Reclaiming History? or Re-framing Oswald?

Review of Reclaiming History

by Gary L. Aguilar, 21 Dec 2007

Ed note: This review first appeared in the Nov/Dec issue of The Federal Lawyer.

"[A]lthough there have been hundreds of books on the [JFK] assassination," Vincent Bugliosi writes in the introduction to Reclaiming History, "no book has even attempted to be a comprehensive and fair evaluation of the entire [italics in original] case, including all of the major conspiracy theories." Indeed, no book has – not even this 1612-page book, supplemented by a CD-rom containing 958 pages of endnotes – although not because it is too short.

The gigantic swing that Bugliosi takes is easily the most ambitious one-person undertaking ever published on the Kennedy assassination. Bugliosi, the famous Charles Manson prosecutor, devotes more than 1400 pages of text and endnotes to "reclaiming" the lost truth as first set forth by the Warren Commission. He then devotes 900 more pages of text and endnotes to pounding myriad “conspiracy theorists” whose efforts over the years, Bugliosi claims, have wrought a grave injustice on the Commission and performed a "flagrant disservice to the American public."

It is not just that critics have convinced 75 percent of Americans (Bugliosi’s figure) to reject the official truth, which he says happens to be the real truth. These critics, Bugliosi contends, are also responsible for a widespread loss of faith in once-respected institutions. Such widespread skepticism, "gestating for decades in the nation’s marrow," he writes, "obviously has to have had a deleterious effect on the way Americans view those who lead them and determine their destiny. Indeed, Jefferson Morley, former Washington editor of the Nation, observes that Kennedy’s assassination has been 'a kind of national Rorschach test of the American political psyche. What Americans think about the Kennedy assassination reveals what they think about their government.'" To those who might wonder if more than 1600 pages of text and 900 pages of endnotes were really necessary, Bugliosi says that the problem is so severe that nothing less would have sufficed.

Although Warren Commission skeptics might not welcome this gargantuan new salvo, there is no denying that Bugliosi’s Herculean effort is an historic and important contribution. It is valuable not only as a reference for the myriad facts in the case and for debunking some of the pro-conspiracy codswallop that has not elsewhere already been debunked (most of it has been, if one has the time to find it). The book’s use also lies in demonstrating that it may not be possible for one person to fully master, or give a fair accounting of, this impossibly tangled mess of a case. In fact, despite Bugliosi’s pugnacious pummeling, he hasn’t laid a glove on major elements of the case for conspiracy.

And, regrettably, it must be said that the most distinguishing characteristic of this book is its demagogic pugnacity. Bugliosi cleaves the world of opinion holders neatly in two – sensible Warren Commission loyalists and conscious evildoers, the "conspiracy theorists." He allows, however, for the occasional sincere dupe. Although his prosecutorial, conclusions-driven style is redolent of Gerald Posner’s in Case Closed, the last attorney-written book to defend the Warren Commission, Bugliosi’s endless self-congratulation and his arrogant condescension make his book far more insufferable.

These traits may have served Bugliosi well as a Los Angeles County prosecutor where, he boasts, he won felony convictions in 105 of 106 jury trials. They may have helped him knock out true-crime books, including his famous book about the Manson murders, Helter Skelter. But his arrogance is of little use in untangling the hopelessly conflicted facts in this 44-year old national tragedy. His incessantly hurling slurs such as "deranged conspiracy theorist," "crackpot," "con man," "kook," and "huckster" at virtually all critics inevitably carries a whiff of buffoonery and anxious self-promotion about it. And that’s particularly the case when he’s flat-out wrong on the facts.

A typical example is Bugliosi’s mocking of skeptics who say that Robert Kennedy was, to borrow from Bugliosi, a "conspiracy theorist." He counters not with an informed discussion, but by producing an RFK quotation of support for the Warren Commission. Ironically, in the very week that Bugliosi’s book premiered, a new best-selling book by David Talbot, Brothers, was published proffering book-length documentation of something skeptics have long known and Bugliosi could have known if he had really looked: While RFK toed the official line in public for the obvious, political reasons, in private, and until the day he died, he remained active as, to borrow from Talbot, "America’s first assassination conspiracy theorist."

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

Vincent Bugliosi's Misnamed "Reclaiming History"

by David R. Wrone, 28 Sep 2007

In the forty four years of sustained discussion about the official findings of the federal government’s investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy no author can equal the failure Vincent Bugliosi has achieved in his misnamed Reclaiming History.

Invented facts & relations.

