There is one book not reviewed here that should have been. The reason is it wasn’t written and, indeed, it cannot now be. I am referring to Evelyn Lincoln’s autobiography. JFK’s executive secretary passed away on 4 May 1995 in Washington and with her have gone all of the secrets she shared with JFK. She kept her silence until the end. However, in a recent Channel Four (London) TV documentary series, Secret Lives, in an episode exploring the life of Jackie Kennedy, Lincoln stated that she believed Jackie had affairs prior to the assassination, with Onassis and others, if I heard her correctly. I understand C. David Heyman is updating his monumental biography, A Woman Named Jackie (1989), in the wake of Jackie’s death and a lot of new information is to be included, much of which he could not publish while she was alive. Perhaps he’ll give us the full story. Perhaps he’ll also give us the word as to whether news of these indiscretions trickled through to JFK’s enemies….
- ARMSTRONG, JOHN, & ROBERTS, CRAIG. JFK: The Dead Witnesses.
Tulsa, OK: Consolidated Press International/Typhoon Press, 1995. vii + 186 pps. Index. - It was the Texas newspaperman and researcher, Penn Jones Jr., in the immediate aftermath of the assassination who first began keeping a tally of ‘dead witnesses,’ and over the ensuing years the uncritical inclusion of just about anyone in the JFK orbit who passed away reduced the list’s worth. The House Select Committee addressed itself to the problem en passant (indeed, come to think of it, there wasn’t much the HSC did that wasn’t done en passant) and decided that there was no problem.
It is highly likely that Patrolman Tippit was the first dead witness and if he wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald certainly was, and in the next six months one could add the following deaths, all of which give rise to legitimate suspicion and certainly warrant further investigation:
Karyn Kupcinet, who allegedly had foreknowledge of the assassination, was strangled in Los Angeles, 28 November 1963;
Jack Zangretti, a minor mob figure who managed a gambling resort and hotel in Oklahoma, told friends while Oswald was in custody that Jack Ruby will kill him within twenty-four hours and someone close to Frank Sinatra would be kidnapped to take attention away from the assassination. Both events happened, and Zangretti was found two weeks later floating in a lake with bullets in his chest;
Eddy Benavides, brother of Domingo Benavides who was a witness to the Tippit slaying, shot in the head in February 1964 after allegedly being mistaken for his brother;
Betty Mooney McDonald, a one-time Ruby stripper, found hanged in a Dallas police cell, 13 February 1964;
Bill Chesher, supposedly had information linking Oswald to Ruby, heart attack, March 1964;
Thomas Henry Killam, the husband of a Ruby stripper, who had knowledge of an Oswald-Ruby connection, fled Dallas and committed ‘suicide’ by throwing himself through the plate glass window of a store in Florida, 17 March 1964;
Bill Hunter, journalist on the Long Beach Press Telegram, visited Ruby in gaol, was at Ruby’s apartment with George Senator and others in November 1963, shot dead in the Long Beach police department ‘accidentally,’ 24 April 1964;
Warren Reynolds, witness to the Tippit slaying who said Oswald wasn’t the figure he saw running from the crime, shot in the head in January 1964 and, miraculously, the only ‘dead witness’ who survived.
The list could be continued: Jack Ruby, 3 January 1967, David Ferrie, 22 February 1967, Roscoe Anthony White, 24 September 1971, Sam Giancana,19 June 1975, Johnny Roselli, 7 August 1976, George DeMohrenschildt, 30 March 1977, and so on.
Armstrong and Roberts have produced a comprehensive if uncritical A-Z of deaths that usefully supplements and enlarges upon the ‘Convenient Deaths’ chapter in Jim Marrs’ Crossfire (New York: Pocket Books, 1993), pp. 555-66, the fullest account preceeding the present work. But why include names like J. Edgar Hoover, LBJ, John Connally, and others who simply died of old age years later?
- BROWN, WALT. The J.F.K. Assassination Quiz Book: Test Your Knowledge.
Santa Barbara, CA: Open Archive Press, 1995. 203 pps. Foreword by Cyril H. Wecht and Gary L. Aguilar.Treachery in Dallas.
