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

[Paul Rigby]

Entry the first - what the CIA's strategy of polarisation had achieved in the US on the eve of Kennedy's murder:

Sunday Telegraph, 24 November 1963, p.17

But Will the True Lesson Be Learned?

By Claud Cockburn

As I left Idlewild Airport on Thursday, the last of twenty American friends who had all said much the same thing, said to me: “Remember, the Union survived the last time we had a civil war. I believe we can do it again.”
For those two months in the United States – a great deal familiar after thirty years than I had expected it to be – that was the kind of talk I heard. Talk of violence and disruption. Talk of a society as near explosion as it was a century ago.

And now, thinking back to a trivial conversation in New York or Washington, I can even now recall a little drunken man who had no information but had absorbed the atmosphere through his pores, saying “They shot Lincoln after he freed the slaves. What d’you think they’ll do to the Kennedys?”

Of course nobody except the man or men who planned to kill him, foresaw the assassination of the President. The assassin had plenty of time. The tour of Texas was, for the most serious political reasons, very well-publicised in advance. Plenty of time to tell just where to place a telescopically-sighted rifle. By a hideous irony, only a few days earlier Mr. Kennedy came to New York and caused dismay to the FBI and the New York Police Department by driving from the airport to his hotel without the customary escort. His decision disorganised the traffic considerably; but while cursing the man for not being more conventional, and thus making us late for our appointments, most of us were also glad that in the city of New York he felt safe.

A Climate of Stress

So why was he killed in Texas? Which asks another question: Why did I, like every other observant man who came from the United States to London recently, try to convey to people here a sense of foreboding; a feeling that the situation in the United States was more electric – perhaps desperately electric – than almost anybody here seemed to believe?

It is possible that this killer was a lone maniac – a van der Lubbe of 1963. But the climate which produced him was not an accident.

It seems by hindsight that we might have taken some warning from the fact that a few weeks ago the American Ambassador to the United Nations, himself an ex-candidate for the Presidency, was struck and spat upon as he toured Texas. I thought at the time that the official apologies from the civic dignitaries of Dallas for this outrageous event were notably perfunctory. Mr. Stevenson said that as for him he was not upset by what had happened – but he felt sorry for the people of Texas.

The people of Texas were not at all sorry for themselves.

They thought – and some of them told friends of mine who had been down there at the time – that this was a natural reaction to the presence of a statesman who favoured the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (and was thus pretty much of a Red), and was an official of an Administration which favoured Civil Rights for Negroes (and thus a near-Communist and certainly a Federal Enemy of the Sovereign Rights of the State of Texas).

Feud Between Democrats

That was the climate of the State into which Mr. Kennedy had to venture in an effort to mend the mouldering political fences of the Democratic party in that section of the South. The Presidential Election of 1964 looked to be such a damned-near-run thing that those 25 Texan votes in the electoral college might swing it one way or another. There was also a savage internal battle going on in the State, a battle typical of those which plagued and wrecked the last months of the Kennedy Administration.

It would take too long to spell it all out; but it involved a deadly feud between a “liberal” Democrat who supported all that “the New Frontier” had been supposed to stand for, and a “conservative” Democrat who could have been very important to Mr. Kennedy in the Presidential contest. Part of his purpose in Texas had been to fix up this feud. It is a feud which, on a national scale, he had been for months trying to fix, patch up or postpone.

Personally, I believe nobody could have done it. I listened to Mr. Kennedy’s speech in the garish wastes of the American Hotel, New York, when he tried to tell the biennial convention of the AFL-CIA (the great chiefs – if you dare leave out Hoffa – of the American trade union movement) that the Civil Rights question was in essence an economic, not a racial problem. If the Congress would pass his Tax Bill, then a great wind of economic prosperity would sweep America. And the Negroes would sail with it. But if his Bill failed to pass, and unemployment rose, soared perhaps, then what would his Civil Rights avail the Negro?

In that strange setting (where between-the-sessions-snacks cost £2 to £3) it was oddly reminiscent of Karl Marx at his simplest.

That was Mr. Kennedy’s bet, his great, terrible and necessary gamble. He had, that is to say, by moving as gently as possible on the Civil Rights issue, by paying out much in patronage to the Southern Senators, including the men from Texas, to seek to create a coalition of Democrats and Republicans in the Congress which would somehow speed the passage of the Tax Bill.
In my own view and that of large numbers of white and Negro Americans with whom I have recently spoken, the bet was tragically on the wrong horse. I agree with those of the President’s advisers who told him that the racial issue, the colour question, is something which cannot be explained simply in terms of rich and poor.

People who believe that it can be so explained keep quoting what they claim is an old Brazilian proverb. It says that “the rich Negro is a white man and the poor white is a Negro.” Very neat. So neat that I suspect it is no more Brazilian than I am but was made up in the shuttle-plane between New York and Washington.

Neither Side Appeased

If it were true, how do you explain Mr. Gaston, the Negro-multimillionaire in Birmingham, Alabama, who for a long time thought the “race issue” was a lot of nonsense, and ended up putting his resources at the disposal of the militant Negroes in Birmingham? Mr. Gaston may be a specially rich Negro, but among rich Negroes he is not otherwise special.

In other words, the sudden upsurge of Negro indignation at the condition of the Negro people – the realisation as the days, and above all the school terms, go by of what the white man has done and is doing to them and their children – is partly an expression of class conflict, but also a movement which cuts across racial lines.

So that Mr. Kennedy’s gamble did little to appease the Negroes and nothing, absolutely nothing, to appease the whites. On the contrary, the Southern white segregationists, believing – with an eye on the election of 1964 – that they had the President locked in a grim half-nelson, became during the last few weeks continuously more aggressive.

The great August “March on Washington” by the Negroes was written off in the North and elsewhere as a proof that really there is nothing to worry about; calm and reason will prevail, and this splendid demonstration of Negro “responsibility” will convince everyone that their demands are just.

The North then sat back and snored its “liberal” pleasure. What actually happened as a result of the Washington march, as distinct from what the Northern pundits said was happening, was the deliberately spectacular murder of those Negro girls in the Birmingham church, and a subsequent tussle between the President of the United States and the Governor of Alabama, in which – despite all soft talk to the contrary – the Governor came off best.

The killings, the behaviour of the Governor, and what amounted to a reign of terror in Mississippi, were the outward signs of the white counter-attack. That attack has been mounting in violence for weeks.

It has created an atmosphere of furious violence in the South, an atmosphere in which every device of the police State – including political murder – is regarded as the justified defence of freedom of “the South” or “the State” or “the Southern way of living” against intrusion.

It is an atmosphere in which there are plenty of men in a condition of mind to plan an assassination, and plenty of half-crazy dupes available to pull the trigger.

Just a week ago I sat, at a very respectable Washington dinner party, beside a respectable Southern lady who told me she spent almost the entire morning in her bath trying to make up her mind what degree of allegiance, if any, she owed the Federal Government as and when it was in conflict with her native state of Georgia, and at what point it would be right for the South to “start shooting.” She ran the hot water again and again, missed an appointment with her hairdresser, and at the end of it still stood dripping on the bathmat, no nearer a solution.

A ludicrous, possibly harmless lady. But a silly symbol of a state of mind which among the “extremists” of the South – a term used to indicate a majority of the white population – is no more ludicrous nor harmless than a bunch of rattlesnakes.

If This Were Europe

Indeed, an American who had just returned from a tour of the South, where he had consorted principally with the rich and powerful whites, said, “The only way you can begin to get an idea of the Administration’s problems is to imagine that there was a United States of Europe with Hitler in it, and no major policy could be carried out, or put into effect, without taking account of ‘the German vote’ and ‘opinion in Berchtesgaden.’

On occasions like this, decent people are inevitably inclined to take almost for granted that the monstrosity of such an act as the assassination of Mr. Kennedy must at least produce a “revulsion of feeling.” They are fumbling in the dark for some sort of compensatory factor.

There will, of course, be genuine outbursts of horror from some of those who have been active in fomenting hatred and madness, and some big floods of crocodile tears too. But from what I know of Southern attitudes I must say that in my estimation very few among the white segregationists are likely to draw decent or proper conclusions from the event.

Some of them will, naturally, prefer to see it as the isolated act of a maniac, without reference to the climate of violence which has been created and in which such acts can occur. Many more, I should judge, will secretly come to view the assassination as a bloody episode in a period when they have for months been preparing and practising bloodshed.

