JAMES MC CORD: THE LAST WORD INTERVIEW

My discussion with Matthew Bannister about Watergate burglar James McCord is online at BBC Sounds,
you can link to it here. It starts about 13:30 in, if you want to go straight there. I originally recorded it about a month ago, but given the two years it took for McCord's death to become public knowledge, that's not really a pressing problem. We go through the basics of the Watergate burglary and trial, the Bay of Pigs, and McCord's other CIA work (including covering up the death of Frank Olson, which I mentioned in my post about my Guardian obituary, here) but not included in the broadcast edit is the link with JFK's assassination, or as Richard Nixon put it, 'the whole Bay of Pigs thing'.

LOU BERNEY'S NOVEMBER ROAD

It's November 1963, and in Dallas President Kennedy has just been shot. In New Orleans, Frank Guidry is thinking about a trip he made the other day, dropping off a clean Cadillac to a garage just a couple of blocks from Dealey Plaza. Guidry works for Carlos Marcello, the Godfather of the New Orleans mafia, and a confirmed Kennedy-hater. He's Rat Pack sharp and Sinatra smooth. And now Marcello's assistant, Seraphine, wants him to deliver another car, this time to Houston. It's not the kind of job Guidry, a smooth-talker who can get things done, would usually do, and he wonders if the boss isn't starting to take care of loose ends. Because it doesn't take a wise guy to figure out what has just gone down in Dallas, and who was involved. So what he fears is just what happens at the Rice hotel in Houston, but Guidry, sharp as ever, is just a step ahead, and now he's on the run, headed for Las Vegas, where his only possible help might be found.

In a small town in Oklahoma, Charlotte Dooley has a boring Sixties American life, which would be alright were she not married to a drunk. She works for the local photographer, and would like to do more, but she has two kids and a dog, and though her husband doesn't mistreat her or the kids, their common ground has disappeared, and on the Sunday Jack Ruby kills Lee Oswald, when her husband goes off on the kind of errand that lasts until he's drunk his fill, Charlotte puts her daughters and dog into the car, and heads west, aiming for the Los Angeles home of an aunt she hasn't seen in years.

And after another killer botched the hit on Guidry, Marcello has put his top button, Paul Barone, onto Guidry's trail, once he's eliminated the assassin who failed. 

Three people headed West, and their inevitable convergence, is the core of November Road, and its a core which Lou Berney orchestrates well and writes even better. Berney gets the pace and the feel of Sixties paperback originals, those raw, well-written Gold Medal novels by the likes of John D MacDonald, except there's a kind of balance between the characters, and an awareness that our contemporary perspective can provide. Thus we see that, although Guidry lives within the strict rules of his business, where everyone is out to protect themselves and will always act in their own best interest, but where you have to be sharp enough to know the angles and what that best interest is, Charlotte is in a similar world, where most of the decisions have been made for her, and although the payback is not so severe, straying from them is not easy.

Berney writes this with a flow that keeps you entrenched in the drama, in the choices, in the forks in the road, the way the best road fiction works. He also writes with beautiful touch. “Why,' Ed said, 'what have we here' seems a simple line, but ending a chapter as it does it is so full of portent I sat and stared at it for a while. As I did at the end of the story, which is moving and sad, but not sentimental. I had added three words, in my mind, to the penultimate line, then realised I was being too literal, and the words were already there, unsaid. It doesn't really matter what those words are (I don't want to drop a spoiler in) but the fact that the scene had been written with such accuracy and grace that those words were unncessary. You'll see when you read it, as you really ought to.

November Road by Lou Berney

Harper Collins, £8.99, ISBN 9780008309336

note: this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

JFK ASSASSINATION PAPERS: THE PARTIAL DUMP & THE PERFECT PATSY

Watching the response to the latest release of documents about the JFK Assassination, I'm struck by just how much noise and how little light has been generated. Starting of course with Donald Trump's claim 'he' was releasing the docs, 'ahead of schedule', when of course the release was mandated by a law passed 25 years ago, and Trump in the end withheld what were probably the most crucial documents. But that's par for the course with the Tweeter in Chief.

The spin had been delivered to the mainstream well before the release: the voices called upon to evaluate it were predictably defensive. A couple of threads likely to attract attention from the general reader and deflect attention from bigger issues were the major talking points on virtually all media, from BBC to NBC and even to Fox, where you'd think so-called 'conspiracy theories' about JFK would get as much credence as all the other weirder stuff Hannity, Alex Jones and Trump peddle. Watching the uninformed bit of the  punditocracy wade around in this sludge like they were backstroking in perfumed waters has long since ceased amusing me.

