Suspicion in Plenty: An anthology of scepticism published in Britain 1963-1973

[Paul Rigby]

News of the World, 15 March 1964, p.4

How many in the gunmen in the Kennedy killing?

By Jack Miller

The verdict on that nut Ruby doesn’t matter. The hell of it remains, that by killing Lee Harvey he removed the one man who could answer beyond shadow of doubt: Who – and how many – shot President Kennedy?

Mystery was always there under the surface, and still is.

Reaction to Thomas Buchanan’s Who Killed Kennedy? (London: Secker & Warburg, 1964). Secker & Warburg, it should be noted, housed the offices of the CIA-financed Encounter; and published a number of books which give every evidence of enjoying a spook subsidy. The plot isn't thickening, just becoming a little more obvious: the CIA was attempting to steer the debate from the outset.

Cyril Dunn appears to have been the spook urinal of choice at his paper in this period - and it shows:

The Observer, 5 April 1964, p.11

Who really killed Kennedy?

By Cyril Dunn

Worldwide efforts are now being made to throw serious doubt on the official American account of President Kennedy’s assassination. One or two of these re-examinations of the “evidence” have appeared in America, but the more daring examples are coming out of Europe.

Copies of recent issues of the French weekly L’Express, for instance, have not been offered by its publishers for general sale in the United States. They contain articles about the assassination thought likely to “inflame” American public opinion.

They belong to a series which has been running in L’Express for several weeks. The first number was boldly headlined: “Le Vrai Rapport sur L’Assassinat.” The author is an American novelist and computer-programmer called Thomas Buchanan, who has been living in Paris since 1961. The full Buchanan report is to be published as a book in this country by Secker and Warburg this month.

‘Other gunmen’

Many Americans, among them officers of the FBI, are already satisfied that Kennedy had only one assassin – a mentally unstable young man named Lee Harvey Oswald, who operated quite alone. It has been reported by leading American news magazines that this conclusion is likely to be sustained by the Warren Commission, set up by President Johnson to establish the truth.

But Buchanan suggests there were two gunmen, neither of whom was Oswald. He also argues that Kennedy could have been the victim of a murder plot directly involving officers of the Dallas Police, one or two of whom must have been high-ranking. He implies that a conspiracy of this sort might well have been sponsored by some of the Texan oil millionaires.

Texas oilmen, Buchanan says, have financed and sometimes directed the activities of the extreme American Right. He argues that they have done so because of their vested interest in opposing any Russian-American understanding. He implies that they might have been drawn into an elaborate frame-up of Oswald, intended to discredit the American Left and Communism in general.

Buchanan does not pretend that Oswald was entirely innocent. He simply reduces him to the status of a minor accomplice with a left-wing background, tricked by the real conspirators into becoming their scapegoat. Buchanan is oblique in what he says about the role of Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub operator who shot and killed Oswald, but suggests that by so doing he must at least have earned the overwhelming gratitude of the plotters.

Exposure threat

For Buchanan’s hypothesis covers the possibility that their plan ran into grave trouble, threatening them all with exposure. This occurred when Patrolman Tippit – now something of a national hero in America but nominated by Buchanan as another possible accomplice – bungled his part of the job by failing to kill and silence Oswald at the moment of arrest. Tippit, of course, was himself shot and killed, allegedly by Oswald.

Although easily the most startling, what Buchanan calls his “evaluation of the probabilities” is one of a basically consistent series.

The first detailed rebuttal of official “proofs” appeared in America less than month after the assassination. It was written by a New York lawyer called Mark Lane, a well-know spokesman for American dissent, who was later to represent Oswald’s mother. His “defence brief for Oswald” was published by the “progressive newsweekly” National Guardian. Lane examined, point by point, the case publicity made out against Oswald, on the day he was killed, by the Dallas DA, Henry Wade, and Lane treated most of it with derision.

Almost all other re-examinations of the evidence against Oswald have been patently inspired by Lane’s brief and make the same points. Buchanan himself seems to rely on it for his opening chapters, though he often goes on to speculate about what might have happened with a freedom Lane must surely find dizzying.

Nobody who has studied the existing case against Oswald could be wholly satisfied with it. Some of the “contradictions and inadequacies” in statements made by American officials directly after the event do not seem to have been resolved by later amendments.

The case against Oswald based wholly on newspaper reports may not seem convincing; if it did, there would be no point in setting up the Warren Commission. But other and different cases which rest on the same “evidence” must surely be received with a similar scepticism.

No denial

It may be thought fair, for example, to examine the private eyes and their motives. Most of them seem anxious to absolve the American Left. It might be argued that they are justified in this by past events, such as the Sacco and Vanzetti case and the “Red Hunt” that followed. But any sense of the pure objectivity of these investigators must be diminished by their distrust of the FBI, the Secret Service and the local police, which is often evident, and by occasional undertones of special pleading.

Nor does it appear that Buchanan, for example, has so far denied published reports that he was once a member of the American Communist Party with personal reasons for resenting the activities of American under-cover agencies, such as the FBI.