A characteristic of his narrative is the frequent use of hypothetical instances as a substitute for a lack of evidence or absence of documentary support for a statement. These he typically expresses with such phrases as “probably” or “must have” and similar wordage. In other words, when no or scant evidence exists to sustain a point he is writing about, he makes it up. For example, in one three page section of the end notes where he discusses the Officer J. D. Tippit murder he uses these made up substitutes for the lack of evidence thirty seven times. In the book as a whole one can only estimate the total number of inventions to be incredibly large. This is not what the civilization we are part of calls history, but is a class of fiction presented as non-fiction known as Munchausen’s work. In the appendix the thirty seven instances are set down.

Mythic reconstruction substituted for evidence.

Closely akin to Vincent Bugliosi’s inventions employed as evidence is his use of imaginary or mythic reconstructions to carry a point when he hasn’t any facts to sustain them. These he plugs into his narrative and employs for all the world as if they were expressions of the November 22nd reality. In this he parrots the Warren Commission’s lavish and pious use of reconstructions as a solution for the lack of evidence in its rush to frame Oswald’s guilt so a doubting America and a skeptical world would believe it. While we could cite many of these stand-in devices to illustrate this common Bugliosian anti-historical trait, perhaps his invention of the path Oswald took from his rooming house at 1026 N. Beckley Avenue to the scene of the Officer J. D. Tippit murder near 10th Street & Patton Avenue, will suffice.

Like the Warren Commission did before him Bugliosi claims Oswald killed Tippit. To do this Oswald officially—following the Warren Report’s scenario—had to move from his room on Beckley three minutes after 1:00 p.m. to the scene of the murder by 1:15 p.m. (radioed in at 1:16 p.m.) the time the Commission set for the shooting. Responsible critics long ago convincingly proved the feat to have been impossible for him to have performed. Bugliosi overcomes this severe and ultimately exculpatory time constraint in three ways. First he gratuitously starts Oswald to the Tippit scene several minutes before 1:00 p.m. to gain minutes for his thesis. Next, he adds minutes to the end of the walk where he speciously asserts Oswald arrived later than 1:10 p.m., the time a witness swore he had seen Tippit dead on the pavement. He then couples the gerrymandered time with an invented pathway. He declares he himself fast walked this route taken by Oswald south of the rooming house to the murder scene, a route he knows by intuition alone. He got there in 11’ 23” minutes, plenty of time for Oswald following this asserted trail and supposed time to have shot Tippit at 1:15 p.m. before a citizen sounded an alert on the police radio at 1:16 p.m.

But when we examine the path Bugliosi took, upon which his assertions of Oswald as murderer of the police officer must rest, we discover it is all a type of blue sky matter, a theory not history. He invented the route. There is not a scrap of genuine evidence, a fact, a scintilla of data, to mark any route to Tippit. Just as with the Commission’s map of Oswald’s alleged path taken, it is a pining wish.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

Besmirching History: Vincent Bugliosi Assassinates Kennedy Again

by Michael Green, 19 Sep 2007

Copyright 2007 Michael Green

The purpose of Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History is to defend the integrity of the USG National Security State by grossly distorting its nature and function, by disguising that it is the servant of factions of the ruling classes within the United States, and by pretending that the people who control it did not and could not contemplate the assassination of a democratically elected President whose recalcitrant politics fell outside their parameters. According to Bugliosi, only the lunatic can seriously entertain that Kennedy was murdered because he pursued détente with the USSR, championed nuclear disarmament, decided not to back the invasion of the Bay of Pigs with US military might, made a peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the Joint Chiefs wanted invasion and war, and decided to withdraw US troops from Vietnam rather than pursue by brute force an imperial venture in Southeast Asia. According to Bugliosi, Oswald is not just the murderer of Kennedy, he is the only one involved, and he is nothing but “a first class ‘nut.’” (945) Thus, Kennedy’s murder is deprived of any political significance whatsoever, assassinating him yet again.