One thing perfectly certain is that no degree of shock, no talk of “pulling together in the hour of national mourning” will cause these people to desist from policies which are driving the United States to the verge of general civil conflict.

On the contrary, with President Lyndon Johnson in the White House, himself a Southerner, a man of elaborate compromises, and certainly not a man of the New Frontier, they are most likely to feel that now is the moment to intensify their attack.

[Paul Rigby]

Entry the first - what the CIA's strategy of polarisation had achieved in the US on the eve of Kennedy's murder:

Sunday Telegraph, 24 November 1963, p.17

But Will the True Lesson Be Learned?

By Claud Cockburn

Entry the second - profound doubt in mainstream press:

Daily Mail, 25 November 1963, p.2

Untitled

By Don Iddon, NEW YORK, Sunday [Extract]

Some officials speculated here last night than an extremist group was behind the assassination of President Kennedy and that Lee Harvey Oswald was used as a “gun for hire” man.

It has all been a little too pat, too quick, too slick.

Nightclub owner Jack Ruby has entered the picture and will be charged as the killer of the assassin of President Kennedy.

It seems to some informed people here “an arrangement.”

One day after the President’s death, Dallas police claimed to have a “clinched case.”

Round-up

Thinking Americans tonight are saying there must be more behind this than we know or have read or have heard.

Texas is the biggest state in the Union – proud, swaggering, and gun-toting.

This is not the end of the case of the assassination of President Kennedy or the sudden death of the alleged assassin.

My own belief is that there is a great deal more behind this….

[Paul Rigby]

Daily Mail, 25 November 1963, p.2

Untitled

By Don Iddon, NEW YORK, Sunday [Extract]

Some officials speculated here last night than an extremist group was behind the assassination of President Kennedy and that Lee Harvey Oswald was used as a “gun for hire” man.

It has all been a little too pat, too quick, too slick.

On the right:

Daily Mail, 25 November 1963, p.2

In a hat

By Bruce Rothwell, Sunday [Extract]

“A Dallas police officer said after the shooting of Oswald: “If I had seen Ruby I would have thrown him out.”

The official police version, to a Press Conference, is that Ruby had been waiting in a parked green convertible outside the headquarters, leaped over a barrier and shot Oswald.

But millions watching TV saw Ruby standing among reporters long before Oswald was brought to the basement to board an armoured car.

They saw him because he was wearing dark hat - and he was the only man in the throng of reporters wearing a hat.

Despite stringent security measures the police had announced Oswald’s transfer beforehand to the public. And all reporters had been required to show credentials before entering Ruby got in unnoticed.”

On the right again:

Daily Mail, 26 November 1963, p.1

Comment: The Anxious World

It was the time, yesterday, for the impressive last rites, the funeral orations, the eloquent tributes in assemblies like our own Parliament.

So hardly won; so well deserved.

It is not the time for the reality to break the dreamlike state of horror in which the American people have lived since their President was murdered. Not yesterday – nor, perhaps, today either.

They are still stunned by the shock, and the reaction is yet to come. When it does come, what will it be? Will the nation rise in anger and say: “Someone must pay for this?”

If so, who will pay? Who will be the scapegoats? Will the U.S. in its agony turn inwards and rend itself? These are some of the questions an anxious world is asking now.

Violence

An appalling undercurrent of violence in American life is revealed by the recent dire events, especially in the South, and more especially in Texas.

When the Washington Post says “respect for the office and person of the President precludes even the thought of physical violence against him,” it is demonstrably untrue.

Four American Presidents have been assassinated and four others shot at during the past century. Two other cold-blooded killings accompanied the murder of John Kennedy.

In Texas there is a homicide every eight hours and guns are bought and sold like cans of peas.

Hatred

It is against this background and that of racial conflict that we view the assassination while wondering what may come next.

It is devoutly to be hoped that the murder was the isolated act of one half-crazed man against whom vengeance has already been exacted by another.

Oswald had a record of unstable political affiliations. The frank, sympathetic way in which the dreadful deed has been handled in Russia must help to banish the idea that it was Communist inspired.

There is the opposite whisper – that the President was killed by racial extremists who hated him and his Civil Rights policies towards Negroes. According to this Oswald was a tool who was used and then liquidated.

Facts can be produced to fit this theory. The ease with which Oswald was picked up and the evidence against him made ready. His extraordinary end.

Depravity

Why, it is being asked, was it publicly known that he was to be moved to another jail? How was it that his killer could shoot him at point-blank range in spite of the strong police escort?

Such are some of the doubts and speculations. But the whole thing can just as well be explained by sloppy security measures, and, above all, by familiarity in the wearing and use of firearms in Texas.

Civilised men must hope that this is the true explanation. If it were not, one would despair at human depravity.

But if this is really what happened we can close a blood-stained chapter and turn our faces to the future.

From the left:

Daily Worker, 26 November 1963, p.2

A long, black record of violence

By Jack Sutherland

Will the truth ever be known about who shot and murdered President Kennedy as he drove through the streets of Dallas last Friday?

Says the police chief of Dallas: “The case is closed. We had all the evidence to convict Lee Oswald. Why, it was a cinch.”

But Lee Oswald, the 24-year-old accused, who amid a mass of contradictory accusations and evidence, maintained his innocence to the end, has himself been murdered while in police custody.

Far from being heavily guarded, as the first reports said, he was in fact (as anyone who watched the appalling scene on television can testify) paraded by the police along a corridor, an open target for his assassin.

The Southern racialists and opponents of democratic liberties and civil rights no doubt believe they have won a great victory.

The triumphant mood of Saturday after the murder of Kennedy must know be mixed with pure delight at the way events have turned out.

For these men are the embattled heirs to the longest and most savage traditions of political violence and frame-ups in the entire capitalist world.

If one has a sense of revulsion at the mere term “Southern justice,” it is because here there are people who have learned well, still believe in and practise the methods and the examples that made the American ruling class notorious.

The explosions at Dallas can be paralleled countless times in the history of the American people’s struggle for democratic rights.

Invariably the murders, provocations and frame-ups have been an attempt to postpone, delay and sidetrack the popular struggle to blacken its name, to destroy its leaders.

Who can forget, for instance, the name of Tom Mooney? On July 22nd 1916, during a peaceful parade in San Francisco an explosion occurred which killed ten innocent people and wounded 40 others.

Tom Mooney, a young trade union leader, was arrested with his wife and three other trade unionists. Tom had been active in organising the motormen and conductors of United Railways, and in organising a strike.

The arrest was the swift and sudden revenge of the employers. It was a warning to the unruly Labour movement of the city.

Tom Mooney was charged with murder and though there was completely irrefutable proof that Mooney and his friends had nothing to do with the explosion some were sentenced to death and some to long periods of imprisonment.

Even when the defence went to court with photographs which completely destroyed the whole fabric of underworld perjury used against the accused, the frame-up gang proceeded undaunted with the fabrication of false evidence.

Tears

It was 22 years later when Tom Mooney, his death sentence commuted, was eventually freed.

An account of his release says:“The tears became uncontrollable and his voice broke when he recalled the vilification that was directed at his mother, who gave her life in the fight for his freedom, and others dear to him in the courtroom where the sentence of death was pronounced upon him.”

Yes, tears have flown in plenty.

It was only four years after the events in San Francisco that an armed robbery took place in Briantree, Massachusetts, in which two employers were killed. This time the crime was pinned on two young radicals. Their names – Sacco and Vanzetti.

The fight for these two innocent men went on for seven years. New evidence was brushed aside, the confession of the man who actually committed the murder was dismissed.

Just before the two men were executed, Vanzetti said this: “If it had not been for this thing I might have lived out my life among scorning men. I might have died unknown, a failure. This is our career and our triumph.

Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man, as we do know by our accident.

Our words – our lives – our pain – nothing. The taking of our lives – lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddlar – everything.”

Racists

Yet who have been worse victims of frame-ups and violence than the Negro people? No dossier will ever be long enough, comprehensive enough to catalogue the crimes committed against the Negroes by the race haters.

On March 25, 1931, in Alabama, nine Negro boys, aged 13 to 20, were pulled off a freight train and jailed in nearby Scottsboro. Two white girls accused them of rape.