Perhaps it should also be borne in mind that none of the major critics of the case against Oswald was in Dallas when it was being built up. They had still not been to Dallas, or spoken to anyone directly involved, when they published their first articles. Both Lane and Buchanan have been there since. Lane found his private inquiry almost impossibly difficult, but conceded, after talking to some of Oswald’s friends, that one of his major submissions was ill-founded. Buchanan, on the other hand, seems to have found his suppositions triumphantly confirmed.

Things evidently thought sinister by the “private eyes” made a different impact on people who were in Dallas after the murders. The confused nature of official statements, the reckless freedom with which they were made, seemed open to innocent – though bizarre – explanation.

Nobody who has read the verbatim record of what the Dallas district attorney said at his Press conference on November 24 – an astonishing mix-up – could honestly believe that this highly professional man would have made out his case to a jury in anything like the same form. The fact is that the Dallas officials and police were under enormous pressure.

On the one hand were hundreds of fairly frenzied reporters, most of them insisting on the American ‘right to know.’ On the other were the Boss Men of Dallas – the bankers and corporation presidents whose authority has long been paramount in the city – insisting that “the Media” should have every facility. It may be thought deplorable that, with an accused man in custody, officials should have talked as they did. It would be absurd to rest a case, either for Oswald’s guilt or for his innocence, on what they said.

It must now be difficult for any outsider to admire the Dallas Police for anything except the size of their shoulder-patches. But it is at least imaginable that some of the statements made on their behalf were primarily designed, not to convict any innocent man, but to save some shreds of their own tattered professional reputation.

The bullets

Even so, there are obvious discrepancies in the official story as it stands. Some of them are bound to disconcert honest men. The key issue seems to be this.

The police insist that all the shots came from the same place – a room on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository – that this building was 75-100 yards behind Kennedy’s car when the shots were fired and that Kennedy was facing forward. Yet the doctors who tried to save the President’s life at the Parkland Hospital in Dallas said that one bullet hit Kennedy in the throat and was an entry wound.

An autopsy was performed on Kennedy’s body later that same day at the naval hospital in Washington. The doctor who performed it identified the throat wound as an exit wound. When two Secret Service men showed the Parkland doctors a copy of the autospy report, they retracted their original statements.

Critics of the official version refuse to be satisfied by this apparent volte-face. Who, they ask cogently, could be better qualified to identify the nature of bullet-wounds than any doctor practising in trigger-happy Dallas? Admittedly, it seems odd. But in fact the doctors operated on the throat wound at once, trying to sustain or restore Kennedy’s breathing. Is it possible that obliged to act swiftly and appalled as they must have been by the lacerated body of their President, the Parkland doctors’ judgment on this aspect was momentarily distracted?

Hole in screen

But Buchanan and others insist that at least one shot must have come from ahead of Kennedy. They rely on other evidence besides the throat wound. For instance, two reporters – Frank Cormier of AP and Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – wrote that they had seen a hole in the windscreen of Kennedy’s car, though they were not allowed close enough to examine it. One of these reporters, Dudman, is now willing to believe the mark he saw on the windscreen could have been caused by a ricochet from inside the car.

It is when Buchanan and Lane set out to show where the shot could have come from that they tax the credulity of anyone familiar with the scene of the murder. They argue that it could have been fired by a gunman hidden behind the parapet of a railway bridge over the underpass down which the Kennedy cavalcade was advancing.

Buchanan’s case for a gunman on the bridge is particularly detailed and he claims to established its probability by going there. It sets out to show that a gunman so placed would have been a sitting target, would have been perfectly invisible from the road below and could have walked away, reaching in five minutes and without difficulty the front door of the Dallas Morning News. And in this office Jack Ruby was seen before and after the assassination – but not for 15 minutes on either side of 12.30 p.m., when the first shot was fired.

Buchanan believes this hypothesis explains away another major difficulty – how could a mediocre marksman like Oswald fire off in five and a half seconds at least three, and possibly more, deadly rounds from a bolt-action rifle at a moving target? Actually, Buchanan is not satisfied that Oswald fired any shots from the Depository, but presents us instead with an anonymous First Murderer – another Dallas policeman or perhaps a hired gangster – whom Oswald sneaked into the building before the assassination and who escaped after it with police connivance.

Appalling risk

The Buchanan case sags if you stand where Kennedy was first hit and stare up at the railway bridge. It is the skyline. Moreover, its parapet is a balustrade with fairly wide gaps between the supporting pillars. It seems highly improbable that a gunman could have pushed his rifle through this balustrade and lowered his head to aim and fire without instantly being seen by the Secret Service men directly behind Kennedy.

But even if this gunman had been invisible from in front, behind him there was virtually no cover. A wide bed of rails across the bridge into Dallas Station. Buchanan himself says that if Ruby had still been in the newspaper office, five minutes walk away, he could have seen a gunman on the bridge. Would anyone have taken so evident and so appalling a risk?

One of America's best columnists of the period contemplates the conspiratorial abyss - and choses his career. Sensible man:

The Spectator, 10 April 1964, pp.172-173

Waiting for the verdict on Oswald

By Murray Kempton

We are likely to wait until June before we have a report from Chief Justice Earl Warren and the seven other representative Americans whom President Johnson appointed to find for us an official and, we prayerfully hope, a definitive judgment on the circumstances of Mr. Kennedy’s assassination.

