible ones...
...And he grossly distorts evidence, as Belin shows, in the killing of Officer Tippit and in many other areas...
...The overall effect is to mislead...
...Photographs were taken with a Polaroid camera to ensure that no internegatives were used, and five witnesses signed statements asserting that the shutter on the camera was clicked only once...
...It was the Big Picture he was after...
...It is more than a fear of seeming naive...
...Less than two weeks before he died, as Anson must know but does not tell his readers, Ruby was interviewed by his brother, with his two sisters present, in his hospital room in Dallas...
...Thanks to Vietnam and Watergate and disclosures about the CIA, they realize not only how the government lies, but how it operates...
...This is the McCarthy technique: the allegation which cannot be refuted Sly Nudges Both Clay Shaw and David Ferrie are now dead, so they cannot defend themselves against the allegations, and there is no independent corroboration of the charge...
...The same assumptions exist today...
...Garrison had confidently asserted this, of course, but he never had any evidence...
...In the back of my mind was a certain thought: what if he doesn’t come up with anything...
...camera...
...that there must have been more to this because Ruby knew all these underworld types, all these suspicious people...
...I was in charge of Garrison’s “Arc h i v e s ” t h r o u g h o u t t h i s investigation-his research man, so to speak-and so I was well placed to observe the course of his investigation...
...Mirror Images Then I read this in the Village Voice, and my heart almost missed a beat: “The Kennedy assassination is a mirror-image proposition,” Schweiker was quoted as saying...
...But pot, I think, to Garrison himself, who lived in a world of his own and was blithely unaware of any such concern by his aides...
...Ruby was dying of cancer, and knew he was dying, and so had nothing to lose or gain...
...Either they confirm it, in which case they are telling the truth, or they deny it, in which case they are lying...
...A further treasure trove of documents awaited the diligent conspiratorialist in the National Archives, where thick volumes of FBI and Secret Service reports were available for anyone who walked in off the street...
...it than this...
...this, surely, is Schweiker’s opening...
...First there were Oswald and his conspirators, or perhaps...
...And so on...
...I recalled a passage from Robert Sam Anson’s book which, I felt, told more than he knew...
...didn’t you know they,were part ofit, friendly with the Rocliefellers, giving their underlings ethne io uusriooFnp e o hf efrree eadnodm th, ebruet troe acdrye attoe pull the reins’ in tight whenever it looked as though the lads’(in their ” naive enthusiasm ’for “digging” into a ,story) were getting too close to the . truth...
...Back and forth three or four times this went on...
...Anson’s conclusion about the Garrison investigation was that “it was a classic case of what is known in the intelligence trade as ‘disinformation.’ Truth mixed with half truth, scrambled with no truth at all...
...What were the circumstances of the Nixon pardon...
...Back in 1966, some Warren Commission critics cast doubt on the authenticity of the above picture of Lee Harvey Oswald, taken by his wife Marina in his backyard in Dallas eight months before the assassination...
...Suddenly even the ultimate horror seems possible...
...After studying the assassination for a while, I finally came to the conclusion that one could, ultimately, assign such a motive to almost any group in the country, with the possible exception of the Hyannis Civic Improvement Association...
...There is Oswald, the apparent agent, in constant contact with other CIA men, many of whom have their own ties to the mob...
...in his book attacking the CIA...
...As for Peter Noyes’ article “Legacy of Doubt,” there is some doubt as to whether he has any grasp of the subject at all...
...This theory is outlined in innuendo form in Robert Sam Anson’s book about the assassination...
...I asked...
...that a secret police agency was created within the walls of the White House...
...Crying Conspiracy Let us take stock of the conspiracy theorist’s position at this point...
...Furthermore, Marchetti failed to include this interesting...
...Just half sentences...
...information” (disinformation...
...g. that there were three Oswalds, including a look-alike and an impersonator, based on such frivolous evidence as height discrepancies of an inch or so, or on very unreliable “sightings” of Oswald which Anson chooses to believe when it suits his purpose to do so...
...Not only that, it is subsequently “plugged” week after week by the Book Review in its “Editor’s Choice” section...
...Consider, also, Anson’s chapter on Jack Ruby, which typifies his technique...