In a framed-up trial they were sentenced to execution. Years of campaigning by the progressive movement, and eventually the repudiation of her evidence by one of the girls concerned, helped to free the boys. But only after the most appalling experiences in prison.

No one learned better than the nazis how powerful can be a political provocation and the frame-up of victims. The firing of the Reichstag in January 1933 was the excuse for the seizure of power by Hitler.

The arrest of Dimitrov and three other Communists on framed-up charges of setting fire to the Reichstag was used by the nazis to attack first the Communist Party, then the Social Democrats and eventually the entire Labour and progressive movement in Germany.

But their plans hardly went smoothly and by the time Dimitrov appeared in court and made his famous defence the whole world knew what the nazis were up to.

The last war saw the growth of democratic sentiments, ideas of a new and better society, and hopes for a peaceful world. The organisation of the cold war was in itself a gigantic provocation.

The Rosenbergs were two of the victims of that period and they will never be forgotten for their courage and their stand against American reaction.

They faced death with bravery. When they were offered their lives in return for a confession of guilt, they replied to Eisenhower: “By asking us to repudiate the truth of our innocence the Government admits its doubts concerning our guilt. We will not help to purify the foul record of a fraudulent conviction and a barbaric sentence.”

Temporary

President Kennedy’s death is a tragedy which may set back the struggle for civil rights in America and may hinder the development of peaceful relations between the world’s Great Powers.

If we do not know who killed him, we know who has been rejoicing over his death – who stood to gain most by his violent end.

But violence of this kind, the attempts to blame the progressive movement and make martyrs of innocent men and women, have only a temporary effect on history.

Men are murdered, tears are shed, people are confused, but in America, as elsewhere, the great underlying movement of the people for equality and democracy is by now too great to be halted.

And left again:

Daily Herald, 26 November 1963, p.3

Johnson’s investigators fly into Dallas

By Antony Currah

The F.B.I. began an investigation over the heads of the Dallas police here today in an attempt to discover whether the assassination of President Kennedy was organised by an international political ring.

Assistant Attorney-General Jack Miller, who flew from Washington last night after the slaying of the President’s alleged killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, by a strip-tease club owner, is expected to be in the city for many days.

After 52-year-old Jack Ruby shot Oswald with a .38 revolver at point blank range in the underground car park of Dallas police the police chiefs declared the case against Oswald closed.

But the F.B.I. reacted quickly and announced: “It is far from closed.”

Questions

Mr. Miller was immediately ordered by new President Lyndon Johnson to the tense city.

The fantastic case of the assassination and the killing of Oswald, who denied his guilt, raised grim implications and leaves many questions unanswered.

Investigators believe it is impossible with Oswald’s background of Communist sympathy and pro-Castro crusading to eliminate the possibility of accomplices.

Police evidence now made public reveals Oswald had a map in his rented Dallas room in which he marked the line of rifle fire of the President’s route past the office building where he is said to have crouched at a sixth floor window.

Yesterday, with the amazed eyes of the world upon them, the police force of Dallas still left a great deal unexplained.

Today there was still no logical answer to the slaying of Oswald beneath the police H.Q. It happened after a series of anonymous phone calls threatening Oswald’s life.

And in the early morning on the day of his planned transfer by armoured car to the county jail three-quarters of a mile away, another threatening call was received by the F.B.I.

Yet, despite this, police chief Jesse Curry kept his promise to Pressmen not to move Oswald until 10 a.m. in front of the nation’s TV cameras.

Orders had been given only Pressmen with bona fide police passes would be allowed anywhere in the building.

Yet the staggering fact remains that club owner Ruby – he legally changed his name from Rubenstein – had been wandering round police headquarters since the day of the assassination.

[Paul Rigby]

Daily Mail, 25 November 1963, p.2

In a hat

By Bruce Rothwell, Sunday [Extract]

“A Dallas police officer said after the shooting of Oswald: “If I had seen Ruby I would have thrown him out.”

The official police version, to a Press Conference, is that Ruby had been waiting in a parked green convertible outside the headquarters, leaped over a barrier and shot Oswald.

But millions watching TV saw Ruby standing among reporters long before Oswald was brought to the basement to board an armoured car.

More from the same period:

Daily Sketch, Tuesday, 26 November 1963, p.6

The Ugly Questions Mount

By Louis Kirby

As they prayed yesterday for a deeply mourned leader and man, the citizens of America also began to search their hearts over the unsolved mystery of Lee Harvey Oswald.

On the evidence produced by the detectives of Dallas, the 24-year-old warehouse worker seemed guilty.

The moment he died on the operating table, Captain Will Fritz, the local police chief, abruptly closed the file.

As he confidently claimed to know about that Oswald had acted carried out the carefully-planned assassination alone.

But troubled voices raised yesterday may finally have made it plain to Dallas, city of oil, cattle and violent death, that the bizarre behaviour of its police force cannot be allowed to corrode the conscience of a nation.

Serious doubts in influential quarters yesterday made FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover lead a new investigation on the direct orders of President Lyndon Johnson.

Until he gives his verdict after reopening Captain Fritz’s file, a number of towering question marks will hang over the affair.

The New York Times has protested in an angry editorial: “The primary guilt for this ugly new stain on the integrity of our system of order and respect for individual rights is that of the Dallas police force and the rest of its law enforcement machinery. But none of us can escape a share of the fault for the spiral of unreason and violence.”

It is now the task of the FBI chief to answer the flood of ugly rumours and produce the truth of the case against the late Lee Harvey Oswald.

Deep

His enquiries will probe deep into these major questions being asked across the world:

ONE: Could a man of Oswald’s limitations plan the assassination so expertly without a single accomplice?

TWO: Was Oswald a pawn in the hands of an extremist organisation?

Because of his liberal policies, President Kennedy angered right-wing elements such as the John Birch Society.

Because of his attempts to help coloured people he earned the enmity of anti-Negro racial groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

THREE: Was the assassination encouraged by a foreign power or known to it in advance?

Oswald, a self-confessed pro-Castro Communist, was said by a Mexican newspaper yesterday to have seen the Soviet and Cuban consuls in Mexico two months ago in an attempt to get a visa to travel to Moscow via Havana.

FOUR: Why did the FBI, who already had plenty of reasons to detain Oswald during the President’s visit, fail to act?

A Customs investigator reported yesterday that Oswald’s journey to Mexico was watched “at the request of a federal agency at Washington.”

FIVE: Why did Dallas police take the unusual step of announcing the precise time at which Oswald would be moved from their city hall jail to the county jail?

SIX: Was Oswald personally known to his killer, and if so, could they have been linked in the plot to kill the President – or Governor Connally?

An entertained named Bill DeMar who has a “memory man” act at Jack Ruby’s club in Dallas, has reported that he saw Oswald there last week.

Irony

SEVEN: Or were Ruby’s motives simply as he told a police officer, to spare Mrs. Kennedy from returning to testify at Oswald’s trial?

For this would be the final irony. There was no intention of calling the President’s widow to the witness stand.

Again:

Time & Tide, 5-11 December 1963, pp.11-12

The questions to be answered

Anonymous

Washington – The decision by President Lyndon Johnson on Saturday to set up a special committee of enquiry, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, into the assassination of President Kennedy and Lee Oswald, which will ‘report to me, the American people and to the world,’ has been welcomed at all levels.

Oswald’s death at the hands of Dallas night club owner and ex-Chicago hoodlum, Jack Ruby, has so far left too many questions unanswered. Since 98 years ago the murderer of President Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, was shot by one soldier of a troop told to take him alive, mystery and suspicion have surrounded the circumstances and motives of Lincoln’s death. Obviously, it is in the interests of America that everything this time be cleared up.

To do this, three official investigating bodies, the Dallas police, the FBI, and Earl Warren’s joint Congressional committee, will have to account for several query-prompting facts:

• Where did Oswald get his money from? Ever since he returned from Russia he had found it hard to get a job, as nobody liked to employ a man who had gone over to the Communists. As a result, he had a hard time keeping his wife. Yet he is reported to have had a flat in a neighbourhood where the rent was £42 per month. He also went on expensive travels. And when he was picked up after the murder of policeman Tippit he had £50 on him.

• What did he do on his seven-day visit to Mexico, two months before Kennedy’s death, apart from see the Cuban and Russian Consuls? Why did he cross the Mexico-Texas border dressed in naval uniform? And why did the US Customs have a file on him? How did Oswald, out-of-work since July, pay for the trip?