The Warren Commission has heard fifty witnesses and studied summaries of the recollections of a hundred more. It expects to spend another month listening to more testimony and a number of weeks thereafter to assemble its findings. It is our pride, of course, to think of ours as a government of laws rather than of men. But moments like these remind us how much more we are a government of laws terribly dependent upon men. Our dependence on Mr. Justice Warren amounts to a surrender of our faculties almost total. What we ask of him is a verdict we are able to accept as the truth and a truth no worse than the dreadful one we already know. We need to believe that Lee Oswald acted by himself and that what happened in Dallas was lonely and absurd and without the smallest explanation in reason. Any explanation in reason would leave us to face the condition that a number of our own citizens joined together to kill a man whom all Americans should have cherished as a person and as a symbol, and anyone who asks that asks too much of us. We seek a judgment that would both comfort and convince us.

Mr. Allen Dulles, a commission member and former director of the CIA, said last week that the mail-order rifle, assumed to be the murder weapon, ‘bore, among others, the fingerprints of Lee Oswald.’ This is a statement harder to take than anything the FBI has said about fingerprint evidence so far. Still, there is something about this case which never lays to one question to rest without raising another. Whose are the other fingerprints of whose existence Mr. Dulles incidentally informs us? Some of them at least have an obvious origin which, however innocent, is certainly unfortunate. After the rifle was found, one Dallas policeman was photographed holding it in the air with his bare hands; the next day another policeman appeared in the prints holding it carelessly by the sling. Each of these displays, offered for no reason but journalistic convenience, must have left fingerprints behind; and each was a breach of elementary police practice. The most critical piece of evidence in the most important murder in the lifetime of every American was handled like a stage prop; we depend on Mr. Justice Warren and he depends in turn for the truth on pieces of evidence picked over and mishandled by policemen.

I do not contend that Lee Oswald was innocent. Yet it is hard not to notice how glad every law enforcement was to believe that, having found Oswald, there was nowhere further to look. It seems to have become the law’s business in those early hours to keep us from asking why it could not protect Mr. Kennedy from a murder which was unthinkable by showing us how efficiently it could prevent Lee Oswald from an escape which would have been merely embarrassing. Ever since, there have remained discrepancies in the official version of Oswald’s capture which, if they are not indicative of a frame-up, can only be explained as exaggerations of the speed and efficiency with which the Dallas police reacted.

They could not have moved into the Texas Book Depository at once and in force, as their chief says they did, and still given Lee Oswald time to leave what they say was his hiding-place, dispose of what they say was his rifle, and be four flights down drinking a Coca-Cola in time to greet the first policeman to arrive. The police could not then have given Oswald time to leave and called the rest of the book depository’s employees to a formation and discovered Oswald missing and put out a perfect description as a wanted call on their radio, all in the space of one minute. And yet , when Justice Warren puzzles over these prodigies of logistics, there is no place for him to seek the answers except from the Dallas Police Department. In the same way, if he wants a full report on Lee Oswald’s relations with the FBI – both as informer and person informed upon – he can only ask Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s director, and trust him to accept the consequent risks of institutional embarrassment.

To think about Justice Warren’s problem is to come to a peripheral but none the less curious mystery. That is, the role of the American reporter, who at his very good best is the most active and persistent of his breed on earth. The Kennedy murder is full of puzzles; yet our journalists look at them with a languor and an anxiety not to ask questions which has never fallen on us before. We have left the questions to amateurs and strangers; books on the plot to kill Mr. Kennedy are reported best-sellers in France and Brazil. It is possible to dismiss these things as fantasy. But there remain areas of doubt perfectly realistic and subject to workmanlike inquiry which American reporters simply refuse to engage. Mr. Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post Dispatch raised a few questions in the wake of Mr. Kennedy’s murder, but seems to fallen back discouraged since; I have seen no evidence that any American reporter is stirring with the curiosity which he would normally bring to any police case so untidy.

I do not think this neglect comes from complacency; most of what the world knows about the deficiencies of the United States was set forth for it by American journalists. I am afraid we have been rendered immobile by shock. I myself am readier than most to believe the worst about our institutions. Still, when I was in Dallas, I went to the Book Depository to look out of the window which Oswald is supposed to have used. I felt like a tourist and an intruder, and I was automatically comforted at how close the range seemed and how plausible for the powers of an ordinary marksman; I should, I am afraid, have been upset if it had seemed too far away.

We have failed in our duty, then; our excuse – and a poor one – is that we are wounded. The nature of that wound is best described in the experience of Thomas Buchanan, an expatriate American, who has composed for L’Express the most elaborate and ingenious of all the conspiracy theories – one which embraces Jack Ruby for the Mafia; some six Dallas policemen, one of whom was the real assassin; the John Birch Society for tactical planning; and an H. L. Hunt-model Texas millionaire for finance. The editor of L’Express found it all so persuasive that the sent Buchanan here to tell our Department of Justice, and Buchanan went home terribly saddened by how coldly he was treated bearing this gift of so many public pests.