Those pundits always work within the Conspiracy Anomaly, an oddly worthless syllogism which posits anyone suggesting the Warren Commission might be wrong in its assumptions that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone crazed leftist assassin, must therefore also defend any and all other conspiracies extant, from Elvis on the Moon to David Icke's Lizards. Meanwhile, defenders of the establishment like themselves can be proven wrong time and time again when they accept the official version, and never be compelled   to account for that history of conspiracies or lies. They simply write those events off as good intentions gone bad, unfortunate coincidence, or unwitting mistakes. Then they erase their errors and press on with accepting and acting as PR boosters for the next set of official lies which come along. This represents a long and ignoble list of the highly paid and highly promoted punditocracy.

Nevertheless, or indeed, for this reason, I do have a few names to throw out there which I wish some of those enlightened personages might have considered.

1. DONALD TRUMP As mentioned, this was not 'Donald Trump Releasing JFK Documents', as it was billed almost everywhere. This was a release mandated by law 25 years ago, which Trump managed to sabotage by allowing both the CIA and FBI to allow a large tranche of docs to be withheld, for at least six more months until a 'review' has been undertaken. Which was what the 25 year wait was supposed to allow.

2. EARLE CABELL One of the more interesting documents released, as highlighted by Jefferson Morley, confirms Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell was a CIA asset going back to the 1950s. Given that his brother was Charles Cabell, deputy director of the CIA under Allen Dulles, and the man who planned the Bay of Pigs invasion and then was forced by JFK to resign along with Dulles, there has always been speculation of collusion, not least with the late change of the motorcade route to include the odd and unsafe turn through Dealey Plaza on its way to the Stemmons Freeway. Knowing he actually worked for the CIA makes such speculation that much more credible.

3. DAVID ATLEE PHILLIPS: Many of the stories led with Oswald's contacts in Mexico City with the Soviet embassy, and their so-called head of assassinations. This made for great headlines to relaunch the CIA's pet conspiracy theory of 50 years ago into a climate where Russia-hating is popular and rife. The documents released shed no new light, but it's worth remembering what we already knew. First, at the time he was supposedly traveling from New Orleans to Mexico City via Houston, Oswald, or someone pretending to be him, was introduced to Sylvia Odio in her Dallas apartment. Odio, the daughter of a man who tried to assassinate Castro, would have no reason to lie about this.

The tapes of Oswald's telephone calls to the Soviet embassy were originally claimed to have been destroyed by the CIA, before they showed up, at which point the 28 Sept calls were shown to have been made by a voice not Oswald's. The pictures of the man taken by CIA cameras were of a man not Oswald. If, as we believe, Oswald was a patsy, he may have been being moved around Mexico City with one cover story (trying to get to Cuba?) while another man was moving in parallel paths setting him up, and another was doing the same in Dallas.

It's also possible that there were two separate frames built, as Peter Dale Scott has suggested. The first was intelligence sources setting up Oswald the assassin as a Russian/Cuban hireling or sympathizer, in order to justify LBJ's invading Cuba. The second was cobbled together quickly when LBJ unexpectedly balked at triggering WWIII, and then put together piecemeal to show Oswald as a disaffected lone crazed assassin.

Most of the rest of the docs which are still being withheld are most likely for CYA reasons involving cover up for involvement by CIA agents and contacts with Oswald as an informant by FBI. But there may be others, more directly dangerous to the CIA. The most interesting would concern David Atlee Phillips, who, under the name of Maurice Bishop, actually introduced Antonio Veciana, the founder of the militant Cuban exile group Alpha 66, to Lee Oswald in Dallas in August 63. Phillips, who would lead the CIA's anti-Castro ops, was Win Scott's deputy in Mexico City. Intuiting that he might have been running Oswald around and framing him requires no great leap of imagination.

4. GEORGE JOANNIDES: Joannides worked on JM/WAVE, the CIA's operations run out of the University of Miami, which included the plans to kill Castro (Operation Mongoose). He basically ran the Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE), which was even more aggressively active than Alpha 66 against Castro; it was DRE who staged the confrontation with Oswald in New Orleans which caused Trump to accuse Ted Cruz's father of killing JFK. Joannnides was also appointed the CIA liason to the House Committee on Assassinations in 1978, which is an interesting use of the fox as a game keeper (HSCA was of course never informed of the conflict of interest). There were lawsuits to get his files in 2005 (he was also accused of participating in the RFK killing, but that appears to have been disproven) which the CIA blocked. These likely don't fall under the purview of the files in the National Archives, but it would not surprise me were there other material there.