• Who sent Oswald the supplies of Communist literature? Who sent him regular cheques?

• Was it entirely without sinister implications that Mrs. Paine, with whom Oswald’s wife lived, spoke Russian?

• What, if anything, was the connection between Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, and Oswald? Was it true that just before Oswald’s death, a look of recognition for Ruby came over Oswald’s face? Had the two men had next door flats, as had been reported? Was it coincidence that the two men frequented the same YMCA club? And why should Jack Ruby, a small-time gangster, suddenly have a fit of burning patriotism that caused him, so he claimed, to kill the President’s assassin?

• And what was the truth about the rifle found in the room whence the shots had been fired? Could it have fired three bullets in the time stated? Was Oswald a good enough marksman to hit the President in a car moving at 20 mph, at an angle of 45 degrees, at a distance of 75 yards? And was there another rifle?

To find the answers to all these questions, Earl Warren and the FBI are going to have a hard time.

[Paul Rigby]

Time & Tide, 5-11 December 1963, pp.11-12

The questions to be answered

Anonymous

And so to the piece which I regard as among the best ever written on the case. It has stood the test of time remarkably well:

Labour Monthly, January 1964, pp. 1-15;

Notes of the Month: After Kennedy

Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long

Shakespeare

By R. Palme Dutt

December 10, 1963

President Kennedy’s murder has thrown a sudden fierce light on the realities of the world in which we live, beneath all the smooth, polite façade of ‘Western civilization.’ This murder was a political act. Its consequences may reach far. The murder of an Archduke in Sarajevo at one end of Europe and the murder of the silver-tongued orator of socialism, Juares, at the other, inaugurated the first world war. The murders of Liebknecht and of Rosa Luxembourg immediately after the first world war, and of Rathenau in the succeeding years, presaged the downward slide of the Weimar Republic into Nazism. The murders of the last independent French Foreign Minister Barthou and King Alexander of Jugoslavia heralded the appeasement of Nazism. What will prove the sequel to Kennedy’s murder? It is no wonder that concern and anxiety is shared in many countries among wide circles of the people far beyond those sharing his political outlook.

Karl Marx’s Address to President Johnson

After the murder of President Abraham Lincoln the First International or International Working Men’s Association (the centenary whose foundation we honour this year) transmitted an ‘Address’ written by Karl Marx, and signed by Marx and all his associates of the General Council, to Lincoln’s successor, President Johnson, whom as Vice-President the assassin had also sought to kill, but who had escaped and survived to find himself suddenly, not by his own wish or solicitation, President Johnson. In his Address Karl Marx and his fellow signatories declared:

It is not our part to call words of sorrow and horror, while the heart of two worlds heaves with emotion. Even the sycophants who, year after year and day by day, stuck to their Sisyphus work of morally assassinating Abraham Lincoln and the great republic he headed stand now aghast at this universal outburst of popular feeling, and rival with each other to strew rhetorical flowers upon his open grave…Such indeed was the modesty of this great and good man that the world only discovered him a hero after he had fallen a martyr…

Yours, Sir, has become the tremendous task to uproot by the law which had been felled by the sword, to preside over the arduous work of political reconstruction and social regeneration. A profound sense of your great mission will save you from any compromise with stern duties. You will never forget that to initiate the new era of the emancipation of labour the American people devolved the responsibility of leadership upon two men of labour – the one Abraham Lincoln, the other Andrew Johnson.

Such were the words Marx chose to address the President of the United States a century ago.

From Lincoln to Kennedy

Kennedy was no Lincoln. Nevertheless it is true that the same evil upas tree of racial slavery, which was and remains the foundation of American ‘free’ institutions and of American wealth, just as of all Western ‘freedom’ and Western wealth, struck down Lincoln a century ago and was one of the key factors in striking down Kennedy today. Lincoln was the leader of ascendant American capitalism, when it was still progressive; and his leadership of the fight of the Republican North against the slave owners of the South made it possible for this Head of State of the already powerful American capitalism to be acclaimed by Marx as a ‘hero’ honoured by the international working class. Yet Lincoln was at the same time the head of what Marx characterised, in his letter to Engels of September 10, 1862, as ‘a bourgeois republic where fraud has so long reigned supreme,’ or again, in his letter to Engels on September 7, 1864, as ‘the model country of the democratic swindle.’ This merciless exposure, in informal private correspondence, of the real character of United States capitalism and capitalist democracy did not prevent Marx from recognising at the same time the historic significance of the role of its President in a given national and international situation, and from giving unreserved public expression to that recognition. It is possible that even today Marxists can learn something from this example of Marx, that it is not enough simply to classify a given political figure by his class affiliation and thereby regard the issue as closed when the need is to judge correctly his political significance in a given historical situation.

Dilemma of United States Policy

Certainly Kennedy belonged to a very different era from that of Lincoln. Kennedy was the representative, no longer of ascendant American capitalism, but of American capitalism in extreme decay, in the culminating stages of monopolist decline: on the one hand, extending its tentacles over the entire world; aggressive, ruthless and brutal; on the other hand, desperate and fearful before the advance of the new world of socialism and national liberation. The lords of American capital are finding themselves compelled to learn today, as the lords of the British Empire had to learn yesterday, that they are no longer all-powerful rulers of the world, capable of dictating their will in any quarter of the globe where they chose to impose it. They have to reckon with a new world situation in which there is equality of forces on either side. They have to reckon with a new strategic situation in which the superiority of ‘Western civilisation’ can no longer be proved by the superiority of the gatling gun over bows and arrows; while the alternative replacement dream, which had currency in the years after the second world war, of atomic monopoly or superiority to maintain the old supremacy has now also vanished. The have to reckon with a new world economic situation where the previous incontestable scientific and technological superiority of capitalism over older systems has now been successfully challenged in turn by the increasingly manifest superiority of the newer economic system of socialism. All this presents a new type of problem for the American policy makers, unguessed even in the days of the foundation of NATO.

Schizophrenia

From this situation follows the peculiar schizophrenia, the switchback somersaults of contradictions, the open clash of conflicting trends also on the highest levels, the ferocious battles in the Senate Committees or between rival strategic services, the ceaseless ‘agonising reappraisals’ of American policy in the current period. All the previous dreams of ‘the American century’; the spate of bombastic volumes of the Ludwell Denny type proclaiming the inevitability of the American world empire (‘What chance has Britain against America? Or what chance has the world?); the Colliers Magazine ‘Third World War’ Specials in five million copies in 1951 depicting on the cover the American G.I. bestriding Moscow, and proclaiming the theme ‘Russia’s Defeat and Occupation 1952-1960’ – all these have had to vanish into the discard so completely that younger people today, who know nothing of them, would find it difficult to believe that such was the current coinage of the Western world only a dozen years ago, when Priestley also contributed a star article to the Colliers’ ‘Third World War’ Special, describing with imaginative gusto the American occupation of Moscow, or Bertrand Russell, who has since to his honour abundantly redeemed his temporary loss of direction at that time, was advocating a preventative atomic war on the Soviet Union.

Toynbee on the American Counter-Revolution

But once these Fulton dreams of a Truman and a Churchill, of a Bevin and an Attlee, these dreams of the ‘policy of strength,’ of invincible Western power, of nuclear superiority, of triumphant ‘showdown’ with the Soviet Union to ‘roll back the frontiers of Communism,’ have vanished, what is to take their place? There is the problem, there is still the unresolved dilemma of American policy today. All the instincts of the American lords of capital, accustomed to bludgeon and bulldose their way triumphantly against all lesser breeds either within the United States or on the American Continent or abroad, and above all against any whom they might choose to describe as ‘Reds,’ revolt against the idea of negotiating on a basis of equality with the Soviet Union, with Communists. ‘Treason.’ ‘Twenty years of treason.’ They took sixteen years even to recognise the Soviet Union. After fifteen years they have not even yet recognised the Chinese People’s Republic. The banner of revolution raised in the American War of Independence nearly two centuries ago has turned to the opposite. As the historian Arnold Toynbee, until recently the favoured idol in the United States with his mystical cyclical theories cherished by reaction as the doom of any conception of human progress, has noted in his latest lectures published this year:

America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in defence of vested interests.

(Arnold J. Toynbee, America and the World Revolution, 1963.)