But the Justice Department is captained by Mr. Kennedy’s brother and staffed with his old friends. I can imagine how terrible it would be for them to accept the idea that this could be a conspiracy. For I, a mere acquaintance, know how much I want to believe that whoever killed Mr. Kennedy acted alone; I just do not want any other American to have a piece of this thing. We blame the Continent for inventing conspiracies; yet we ourselves cling to one man almost to the point where we would need to have invented him. We are in shock and in forfeit and have lain the whole duty of our critical judgment on Mr. Justice Warren.

A trailer for a longer review:

Time & Tide, 30 April 1964, p.5

Who killed Kennedy?

Anonymous

On 22 November, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

So much is certain. But about who killed him, and why, there is increasing doubt and mystery.

The official version is that it was Lee Harvey Oswald. Now, this view has been contested by American author, Thomas Buchanan. And he makes some very telling points.

Why do the police insist that only three shots were fired, when many witnesses said they heard four?

Why has the FBI refused to show anyone the car windscreen when two journalists claim to have seen a bullet hole in it?

Why did Oswald have no trace of gunpowder on his cheeks?

Why was a half-smoked pack of cigarettes found in the warehouse room when Oswald did not smoke?

How could the police have discovered in one minute that of the 90 employees at the warehouse, Oswald was the only one missing?

Thomas Buchanan’s answers to these questions, and others, will be put forward in a fascinating article in ‘Time and Tide’ next week.

Time & Tide was briefly revived as an organ of Thatcherite devotion. In its original incarnation, however, it was rather more intelligent and probing:

Time & Tide, 7-13 May 1964, p.11

Who killed Kennedy?

Anonymous

Not only in the United States but throughout the world the doubts and speculation about the death of President Kennedy increase as the days go by. What happened on that November day?

On November 22 last year President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

The ‘official’ version of the crime – the one which Dallas police and the FBI put before the Warren Commission appointed to investigate it – is that the assassin was Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald worked at the Texan School Book Depository. On the fateful morning, it is said, while his fellow-workers went down to the street to watch the President pass, Oswald remained inside and went up to the stockroom on the sixth floor. He fired three shots from the corner window, then hid the rifle, hurried down four flights of stairs and started drinking a Coca-Cola from the automatic dispenser in the canteen. There he was passed by Roy Truly, the warehouse superintendent, and a policeman, revolver drawn. ‘This boy work here?’ asked the policeman. Truly said yes. Then they both went on upstairs.

Oswald left the building at about 12.35. He walked four blocks, got on to a bus and about 10 minutes later, impatient at its slowness, got off and started to look for a taxi. He found one and got the driver to take him five blocks beyond the boarding house where he was staying. The he paid off the taxi, walked back to his room, rushed inside, changed his coat for a windcheater, grabbed a .38 calibre revolver and went outside again. Shortly afterwards he bumped into Policeman Tippit, shot him, and then took refuge in a nearby cinema. There, at 1.36, he was discovered and arrested.

Two days later a local gangster, Jack Ruby, shot Oswald in an outburst of patriotic fury as he was leaving Dallas City Jail for the nearby Dallas County Jail. At 11.21 Oswald died. Ruby said to Detective Thomas McMillon: ‘Someone had to do it. You guys couldn’t. You didn’t think I was going to let him get away with it, did you?’

Such is the outline of the official version. It has been contested this week by American author Thomas Buchanan.* Buchanan argues that although Oswald was involved in a plot to kill Kennedy, he was not himself the assassin. And he makes some very telling points.

How many shot were fired at President Kennedy? The police say three, all of them fired from the stockroom in the book depot. But a number of witnesses say they heard four, and two journalists claim to have seen the windscreen of the presidential car shattered by gunfire – which would mean that at least one shot must have come from in front of the car and not from the stockroom window behind it. Could it have been fired from the unguarded railway bridge as the President’s car was approaching?

Moreover the team of surgeons who examined the President at the Parkland Memorial Hospital said that the first shot struck Kennedy directly from the front. One of them said he was ‘a little baffled’ by this.

The police then claimed that the shot fired from the front must have been fired by Oswald before the car approached the book depot. But a film of the whole assassination taken by an amateur photographer showed that this was impossible. So the police withdrew their explanation. Weeks later, after they had been visited by two Secret Service agents, Dr McClelland and Dr Perry, two of the leading surgeons who had examined Kennedy, retracted their evidence about the frontal bullet.

Why was the half-eaten plate of chicken, and a near-empty packet of cigarettes, found in the stockroom at the book depot? Oswald had been working with his fellow-employees all morning; he did not go up to the stockroom until shortly before the President’s car passed by. Would he have had the time, or the inclination, to start eating a cold meal? Moreover, he was a non-smoker. Could there have been another man in the room, who had been waiting there all morning, perhaps all night?

Two pieces of evidence suggest there was. First, a photographer happened to film the outside of the building just before the assassination (a clock in the film shows the time to have been 12.30). It shows two silhouettes against the sixth-floor window of the stockroom.

Second, Oswald’s marksmanship. The Warren Commission is assuming that if it is established that more than three shots were fired, it will be assumed there was more than one assassin. But even if only three shots were fired, could Oswald have done it? The evidence suggests not. Indeed Hubert Hammerer, Olympic rifle champion, doubts if there a marksman in the world who could have fired three accurate shots with the type of rifle Oswald is reported to have used, in the time he is reported to have taken.

