Reclaiming History? or Re-framing Oswald?

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

Bugliosi's lawyering worse than Posner's

by Peter Dale Scott

I’d like to share an example of how Bugliosi’s lawyering is even worse than Posner’s. The following extract from Bugliosi (p. 980), is his only extended treatment of my book Deep Politics:

Here are just two examples representative of literally thousands of A-B-C (and D, E , and F) situations that the conspiracy theorists set forth in their books : Conspiracy author Peter Dale Scott believes that Dallas oilmen, Jack Ruby, and J. Edgar Hoover, along with many others, may have been part of a conspiracy to murder Kennedy . In support of this, he writes, "A businessman told the FBI that Ruby had once introduced him to Dallas businessman E. E. Fogelson and his wife, Greer Garson. Fogelson was a member of the 'Del Charro set'. "This was a group of Texas millionaires who frequented [Texas oilman ] Clint Murchison's resort, the Hotel Del Charro, near Murchison's racetrack, the Del Mar, in La Jolla, California . Clint Murchison and some of his associates would pay for annual racing holidays of their good friend J . Edgar Hoover."

You can judge for yourself how accurate is Bugliosi’s summary of what I actually wrote:

“The story of Ruby and Alfred McLane illustrates how Ruby’s intimacy with the world of gambling gave him an entrée to the overworld of Dallas oilmen and lawyers, men with considerable political influence. Beyond question, Ruby knew a number of such individuals. A businessman told the FBI, for example, that Ruby had once introduced him to Dallas businessman E. E. Fogelson and his wife, Greer Garson. Fogelson was a member of the 'Del Charro set.' This was a group of Texas millionaires who frequented Clint Murchison's resort, the Hotel Del Charro, near Murchison's racetrack, the Del Mar, in La Jolla, California . Clint Murchison and some of his associates would pay for annual racing holidays of their good friend J . Edgar Hoover.”
               (Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 204-05)

Just for the record, I do not believe, and never have believed for an instant, “that Dallas oilmen, Jack Ruby, and J. Edgar Hoover, along with many others, may have been part of a conspiracy to murder Kennedy.” I defy Bugliosi or anyone else to find anything in my writings that even hints at such an absurd possibility. The above quotation certainly does not.

When I debated Posner in 1993, I had the problem that Posner misquoted and distorted what I said. Bugliosi is not distorting, he is fabricating his nonsense out of nothing. There is a shorter word for that kind of activity.

Reclaiming history from Vince Bugliosi

by Lisa Pease

Vincent Bugliosi, the famed prosecutor of the Manson case, has stopped putting liars in jail and started putting them in print. In his Orwellian-named book, “Reclaiming History,” Bugliosi purports to answer all the questions and shut all the doors to conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy. Long before we get to the question of why he would waste the later years of his life on such an impossible task, the first question we need to ask is this:

Is this an honest presentation?

After just minutes in its pages, I was shocked at how easily I could answer that.

No. This is not an honest presentation of the case.

This is completely one-sided attempt to do the impossible, to wash away the conspiracy and pretend it never happened.

Now I was hoping to come and tell you that while I thought Bugliosi was an honest man, he was simply wrong. He subscribed to Probe magazine for several years. So I know he’s not ignorant of the facts. He’s just incredibly biased in many cases, and in some, he’s flat out dishonest.

He’s wrong too, but everyone can be wrong, now and then, and that is not a crime.

Deliberately misrepresenting history, however, is the highest possible crime to this Real History lover. So I’ll start the ball in motion. A lot of us will be reclaiming history from the death grip Mr. Bugliosi has tried, but spectacularly failed, to put on the JFK case over the next several months.

I turned right to the chapter that most interested me: his chapter on the CIA. After 15 years of research, serious on-the-ground research interviewing people and reading original documents that were never supposed to see the light of day, I’ve come to the firm conclusion that specific people in the CIA were involved in the crime. Of course I’m curious to see how Bugliosi is going to explain all the evidence away.

Read the full essay at Real History Blog.