Bugliosi considers himself at liberty to mock those who appreciate the truth of the opposing world view, inter alia, “conspiracy icon Vincent Salandria [for claiming that] ‘the killing of Kennedy represented a coup d’état.’…I suppose that since a coup d’état is defined as a sudden, unconstitutional change of state policy and leadership ‘by a group of persons in authority,’… you couldn’t even have a coup without the involvement, cooperation, and complicity of groups like the FBI, CIA, and military-industrial complex.” Individuals who entertain such notions are so wrapped up in “their fertile delusions” that they substitute finding a motive for finding evidence, make no connections between, e.g., the CIA and Oswald, and thus sadly show nothing but “this crazy, incredibly childlike reasoning and mentality that has driven and informed virtually all of the pro-conspiracy sentiment in the Kennedy assassination from the beginning.” (985-987)

This essay answers Bugliosi by showing direct involvement of the Warren Commission and the US military in the cover-up, and by demonstrating that the assassination was a state murder, without attempting at this point the far more difficult and far less important task of saying which individuals did precisely what. All of the organs of state power participated in the cover-up; indeed none could do so without confidence in the cooperation of all the others. Some did so as part of their role in the murder, some like the FBI did so reluctantly, but there were no institutional whistleblowers because the consensus of persons with political power was firmly opposed to Kennedy’s foreign policy and they used their control of the organs of state power to kill him, and then replaced his foreign policy with theirs.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org

Bugliosi, Bowles and the Open Mike

(c) Chris Scally

The final report of the United States' House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (the HSCA) was published on July 29, 1979. This second official investigation into the Kennedy assassination found that President Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy", although Lee Harvey Oswald did fire three of the four shots, and he fired the shot that actually killed the President. The HSCA's report stated that "scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired" at the President ﷓ Oswald from the Texas School Book Depository building above and behind the President, and a second, unidentified gunman from the grassy knoll in front and to the right of the motorcade.

The HSCA’s “scientific acoustical evidence” was based on a study of recordings of the transmissions over the Dallas Police radio on the day of the assassination. The HSCA’s scientific experts concluded that these recordings contained a series of impulses which they believed represented gunshot sound patterns. Furthermore, the scientists concluded that the sounds had been recorded by a police motorcycle radio which was stuck in ‘transmit’ mode, and that the motorcycle was that of Officer H.B. McLain, who was riding some 120-140 feet behind the President’s limousine.

However, on January 4, 1979, just two days after the HSCA’s summary findings were published, and exactly one week after his own public testimony, McLain told CBS television viewers that he was not the officer in question. The dispute over the identity of the officer with the open mike has continued to this day, and it remains central to the question of whether or not the acoustics evidence merits consideration as powerful evidence of more than one gunman in Dealey Plaza.

In a 66-page endnote to his book “Reclaiming History”, author Vincent Bugliosi dismisses the HSCA’s acoustics evidence. Of the acoustic scientists whose work formed the basis of that acoustics evidence, Bugliosi said their “presumed expertise”, “demonstrated incompetence” and “possible zeal to become famous” led them to “unintentionally” mislead the HSCA.

However, hidden away in this important footnote, but not referenced in the book’s Index, are three remarkable revelations:

• The alleged identity of yet another Dallas Police officer as “the officer with the open mike”, which is at the heart of the acoustics evidence;
• The claim that this officer’s identity was common knowledge in the immediate aftermath of the assassination; and
• The very serious allegation that his identity was made known to (but apparently ignored by) a HSCA investigator.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

An Ass of You and of Me

or, Buyer Beware: Initial impressions, but not really a review, of Reclaiming History
by John Kelin

One must assume that Vincent Bugliosi is honest, and that his new book on the JFK assassination is likewise honest. Reclaiming History is Bugliosi’s long awaited entry into the war of words over what really happened to John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

This is a massive book, so massive that the publisher, W.W. Norton, elected to put all of its end notes and other source notes onto an accompanying CD-ROM. At more than 1,600 pages, Reclaiming History gives the appearance of a comprehensive and minutely detailed study of the crime that shook the world four decades ago. Bugliosi says he devoted twenty years to his book. I’m devoting about twenty minutes to writing this essay.

Vincent Bugliosi, of course, is the former Deputy District Attorney from Los Angeles, best known for prosecuting Charles Manson and members of his murderous “family” some thirty-five years ago. Bugliosi’s resulting book Helter Skelter (written with Curt Gentry) became a best seller, and according to the press materials accompanying Reclaiming History is the best selling true crime book of all time. Bugliosi has since written several other true crime books that have also been best sellers.

Why did the former prosecutor decide to tackle the Kennedy assassination? “Over 95 percent of the books on the case happen to be pro-conspiracy and anti-Warren Commission,” he says. “So certainly there is a need for far more books on the other side to give a much better balance to the debate.”

Well, maybe. But what was the purpose of the Warren Report? Early Commission critic Sylvia Meagher once observed that if the Report cannot stand on its own – if it requires additional books to prop it up – that in itself is “a total default” to its critics. It may be a double fault in Bugliosi’s case. For sheer bulk, Reclaiming History is nearly twice as long as the 888 page Warren Report it defends.