Finally, the scientific evidence. Said District Attorney Wade: ‘I’ve got tests that showed he had recently fired a gun.’ He would not add whether he meant by this a rifle or a revolver, but merely restated that gunpowder was found on both Oswald’s hands. No gunpowder, however, was found on Oswald’s cheeks. Had he fired the murder weapon, there must have been some there.

* Who Killed Kennedy? Thomas G. Buchanan. Secker & Warburg 18s.

The pre-Dacre Daily Mail:

Daily Mail, 7 May 1964, p.14

Books: The killing of Kennedy: Can this shock theory be true?

By Kenneth Allsop

Who Killed Kennedy? (out tomorrow, Secker and Warburg 18s.) says (a) Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t, (b) at least seven others were in collusion on the murder day, and © the master-mind assassin is “Mr. X,” a Texas millionaire.

Thomas G, Buchanan, a Leftist American political writer, argues his case with sludgy diffuseness.

This is a pity, because the transcendent need is for clarity and coherence in debate about what everyone in his bones knows still to be a mystery, muddied – perhaps deliberately – with confusion.

Fortunately the powerful probability of Mr. Buchanan’s theory triumphs over his rambling turgidness. This, you are left thinking, is perhaps the right road, among a maze of bum steers, towards the truth.

He first sets out to scotch the easy face-saver that the President’s assassin was a solitary maniac. This is not within the pattern of history, he shows.

Confusing reports

From Lincoln onward, the shootings of national leaders have first been accepted as the acts of crazed lone wolves, and later found to be political plots.

Mr. Buchanan damningly sets down the switches of official explanations, retraction and contradiction – even to the position of the wounds in Kennedy’s body indicating where the bullets came from.
Sifting out the logical fragments of evidence, he assembles the jigsaw into this picture…

THAT Oswald was not a Communist stooge, but a slippery double-agent and creature of both the F.B.I and the John Birch Society ultra Right-Wingers;
THAT although he smuggled a rifle into the book depository this was a supplementary weapon – the killer fired from the railway bridge in front of the presidential motorcade;
THAT anyway, Oswald’s Army record disqualifies him as the exceptional crackshot who fired accurately upon the distant moving target;
THAT members of the Dallas police force were in the conspiracy – which enabled the book depository rifleman to pass through the cordon unchecked;
THAT patrolman Tippit was an accomplice – assigned to kill Oswald so that his would be the sacrificial corpse, but Oswald outdrew him;
THAT ,therefore, Jack Ruby was sent to silence Oswald before he could blab to reporters and put the finger on the plotters.

Wordily waffling though Mr. Buchanan’s dissertation is, the incontrovertible facts seem to settle that this murder could not have been done by a deranged solitary operator: that it was a syndicate job, expertly planned and co-operatively accomplished.

But who was the secret executioner and why should he have wanted Kennedy dead?

To substantiate his theory of the yet unidentified oil-man despot, the author sketches in the gaudy Texas background.

It was in Dallas, the day before Kennedy’s visit, that leaflets circulated showing his face, police poster style, in front and profile, decorated with a hangman’s noose, and screaming: “WANTED FOR TREASON. Impeach this traitor for giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies.”

The director of the assassination, says Buchanan, had three reasons:

Kennedy was determined to end the huge oil tax concession which is the gusher of gold for the Texas corporate rich.

This “Commie’s” peace efforts threatened both the armaments industry which oil feeds and the hopes of the fanatical fringe for a nuclear attack on Russia.

The boredom of a rogue oligarch used to gambling in multi-millions who – never much affected by civic law and order – gambled with the future of America and perhaps the world.

Damaging interests

And Mr. Buchanan adds the theory that this same financier-dictator ordered the 1962 blowing-up of Enrico Mattei, the Italian oil freelance who was damaging Texas interests.

There could even be another in his list, he suggests: Krushev.

It is a melodramatic and outlandish hypothesis. But no more melodramatic and outlandish than the actual killing of the President of the United States in that Dallas street on November 22, 1963.

Our second piece from this paper:

The Daily Sketch, 7 May 1964, p.8

Who Killed Kennedy?

Anonymous

New book today is certain to inflame the arguments

Jack Ruby killed Lee Oswald, the man named officially as President Kennedy’s assassin, to stop him confessing and revealing the truth about the President’s murder.

Patrolman Tippit, the Dallas policeman shot dead by Oswald, was an accomplice in this plot. His role had been to kill Oswald, then claim: “I got the President’s killer.” But Oswald was faster on the draw, and shot Tippit first.

And as for Oswald himself: he did not kill President Kennedy.

He was involved in the plot, and the conspirators used him as their “fall guy.”

The actual murderers have never been arrested. One of them was a gangster, the other possibly a policeman.

On a bridge

These are the breathtaking conclusions about the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 34th President of the USA, set down by American author Thomas G. Buchanan in his book, out tomorrow, WHO KILLED KENNEDY? (Secker and Warburg, 18s.)

This is how author Buchanan reconstructs the crime:

The gangster assassin was on a railway bridge near the President’s route through Dallas.

Proof: At least one bullet came from that direction, and not from the book store where Oswald was said to have lurked.

