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.

Comments

[Pat Speer]

I have been writing about many of these same issues on my webpage. Bugliosi's use of Givens to prove Oswald was on the sixth floor when better more credible witnesses made it clear Oswald had come down for lunch is cherry-picking at its worst. Why repeat the Warren Commission's mistakes? Why not argue that Oswald had come down to establish an alibi, but then sneaked back upstairs? I suspect the answer is that Bugliosi has little interest in developing a logical scenario, and much more interest in telling everyone the Warren Commission was right all along and all those dang critics are wrong. Yawn.

[Jeff]

Rather than working so hard to discredit Bugliosi's book why don't you provide a shred of evidence that anyone other than Oswald fired the rifle from the 6th floor. So who placed the gun, the brown paper wrapper to hide the gun, the cartridges and the strategically placedboxes with fingerprints on the 6th floor?? Casper the unfriendly ghost? Like Bugliosi correctly claims - all the evidence points to Oswald and no evidence points to anyone else.

[Rex Bradford]

Regarding why "don't you provide a shred of evidence" re: gun etc., here's one reply:

1. Rifle - Unknown persons planted it. Why is it incumbent upon writers years later to find someone that nobody was even looking for the day it happened?

2. Brown paper wrapper - Was it even there? See Ian Grigg's The Paper Bag That Never Was: http://spot.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/15th_Issue/pbag1.html

3. Cartridges - Presumably same unknown person who placed the rifle.

4. Box fingerprints - Oswald worked on that floor, and many workers' fingerprints were on the same boxes. Not very illuminating.

"All evidence points to Oswald" because it was designed to, and "no evidence points to anyone else" is true only in the strictest sense that conspirators didn't leave business cards at the scene.

One might ask, if all evidence points toward Oswald, such basic questions as:
1. Why did his cheek fail a paraffin test to see if he had fired a rifle?
2. Why no fingerprints on the rifle, only a highly suspicious palmprint on a piece of tape claimed days later to be from the rifle? How did Oswald assemble the rifle without leaving prints? Was he wearing gloves? Where are they? If we are required to locate people who planted the rifle, shouldn't Bugliosi and the WC be required to find the gloves?

Etc etc ad nauseam. This is all well-trodden ground, but with the Bugliosi book everything old is new again.

[Dr. Gregg Wager]

I still believe Roger Craig's testimony that the gun found on the sixth floor was a Mauser. This gun was not planted, it was one of the assassins' actual weapon.

[Jeff]

You each probably believe that OJ was innocent also, correct? Sure the rifle was a Mauser, you bet - and of course the police planted the brown paper bag there for those magical curtain rods, right? So who planted Oswalds gun there and the empty shells - Casper again?? Damn that Casper - he provides you an alibi for all your excuses doesn't he?

[Jeff]

Who planted all this evidence Rex - like I said you just prove my point further. You don't have a single solitary shred of evidence that anyone other than Oswald owned, touched or fired the weapon. Come on Rex, grasp some reality for awhile. Quit looking for Casper around every corner. I'll ask you one more time - provide one piece of credible evidence that someone other than Oswald is guilty. You can't do it.

[rc helicopter]

Impressive blog! -Arron