Taking Bugliosi’s numbers at face value, there are still plenty of books attempting to legitimize the Warren Report, and they are typically welcomed with great praise by the mainstream media. To name just a few, Gerald Posner’s Case Closed, which appeared at the time of the assassination’s thirtieth anniversary, was featured prominently in U.S. News and World Report and Posner was all over the boob tube for months. Commission member Gerald Ford published a book on the case, Commission attorney David Belin published two, and Arlen Specter devoted many pages to defending the Report in his 2000 memoir. William Manchester was contracted by the Kennedy family to write a book on the assassination before the Warren Report was even published. Jim Bishop wrote a book that did not question the official story. Richard Warren Lewis and Lawrence Schiller proved two heads aren’t always better than one in a book attacking the critics. Jim Moore published a pro-Commission book in 1989. Commission attorney Wesley Liebeler announced he was writing, but never completed, a book on the case. And former Yale University professor Jacob Cohen also announced but never published a book defending the Warren Report.

And then there are the television networks. The electronic media convicted Oswald the weekend of the assassination and has never let up in the forty-something years since. CBS has produced multiple documentaries supporting the official story, as have NBC and ABC. Don’t even get me started on Time-Life. Methinks Vince Bugliosi’s protestations are without merit.

Spoiler alert. I’m going to give away the ending to Reclaiming History. Like the butler in a hackneyed murder mystery, Oswald did it. “Oswald,” Bugliosi writes in his Introduction, was “an emotionally unhinged political malcontent who hated America [and] was as guilty as sin.”

And that, really, is about all you need to know of Vincent Bugliosi’s book. But I’ll add that one of his objectives is to deconstruct and debunk every theory offering an explanation to the assassination – every one, that is, but the lone nut theory. If Bugliosi’s comment on Lee Oswald intrigues you, or if you like to read everything on this case, then by all means spend the fifty dollars that is the book’s suggested retail price. Otherwise, hang on to your money.

In spite of Bugliosi’s explanation for why he wrote Reclaiming History – what he sees as a dearth of books supporting the official account of the assassination (again, why wasn’t the Warren Report adequate?) – I can only understand his undertaking of a project such as this in the context of an ideological war. Oswald, after all, “hated America,” Bugliosi says. In a section of his book describing the earliest Commission critics, he emphasizes their politics, which were mostly, but not exclusively, left-leaning. The first published book on the assassination, Bugliosi writes, was by “an expatriate American Communist living in Paris.” Another early author was “a German Communist party member.” The next two books were written by “leftists sympathetic to Marxist ideology.” This is reminiscent of fifties-style red baiting, and if such criticisms are valid, then it is equally valid to argue that Vincent Bugliosi, as a former big city prosecutor, is a thoroughly entrenched Establishment figure who is parroting the party line, and summoning his considerable rhetorical skills in an effort to bully skeptical readers and reassure others.

As noted at the outset, this commentary is not really a review of Reclaiming History; I have not read the book in its entirety and do not intend to. Its point of view is plain as day, and taking the time to dissect and expose its fallacies is, for me, an errand of too few returns. I leave that necessary chore to others.

But in the interest of full disclosure, I must note that I am the author of a forthcoming book related to these matters. Praise from a Future Generation is the story of the early, “first generation” Warren Commission critics. Documents released by the Assassination Records Review Board show that the activities of virtually every one of these critics were monitored to some degree. I will briefly describe just one example, and leave it to the reader to decide whether Bugliosi’s characterization is fair and impartial. The “German Communist party member” Bugliosi refers to is Joachim Joesten, the author of Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? Bugliosi happily acknowledges (on p. 990) that his sources on Joesten include, via the Congressional Record, Gestapo documents seized by British authorities at the end of World War Two. Copies of these Gestapo records were provided to the Warren Commission by then-CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms. One of these Gestapo documents, translated by the CIA, was a memorandum from 1937 stating that while living in Copenhagen, Joesten published an article in a French newspaper warning of Germany’s military threat to Denmark. So Joesten’s life work includes opposing Hitler, and in Reclaiming History, Vincent Bugliosi relies on documents prepared by Hitler’s Nazi regime to pass judgment on his political reliability. This, I think, is just a tad questionable.

But, one must assume that Vince Bugliosi is honest, and Reclaiming History represents his true feelings on the Kennedy assassination. His motives, surely, are pure as the driven snow.