A wound in the President’s throat proves this.

The other killer was in the book store. But he was either wearing uniform, or had a police accomplice.

Arrest

Buchanan alleges that the police simply “changed the facts” where they clash with their version.
Their motive for this:

Dallas police were themselves involved in the murder.

There was the police official who ordered Oswald’s arrest – before there was any evidence to connect him with the shooting.

There was the policeman at the book store who let the second assassin out – or who was the other assassin.

And what about Jack Ruby.

He said, when he killed Lee Oswald 48 hours after Kennedy’s death: “I didn’t want to be a hero, I did it for Jackie.”

But Buchanan asserts that few people in America really believe that this “gangster” killed for patriotic reasons.

“And in the underworld that Ruby had frequented since his childhood, when a witness who is soon to testify in court is murdered, it is for a single purpose:

To prevent him from confessing.”

So there we have the plot. The web of the spider is dramatically displayed. But who is the spider?

Gambler

Thomas Buchanan “identifies” him as a Texas oil millionaire, but will call him only “Mr. X.”
He writes of him: “Mr. X is now, and has been all his life, a gambler.

“He has made a bet – the biggest wager that he has ever made – and so far, he has won it.

“He considered Kennedy to be pro-Communist, and he sincerely thought that Kennedy’s assassination would, in some way, serve the interests of the US.

“In addition (because he thought that his oil and arms interests were threatened by the East-West thaw) he felt it would bring him an immediate advantage.

“Most of all, though, he looked on the plot as a manner of relieving his own fatal boredom…Mr. X had no more worlds to conquer in the State of Texas.”

More from The Daily Sketch, this time with dose of scepticism:

The Daily Sketch, 7 May 1964, p.8

Who Killed Kennedy?

What the Sketch critic says…

By Arthur Pottersman

With a fine flourish of melodramatics, author Thomas Buchanan says that a mysterious “Mr. X” was the man behind President Kennedy’s assassination.

This dark figure seems to have acted partly because he was so bored.

And he seems to have acted partly in the spirit of those armaments manufacturers who used to make their fortunes by promoting Balkan wars – he is said to have done it to protect his interests against Kennedy’s “softness” on Communism.

Only the most rabid members of America’s extreme Right-Wing John Birch Society would deny that such interests do exist in the US.

They do exist in most countries, too – and that includes Russia.

So all right. So the arms industry exists. So there’s a lot of money at stake in it.

More facts

You need to furnish more evidence, more facts, than that, Mr. Buchanan, before your tale of “Mr. X” will stick.

As to what actually happened in Dallas:

Author Buchanan theorises about police accomplices in this plot.

But the problem of enrolling part of the Dallas force as conspirators – and keeping it secret from the rest who Buchanan agrees, did their duty honestly, is one objection.

Another objection is the way by which he works out Ruby’s motive in killing Oswald – and using this theory as actual proof of Mr. X and his band of plotters.

I might as easily talk in high-falutin psychological jargon about Ruby’s long-buried desire to be admired for his nobility of character and strength of purpose.

For years this poor fellow could find no other outlet than crime.

Now, at last, he takes on the role of Jackie Kennedy’s St. George – and slays the nasty dragon Lee Oswald.
And that wouldn’t be true either.

Probably Ruby just thought of this way to cheap publicity.

There are two points in Buchanan’s book, however, which are interesting:

How was it possible, even in Dallas, for Ruby to kill Lee Oswald in police HQ?

The question of the bullets. How many were there? From where were they fired?

Vacuum

By themselves, however, these two problems just do not add up to ‘Who Killed Kennedy? – Mr. X.”

Thomas Buchanan told me last night: “I have no name for Mr. X. He is a compendium of people who are responsible. X is the X in an equation. He’s the unknown that everything leads up to. He’s a vacuum that’s got to be filled in.”

Here, a spook-informant publishes a favourable review in a CIA-financed journal:

Encounter, June 1964, pp. 73-74, 76 & 78

Books & Writers: Whodunnit

By Goronwy Rees

Who Killed Kennedy? By Thomas G. Buchanan. Secker and Warburg, 18s.

For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the office of the President has a numinous quality which is reflected upon all its occupants. The President is hedged by a kind of divinity which has long ceased to surround a king. Thus, for Americans, there is something sacrilegious in the murder of a President, which others cannot wholly understand, however much they may sympathise. It is a desecration of the Union’s hallowed ground and for an American it is almost inconceivable that this could be anything except the work of a diseased and deranged personality. To think otherwise, one would have to assume that there are evil men who for their own ends would plot and conspire to violate the most sacred altars of the Republic, and, unless of course such men were Communists, this is something most Americans cannot bring themselves to accept.

Mr. Buchanan, himself an American, has now written a book which will outrage all such beliefs, or superstitions, and at the same time give profound offence to many who believe themselves to be friends of the United States. Who Killed Kennedy? is in many ways an unpleasant book. It is marred by that kind of sour malice, of innuendo and Schadenfreude, to which left-wingers (Mr. Buchanan is a recent ex-Communist) are so often unfortunately prone; even the shade of Jefferson Davis does not escape a perfectly irrelevant sneer. It is also marred by errors of historical interpretation which make one doubt Mr. Buchanan’s credentials as a commentator on the contemporary American scene. If he can be so wrong about the historical situation which led to the assassination of Lincoln, about which after all one knows a great deal, if still not everything, why should we trust his account of the forces which led to the assassination of Kennedy, about which we as yet know very little?