‘Paralysis of Power’

But while all the instincts of American reaction continue more violent and aggressive than ever, the more Communism advances in the world, prudence and hard facts and realism compel the recognition of the possible necessity of alternative courses. Slowly, hesitantly, doubtfully, amid the snarls of reaction, the U.S.-Soviet dialogue begins. George Kennan, who initially in the first years after the war (in the famous semi-official article signed by ‘X’) was one of the authors of the cold war theory, describing how its practice would inevitably lead to the crumbling and disintegration of the Soviet Union, has in the subsequent period, notably in the famous Reith lectures of 1958, been among the foremost to recognise the changed facts and the consequent necessity for a change in policy. In his most recent study ‘The Paralysis of American Power’ he has posed the question as ‘the heart of the problem’ of American policy:

Do we want to destroy or negotiate with Communist nations?

And again:

Do we want political or military solutions for the Cold War?

There indeed is ‘the heart of the problem’ of American policy today. And it is this context that needs to be seen the significance equally of the transitional role of Kennedy and of the murder of Kennedy.

Passing of the Eisenhower Era

When President Eisenhower went to the first Summit Conference in 1955, it was not by any means out of his own wishes or with any hope of the prospect that he went. It was the compulsion of world conditions and the climate of world opinion that sent him there. He has recorded in his recently published Memoirs The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956, how initially Anthony Eden, when he was Foreign Secretary under Churchill, was opposed to the idea, but that after April 5, 1955, when he became Prime Minister,

For some reason, whether because of political exigencies of his new position or the turn of events in the world, Anthony now reversed his former opposition.

Eisenhower reveals that he eventually fell into line, ‘not wishing to appear senselessly stubborn.’ So the 1955 opportunity came and went, with nothing visible to show save for the theatrical gesture of the ‘Open Skies’ proposal of Eisenhower. Odd, incidentally, how, whenever it comes to proposals at the conference table, the American negotiators have always tended to harp on their central strategic aim of inspection of the Soviet Union. The U2 was another highly unorthodox kind of ‘Open Skies’ inspection. The test ban negotiations were bogged down for years on the issue of inspection. And now, when discussions have been opened on the possible next steps for disarmament, it appears that the American proposals are concentrated on the stationing of inspection teams in the Soviet Union. This nagging desire, with the calculations behind the desire, has become too obvious even to the most unobservant – as Blackett has long ago shown.

Eisenhower’s Unhappy End

1955 passed into the dead record. From the point of view of British Toryism the election had been won, and the urgency of the need was over.

The Devil was sick;
The Devil a Summiteer would be.
The Devil was well;
The Devil a Summiteer was he.

But then came the 1959 election; and the need became urgent again. This time the level of world pressure had risen far higher. Once again the reluctant Eisenhower was brought to the mountain. This time the most extraordinary measures had to be taken by the Central Intelligence Agency and the strategic services to wreck the Summit. The U2 was sent out on its reckless illegal raiding mission over the heart of the Soviet Union at a height which was believed to be beyond the reach of any known rocket, while in case of accident the pilot was equipped, not only with his roubles and revolver, but also his suicide instructions and kit. All went wrong. The deadly accuracy of Soviet rocketry capable of bringing down a fly at 80,000 feet was demonstrated to the world, while the pilot survived to tell the tale of how the massive bribe of dollars had led him to this shameful role. The unhappy Eisenhower was compelled, first to deny knowledge, then to claim a supposed accidental error of flight direction (before it was known that the pilot had survived to tell the tale); then to admit publicly that he, the American President, had lied, and confess to full guilty knowledge beforehand; finally to try to bluster it out and claim the sacred right of American aggression to violate sovereignty any where in the world. So Eisenhower passed out in a blaze of ignominy. The tragedy was duly repeated as farce when his colleague of the abortive Summit of 1960, Macmillan, ended in his turn with the ridiculous ignominy of finding the dignity of his name of a would-be grand signeur inextricably linked for all future history with the final episode of a Profumo and a Keeler attached like a tin can to his tail.

Transition to Kennedy

Kennedy was elected President in 1960 – by an extremely narrow majority against the notorious Red-baiter Nixon – on the basis of a very vehement electoral campaign of denunciation of the entire record of Eisenhower as a record of slackness and sloth. This cut both ways. Eisenhower had himself been originally returned in 1952 on a basis of a vehement electoral denunciation of the Democratic President Truman and his Secretary of State Acheson for their role in the Korean War and a solemn pledge to end the Korean War and bring peace in Korea. He kept that pledge and agreed to the Korean Armistice in 1953. It is one of the more engaging sidelights on American electoral tactics, and also one of the permanent indications of the deep true feelings of the masses of the American people beneath all the noisy official chauvinist bluster on the surface, that any promise of peace from a leading contender can be regarded as a sure electoral winner. President Wilson won the 1916 election on the unanswerable slogan ‘He Kept Us Out of War,’ only to enter the war as soon as the election was safely over, in the spring of 1917. The denunciation of Eisenhower by Kennedy included denunciation of the ‘weakness’ of Eisenhower on Cuba and the promise of vigorous action against the Castro regime in Cuba. That was one side of the medal. But it was not the whole picture.

Two Sides of Kennedy

The historic significance of the role of President Kennedy was that he embodied in his own person both the two conflicting trends in American policy today. On the one hand, he was a most active champion of the cold war. He raised arms expenditure again and again to the most staggering record peacetime height. He sanctioned the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in the first year of his office. Infuriated by the fiasco of that adventure, he prepared in the following year to launch the most massive large-scale official assault and invasion of Cuba, and was only foiled by the Soviet missiles. He conducted the dirtiest war of modern times in South Vietnam. At home, fearful of the power of the Southern Democrats controlling the levers of his machine, he faltered and fumbled before the imperative issue of Civil Rights, until his hand was forced, and let the flames of lawless racial violence rise to such heights as found expression in the murder of tiny Negro children in the open streets while the majesty of American law and power appeared palsied and impotent. The sequel was rapid. The bullet that had shot the Negro children with impunity shot Kennedy as the next victim. Just as the murder of Lumumba prepared the murder of Hammarskjold, so the murder of the Negro children prepared the murder of Kennedy. But it was not for the crimes of the cold war, or the dark record over Cuba and South Vietnam, or for the faltering over Civil Rights, that Kennedy was shot. It was only when he appeared to be moving in the direction of East-West negotiations and possible accommodation, when he set up the joint private exchange line with Premier Khrushchev, when he began to press forward the bill of Civil Rights, that he became the universal target of hatred and calumny by American reaction on a scale unparalleled since Roosevelt after Yalta. The death shot was the sequel.

Kennedy and Peace

For the other side of Kennedy’s restless, enquiring, action-seeking outlook and personality, that side which recognised with sober seriousness the deadly hazards of cold war recklessness and nuclear strategy, and which began to grope, however hesitantly, for an alternative, that side was also present from the outset, and visibly grew as his experience grew, as his contacts with Soviet representatives extended, as he grew with the responsibilities of the Presidency. Already in his election year in 1960 Senator Kennedy had called the ‘liberation’ policy of Dulles and Eisenhower ‘a snare and a delusion,’ and had declared that the United States ‘had neither the intention nor the capacity to liberate Eastern Europe’ (see J. Crown and G. Penty, Kennedy in Power, New York, 1961). True, in his platform speeches (reprinted in the collection under his name entitled To Turn the Tide by Harper and Brothers, 1962) he could still hand out the old threadbare rhetoric about the ‘eternal struggle of liberty against tyranny,’ dating it on one occasion from ‘500 years before the birth of Christ,’ on another occasion as ‘since the beginning of history,’ and on another occasion (all in the same book) as ‘since the end of the second world war.’ But the more the problems gathered around him, the more the real alternatives shattered the tinsel of rhetorical platitudes, and especially after the Caribbean crisis of the autumn of 1962, with the experience of the Soviet-American confrontation and final co-operation for peace in that grave test, the new positive note of insistence on the necessity of negotiation began to sound increasingly in all his major utterances.

‘Re-Examine Our Attitude to Peace’

On June 10, 1963, came the famous speech, appealing to Americans to re-examine their whole attitude to the Soviet Union and to the cold war – the speech which was the first public expression of the approach to a major new phase in American policy, and which was at the same time the starting point of the developments that culminated for Kennedy on November 22. He rejected the conception of a ‘Pax American’ based on the ‘policy of strength’:

What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax American enforced on the world by American weapons of war.