5. ALLEN DULLES David Talbot's biography of Dulles, The Devil's Chessboard, is essential reading on the subject of the CIA and its doings, including re JFK. Had it been published back then, I would have added it to the compendium I wrote for the London Library on the 50th anniversary of the assassination (you can link to it here) for his speculation on what documents may be missing. Talbot provides information about what Allen Dulles was doing at the CIA facility known as 'The Farm' on 22 November; unusual given that he had been gone from the Agency for two years. It's easy to speculate he was ready to oversee operations in the chaos that might have followed the assassination (recall communications going dead just after the shooting). I would be surprised if records were kept, but any confirmations of meetings or other attendees would be welcome, and, since they might suggest a highly-placed disaffected element of the CIA was involved or had knowledge of the plot. This of course would be something the CIA would need to stall indefinitely.

6. WILLIAM HARVEY, HOWARD HUNT et al: David Talbot also mentions files on the Church Committee's 1975 interview with the CIA's legendary William Harvey, who was in charge of the much of the Company's dirty work and may have felt he was being hung out to dry. Even travel records might be revealing for Harvey, David Morales (who was a hit man working for Harvey and Ted Shackley) or Howard Hunt, who denied being in Dallas on 22 November, but lost a libel suit to the magazine who claimed he was, and then of course issued a death-bed confession via his son. Talbot also mentions files on J. Walton Moore, the Dallas CIA office chief who assigned George de Morenschild to Oswald (I have always believed it was de Morenschild's writing in Russian on the back of the famous Oswald posed photo) and Gordon McClendon, the Dallas businessman Jack Ruby called for after he shot Oswald.

7. LEE OSWALD: The '201' file the CIA kept on Oswald was supposedly destroyed by James Angleton (who also destroyed Mary Pinchot Meyer's diary after she was murdered; her estranged husband Cord Meyer was high up in the CIA and she had been having an affair with JFK) but bits of it have been pieced together. If you believe that many of the contradictions in that file were because Oswald's 'defection' to the USSR was being used as a barium meal, to discover leaks within the CIA, this complete file would possibly answer some crucial questions. It might also reveal contacts who knew of Oswald, and knew his identity was being used in this way. If you can show that oswald was indeed being used by the CIA, whether as agent, informer, and/or dupe  you are well on the way to understanding that he was: in other words, a perfect patsy.

MARK LANE: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of the JFK assassination critic Mark Lane was posted on the Guardian online back on 17 May; I somehow missed it at the time. I may have missed its appearance in the paper paper too. You can link to the story here.

It's a fairly straight forward catalogue Lane's peripatetic career; I had to avoid getting too deeply into the minutiae of either the JFK or MLK assassinations, and dipping into the constant back and forth before critics of the official line (I did mention Calvin Trillin's New Yorker piece about what he dubbed 'assassination buffs', in which Lane was central, as an early attempt to trivialize critics). The first big books about the assassination were those published by Lane, Harold Weisberg (the Whitewash series, basically self-published, apart from Oswald In New Orleans, after the original paperback, while successful, disappeared), Josiah Thompson (Six Seconds In Dallas), and Sylvia Meagher's indispensible Accessories After The Fact, which catalogued the deliberately random presentation of evidence in the Warren Report. They were also dubbed 'critics' because they were criticising the Report itself, and one of the biggest problems is that the Warren Report is so shoddy, the evidence it presents so dishonest, that it has always obscured and made more difficult efforts to find a 'solution' to the JFK assassination, something I doubt will ever be done.

In my original copy I also mentioned how Lane and Jane Fonda were eventually marginalised by the leadership of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, because their publicity-seeking became self-defeating; the VVAW got more traction from its actual vets, including leader Donald Duncan, whose obituary had appeared in the New York Times only shortly before Lane's, but who had actually died in 2009. (The story behind that is fascinating, and told in the Times here).

What I really should have made clearer was the way in which, as I said, Lane's career might been seen as a metaphor for what I called the 'chaotic web' around the assassination. This was reflected in my original copy for the graf about E. Howard Hunt:

Typifying the fun-house mirror world of conspiracy, Lane's most unlikely client was The Liberty Lobby, a far-right group whose magazine The Spotlight published an article by CIA whistle-blower Victor Marchetti claiming E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglar, had been in Dallas when Kennedy was shot. Hunt had often been mis-indentified as one of the three men in the infamous Dallas 'tramps' photograph. In 1981 Hunt sued for libel, and Lane was brought in for the 1985 appeal hearing, where he produced witnesses who claimed Hunt was in Dallas and won the case, though some jurors apparently voted against Hunt on the grounds his reputation couldn't be defamed. Ironically, after Hunt's death in 2007, his son claimed his father had excised information about his involvement in the assassination from his own memoir, and in a death-bed confession implicated himself and a number of other CIA operatives. Researchers clashed on whether this could be taken at face-value or was just a final bit of disinformation from Hunt on the Agency's behalf. On the back of the trial, however, Lane published Plausible Denial (1991), positing CIA involvement in the assassination. 