A Crime Scene Between Two Hard Covers

by Milicent Cranor

If you ever want to witness a crime with your own eyes, you need only look at certain pages of the official record on the murder of John F. Kennedy. The crime is perjury. But unless you know a great deal about the case, you may not recognize it. There is, however, another crime scene you can visit that is easier to evaluate. Here, the crime is fraud, six pounds of it: “Reclaiming History,” by Vincent Bugliosi. 

This book is infested with fraud from cover to cover, but you might never know it unless you were to compare (a) the actual record with (b) what Bugliosi says is on record. You would also need to know (a) what else is on record that is relevant and significant, and (b) whether Bugliosi included this information.

This essay contains only a few samples of Bugliosi’s highly selective, and sometimes outright false reporting on the medical-ballistics in this case.

If this is how Bugliosi reports simple, physical information, imagine what he does with more complex issues.

The Throat Wound

Misrepresenting Parkland

Was the wound in Kennedy’s throat an entrance or an exit? The wound itself can no longer tell us. No samples of the perimeter of the wound in the skin were preserved on slides. The only known photos of the wound were taken from too far away and are of poor quality. Words describing the wound have been preserved, but often they can be used to fit either situation.

All of the doctors at Parkland Hospital agreed the wound was relatively small. Four of six doctors who saw the wound said the edges were not ragged. Two other doctors and one nurse said the opposite. (See below for actual quotes and references.) All of these words are suggestive but not definitive. The problem:

Exit wounds can be small.

Entrance wounds can be slightly ragged, or show “tattering” (Journal of Trauma 1963 (March) 3(2):120-128.) But words describing the little irregularities along the border of a round wound should not be confused with words indicating a jagged or star-shaped (stellate) wound — i.e., a typical exit wound.

You will never learn of these ambiguities in Vincent Bugliosi’s book. Bugliosi wants you to believe that (a) the wound was “ragged,” and (b) this proves it was an exit.

You will not learn from Bugliosi that the majority of Parkland doctors said the wound was not ragged. What is more seriously deceptive is that Bugliosi put these words — “ragged edges” — into the mouths of doctors who in fact said the opposite.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

Bugliosi Fails the Paraffin Test

by Pat Speer

On Page 964 of Reclaiming History, as part of his list of evidence proving Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy, Vincent Bugliosi states:

"Dallas Police performed a paraffin test on Oswald's hands at the time of his interrogation to determine if he had recently fired a revolver, and the results were positive, indicating the presence of nitrates from gunpowder residue on his hands."

This statement is incredibly deceptive.  By including this statement in his list, Bugliosi is clearly suggesting that this evidence is indicative of Oswald's guilt, even though he readily admits 800 pages earlier that "the paraffin test is not conclusive...mere handling of a weapon may leave nitrates of the skin, even without firing it." (p. 164)  Even worse, when one looks at the results of another test, performed on the paraffin casts of Oswald's cheek, one can only conclude they suggest that Oswald did not fire the shots that killed Kennedy.  You see, while the tests of Oswald's hands were positive, the tests for Oswald's cheek were negative.  This suggests that he did not fire a rifle on November 22, 1963.

Bugliosi tries to tackle this problem. In a footnote on page 165, Bugliosi states "Predictably, the paraffin cast for Oswald's right cheek showed no reaction." Predictably? He explains by asserting that there is no gap through which residue from a rifle could leak onto the cheek.  He then cites the Warren Commission testimony of FBI Special Agent Cortlandt Cunningham to support this supposition. On page 79 of his endnotes (available on a separate cd-rom) he acknowledges that former FBI agent William Turner reported that he'd spoken to Dr. Vincent Guinn about tests performed by Guinn, and that Guinn had found nitrates in abundance on casts of the cheeks of men who'd fired rifles like the one owned by Oswald. Bugliosi dismisses Turner's assertion, however, essentially calling him a liar, by stating "There is simply no way to square this with the testimony and experience of the Dallas Police and FBI."  Bugliosi then explains that two Dallas Police officers testified that they didn't think a test of the cheek would read positive for a man firing a rifle, and that Cunningham testified that an FBI agent had fired the rifle three times but that tests for his cheek had come up negative. Bugliosi begs of his readers "Why in the world would these two Dallas officers lie under oath about something like this?" and that "No one could really believe this is perjured testimony, if for no other reason that no professional would lie under oath on a matter that he knows other experts could easily refute him on." (endnotes, p. 80)

But what Bugliosi misses, or simply chooses to ignore, is that these men were discussing the standard paraffin test performed in the 1960's, and that Turner asked Guinn about a different test entirely involving neutron activation analysis of the paraffin casts.  Bugliosi, who elsewhere cites conversations with Guinn, never mentions discussing this with Guinn himself, nor of Guinn denying that he'd conducted such tests.  He never mentions that, as exposed in Professor Gerald McKnight's Breach of Trust, Guinn called the FBI in 1964 suggesting they conduct these tests (McKnight, Breach of Trust, p.211) and that, per the testimony of the FBI's John Gallagher—the last testimony taken by the Warren Commission—the FBI had indeed conducted neutron activation analysis on the paraffin cast of Oswald’s cheek.