...if we could have gone over it when the trail was fresh...
...Bantam Books, 1975...
...At the Clay Shaw trial, Perry Raymond Russo, who did know Ferrie, testified that Ferrie had known one “Leon” Oswald, but when asked to repeat this testimony in federal court after Clay Shaw was acquitted, Russo took the Fifth Amendment...
...A personal recollection may perhaps be illuminating here...
...For the most part, I am sure, the various authors of The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond belong in the former category...
...The trouble was that Garrison and others (myself included) had come to the conclusion that the Warren Report was a pushover as a result of reading Mark Lane’sRush to Judgement and Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash series, and other similar books...
...Then comes the Warren Commission cover-up, connived at, no doubt, by a goodly number of FBI agents, Secret Service agents, the Chief of Justice of the United States, President Ford (who was on the Commission) , high-rankin g congressmen , and so on...
...A tape recorder was hidden inside a briefcase, and Ruby and his brother spoke Yiddish, so the ard from the county sheriffs office Ed not know what was going on...
...With so much good material on the Garrison investigation available-e...
...How could you expect anyone to accept that...
...view the world as a huge, untidy cobweb of relationships, with a Rockefeller sitting at the “nerve center” of the cobweb...
...of time with members of the Dallas police in the course of his investigation into the assassination, that the Dallas police force was so leak-prone in its relations with the press that there was just no way they could have conspired with Ruby to let him into the basement without someone talking about it...
...Disinformation’ Garrison got in way over his head when he decided to take on the Warren Report...
...A year ago, when I wrote “Was Sirhan Sirhan on the Grassy Knoll...
...Seven or eight years ago, Kennedy assassination sensation-mongers had to deal with an intellectual community which acted as a countervailing force against which, one hoped, only the truth could prevail...
...McCarthy Techniques Here is another distortion...
...For one thing, Nelson Rockefeller was no doubt a part of it all, in ‘the view of many conspiratorialists, who often tend to...
...The Schweiker investigation is still continuing, and one eagerly awaits its conclusions (with, admittedly, a certain sense of premonition as to their fate...
...Wicker might have added, because he has rather enjoyed what one English newspaper recently called the open disarray of American public life, and he’s afraid that it might be coming to an ehd...
...What this suggests is not that the cornmi* sions and officials and news organizations that have carried out these investigations in turn became a part of the conspiracy, but, quite simply, that the central conclusions are true, however unpalatable this may be to those who would like to use the Kennedy assassination to...
...Not the valiant little reporters, mind you, not the Peter Kihsses of this world, whom &inison once described to me as .a rk Times reporter who was up in the basement,” but the . big’ boys, the edecutive heavy-weights, the Harrison Saljsburys and the Paleys and.$be Luces-G+od...
...Its central conclusions are not necessarily impugned by these circumstances...
...No, Troy Gustavson told me, they’re not giving out the names of people they are calling to give depositions...
...Look, suppose you don’t come up with anything,” I said...
...Along with John Marks, Marchetti is the author of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence...
...If Noyes had read an account of the trial, he would know that Russo was, in fact, the key witnesss...
...But let us not, at the same time, allow our critical faculties to be swept aside just because confidence in government is low, or because the Warren Commission performed, in some respects, carelessly...
...Why has this tendency become so noticeable recently...
...Well, let the investigations continue...
...I was given the story that Clay Shaw had had some agency contact...
...The purpose of disinformation is to discredit the truth...
...There are also those who, I believe, are disingenuous, who know that there is a large and gullible public which finds it hard to sort among the various distortions and concealed half-truths and disguised accusations they are handed...
...I remember Josiah Thompson, the author of Six Seconds in Dallas, ‘telling me, after spending a good deal...
...Most of this stuff should be declassified, except where there’s a perfectly legitimate national security interest...
...First, in 1964, there was the Warren Commission’s report, whose central findings were that Lee Harvey 9wald shot President Kennedy alone and unaided...
...These “links” are, in almost every case, established principally by Anson’s own wishful thinking, but no matter...
...There is an actual hostility, a burning rage, a desire to take the offensive against the status quo no matter what, even a willingness, if necessary, to chop off the branch one is resting on...
Vol. 8 • March 1976 • No. 1
