Letters

...If it were untrue, however, I would assume that Bethell would have used it as an example to prove his thesis that Anson is not to be believed...

...Even my better informed graduate students are impressed with the Mark Lanes...

...To foil the government, he periodically fingerprinted his children...

...ADAM YARMOLINSKY Boston, Mass...

...In any case, for Bethell to.ignore the charge completely is an act of intellectual dishonesty...

...All this suggests that the psychologists who at the time of the assassination noted that conspiracy theories are paradoxically reassuring to people have a point: namely, if there is a conspiracy the event is expkcable...

...The author replies: I discussed the “charge” in an earlier Washington Monthly article, “Was Sirhan Sirhan on the Grassy Knoll...

...Homer is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers...

...I think the story was started by Barry Goldwater...

...Macaulay did not disparage Boswell’s character because Boswell had painted Johnson “warts and all...

...It was a pleasure to read your excellent article on the endless dubious, spurious, opportunistic Kennedy assassination literature [“Earl Warren: On the Mob’s Payroll...

...JOHN MARKS Washington, D. C. John Marks is co-author of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence...

...There is no ‘discovery law’ in Louisiana, which means that the prosecution (us) can introduce surprise witnesses into the trial without forewarning...

...FRED I. GREENSTEIN Princeton, New Jersey Fred Greenstein is a professor of politics at Princeton University...

...Here’s how I described the event: “After a while it became clearer and clearer that [Garrison] 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...

...and I ended up betraying Garrison to Shaw’s attorney...

...I would simply like to point out what I consider to be an unconscionable omission on Tom Bethell’s part which may raise questions about his motives in writing “Earl Warren: On the Mob’s Payroll...

...March 1975...

...by Tom Bethell, March 19761...

...Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere...

...This was true of Ton1 Bethell’s piece [“Reporters and their Status Taboo”] in your February issue...

...Bethell mentions in his article that he was indeed Garrison’s “ar~hivist,’b~u t nowhere does he say a word about the perfidious act which which he is charged by the author of the book he is reviewing...

...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...

...He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worthwhile to place them...

...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...

...I suspect that even if the Commission had attended to the issues and procedures on which they could be faulted-those Edward Jay Epstein discusseswe would have similarly overwhelming proportions of every Gallup Poll sample queried saying there had been a conspiracy...

...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), 1 decided that the time had come to turn the necessary information over to Shaw...

...namely, that Bethell, while serving as “custodian of the files” for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, turned over to Clay Shaw and his attorneys copies of Garrison’s case against Shaw before the Shaw trial had started...

...Beyond that, I am rather surprised to note that John Marks, co-author with Victor Marchetti of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, seems to regard the disclosure of government information by one privy to it as necessarily being a “perfidious act...

...Adam Yarmolinsky is a Ralph Waldo Emerson Professor at the University of Massachusetts...

...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...

...If Macaulay dwelt at tedious length on Boswell’s idiosyncrasies and character weaknesses, it was only because of his effort to demonstrate that only such a person could have written such a great book...

...Having followed this issue from the beginning, I’m continually struck by the pervasiveness of the conspiracy theories...

...CLIFFORD P. CASE Washmgton, D. C. Clifford Case is a U. S. Senator from New Earl Warren: On the Mob’s Payroll...

...In the book, Anson makes a very serious charge against Bethell...

...In the paragraph in Macaulay’s essay on Johnson before that from which Bethell quotes, Macaulay has this to say about Boswell as a biographer and about his Life of Johnson in particular: “The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work...

...He has no second...

...Waco, Wilt, and the AMA It is not a matter of great import, but I can’t help pointing out that your extraordinarily sensible article in the current issue [“Waco, Wilt, and the AMA” by James Fallows] repeats a calumny about Robert MacNamara that ought to be laid to rest: He was never a proponent of the Edsel...

...in fact he opposed it within the company...

...To have done so again would have been repetitious, I believe...

...But I must protest against his including Lord Macaulay among those who take revenge upon violators of a “status taboo” by attacking them per sonally...

...I have no way of knowing about the accuracy of Anson’s charge...

...Nothing is more unnerving than dangers due to mere chance...

...The article in question is, to a large extent, a review of a new book by Robert Sam Anson called “They’ve Killed the President...