It seems more than a coincidence that Bugliosi keeps the results of this test from his readers Gallagher testified that there was more gunshot residue on the outside of the paraffin cast than on the side exposed to Oswald’s cheek and that he could therefore reach no conclusion as to whether Oswald had fired a rifle. He stated furthermore that “I found that there was more barium and antimony on the inside surface of the cast than you would find on the cheek of an individual who had recently washed his cheek” without explaining why anyone should assume Oswald had just washed his cheek. (While the casts had reportedly been washed, nothing was offered to substantiate that rinsing a wax cast would have nearly the effect on the levels of residue as Oswald’s washing his face.) (15WH751)

This unexpected result, which suggests that the gunshot residue levels were too low to conclude Oswald had recently fired a rifle, becomes even more intriguing when one considers that researcher Harold Weisberg, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, received the controls for this test and found that gunshot residue was always present on the cheeks of those firing a rifle like Oswald’s (Weisberg, Post Mortem, p. 437).  These controls, moreover, confirmed what Guinn had told the FBI in his phone call, (the FBI document describing this phone call is listed in McKnight’s book as R.M Jevons to Conrad 2/27/64 memo), what Guinn told an August 1964 conference (Lane, Rush to Judgment, p. 153), what Guinn published in an October 1964 article in the Journal of the Forensic Science Society (p. 189), and what Guinn later told Turner (Turner, Invisible Witness, p. 76).

Also of significance is that, unlike the paraffin tests originally performed on Oswald, the Neutron Activation Analysis performed by Gallagher only gained in respectability in the years following the assassination (Scientific Evidence in Criminal Cases, 1986, p.255), and is considered to be a reliable indicator of whether a suspect has fired a rifle.  Larry Ragle, a retired Director of Forensic Sciences for Santa Ana, California, in his 1995 book Crime Scene, explains: “By design, revolvers can leak…Rifles, depending on their construction and wear, can also leak.  There is only one way to determine the leakage capacity of any weapon and that is to collect samples from the hands or face firing the weapon under controlled conditions while using the corresponding ammunition.” (Ragle, Crime Scene, p. 172) Of course, this is precisely the kind of test performed by Guinn and Gallagher in 1964.

In sum, the gunshot residue tests conducted by Guinn and Gallagher create real doubt that Oswald fired the rifle found in the Book Depository.  Rather than acknowledge this, Bugliosi dismisses these tests as a William Turner pipe dream.  That he is outraged that anyone might think FBI agent Cortlandt Cunningham a liar, while simultaneously implying that William Turner—a man who left the FBI after he'd had enough of J. Edgar Hoover's misuse of the agency—is a liar, is outrageous. Perhaps Bugliosi's blind hatred of all suggestions of Oswald's innocence has blinded his thinking. In any event, his research simply can not be trusted.

For more information on the paraffin tests and their significance, see chapter 4 at patspeer.com.

See also Pat Speer's blog on Vincent Bugliosi's book, Reclaiming History from Reclaiming History.

Rewriting History: Bugliosi Parses the Testimony

by Don Thomas

When Jesse Curry retired as police chief of Dallas, Texas, he wrote a book called "JFK Assassination File." In a 1969 interview for the Dallas Morning News around the time of publication, Curry stated,

''We don't have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did.
''Nobody's yet been able to put him in that building with a gun in his hand."

Curry’s statement is as true now as it was then, a problem which would not be obvious to a reader of Warren Commission apologist Vincent Bugliosi’s new book “Reclaiming History.”  According to Bugliosi there is...