If someone brought signed confessions or documentary evidence about the men who shot JFK, half the research community would argue with the other half over its validity, and there is a good case to be made that some of the work presented over the years has indeed been disinformation.

I have written before that establishment writers posit a strange double-standard for those who believe JFK was not killed by a lone crazed assassin. We have mountains of evidence of government conspiracies, to kill, to wage war, to steal, to spy, to lie and to cover up, yet establishment writers always take the official version at face value, and turn the accusation of 'conspiracy theorist' on those who don't. Although the burden of proof should always remain with authority, the way the game works is if you posit, however reasonably and with whatever evidence, anything that might be dubbed a conspiracy, you are then expected by the guardians of the official version to defend every whacko out there--you are assumed to believe with David Icke that the Royal Family are lizards from outer space.

You could look at Lane's winding up with Jim Jones and the People's Temple as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, of the researcher looking for a conspiracy. Lane claimed to have heard shots from the scene of the mass suicides; as far as I'm aware that was never confirmed by evidence (though people were shot in other locations). I think in the end my approach to Lane's life was the best way to recognise the importance of much of his work, and to take it at face value, as it deserved to be taken.

RICHARD SCHWEIKER, LIBERAL REPUBLICANS, AND JFK

Last week I couldn't get any papers here to take an obituary of Richard Schweiker, best-known as a liberal Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, but his career is fascinating for two reasons.First, he represents the last-gasp of the now virtually extinct 'liberal' wing of the Republican party. That wing, which was largely eastern, and which you might argue represented old Yankee money, was dominant in the party up until after the JFK assassination. They were the ones Time magazine idolised, and hence got a lot of respect in the household where I grew up, even though my parents were strict FDR Democrats.

Even the Republican rabid right, represented by Robert Taft of Ohio, was relatively moderate on social issues despite being vehemently anti-union and pro-business, while always pushing a militaristic foreign policy. The Republicans could occupy this political middle ground because the Dixiecrats, southern Democrats, were the far-right on social issues, specifically civil rights.

Goldwater's nomination in 1964 was the first break-through of the 'Cowboy', new-money: a more triumphalist greedy, defense-industry-dominated turn right. He lost heavily to LBJ, but Richard Nixon, basically an older-style Republican at heart, was brought along by that very new breed from California, and realised the southern states were there for the taking after LBJ got the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts passed. He approached this 'southern strategy' with coded reference to states rights, and by the time Reagan sought a second term, the 'solid south' was solidly GOP.

Schweiker was the prototype liberal Republican swimming against this flow. Although he inherited his family wealth (his liberal Republican counterpart in the state house in Pennsylvania, William Scranton, was also a child of inherited privilege) he possessed a keen social conscience, what the British might think of as noblesse oblige. The Republicans were full of them: Rockefellers, Chaffees, Cabots and Lodges, even Bushes. Representing some very wealthy Philadelphia suburbs as a congressman, then out-polling his party to win a Senate seat, he supported civil rights and Medicare, opposed Vietnam, and voted against Nixon's Supreme Court nominations of Haynesworth and Carswell, the Alito and Thomas of the 60s.

In 1976 Reagan, looking to balance the prospective Republican presidential ticket, announced Schweiker as his potential running mate. In this too-long running age of Don Ron's hagiography we forget Reagan started out as a 'liberal' and went with the flow of money and power to the right. Looking at Schweiker and the Great Prevaricator exchanging a reverse Republican high-five makes me think Richard Dreyfuss would play Schweiker in a bio-pic (with Will Ferrell or Dan Ackroyd as Reagan). But Reagan actually remained committed to some New Deal social programmes, just as Nixon had, which today's greed-is-good upwardly mobile tea partiers have pledged to destroy. They forget about his raising taxes, and his major recession too, but memory isn't a strong point with the wingnut right, fast becoming America's de facto centre. More on this in a moment.