Nevertheless, it would be a pity if its faults denied Mr. Buchanan’s book the attention it deserves. Who Killed Kennedy? asks a serious question which demands a serious answer; and if no better answers are given than those we have already received from Dallas, one might reasonably conclude, as Mr. Buchanan does, that the United States may be threatened by even greater disasters than the murder of a President.

Who Killed Kennedy? has something of the manner, the form, and the fascination of an extremely high class detective story. It begins with a study of the assassination of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley; it is as if Mr. Buchanan were examining the history of some well-ordered and apparently prosperous family whose past has dark secrets, some taint of blood, which one day will once again erupt into violence.

Mr. Buchanan has no difficulty in showing that the assassins of the three Presidents were in no ordinary, or medical, or legal sense mad; in the case of the two of them who were brought to trial, the courts held that they were responsible for their acts. He also shows that they all had definite political motives, however eccentric or mistaken; that John Wilkes Booth certainly was the centre of a widespread plot, even though we still do not quite understand all its ramifications; that Guiteau, who murdered Garfield, thought he was acting on behalf of a defeated political faction; that McKinley’s assassin, Czolgosz, was an anarchist who believed he was acting in the interest both of his own cause and of the people of the United States: “I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good working people.”

What Buchanan is trying to establish is that there is a pattern of Presidential assassination in the United States and that this pattern does not accord with the popular belief that the murder of a President is necessarily the irrational act of a lonely and isolated individual who is diseased or deranged in mind. He wished to show this in particular because the case against Lee Harvey Oswald is precisely that he was such an individual, who acted for no none motive; the original charge that he was a Communist agent was hastily dropped, both because of its inherent improbability and because it would have been extremely difficult to reconcile it with the details of Oswald’s extraordinarily tortuous and ambiguous career. And indeed nothing that is known about Oswald lends support to the theory that he was a totally isolated individual capable of a wholly irrational act; any more than anything that is known about Ruby lends support to the theory that he was a patriotic and emotional American capable of shooting Oswald to spare Mrs. Kennedy further suffering.

The second act of Mr. Buchanan’s whodunnit consists of a detailed analysis of the circumstances of President Kennedy’s murder, so far as these are known from official statements and press reports. This is the best part of the book; and it should be noted that his criticisms of the official theory of the murder coincide with those of others, who may be believed to be less prejudiced than Mr. Buchanan but have found the same difficulty in accepting the baffling improbabilities of the official version. That version is that Oswald and Oswald alone was responsible for the crime and that he shot the President from a room on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository on the corner of Houston Street in Dallas.

Unfortunately, Oswald once again does not conform to the character of the assassin required by the official theory. It requires that, within the space of 5½ seconds, using telescopic sights, he should have directed three accurate shots from a rifle which had to be reloaded after each shot, at a range of 100 yards at a target moving at a speed of ten miles an hour. Such a feat would challenge the skill of the greatest marksman in the world. But Oswald’s record as a marine shows that he was a poor, at best a mediocre shot, and I agree with Mr. Buchanan that even the most intensive training and instruction (which would imply that he had accomplices) could not have transformed him into the superlative marksman who is held to have shot the President.

There is the further difficulty that the distinguished surgeons who operated on the President stated that the bullet which killed the President entered his throat from the front. The assassin on Houston Street, of course, shot the President from the back. The surgeons’ statement was later retracted and we are asked to believe that they made a mistake in the excitement and confusion.

But indeed the series of official statements issued in support of the case against Oswald present such bewildering inconsistencies and contradictions that they defy even the most willing suspension of disbelief. As Mr. Buchanan says, the only constant factor in them was the repeated assertion that Oswald alone was guilty, and as facts appeared which seemed to make this improbable if not impossible, the official version, but not its underlying premise, was hurriedly altered to accommodate them. The official case is surrounded by such a cloud of improbabilities and coincidences (as of the second Carcano rifle which, before the murder, a gunsmith fitted with telescopic sights to the order of an Oswald who was not Lee Harvey Oswald) that it places an almost intolerable strain on one’s credulity. Mr. Buchanan concludes his examination of the police case by leaving the verdict to the reader; but he leaves no doubt of his own conclusion that Oswald alone did not and could not possibly have assassinated the President.

This brings him to the third act of his drama. For if Oswald was not alone guilty, who else was implicated and how was the crime committed? In answering this question Mr. Buchanan is necessarily driven far into the realm of speculation, and most of his readers, unless they share his own prejudices, will be inclined to dismiss his conclusions as at best non proven and at worst as the product of a fervent and malevolent imagination.