'“a mountain of evidence conclusively proving that Oswald shot Kennedy,” (p. 832)

and he invokes this assertion whenever he needs an excuse to dismiss evidence to the contrary. The fact is the totality of the evidence that Oswald shot Kennedy amounts to little more than the proverbial molehill. The eyewitness testimony, for what it was worth, indicated that someone other than Oswald did the shooting. In this regard, one of the more shameful aspects of the Warren Commission investigation was its handling of the African-American witnesses. These individuals were among the Book Depository employees closest to Lee Harvey Oswald. Because they often ate lunch with him (Givens: [6WH354], Arce: [6WH364], Jarman: [3WH200]) they had a special perspective on Oswald’s whereabouts during the lunch hour on the day of the assassination. The accounts of these witnesses tended to exculpate Oswald, but the Warren Commission took advantage of their status as second class citizens to ignore or distort, and in some cases, manipulate their statements. Bugliosi argues around, but never comes to grips with these problems, instead preferring to denigrate not the Warren Commission, but the Warren Commission’s critics.

The official mythology holds that during the lunch hour Lee Harvey Oswald was hiding in the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor awaiting the President’s motorcade and was there to shoot the President at 12:30 Dallas time. In his interrogation Oswald insisted that he was on the first floor of the building when the President’s motorcade went by. To counter Oswald’s alibi the Warren Commission and Bugliosi relied on the testimony of Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz who led the interrogation. Fritz was not only underqualified for his job (admitting to the Warren Commission that he had no formal training in forensics [4WH203]) but demonstrably incompetent. His investigation of Kennedy’s murder was a succession of blunders, not the least of which was a failure to protect the crime scene. It was Fritz who was responsible for the misidentification of the murder weapon widely reported in the press as a Mauser rifle. It was Fritz who refused to allow the suspect access to legal counsel. It was Fritz who told Louisiana law enforcement officials that he didn’t need their witnesses because he already knew who killed the President [editor's note: the Rose Cherami incident]. Fritz picked up the evidence cartridges before they could be checked for prints and then pilfered one, apparently for a souvenir, and then returned it damaged. At the time of his testimony to the Warren Commission Fritz was still unaware that the remains of a chicken dinner found in the sniper’s nest belonged to a key witness to that days events, thinking that they were leftovers from days and weeks previous. In testifying to the Warren Commission ''a capella'', that is, without notes, Fritz gave a distorted version of Oswald’s alibi, claiming that Oswald had said that he had eaten lunch with two of the black employees, “Junior” and a “short fellow” [4WH213, 224]. Fritz’ brief handwritten notes, donated to the National Archives thirty years after the fact, do not reflect that version, noting only,

''two negr. came in, one Jr.- + short negro-." [Fritz Notes, p. 1]

The Warren Commission and Bugliosi cite the two employees, Junior Jarman and Harold Norman, as denying that they ate lunch with Oswald, and therefore that Oswald’s alibi was a lie [WR180, 195]. In doing so they ignored the account of the two FBI agents who were present during the interrogation and who, unlike Fritz, had filed a written report on Oswald’s statements. According to the FBI report, Oswald had actually said that he had eaten lunch alone.

''On November 22, 1963, he had eaten lunch in the lunch room alone, but recalled possibly two Negro employees walking through the room during this period. He stated possibly one of these employees was called "Junior" and the other was a short individual whose name he could not recall but whom he would be able to recognize." [WR622]

In fact, during their Warren Commission testimony, Junior Jarman and Harold Norman separately confirmed that they had "walked through" the first floor lounge, known as the domino room, to retrieve their sandwiches, thus independently corroborating Oswald's account. Significantly, Harold Norman testified that usually some of the employees, including himself, would play dominos in this room during the lunch hour, but on this particular day, because of the pending passage of the Presidential motorcade, no one was playing dominos [3WH189]. When asked if anyone else was in the domino room, Norman, who did eat his sandwich in the lounge before joining his friends to watch the motorcade, responded that in fact somebody else was present, but he could not remember who it was [3WH189]. Hence Oswald had somehow correctly guessed not only the people who had been in the lunchroom that day, but their actions, even though they were different from the usual. Thus, the statements by the black employees which actually corroborated Oswald’s alibi, is twisted by Bugliosi to make it appear that Oswald had lied.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

Reply From a Conspiracy Believer

by Gaeton Fonzi

Vincent Bugliosi must be exhausted.  He not only churned out more than 1600 pages of tautologically strained contentions to support his book’s  pretentious title, ''Reclaiming History'', he must be weary from wrestling with the multitude of distortions and twisted conclusions he was forced to make to support his primary assertion.

His primary assertion?  Swallow that mouthful of  Dr. Pepper before you read this:  “...it has been established beyond all doubt that Oswald killed Kennedy.”