New York: Carroll and Graf, 1995. x + 435 pps. Illustrated, bibliography, index. - Walt Brown’s courtroom docunovel about Oswald surviving the Ruby shooting and standing trial for the assassination, The People v. Lee Harvey Oswald, was published in 1992 (reviewed in Lobster 26), and since then he’s produced these two titles and another two slated for publication later this year. He’s a prodigious researcher, knows his stuff and writes well. The Quiz Book may at first glance seem a trivialisation, but it isn’t. View it instead as a primer/refresher on basic facts in the case – all that obvious too-well-known-to-be-remembered-stuff that slips away. Each topic is divided into Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert sections.
Treachery in Dallas is a mature, reflective work based on many years of research and contains one of the best critiques of the FBI and the Warren Commission’s failure to adequately investigate the assassination. Brown’s main concern, however, is the Dallas PD and their failure to protect the president, investigate the crime, and protect Oswald – in fact their total dereliction of duty without which the assassination would not have been possible. The argument is persuasive but I have always seen the boys in blue as monkeys not organ grinders (vide Jesse Curry’s hasty retraction at a press conference of his earlier claim that the FBI had interviewed Oswald ‘a week or two ago’ after the FBI’s Gordon Shanklin had read him the riot act). This is not to say, however, that individuals in the PD were not involved in the assassination, either as accessories to or after the fact.
Along with John Newman’s book noted below this is an essential read for the critical community.
- BUTMAN, JAMES, & SPRINKLE, BRIAN. The Armchair Detective: Your Guide through the Maze of the JFK Assassination.
127 pps. Highland City, FL: Rainbow Books, 1992. Bibliography. - A curious and well-meaning book written by two guys with names straight out of a Thomas Pynchon novel. Butman and Sprinkle write in their Introduction, ‘What we, the authors, have done is research dozens and dozens of books on the conspiracy, plot [sic], murder and evident cover-up. We then picked five of what we felt were the most informative and interesting of those books and reviewed them in a form that makes it simple to be thoroughly informed about the events which transpired in and around the tragedy in Dallas, Texas, without being inundated by tens of thousands of pages of written material. Within the format we have chosen, other books are cited to shore up or enlighten [sic] on certain points. In this small book, you will travel the available literature on the JFK assassination without pain or strain’ [!].
The five works our readers digest are: Jim Marrs Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (1989), Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgement (1966), Jim Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins (1988), David Belin’s Final Disclosure (1977), and Hugh C. McDonald’s Appointment in Dallas (1975).
Sprinkle concludes that LBJ was behind the assassination while Butman goes for the Mob.
With this short notice of The Armchair Detective you needn’t be inundated with the 127 pps of the book (all that written material!), you know what it contains and therefore now needn’t purchase it.
- DELORIA, ROBIN T. Mirror of Doubt: Can You Solve the JFK Conspiracy?
Pittsburgh, PA: Dorrance Publishing, 1993. xv + 159 pps. Illustrated. - A worthy introductory critique of the Warren Commission’s findings and particularly strong on discussing aspects of the photographic evidence such as the Zapruder film and the Altgens pictures. Also contains some long overdue schematic diagrams detailing the position of the presidential car in Dealey Plaza. The book could have been improved by some judicious copy-editing.
- HASLAM, EDWARD T. Mary, Ferrie and the Monkey Virus: The Story of an Underground Medical Laboratory.
Albuquerque, NM: Wordsworth Communications, 1995. [8 pps] + 258 pps. Illustrated, bibliography. - Haslam doesn’t prove that David Ferrie invented AIDS in his apartment while researching cancerous tumours in mice, but he does show that Tulane University was doing some shady monkey virus research for the US government’s biological warfare programme and he does raise many legitimate questions about the nature of Mary Sherman’s work at the University and the circumstances of her death (undoubtedly a murder, and an odd one at that).
The author grew up in New Orleans and there’s some very interesting background material on the JFK case and the Garrison investigation that was all news to me. Did you know, for instance, that Joseph M. Rault, a wealthy oil and real estate businessman, one of Garrison’s key backers through ‘Truth and Consequences,’ was fire-bombed at the Rault Center skyscraper in New Orleans, fled to the roof, and was only saved because of a chance passing by a helicopter?
Who was behind that?
This is a key book for anyone wishing to research the Garrison investigation and David Ferrie.
- HODGKINSON, KEITH. Pause for Judgement: A Critical Review of the Literature on the Kennedy Assassination.