In common with the 1960 Statement of the 81 Communist Parties he recognised two basic propositions of the present epoch. First, that the latest development of nuclear weapons had brought a qualitative change to the question of a new world war:

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces.

Second, that a third world war should not be regarded as fatalistically inevitable:

Let us re-examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed. We must not accept that viewpoint.

On this basis, while emphasising the fundamental difference of social system and outlook of the United States and the Soviet Union as not to be surrendered by either side, he urged the aim and possibility of ‘attainable peace’ through successive limited concrete agreements corresponding to the interests of both sides:

I am not referring to the absolute infinite concept of universal peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics still dream. Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace – based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a more gradual evolution in human institutions – on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned.

‘Re-Examine the Cold War’

Confronting directly the argument of opponents that the character of the Soviet Union and of Communism ruled out the possibility of any stable agreements or peace, he launched out in a series of appeals to the American public to re-think these questions and prepare for the prospect of a reversal of the traditional attitudes of the past eighteen years and a new era of U.S.-Soviet relations:

History teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising shifts in the relations between nations and neighbours…

Let us re-examine our attitudes towards the Soviet Union…Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Russians suffered in the course of the second world war…

Let us re-examine our attitude towards the cold war…Our conflicts, to be sure, are real. Our concepts of the world are different. No service is performed by failing to make clear our disagreements…but…we need a much better weapon than the H-bomb – a weapon better than ballistic missiles or nuclear submarines – and that better weapon is peaceful co-operation.

However much the innovating content of this June 10 speech might have been wrapped up in an accompaniment of conventional phrases and sentiments from the cold war armoury to reassure suspicious hearers, the unmistakable signpost pointing towards a major shift in U.S.-Soviet relations and possible closer co-operation was noted by diplomats all over the world, and not least by all the reactionaries and militarists of the United States and West Germany, who already began to sound the alarm.

‘A New Yalta’

Only the most naïve would imagine that an eloquent statement of principles is the same as action. Within a fortnight of that June 10 speech Kennedy was basking in the applause of the neo-Nazi hearers in West Berlin as he denounced Communism and proclaimed himself ‘a Berliner.’ Nevertheless, despite all the obvious contradictions and clashes, through all the fluctuating zig zags, the major line indicated in that June 10 speech continued to be pursued. By the end of July the Partial Test Ban Treaty was initialled, with the official signing by the beginning of August, and was universally recognised as opening a new diplomatic perspective. The anger and alarm of all the embattled hosts of reaction and militarism in the United States and West Germany now became open and unconcealed, all the more as rumours spread (denied by Kennedy on October 31) that the United States was preparing to withdraw some of its occupation troops from West Germany. Talk of a ‘new Yalta’ now began to be heard. Thus in the West German Welt am Sonntag of August 18 the influential economist, reputed close to Erhard, Professor Ropke, wrote:

Kennedy, being progressive, suffers from chronic distortion of sight in face of communist danger. Notwithstanding all the assurances he has given the Germans, he is gravely jeopardising the German glacis by pursuing a policy of one-sided concessions inaugurated by his emissary Harriman, one of the chief architects of the capitulation at Yalta. What de Gaulle justifiably fears is…a decision on Europe made by the Harrimans, the Kennedys and Macmillans – in a word, a new Yalta, whose first stage would be the recognition of the communist rape of territory and of peoples that Yalta made possible, and the second stage the systematic moral and political subversion of what remains of free Europe.

It is rich indeed when the heirs of Hitler can publicly rebuke the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union for daring to draw up the Crimea Agreement (drawn up at Yalta) pledging Three Power co-operation for the destruction of German militarism, Nazism, and fascism.

The ‘Final Solution’

But there is no mistaking the significance of this language which now became current in all the powerful right-wing cold war circles in the United States and West Germany during the autumn of 1963. In these circles ‘Yalta’ represents the ultimate term of abuse, because it was the expression of Western-Soviet unity for the destruction of Nazism and militarism. All the venom and hatred which was piled up against Roosevelt after Yalta from the wealthy monopolists and jackals of reaction began to be accumulated against Kennedy as the target. This menacing trend was accentuated by the internal situation in the United States. Just as the fury of the big vested interests against Roosevelt was intensified by his home measures of the ‘New Deal’ union recognition and war-time taxation (although all these measures were in reality indispensable prescriptions to seek to save the sick American capitalism), so the fury of reaction against Kennedy was intensified as he endeavoured to press forward with even the minimum measure of the Civil Rights bill. On November 11 the Economist recorded from Washington increasing

suspicion of the President’s contacts with the Russians. The report that he and Mr. Khrushchev have exchanged forty or so letters in the past year has become a matter for reproach as well as suspicion.

Kennedy, never lacking in courage, went to beard the beast of American right-wing reaction in its den in Dallas. There on November 22 he was shot dead. Whoever shot those three bullets with such unerring accuracy from a distant window at a moving target, with each bullet a bull’s eye, was certainly a skilled marksman. Kennedy’s death was sudden and rapid, unlike the painful and lingering road to death of Roosevelt during the two months after Yalta. The stock exchange, as soon as it re-opened after the assassination, soared to record heights.

Presidential Murders as a Political System

For a century the murder of the President from time to time has been an unwritten article of the American Constitution. Commentators have observed that out of thirty-two Presidents during the past century four have been assassinated (leaving out the score unsuccessful attempts on others), and that one in eight chances of sudden death might appear a somewhat high casualty rate. But they have either remarked on this as a curious phenomenon, or deduced from it a strain of violence in the American Way of Life. What they have not observed is the constitutional significance of this practice. Under the United States Constitution the President, once he is installed in office for his term of four years (which in practice in the modern period has tended to become a term of eight years), exercises supreme executive power at will, and cannot be removed by any device in the Constitution. He cannot be forced to resign by a vote of Congress. He cannot be impeached. If a President develops progressive tendencies, and begins to enter on courses of action displeasing to the great propertied interests which are the real rulers of America, there is no legal or constitutional way of removing him, there is no way of getting rid of him save by physical elimination. The record of the kingdom of the Carnegies and Rockefellers has shown no scruples in that respect, either within the United States or through the actions of the Marines or the C.I.A. or other agencies in Latin America or other countries.

A Roll of Dead Presidents

Lincoln and Kennedy were shot dead in public. Others also from the moment of causing displeasure to the ruling interests vanished rapidly from the scene. Woodrow Wilson, aflame with the ideal of the League of Nations as a vision of international peace, incurred the obstructive hatred of the Elders of the Senate, who understood very well that American monopoly capitalism could not yet dominate an international organisation of this type and would therefore be stronger outside. Buoyantly Wilson entered on a speaking tour to convert the nation with his unrivalled prestige and popularity. On the tour he was suddenly struck down with physical collapse from which he never recovered; and he died an embittered man. Roosevelt returned from Yalta with its triumphant vision of American-Soviet co-operation for peace and popular advance in the post-war world, and incurred such venomous hatred from American reaction as has never been equalled. Within two months he was dead. He was replaced by the miserable pigmy Truman to inaugurate the cold war.

A C.I.A. Job?

The facts of the Dallas murder may become later more fully known. Or, as is more likely, they may remain forever buried. Universal suspicion has certainly been aroused in all countries by the peculiar circumstances and the still more peculiar actions and successive statements of the authorities both before and after. The obvious tale of ‘a Communist’ was too crude to take in anyone anywhere – especially as it was evident to all that the blow was a blow precisely against the aims most ardently supported by Communists and the left, the aims of peaceful co-existence, American-Soviet co-operation and democratic rights, which Kennedy was accused by the right of helping. The old legal maxim in a case of murder, cui bono – for whose benefit? – still has its value for sniffing out the guilty party. It is natural therefore that most commentators have surmised a coup of the Ultra-Right or racialists of Dallas. That may be but the trail, if followed up seriously, seems to reach wider. Any speculation at present can only be in the air, since the essential facts are still hidden. But on the face of it this highly organised coup (even to the provision of a ‘fall guy’ Van der Lubbe and rapid killing of the fall guy while manacled in custody, as soon as there appeared a danger of his talking), with the manifest complicity necessary of a very wide range of authorities, bears all the hallmarks of a C.I.A. job.