His account of the assassination involves the existence of two assassins, one of whom shot the President from the front from the railway tracks over the underpass which the President’s car was approaching (it is significant that when the first shot was fired the onlookers instinctively thought it had come from the direction of the underpass), while the other, with the assistance of Oswald, shot him from behind from the book depository on Houston Street. It involves the complicity of the Dallas police, who left the underpass unguarded and allowed Oswald to leave the book depository before, precisely one minute later, issuing an order for his arrest; and also of the unfortunate policeman Tippit, who was shot by Oswald after the assassination. It involves the existence of a widespread plot, in which Oswald was cast as the scapegoat and fall guy, and Tippit for that of his executioner, who would shoot him down, “while attempting to escape.” (It is inexplicable that Tippit was alone in his radio car in the neighbourhood of Oswald’s rooming-house, after a general call had been sent out for his arrest, though Oswald’s address was known to the police.) But Oswald shot first, and by remaining alive became, for two days, an intolerable embarrassment to the conspirators until, with otherwise inexplicable negligence, the police created the opportunity for the professional gangster Ruby to shoot Oswald before the eyes of the astonished world.

But who were the instigators of the plot? Mr. Buchanan accuses the chiefs of the Texan oil industry, who through the “Dallas Citizens’ Council” control Dallas and its police as effectively as any robber baron ever ruled a medieval community, and in particular one of them, Mr. X, a man of fabulous wealth and a colossal gambler who was willing to take all the immense risks involved in the conspiracy; Mr. Buchanan’s description of him leaves little doubt whom precisely he has in mind.

But what were his motives and what had he to gain? His motives were political; to remove President Kennedy because, firstly, his policy of détente with the U.S.S.R. and consequently of disarmament was a threat to the Texas oil industry’s huge investment in the industrial expansion which had taken place in Texas since the war, and, secondly, because he favoured a reduction in the 25% tax concession which makes oil the most privileged industry in the United States. Equally the motive was to replace Kennedy by Lyndon Johnson, a Southerner, a Texan, sympathetic to the oil industry and as a favourite of reactionary Texans less inclined than Kennedy to make the concessions which a détente with the U.S.S.R. would require.

Stated so briefly, Mr. Buchanan’s charges have an air of fantasy; we are in the world of the Manchurian Candidate, only the cops and robbers have changed sides. But they also have a basis of reality. He supports them with an account of the known connection between politics, big business and organized crime in America, based on the findings of the Kefauver Senate Committee, and with an analysis of the structure and organisation of the Texas oil industry, and the psychology and political chauvinism of its masters, which does not differ in essentials (though with the note of admiration missing) from what one may read in such respectable writers as Mr. John Bainbridge or Miss Edna Ferber. Mr. X is Giant.

And indeed in this lies the sting and the venom of his book. Mr. Buchanan uses the murder of the President to hold up a mirror to America which reflects such a Caliban image of brutishness and corruption that her enemies can only view it with glee and her friends with dismay. It acquires force simply because the analysis of the President’s murder is sufficiently searching and persuasive almost to convince one that this explanation of it must be true; at the very least one is inclined to say that it covers what appear to be known facts better than the official explanation. Mr. X is a more convincing figure than Oswald as a lone assassin or Ruby as a patriot.

What is worse is that the seeds which Mr. Buchanan has sown will find fertile ground to fall on, if not in America, in the rest of the world, where millions of men and women who are only too glad to think the worst of the United States, whether she is their friend or their enemy. It is fortunate, therefore, that, even if Mr. Buchanan were right in his account of the particular elements in American life which he has chosen to emphasise for the purposes of his book, there are also other elements in it which he chooses to ignore though in the long run they have invariably proved the stronger.

In the President’s Commission on the assassination of President Kennedy, presided over by Mr. Earl Warren, ex-Governor of California, and Chief Justice of the United States, America has an instrument which can either put an end to the suspicion and charges raised by Mr. Buchanan, and not by him alone, or ensure that the guilty are brought to justice. No-one who is familiar with the career or the reputation of Mr. Warren can have any doubt of his integrity or his courage or his devotion to the principles to which the United States is dedicated; equally, one cannot doubt that Mr. Robert Kennedy will use to their fullest extent his powers as the Cabinet minister responsible for the F.B.I. to ensure that the Commission will have all the technical assistance it requires in its investigation. (Though Mr. Buchanan, no doubt, would ask us to remember that it was only Texas which gave the Democratic Party its victory in the last Presidential election.)

It must be said, however, that unless the Commission examines in closest detail Mr. Buchanan’s criticisms of the official case against Lee Harvey Oswald, there will be many outside America who will fail to be convinced that it has discharged its task adequately. In his Preface Mr. Buchanan states that, at the request of a staff member, his book has been filed in Washington with the President’s Commission. One may expect therefore that it will receive from the Commission the scrupulous and objective examination it deserves, and until the Commission has reported it would perhaps be an act of friendship to suspend the doubts which the question Who Killed Kennedy? must arouse in anyone who has seriously studied the case.

There is however one fascinating corollary to the hypothesis Mr. Buchanan has formed about the President’s murder, and indeed it might be used as the principle of its verification. If Mr. Buchanan is, in general terms, correct, it should follow as the night the day that Ruby will never live to go to the electric chair. He has appealed against his sentence, and the processes of American law are protracted; in the meantime he constitutes precisely the same dangers to the conspirators, if there was a conspiracy, as Oswald did before Ruby shot him. One must hope that Ruby is given better protection than the Dallas police gave Oswald.