Loughborough, Leicestershire: Ludoe Publications [Loughborough University/ Department of Education], 1993 [1995]. 37 pps. Bibliography. - In Lobster 26 I reviewed another ‘paper’ by an English academic, one who had just awoken to the fact that there may be a tad more to Dealey Plaza than Earl Warren had let on. And here’s another scholar dipping his big toe into the controversy. Hodgkinson’s modest task in a little over 8,000 words is to ask ‘whether anything of real value has been gained by the debate [since the publication of the Warren Report] and whether anything more can be said about our understanding of the events of 22 November 1963.’ In the cold ‘academic’ prose of Hodgkinson that strives for ‘objectivity’ we seem to end up with a qualified yes and no. I would have had a little more confidence in the writer had he not consistently got an important bibliographic reference wrong. He thinks the 1980 work, The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Comprehensive Historical and Legal Bibliography, 1963 -1979, was compiled by J. Guth DeLloyd and David Wrone. He got it half right. David Wrone was one of the authors, but the other was DeLloyd J. Guth. A small point I know, but a telling one.
- KRITZBERG, CONNIE. JFK: Secrets from the Sixth Floor Window.
Tulsa, OK: Under Cover Press, 1994. viii + 197 pps. Illustrated, bibliography, index. - Kritzberg worked as a journalist on the Dallas Times Herald in 1963 and here she has assembled an anecdotal collection of her memories salted with those of other local journalists and newsmen. There’s also some good background material on the power and politics of Dallas in the early 1960s, but Kritzberg isn’t too hot at handling information outside of her immediate experience and some telling points get lost in the text. The book is rather awkwardly arranged and not well edited. I am still surprised that nobody has yet written a chronicle of the assassination through the eyes of the local newspaper and television journalists. What was the scuttlebut in the newsrooms of Dallas in November and December 1963? What was being discussed that never got into print?
- MAILER, NORMAN. Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery.
New York: Random House, 1995 [London: Little, Brown, 1995]. 791 + xxxvii pps. Bibliography, index. - Well, good ol’ Norman didn’t end up in bed with Madonna as we all thought, but with Laurence Schiller instead, that well known celebrity ambulance-chaser, former business manager of Jack Ruby’s, and co-author of The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report (1967), who has recently been seen on television sitting behind the defence lawyers at OJ’s trial (not another book, Larry?). So, after many years of being sympathetic to the critical community Mailer performs a volte-face and thinks Oswald was a lone, mad nut after all. There’s an appreciation at the front of the book ‘to Larry Schiller, my skilled and wily colleague in interview and investigation…’ Ah, well.
I better own up and admit that despite the greatest of endeavours I never managed to get beyond page 40. I’ve tried, really tried, but the opus has defeated me. It’s defeated a few others too in the critical community, and if we can’t finish it, who on earth can?
Standard publishing practice is to number a book’s prelims in lower case roman numerals with arabic figures beginning on the opening page of the text proper. For some bizarre reason roman numerals start at the end of this book to cover the appendix, glossary, notes and so on. Quite mindless. But then what can we expect from the publishers who also gave us Posner’s Case Closed? Firm up the Warren Report today! Re-style book numbering tomorrow! Square the circle the day after that! All in a day’s work for Harry Evans and the Random House crowd.
- NEW FEDERALIST. Why the British Kill American Presidents.
Leesburg, VA: The New Federalist, 1994. 32 pps. Illustrated. - ‘Over the past 129 years, four U.S. Presidents – Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John Kennedy – have been assassinated. Publicly available evidence shows that in each of these cases, the assassinations were ordered from London and carried out by professional assassins under the control of His [sic] Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Services. In each instance, the targeted American President had been in a policy war with the British Crown at the time of his murder.’ Thus speaks Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
The alleged English connection in the JFK assassination was Major Louis Mortimer Bloomfield of British Intelligence who directed Permindex, the shady international organisation with Clay Shaw on the board, and this is discussed in Joseph Brewda and Jeffrey Steinberg’s lengthy investigative piece, ‘Permindex Ties Revealed to JFK Murder, 1001 Nature Trust [the World Wildlife Fund]’ reprinted here from the Executive Intelligence Review. Make of that what you will. Permindex just won’t lay down and die.
Much the most interesting material is devoted to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and the ‘Whitewatergate’ material he has been unflaggingly pushing through The Sunday Telegraph since 1993. The ‘slanders’ are here documented month by month. Evans-Pritchard is obviously out to unseat Clinton and, failing that, cause him as much embarrassment as possible. But where was E-P and the Telegraph when we really needed them, during the scandalous years of Reagan and Bush, eh? What has Clinton done that could possibly be compared with, for example, the Savings and Loan rip-off, the biggest financial scandal in US history?