The second key thing about Schweiker was that he and Gary Hart headed the Senate's Church Committee's investigation in the role of the CIA and FBI in the investigation of the JFK assassination, and their conclusions, that the agencies had deliberately lied to, withheld information from, misled and misdirected the Warren Commission, created a firestorm. I'd recommend reading Gaeton Fonzi's The Last Investigation (here's a link to my obit of Fonzi from the Independent in 2012). Schweizer had hired Fonzi, a Philadelphia journalist, as an investigator for the Church Committee; the book details among other things the interference by the intelligence agencies in the House Select Committee's JFK investigation which sprung from the Church and Pike reports. 

In May and June of 1976 Schweiker went public with his and Hart's conclusions. A few months later Vice President Gerald Ford, a Warren Commission member who was later shown to have been leaking the commission's workings to the intelligence agencies, managed to hang on to his party's nomination; he lost to Jimmy Carter and four years later when Reagan ran, Bob Dole was his VP. I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, though we all know what happened to Gary Hart's presidential aspirations.

By coincidence, or not, Schweiker's voting record moved significantly to the right for the next four years, and in 1980 he did not contest his Senate seat. In 1981 Reagan appointed Schweiker secretary of Health and Human Resources; for the next two years he enacted many of the cuts Reagan had promised to Social Security, welfare, Medicare and the like, but can be said to have held them back from the draconian measures Reagan's backers were expecting. He left in 1983 to become head of the American Council of Life Insurance, a typical game-keeper to poacher move in the Beltway.

Ironically, Schweiker's Senate seat was taken by Arlen Specter, on the surface another 'liberal' Republican (he switched from Democrat to Republican in 1965, then switched back at the end of his career in 2009 while facing severe threats from the right--he then failed to get the Democrat nomination for the Senate in 2010). Specter's voting record had always been firmly on the Republican spectrum; you might say he played a liberal to placate an electorate used to voting for liberals. But more telling, given Schweiker's principled stance on the JFK assassination and the intelligence community, Specter's greatest claim to fame is that as counsel to the Warren Commission he invented the 'magic bullet' theory to explain away the idea that Kennedy and John Connally were hit, as Connally believed, and as the Zapruder film strongly suggests, by separate shots. If that were the case, there would be too many bullets for one assassin to have fired. Specter's stroke of genius saved Warren and has sparked criticism and argument for the past six decades. You might argue, in our post-Santorum era, the Keystone State deserves another Schweiker.

THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION IN PRINT: THE LONDON LIBRARY ESSAY

Note: I wrote this essay for the current issue of The London Library magazine (number 22,Winter 2013), which is not generally available, so I offer it here, with some small changes. The original issue is available at londonlibrary.co.uk

THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION AT FIFTY: STILL HAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

If you are of a certain age, you will remember. It was 50 years ago, 22 November 1963 and, with respect to Philip Larkin, a moment more influential than the Beatles’ first hit. We were sent home from school that Friday afternoon; President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been killed in Dallas. We watched Sunday’s live television news coverage as Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, was gunned down by Jack Ruby. Life magazine declared Oswald guilty, its cover showing him posed with rifle and Marxist pamphlets. JFK’s Camelot, the 1,000 days of the New Frontier, the ‘best and brightest’ in his service, the beautiful wife and children, had been struck down by a misfit would-be communist defector. Everything seemed open and shut.

 

The commission appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson and headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren endorsed that simple explanation. But rather than calming the nation, the Warren Report raised more questions than it answered. Over the past half-century, the debate has become a mire of investigation, speculation and disinformation, with more than a thousand books written on the subject, some utterly bizarre. Were shots fired from an umbrella? By a gunman from a nearby manhole? By a Secret Service agent? Are some of the crackpot theories published deliberately, to discredit serious research? In the movie JFK, the director Oliver Stone put Winston Churchill's words into the mouth Joe Pesci, playing David Ferrie, the bizarre pilot who was likely part of an assassination conspiracy: 'It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma.'

 

The literature of the Kennedy assassination has appeared in three waves, each reflecting the tenor of its times. The first was a reaction to the Warren Report of 1964. The second was inspired by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigation, begun by the US House of Representatives in 1976.. The third was prompted by Stone's film, released in 1991. Now, the fiftieth anniversary of the killing has inevitably prompted more writing, including a great deal of material published electronically. Much of it is simply rehashing the work of others, sometimes indiscriminately; approach it with care.