Can the Rat be Deodorised?

After all, the C.I.A. had just arrived fresh from bumping off Diem earlier in the same month. The Kennedy job was certainly a larger order to undertake; but the operation was manifestly organised with the customary elaborate attention to detail. Even the background information offered with regard to the Van der Lubbe presented a highly peculiar story. From the Marines; a supposed ‘defector’ to the Soviet Union being rejected by the Soviet Union; after he has done his job there, returning with all expenses paid by the U.S. Government (not usually so generous to ‘defectors’); endeavours to join anti-Castro gangs in New Orleans, but is rejected by them on the grounds that they regard him as an agent of the C.I.A.; turns up next as a supposed Chairman of a non-existent branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which denies knowledge of him or the existence of any branch either in Louisiana or Texas; applies vainly for a visa to Cuba; travels about widely, including to Mexico, with no visible source of finance. Here is typical small fry (‘so weary with disasters, tugg’d with fortune, that I would set my life on any chance, to mend it or be rid on ‘t’) fit to be chosen, and equipped with damning ‘evidence’ as an expendable fall guy, while a more skilled hand does the deed. By accident, when the whole of Dallas is screened in vigilant preparation, the one most strategic building on the route is overlooked. By accident the one notorious suspect, already under supervision by the F.B.I., but intended this time to be found as a suspect, is overlooked in the general rounding up and clearing out of all suspects. By accident, when immediately after the murder the whole building is swarming with police, he is able to walk out unmolested. And then the unhappy fall guy, tricked and trapped and no doubt double-crossed in face of previous promises of an easy getaway and rich reward, noisily protests his innocence, a quick shot inside the prison closes his mouth; and the shot is fired, oddly enough, again through an accidental oversight in letting this unauthorised intruder come close with a revolver, by a type described as an underworld character close to the police. No. The whole story is really too thick; and the more details are offered, the thicker it gets. Of course it will all be cleared up now by the Presidential Commission of Enquiry. Or perhaps not. Naturally we can have every confidence. For on the Presidential Commission Enquiry sits appropriately enough our old friend Allen Dulles, former Director of the C.I.A.

What Now, President Johnson?

What, then, is the prospect now for the United States and the world? It is another of the special features of the American Constitution that when the President dies or is killed, the Vice-President automatically succeeds. The smooth efficiency of this has been much admired. But the other side of the medal is less often noticed. The candidates for President and Vice-President are chosen in the dust and heat and smoky intrigues of the party conventions, with the Vice-Presidency as a kind of sinecure consolation prize for the defeated candidate. If a progressive representative is chosen to run for the Presidency, then the party machine requires that balance shall be maintained by nominating a representative of the right wing for Vice-President so as to leave everyone happy. Suddenly this tactical choice of a convention for a nominal job becomes the political choice of the country. Roosevelt had for running mate the execrable Truman; the electors chose Roosevelt, but they got Truman. When Kennedy was chosen as candidate by the Democratic convention, the balance was made by choosing for the Vice-Presidency a Southern Democrat from Texas.

The People Will Decide

No one would wish now to pre-judge the role of President Lyndon Johnson. In the past his utterances on foreign affairs have been closer to the ‘tough’ cold war line of an Acheson. His resounding crusade in West Berlin immediately after the building of the Wall of Peace, when he distributed ballpoint pens to the admiring population and with a slight lapse of historical memory proclaimed the Germans the finest and truest allies the Americans had ever had, will not easily be forgotten. He has a past to live down (not to mention the ticklish problem of extricating himself from the snowballing scandal associated with Bobby Baker, the Quorum Club and Ellen Rometsch) as well as a future to live up to. Nevertheless, he has also a record as a staunch supporter of Roosevelt’s New Deal. He is a skilled and realist political manipulator; and that can be an important virtue in diplomacy in the present situation. Everyone will assuredly hope that, within the limits of the present stage and existing political forces in the United States, he will rise to the height of the opportunities and responsibilities of the present historic testing time, equally for the future of peace and East-West relations, and for the future of democratic rights within the United States. Above all, the real outcome depends, not on the character of an individual, but on the role of the peoples in every country in the world and on the political leadership of the working class. Not least here in Britain we can influence the outcome by our contribution and our political activity in the coming year. 1964 is General Election Year, when the defeat of Toryism can be accompanied by the advance of the fight for an effective alternative policy, such as Communism and all on the left are striving to achieve.

[Paul Rigby]

Labour Monthly, January 1964, pp. 1-15;

Notes of the Month: After Kennedy

Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long

Shakespeare

By R. Palme Dutt

December 10, 1963

President Kennedy’s murder has thrown a sudden fierce light on the realities of the world in which we live, beneath all the smooth, polite façade of ‘Western civilization.’ This murder was a political act. Its consequences may reach far.

Mass market magazines posed questions, too:

Today, 15 February 1964, pp. 3-5

Did Two Gunmen Cut Down Kennedy?

Larry Ross asked a crack shot of world repute to test an astonishing theory about the death of President Kennedy. No matter what the official findings may yield, this expert view on the murder that shook the world cannot be ignored.

When Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of Dallas Police Station nearly three months ago, there were Americans who said he should be given a Congressional Medal.

They were convinced that Oswald had assassinated their President. They did not doubt that he was the man whose shots horrified the world and shamed the State of Texas.

But today, can they quite so sure?

Could there have been more than one assassin that day last November when for an awful moment the world stood still?

By Larry Ross

For weeks I have been sifting every available fact. And I am prepared to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald, the mixed-up ex-Marine, may have tried to murder Governor John Connally who was in the presidential car.

But I am by no means convinced that his was the finger on the gun which sent John Fitzgerald Kennedy toppling, mortally wounded, into the arms of his wife.

It is true that he owned the murder weapon, a Carcano rifle. It is true that his palm prints were found on it and on cartons in the room from which the shots are said to have been fired.

Certainly three empty shells were found by that sixth floor window and Oswald was the only one known to have been on the floor at that time.

Admittedly tests showed that he had fired a gun just before the assassination and ballistics tests indicated that the murder bullets had come from Oswald’s rifle.

But, despite this circumstantial evidence, the case of Oswald remains befogged with mystery which Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade has yet to explain.

There is the question of the trajectory of the bullets which passed through the President.

A United Press report, on November 24, based on White House sources, stated: ‘Staff doctors at the Parkland Hospital in Dallas said that the sniper’s bullet pierced the mid-section of the front part of his (Kennedy’s) neck and emerged from the top of his skull.

“He bent forward, turned his head and was struck in the skull by the second bullet.”

Pictures of the scene, and the testimonies of witnesses and the F.B.I. indicate that the President’s car was well past Oswald’s position when the bullets were fired. So Oswald was about twenty yards ABOVE, seventy-five yards behind and slightly to the right of the President when he was alleged to have fired.

How, then, did the first bullet hit the President hit the President’s neck in the front and travel UPWARDS through his head?

The film of the assassination shows that the President clutched at his throat when hit by the first bullet, indicating that this was the first point of impact. He then turned and slumped towards Mrs. Kennedy on his left.

Yet the second bullet hit him on the RIGHT side of the head and travelled clear through, according to a White House medical officer.

When he turned to the left, the LEFT side or back of his head would have been facing Oswald, not the right side which received the bullet.

The situation is confused further by a report I have received from Dr. Robert Shaw, one of the three doctors who examined the dead President. He contradicts the Parkland report.

Different Version

He wrote to me: ‘The first bullet struck the President in the back of the neck at the region of the second thoracic vertebrae and emerged from the front of his neck, piercing the trachea.

“The third bullet struck the President on the left side of the head in the region of the left temporal region and made a large wound of exit on the right side of the head.”

Add to this muddle two reports from the pathologists in the Bethesda Naval Hospital, Maryland, where the autopsy was performed and confusion borders on chaos.

Their findings have yet to be published officially, but reliable sources say that their first report indicated that the President was struck in the right back shoulder, then in the head. The throat wound, they said, had been caused by a fragment of this bullet which “literally exploded in Kennedy’s head.”

But a later report says that the they maintain that the President was shot on the right side of the head, then a fragment deflected downwards out of the neck, and that the bullet actually emerged from the left side of the head.

In fact, if we accept all these medical reports, we must conclude that the President was wounded in the neck, back, top of the head, right and left temples, and back of the head.