- NEWMAN, JOHN. Oswald and the CIA.
New York: Carroll and Graf, 1995. xviii + 627 pps. Illustrated, notes (incorporating bibliography), index. - Newman, known for his magisterial study, JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (1992), has now written one of the most important works on the alleged assassin and the CIA. His concern, as he writes in the Introduction, is not with Oswald the Man, but with Oswald the File, and, specifically, Oswald the CIA File. Newman argues and demonstrates that the CIA had a ‘keen operational interest’ in Oswald from the day he defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 to the day he died (and before and after too).
With his twenty years background in military intelligence Newman knows not only how to read the files but can also understand and interpret the coded phrasing and routing details. A document might not only be interesting for what it does or does not say, but who reads it and when and in what hierarchical order can often reveal more.
This is a dense and sometimes difficult book that requires rapt attention, but it’s worth the effort. There is new information here on nearly every aspect of Oswald under discussion, including the defection, the Mexico City trip (particularly intriguing on David Atlee Phillips), Cuban connections, the ‘201’ file and so on.
Get it. Required reading for all of the community.
- WEISBERG, HAROLD. Never Again! The Government Conspiracy in the JFK Assassination.
New York: Carroll and Graf/Richard Gallen, 1995. xlvii + 498pps. Bibliography, index. - Weisberg, that Grand Old Man of the critical community, has written here a book that begins as a detailed critical account of the Journal of the American Medical Society’s 1992 reports on the Kennedy autopsy which he dissects with relish line by line and word by word. He then goes on to discuss the autopsy and the medical evidence generally and then the larger issues of government complicity in and complacency with the cover-up. This is a must-read for the critical community. I only wish a capable copy-editor had saved Weisberg from the repetitiveness and polemicism that mar his mastery and understanding of the subject. Finally, two conspiracy readers with more than a smidgen of passing interest:
- NATIONAL INSECURITY COUNCIL [sic]. It’s a Conspiracy!,
Berkeley, CA: Earth Works Press, 1992. 252 pps. Bibliography.VANKIN, JONATHAN, & WHALEN, JOHN. The Fifty Greatest Conspiracies of All Time: History’s Biggest Mysteries, Coverups, and Cabals.
New York: Citadel Press, 1995. 393 pps. Bibliographic references, index. - Much the same ground is covered in each of these volumes. Here we’ve got the suspicious deaths of RFK, MLK, Jim Morrison, Robert Maxwell, Vicki Morgan, Danny Casolaro, Marilyn Monroe, Karen Silkwood, et al; the Red Scare, Project Paperclip, Pearl Harbour, the Tonkin Incident, ‘Reefer Madness,’ the CIA and LSD, Mae Brussel, and all the usual suspects. The National Insecurity Council work keeps to the proven and near-proven political conspiracies while Vankin and Whalen demonstrate more of a Believe It or Not! approach and investigate the wilder stuff, such as the we-never-set-foot-on-the moon theory, Stephen Knight’s nonsense about Jack the Ripper being a Freemason and murdering prostitutes on behalf of the British royal family, the Priory of Zion guff, and the Gemstone File.
The NIC’s coverage of the JFK assassination is greater, more detailed and better researched and among the eight sections devoted to it is an analysis of the six major Who Killed Kennedy? theories, with arguments pro and con, that are well presented. Vankin and Whalen have a single chapter only and this zeroes in on the Antonio Veciana/’Maurice Bishop’ controversy and Richard Case Nagell’s allegations, though along the way they deftly and adroitly put the boot into that famous Wall Street lawyer, Gerald Posner.
It would be hard to recommend one book over the other. Get them both and have an intensive induction into the self-perpetuating world of conspiracy theory. You’ll never be alone. There are thousands of people out there just waiting to dovetail their theory into yours.
A good source for JFK books, as I’ve noted before in Lobster, is Andy Winiarczyk at the Last Hurrah Bookshop, 937 Memorial Avenue, Williams-port, PA 17701, USA. Telephone: (717) 327.9338. He accepts VISA and is used to shipping to foreign climes. Ask for a copy of his big new catalogue of JFK assassination and related titles.
Probe, the newsletter of the Citizens for Truth About the Kennedy Assassination, has just been revamped and the current issues runs to twenty pages. It is the only thing I know that adequately covers JFK news and it is now ably edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease. Write to the CTKA at PO Box 5185, Sherman Oaks, CA 91413, USA. Telephone: (310) 558.1796.