The Library's collection of assassination material is limited, though the official version is well represented. The US government printing of the Subject Index to the Warren Report and hearings & exhibits (New York 1966) would be a difficult and frustrating place to start especially without Sylvia Meagher's Accessories After the Fact  (1967), which is not in the collection, but is based on her cataloguing the evidence buried, un-indexed, within the Report's 26-volume appendix. Meagher's title reflects the reaction of that first wave of books to the Warren Report, the two most important being Mark Lane's Rush To Judgment (1966) and Harold Weisberg's Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report (1965). Lane was a lawyer appalled by the Dallas investigation; he wrote an article about it and ended up being hired by Oswald's mother Marguerite to represent her dead son. Weisberg was a former Congressional researcher who kept chickens on his Maryland farm, and whenever his work was derided he would be called a 'chicken farmer'. A Haverford College professor, Josiah Thompson, spent so long analysing the forensic evidence for his groundbreaking Six Seconds In Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination (1967) that he gave up academe, and became a private detective.

The first researchers were described as 'critics' because they were really investigating the anomalies and questions left unanswered by the Warren Report, which seemed to be designed to validate the theory of the lone, crazed assassin, Oswald, firing three shots from the Texas School Book Depository. Testimony that didn't fit that scenario was dismissed, overlooked or discounted – from the dozens who rushed up the grassy knoll, from where they were convinced shots had been fired, to Texas Governor John Connally, seated in front of Kennedy, who insisted he and the President  were hit with separate bullets, which would invalidate the ‘magic-bullet' premise, of one shot that went through both Kennedy and Connolly and caused multiple wounds in both men, before the second, fatal bullet also fired by Oswald, from behind, though Kennedy's head was snapped backwards forcefully by its impact. Then there was the enigma of Oswald himself, the Marxist Marine with Intelligence training, who defected to the Soviet Union and returned with a Russian wife at the height of the cold war without attracting the negative attention of the US government. Oswald showed an uncanny ability to turn up in two places at once, and to agitate on behalf of communism and Cuba, as he did publicly in New Orleans, while surrounding himself with fervent anti-communists. The Warren Commission simply ignored the mafia, who had ample reason to want Kennedy dead; Jack Ruby’s mob connections, which went back to his childhood, were swept aside, and the possibility he knew Oswald before he assassinated him was yet another unexamined loose end. Ruby died in jail, before telling what he called the real story; in his two-volume work, Forgive My Grief (1966–7), Penn Jones, editor of a local paper outside Dallas, catalogued the unusual number of suspicious deaths of assassination witnesses. It was fertile ground for the roots of conspiracy.

The Warren Report was accepted immediately by the mainstream media; and when the word conspiracy is suggested, its proponents can be held to an impossible standard. Those who doubt Lee Harvey Oswald was the gunman, or acted alone, are first dismissed as crackpots, then expected to defend every crackpot theory of the assassination—and there are dozens of them—as well as every other conspiracy theory extant. The theorem appears to be, if any conspiracy can be shown to be absurd, all are invalid. Meanwhile, even as various 'official versions' of other major world events are proven one after the other to be lies, a long line which proceeds through real conspiracies such as Watergate to Iran-Contra to Saddam's WMDs to illegal surveillance, each is similarly dismissed as a well-intentioned mistake, an unfortunate coincidence, or an exaggerated misunderstanding, this requiring each next official version to be accepted at face value.

In what now seems an instinctive recognition of this burden of proof anomaly, early fictions approached Kennedy's murder metaphorically: Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), Loren Singer's The Parallax View (1970), and Winter Kills (1974) by Richard Condon, author of the The Manchurian Candidate (1959), whose stand-in for Kennedy is assassinated on the orders of his mob-connected father. In fact, the idea of a conspiracy was nothing new: a Kennedy-like President had been overthrown by a military coup in the 1962 novel Seven Days in May by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II. Ironically, the movie of the book was made with Kennedy's co-operation, overriding protests from the Pentagon; it would not be released until 1964.

The assassination has been examined in court only once, when New Orleans District Attorney James Garrison prosecuted a local businessman, Clay Shaw, director of the International Trade Mart, as part of a conspiracy to kill the President. Garrison got involved when he investigated Oswald's time in New Orleans.  His investigation received no co-operation from federal authorities and was undermined actively by some of them. His media portrayal was so negative he received, in a landmark court decision, a half-hour right of reply on national television. A similarly negative depiction, however, dominates novelist and playwright James Kirkwood's book American Grotesque (1970), which cast the trial as a persecution of Shaw because he was gay.

