Edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease.
Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003
$24 p/back
ISBN 0-922915-82-2
Let me first clarify the meaning of the subtitle. Probe, now defunct, was a US magazine devoted chiefly to research on the assassinations of the 1960s. I saw it occasionally and it was very good. I assumed this book was an anthology of articles from the magazine until publisher, Adam Parfrey, explained:
‘A number of essays in the book did not appear in Probe, and if they did, they appeared in a different format. Articles combined. Articles chopped. Articles renamed, rewritten. Very few copies of Probe were printed, ranging from 200 to 500, I think. And very very very few people own all the copies, including the editors themselves. I don’t. The book was a lengthy in-house copy edit. There was a great deal of rewriting and snipping. But what matters is the finished product, not the arguments prior to the print job.’
The end result of that process is huge book, 670 pages in all, half of which are devoted to JFK, 100 to Robert Kennedy, 80 to King, 60 to Malcolm X and 30 to the media’s response to the assassinations. The content varies from the readable to the dazzling. The JFK section include 45 pages of John Armstrong’s important recent work on ‘the two Oswald’s’ in a subset on Oswald, and pieces by names familiar to anyone semi-seriously interested in the subject: Gaeton Fonzi, John Newman, David Mantik and Gary Aguilar, as well as Probe’s Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease.
The Malcolm X material, though interesting and relatively little known, is the weakest: the author’s desire to link the plot by the Black Muslims which killed Malcolm to some plot by the US state fails: there is no evidence. It is likely that the US state would have killed Malcolm – it killed many Panthers and King – but the evidence suggests that it was just the Black Muslims removing a threat to the franchise.
Robert Kennedy’s killing gets essays by Lisa Pease and James di Eugenio, Probe’s main writers/editors/producers, which describe the conspiracy case as well as I have seen it done and concludes with a brilliant assault by DiEugenio on the Dan Moldea book on the case which made me realise how little I know. DiEugenio is very good indeed at this kind of detailed analysis and does the same thing here to Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot.
The most striking single essay in the book isn’t an essay at all, it is extracts from two speeches by Judge Joe Brown, one of the judges involved in the civil proceedings successfully brought by William Pepper against Lloyd Jowers and unnamed co-conspirators for the unlawful death of Martin Luther King. A black American, Judge Brown was too sympathetic to the plaintiffs in the case and was removed during the pre-trial proceedings. Pepper wanted permission to run forensic tests on the alleged murder weapon. (Pepper and Brown were pretty sure the gun wasn’t the one which killed King.) Because James Earl Ray had pleaded guilty, such tests had not been done for the original trial. This was a critical moment for the cover-up: without the rifle the official case against Ray, such as it was, would collapse. Brown gave permission for the tests, and the powers-that-be overturned Brown’s decision in a higher court and removed him from the case.
Brown really was the wrong judge for the case from the state’s point of view. Not only was he black and sympathetic to King, he knew a lot about rifles, some of which he displays in these extracts. Being elected officials and not appointees, judges don’t have to kiss ass in America they way they do here. This is Brown talking about the official version of James Earl Ray.
‘And you want to look at that piece of garbage [the Attorney General’s report] that’s 32 pages long, filled with inaccuracies, deliberate misstatements, miss-spellings, incorrect information – and you want to rely upon it as a statement that a sixth grade drop-out [Ray], no money, on the lam, who’s an escaped convict with I suppose great ties into England, great ties into the civil reporting and health systems of England, great ties into people who were expert forgers with indentification and passports, got an inside track into international air travel, inside track into obtaining the wherewithal to do what he was required to make those reservations, accomodations and transportation arrangements in various countries. Yeah. See, you got another thing going on.’
This is the best anthology on the subject since the 1977 The Assassinations edited by Peter Dale Scott and others; but it is also one of the best books on the assassinations since then.
An anthology from a magazine should make the reader think: wow, how could I have missed all this terrific stuff? So: wow, Jim and Lisa: how could I have missed all this terrific stuff?
One tip: read the last essay, DiEugenio’s explanation of why it all matters, first. It should have been the introduction.