Bugliosi Fails to Resuscitate the Single-Bullet Theory

by Jerry McKnight

The Warren Commission concluded that there was only one gunman involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This assertion rested on what in the JFK assassination literature is called the “single-bullet theory.” This theory, as Vincent Bugliosi rightly points out, “is a sin qua non” to the Commission’s single assassin and essential supporting contention that Texas Governor John Connally and Kennedy were hit by the same bullet. In his book, Reclaiming History, Bugliosi embraces the single-bullet theory without fear or trembling. This theory, largely the creation of Arlen Specter, asserts that one shot entered the back of the President’s neck near the right shoulder, transmitted his neck without striking bone, exiting through his shirt collar and tie, and entered Connally’s chest under his right arm pit, smashing four inches off his fifth rib before exiting under his right nipple, then smashing through his right wrist, and finally penetrating his left thigh just under the skin before it came to a stop.

Bugliosi’s assertion that the single-bullet theory is based on substantial or irrefutably convincing evidenced is so removed from reality as to defy caricature or parody.

The first FBI laboratory reports on Kennedy’s clothes revealed that the holes in his coat and shirt submitted to both X-ray and spectrographic analysis showed traces of copper (bullet metal) around the edges of the holes. This was forensically consistent with JFK having been shot in the back with copper-jacketed ammunition. The same tests run on Kennedy’s collar and tie showed no bullet metal was found in the surrounding fabric. Rather than admit that the slits in the President’s collar and nick in his tie were not caused by an assassin’s bullet, the FBI lab report noted that the slits had the “characteristics of an exit hole for a bullet fragment.” (My italics).

The FBI knew that the origin of the slits and the nick in the tie were not caused by a bullet fragment, but it was essential to stay on message: The official story decided upon over the weekend of the assassination was locked into all three shots originating from above and to the rear of the presidential limo, so the FBI was willing to go the extra mile and pretend that a fragment from the bullet that struck Kennedy from the rear caused the “holes,” (the report’s description) in the collar and the nick in the tie.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

Epic Book Resurrects Finding That Oswald Acted Alone in Killing JFK

by Josiah Thompson

Bugliosi picks only the evidence that backs his argument

Former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi claims to be "Reclaiming History" from the riffraff of conspiracy theorists in his massive new book on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The term "conspiracy theorist" is practically married to the assassination, tossed about the way the House Un-American Activities Committee used to throw around "Communist sympathizer." One size fits all!

But according to Bugliosi, conspiracy theorists are the reason more than 75 percent of Americans don't believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the crimes. Bugliosi's intent is to expose its critics as "fraudulent" on the way to resurrecting the conclusion of that panel, which found that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

The first question to Bugliosi must be, "Who cares?"

For more than 40 years, every wingnut outside the city limits of Roswell, N.M., has gravitated to the Kennedy case, and Bugliosi attempts to list them all.

For instance, in a footnote, he skewers someone named Nord Davis Jr., who apparently believes 21 bullets were fired in Dallas' Dealey Plaza and that Parkland Hospital doctors confused police officer J.D. Tippet's body with that of Kennedy.

Or take the case of James Fetzer, Ph.D., who, Bugliosi points out, has been on a crusade for the past decade to prove that the Zapruder film "is a complete fabrication" put together by some shadowy intelligence agency.

Many historical events draw wacky theories. The proper response is to ignore them; it is not to write a 1,660-page book exposing their wackiness.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

Debugging Bugliosi

by Don Thomas

Vincent Bugliosi's treatment of the acoustical evidence is turgid with factual errors, many more than can be enumerated in a ten page essay, so I will cite only the most significant. Acoustical experts for the HSCA in 1978 determined that the assassination gunfire was captured on a police recording of a broadcast emanating from a motorcycle cop's radio microphone, and that the shots included one from the infamous grassy knoll. Although Bugliosi cites from the technical reports he clearly has no grasp of the technical issues. On such details as the manner in which the motorcycle microphone became stuck open, on the manner in which fragments of broadcasts cross-talked from one channel to another, and the manner in which ambient sounds are distorted by the radio circuitry, Bugliosi's account is substantially wrong. The facts and logic that support the acoustical analysis are misconstrued beyond recognition.

Although Bugliosi relies heavily on interviews to get his points across, it is perhaps telling that Bugliosi's interviewees did not include any of the scientists that worked on the acoustics, on either side of the issue. Instead he cites extensively from interviews with persons he considers to be the experts on the acoustics in the JFK case: Dallas cops and a Rock musician named Steve Barber. Like a moth drawn to a flame Bugliosi seems bedazzled by any critical opinion that supports his own.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.