But Garrison did manage to show the Zapruder film in court. Abraham Zapruder’s home movie of the assassination was purchased by Life magazine immediately after the killing, and just as promptly locked away. When Life printed stills from the film, frame 313, showing the impact of the fatal shot on Kennedy, was included out of sequence, making it appear that Kennedy's head was driven forward, not back, by the impact. A similar honest mistake occurred when the stills were reprinted in the Warren Report. To anyone viewing the film it is obvious that the fatal shot forced Kennedy's head backwards violently, and frame 313 shows the impact spray at the front of the head, while the supposed point of entry in the back remains untouched. The best early work on the Zapruder film was done by Robert Groden, whose two illustrated volumes, The Killing of A President (1993) and The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald (1995) remain valuable reference works.

By the early 1970s, despite polls already showing a majority of Americans doubted the Warren Report, conspiracy theories might well have been forgotten were it not for Richard Nixon (who was in Dallas himself on the day of the assassination) and the Watergate scandal. In the wake of this, three separate government investigations probed America’s intelligence services; one of them, the House of Representatives’ Pike Report, included the revelation, as shocking in 1975 as it was again this year, that the National Security Agency was spying unlawfully on the communications of American citizens. The House refused to issue this damning report; it was leaked to the reporter Daniel Schorr and published in The Village Voice. But rising distrust of government prompted Congress to form the HSCA, and a second wave of assassination literature, which studied conspiracy on a wider level, followed. Key books were Robert Sam Anson's They've Killed the President: The Search for the Murderers of John F. Kennedy (1975); Carl Oglesby's The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate (1977); and Government by Gunplay: Assassination Conspiracy Theories from Dallas to Today (1976), a collection of essays edited by Harvey Yazijian and future Clinton aide Sid Blumenthal. An important later addition on the same theme was Peter Dale Scott's Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993), which now suffers from the profligate use of the term 'deep state' by all sorts of crankpots for all sorts of reasons.

 

The HSCA concluded the 'likelihood' of a Kennedy conspiracy, but was notably reluctant to blame anyone but the Mafia, as detailed in The Plot to Kill the President (1981) by HSCA chief counsel G. Robert Blakey and Life journalist Richard N. Billings, one of the men who had bought the Zapruder film. Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi detailed the derailing of other avenues of HSCA’s investigations, and of its original chief counsel, Richard A. Sprague, in The Last Investigation (1993); Fonzi attributed Sprague's removal to his insistence on establishing and investigating the involvement of the intelligence community in the assassination. The HSCA hearings prompted more suspicious deaths, most notably mobsters Sam Giancana, killed before he could testify, and  Johnny Roselli, found floating in an oil drum in Miami’s Dumfoundling Bay the day before he was due to make his second appearance before the committee.

 

Oswald’s interface with the intelligence community features in the two best novels written about the assassination. Often labelled 'the American Le Carré', Charles McCarry was a former spy, and his Tears of Autumn (1975) links the killing to the CIA-backed assassination of South Vietnam's President Diem, while Don DeLillo's Libra (1988) shows a typically obsessive DeLillo protagonist endlessly researching the ultimately unknowable:  “Think of two parallel lines … One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny.”

The recently published new edition of Not In Your Lifetime (2013, originally 1998) by Anthony Summers, began life as Conspiracy, published in 1980. It was the best single-volume study to date, a compendium bolstered by prodigious original research, and has gone through five updates, including as: The Kennedy Conspiracy  (1989). Summers has streamlined his theories over the years, but still suggests that Kennedy's killers were a mix of the Mafia, disaffected CIA agents and Cuban exiles. All three groups had reasons to want Kennedy out of the way, interests which coalesced around Cuba, where the mob has lost its hugely profitable casinos and whorehouses, while the CIA and Cuban exiles wanting to eliminate the communist Castro felt betrayed by Kennedy in the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The official investigations in the 1970s revealed that the CIA and Mafia had indeed worked together, not least to assainate Castro. Even Lyndon Johnson had complained about the 'goddamn Murder Incorporated' the CIA was running in Latin America. Summers suggested that Murder Inc. had come home.

That view of conspiracy was somewhat at odds with those who suggested the assassination was, in effect, a coup sponsored by the military and the CIA. David Lifton's Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1981; updated 1988) examined JFK's autopsy, not carried out by forensic specialists at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, but by military doctors at Bethesda Naval Station, and concluded not only that evidence was faked, but that there were two separate coffins shipped from Dallas to Bethesda. The alleged motive, detailed best in John Newman's JFK and Vietnam (1992) and Oswald and the CIA (1995), was the military's fury at Kennedy's reluctance to pursue the Vietnam War and his willingness to sign a nuclear treaty with the Soviets. Such a conspiracy would have required organisation high up in the military command, though of course we cannot overlook many actions which might be attributable to the post-facto tendency of bureaucracies like the CIA and FBI to cover up rather than reveal their own mistakes or embarrassing secrets. The cover-up can often take the form of conspiracy itself.