Fearful of endowing his abhorrent duplicity with any hint of legitimacy, I hesitate to take the time and effort to respond to all the ungrounded contentions he makes about my role as a federal investigator in the case and about certain areas of evidence with which I was involved.  There are, however,  two very significant segments of the investigation that Bugliosi, with clever  distortion and selected omission of facts, defiles truth and history.  And having cited as a source my own book, ''The Last Investigation'', he had to be well  aware of its documented adherence to the historical facts.  (Former U.S. Senator Richard Schweiker graciously provided a jacket  blurb citing the book for exactly that : “A rarity among Kennedy assassination books, [it] does not indulge in sensational or bizarre conspiracy theories.”)

One key contention that Bugliosi repeatedly makes is that my approach to the investigation was biased  because, before I was hired by the HSCA, I “had long been a conspiracy theorist.”  Bugliosi uses the term “conspiracy theorist” with the same poisonous implication  that Joe McCarthy used when he stigmatized  anyone who defied him as a  “Communist sympathizer.”  In my case, Bugliosi was forced  to characterize my viewpoint as anything but objective in order to distort the validity of certain evidence I had discovered – evidence that knocked hell out of his and the Warren Commission’s crucial single bullet theory and the branding of Oswald  as the lone assassin.

Bugliosi is wrong.  I was never a “conspiracy theorist.”  I went from an agnostic to a ''conspiracy believer''.  Like millions of Americans and almost all journalists whose Fourth Estate responsibility mandates that they maintain a critical oversight of our Government, I didn’t question the Warren Report when it was published.  Didn’t even read it.  Its assertions and conclusions came to me from the daily press and the national news networks.  And the most respected and nationally influential newspapers – including ''The New York Times'' –  editorially praised the Report and instantly endorsed its conclusions.  This despite the fact that the 26-volumes of evidence which the Commission claimed backed its critical conclusions weren’t available to the press until more than two months after the release of the Report.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

Letter to New York Times Book Review

This letter appeared in the June 17 edition of the New York Times.

To the Editor:

Bryan Burrough’s laudatory review of Vincent Bugliosi’s book on the Kennedy assassination (May 20) is superficial and gratuitously insulting. “Conspiracy theorists” — blithe generalization — should according to Burroughs be “ridiculed, even shunned ... marginalized the way we’ve marginalized smokers.” Let’s see now. The following people to one degree or another suspected that President Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy, and said so either publicly or privately:

• Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon;
• Attorney General Robert Kennedy;
• John Kennedy’s widow, Jackie;
• his special adviser dealing with Cuba at the United Nations, William Attwood;
• F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover (!);
• Senators Richard Russell (a Warren Commission member), and Richard Schweiker and Gary
• Hart (both of the Senate Intelligence Committee);
• seven of the eight congressmen on the House Assassinations Committee and its chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey;
• the Kennedy associates Joe Dolan, Fred Dutton, Richard Goodwin, Pete Hamill, Frank Mankiewicz, Larry O’Brien, Kenneth O’Donnell and Walter Sheridan;
• the Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman, who rode with the president in the limousine;
• the presidential physician, Dr. George Burkley;
• Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago;
• Frank Sinatra;
• and the “60 Minutes” producer Don Hewitt.

All of the above, ala Burrough, were idiots.

Not so, of course. Most of them were close to the events and people concerned, and some had privileged access to evidence and intelligence that threw doubt on the “lone assassin” version. That doubt remains  today. Bugliosi himself this year joined us, Don DeLillo, Gerald Posner, Robert Blakey and two dozen other writers on the assassination in signing an open letter that appeared in the March 15 issue of The New York Review of Books. The letter focused on a specific unresolved lead, the discovery that a highly regarded C.I.A. officer named George Joannides was in 1963 running an anti-Castro exile group that had a series of encounters with Oswald shortly before the assassination.

This is obviously pertinent, yet the C.I.A. hid the fact from four J.F.K. investigations. Since 1998, when the agency did reluctantly disclose the merest outline of what Joannides was up to, it has energetically stonewalled a Freedom of Information suit to obtain the details of its officer’s activities. Here we are in 2007, 15 years after Congress unanimously approved the J.F.K. Assassination Records Act mandating the “immediate” release of all assassination-related records, and the C.I.A. is claiming in federal court that it has the right not to do so.

And now your reviewer, Burrough, seems to lump together all those who question the official story as marginal fools. Burrough’s close-minded stance should be unacceptable to every historian and journalist worthy of the name — especially at a time when a federal agency is striving vigorously to suppress very relevant information.

Jefferson Morley , Washington
Norman Mailer, Provincetown, Mass.
Anthony Summers, Waterford, Ireland
David Talbot, San Francisco