Newman was an adviser to Oliver Stone on JFK, which sparked the third wave of assassination literature. Based on Garrison’s experiences, with Kevin Costner playing the DA and Garrison in an ironic cameo as Earl Warren, the movie began attracting mainstream denunciation even before filming was finished. Stone brought the two conspiracy strands together: on the ground the mix of oddballs, former spooks, Cuban exiles and mobsters suggested by earlier research, and behind the scenes the military coup which is revealed to Garrison by the mysterious 'Colonel X'. ‘X’ was based on Fletcher Prouty, a former Air Force intelligence liaison to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and author of two books, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World  (1973) and JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (1992).  

 

Despite his dismissal by the media, JFK: The Book of the Film (1991) by Stone and Zachary Sklar is a remarkably balanced volume that refutes accusations of the filmmakers’ ignorance of history. There are many reasons to disagree with some of its theories, but the impact of the film forced the passage of the JFK Records Act (1992), which released a mass of previously classified documents to researchers, simultaneously providing a wealth of new information, and more layers of contradiction and confusion.

The Establishment response to the film was Gerald Posner's Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993), a prosecutor's selective brief against Oswald and in defence of the Warren Report, which was highly publicised and generous praised in the mainstream, who ignored widespread criticisms of its flaws, most notably from the irascible Weisberg, who published Case Open the following year. Even Norman Mailer called Posner only 'intermittently reliable', but nonetheless used Case Closed as the basis for his biography Oswald's Tale (1995). For Mailer, Lee's unhappy marriage to the Russian beauty Marina saw him shoot Kennedy in a fit of frustrated jealous envy; the handsome President who had what Oswald was denied by his own wife. In 2007, former Los Angeles District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi published Reclaiming History, a 1,612-page work, with footnotes on CD, which recapitulated Case Closed  but also added frequent attacks on the more absurd conspiracy theories, as well as ad hominem denigrations of many of the more serious Warren critics. Bugliosi also produced a condensed version of his book, Four Days In November (2007) which gives his version of the assassination in narrative form, and served as the basis for the2013 film Parkland.

The most significant new fiction came from James Ellroy, chronicler of America's dark underbelly. Ellroy never sees America as innocent; looking at JFK’s presidency he said the 'real trinity of Camelot was look good, kick ass, get laid'. His conspiracy, as laid out in The Cold Six Thousand (2001), oozes with the sleazy reality of mobsters, ex-intelligence agents, Howard Hughes and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. A decade later, Stephen King's 11-22-63 (2012) dismissed doubters of the official verdict as being unable to accept Kennedy's death as an act of random absurdity. Like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone, King sent a Maine schoolteacher back in time to stop Oswald. The time-travel story is better than the Oswald aspect, but he presents a brief but powerful imagining of the butterfly effect of Kennedy's survival in an alternate universe, where small acts have unforeseen consequences. King concludes: ‘It was almost certainly Oswald. You've heard of Occam's Razor, haven't you? … all things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.'

But what is simple about Oswald? His portrait as detailed by Warren, Posner, Mailer, Bugliosi and King is itself the most convincing proof that he was uniquely qualified to become someone's perfect patsy. Ray and Mary LaFontaine's Oswald Talked: The New Evidence in the JFK Assassination (1996) makes a strong case for Oswald as a failed government informer, ripe for the set-up. And, in 2008, James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters put forward the strongest case yet for a conspiracy, including detailing an earlier, similar plot derailed only by the President having cancelled a trip to Chicago. Douglass's research in Dallas neatly marries conspiracies large and small. His 'unspeakable', in the end, is simply ‘The emptiness of the void, the vacuum of responsibility and compassion, it is ourselves.’

Should the actual gunmen still be alive, and confess publicly to their crime, at this point it's unlikely they would be believed. Warren's defenders would dismiss them, and many conspiracy believers might conclude they were yet another late attempt at disinformation. But most of the protagonists of the story are dead, and 9/11 has become the ‘Crime Of the Century’ for new century, as Anthony Summers says, replacing the assassination as ‘a new milestone of national trauma.’ We may never know the truth. Meanwhile Oswald's ghost remains in death what he most likely was in life, a patsy who reminds us that history is not random, but it may be beyond our control. As Don DeLillo wrote, in an essay while researching Libra:

'The valuable work of theorists has shown us the dark possibilities, prodded us to admit to ourselves the difficult truth of the matter. No simple solution, no respite from mystery and chronic suspicion. Conspiracy is now the true faith.'