Personally, having studied the evidence carefully, I believe that the fatal shots came from the front of the car.

Police officers, secret service men and other eye-witnesses bear out this theory.

One of them, a Mr. Truly, said: “I looked around and concluded the shots had come from farther down the street.”

More evidence supporting frontal shots came from a newspaper report on December 7, which stated: “After the shooting a small unexplained hole was found in the windshield of the presidential vehicle, which could have been caused by a bullet.”

On the other hand, all reports agree that the bullet which hit Governor Connally pierced his back. This bullet was obviously travelling on a downward slope and could well have come from Oswald’s position.

Were there, then, at least two assassins – Oswald at his window and another man from in front, possibly hidden in the underpass?

The front man’s second shot could have hit the President in the right side of his head. But even this does not explain how the first bullet could go off at an angle of about ninety degrees after it hit the President’s neck and go up through the top of his head.

I put these points to Captain J.S. Wooster, of the Royal New Zealand Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, a man who has won the Dominion Inter-Services Rifle Shooting Championship four times in recent years.

He has spent almost a lifetime studying, lecturing and competing in the field of small arms weapons and shooting.

He told me: “At a range of one hundred yards a bullet from a Carcano rifle would go through thirty inches of solid oak.

“There is no doubt that solid bullets fired at this range would go through a man’s head and some distance father until they hit a another solid object.”
He thought the difference between the medical evidence and Oswald’s firing position was “absolutely fantastic” and could offer no explanation to account for it.

Small entry wound

From his experience in the last war and extensive hunting, Captain Wooster said a solid bullet entering a human or animal skull leaves a small entry wound and a much larger exit hole.

Thus the small hole in the mid-section of the neck, stated by physicians to be just under the Adam’s apple, would seem to have been the entry point for the first bullet. A much larger wound was reported in the top or back of the head, showing this to be the exit point.

Wooster thought that the impact of this bullet would have knocked the President right off his seat, if it hit him from behind.

More mysteries

The impact of a frontal shot, however, would have been partly absorbed by the car seat supporting the President’s back, tending to leave his body upright.

But the trajectory of the bullets is by no means the only mystery.

Four bullets were found – one in the President’s body, one on the floor of the car, one lodged in Governor Connally’s thigh and one lying on the stretcher on which the President was placed after he was taken to hospital.

Yet everybody seems to agree that only three shots were heard! And –even more amazing – the police say ballistic reports prove that all the bullets came from Oswald’s rifle.

When I put this to Captain Wooster, he said: “If the doctors were right and were reported correctly as saying that the bullets went through the top and side of the President’s head, then they would never have been found in or near that moving vehicle or in his body, much less on the stretcher.”

That the medical men were right about both shots being lethal head wounds was corroborated by the F.B.I. on December 3. They reported: “Either of the two shots which hit President Kennedy could have killed him.”

But let us assume for a moment that by some freak those bullets did not travel farther than the car. Would it have been possible for Oswald to have fired them all in such a short time?

Captain Wooster did not think so. And to test his theory he set up two targets at a range of one hundred yards.

Using a Model 98 Mauser bolt-action rifle with a four-power telescopic sight which, he said, had a bolt action speed almost identical to Oswald’s Carcano, he fired at the first target, shifted his aim to the second target for the second shot, then back to the third target for the third shot.

The first target represented Kennedy, the second Connally. The manual actions involved unloading the empty shell, reloading, sighting and firing.

The Captain’s time by stop-watch from the first to the third shot in a sitting position and bracing the rifle was 6.5 seconds, 5.5 seconds and 5 seconds for three tests.

Lying down, his time was 6 seconds and 5 seconds for two trials.

All his shots hit the targets.

Although he is in the world champion class for rapid fire rifle shooting, even Captain Wooster found it difficult to match Oswald’s time and accuracy.

And Oswald was certainly no champion.

When he left the Marines over four years ago, he had barely qualified in the sharpshooter class, which is considered well below the expert or champion shooting levels.

According to an Irving gunsmith, Oswald did not even take in the gun to have the telescopic sight mounted until October 30, twenty-two days before the crime. In fact the only evidence that he had had some recent shooting practice came from two men who told the F.B.I. they had seen him at a Dallas rifle range.

Moving targets

Yet he is accused of hitting two moving targets with three shots faster than the champion Captain Wooster could hit two static targets.

The presidential car was moving at 12½ miles an hour. If the time between the first and third shots was five seconds, the car would have moved 30½ yards.

As Captain Wooster said: “To think a man of Oswald’s reported proficiency could do that kind of accurate shooting at moving targets in five seconds is utterly fantastic.”

But even estimates of four or five seconds may be too high. Stop-watch timing of the shots heard on the Universal Pictures newsreel indicate that only 3.1 seconds elapsed from the first to third shot.

No man alive could shoot so fast with such a rifle

.

[Charles Drago]

Paul,

This material is invaluable, and we thank you for presenting it.

How early did we understand what went down?

That conspirators struck JFK was known by astute, non-complicit observers during the coordinated firing sequence. The word went forth from that time and place.

It is my understanding that the classified reading room of the library of a certain military institution of higher learning contains a relatively small assassination archive comprised solely of official Communist Party-originating contemporary analyses of the event.

CD

[Paul Rigby]

Paul,

This material is invaluable, and we thank you for presenting it.

How early did we understand what went down?

That conspirators struck JFK was known by astute, non-complicit observers during the coordinated firing sequence. The word went forth from that time and place.

It is my understanding that the classified reading room of the library of a certain military institution of higher learning contains a relatively small assassination archive comprised solely of official Communist Party-originating contemporary analyses of the event.

CD

CD,

I compiled the anthology you're reading out of curiosity; for my daughters; and in the hope that someday we shall see anthologies of similar from the US and around the world. The US, in particular, boasts a rich store of unjustly neglected pieces scattered all over the place. Time we brought them together and rendered them readily accessible. For better, and sometimes worse, this is our tradition, in all its imperfections - and occasional glories.

Anyway, here's two more additions, the first of which remains, nearly half a century on, an outstanding example of honest and logical reasoning:

The Spectator, 6 March 1964, pp.305-306

The Riddle of Dallas

By Mordecai Brienberg

The author of this article, a former Rhodes Scholar from Canada, is a lecturer in sociology at Berkeley, California.

There are two widely held interpretations of President Kennedy’s assassination and the events in Dallas. The ‘liberal’ position contends that Lee Harvey Oswald was a product of the hatred and the violence preached by the ‘extremists of all kinds.’ In this view, radicals of the right and the left are responsible for the assassination. The ‘conservative’ interpretation traces responsibility for the assassination to ‘leftists and Communists’ alone; for, they contend, ‘was not Oswald a professed Marxist?’ But more crucial than the differences in these to postures are their similarities. Both presume that Lee Harvey Oswald was, in fact, guilty of the murder of the President; both by-pass an examination of whether or not this assertion is demonstrable.

Some very few Americans have taken seriously the tradition that a man is presumed innocent until proven guilty. These individuals have attempted to assess the evidence in the case. My purpose in this article is to summarise their minority enquiries, in order to make more widely known some pertinent information.*

The complete case against Lee Harvey Oswald is contained in the F.B.I. and Secret Service report submitted to the Warren Commission, which is unavailable to the public. However, the essence of the ‘water-tight case’ against Oswald was presented in a nation-wide radio and television statement made by the District Attorney of Dallas, Henry Wade. This statement was made after Oswald was murdered, while still in police custody. The F.B.I. and the Secret Service have themselves ‘leaked’ to the news media information from their own subsequent investigation. What follows is a brief resume of the official reconstruction of the assassination.

Lee Harvey Oswald, positioned at the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building (TSBD), fired three rifle shots at the President’s car as it was moving away from the building. The President was struck twice, once in the neck and once in the head; Governor Connally of Texas was struck once. This occurred between 12.30 and 12.31. Oswald then walked down four flights of stairs to the second floor of the building, where he took a coke from the coke-machine. A policeman who rushed into the building immediately after the shooting approached Oswald, selecting him from among several persons gathered around the coke-machine. But the owner of the TSBD, who was accompanying the policeman, intervened and stated that Oswald ‘works in the building.’ Presumably satisfied by this comment, the policeman discontinued his interrogation and ran to the sixth floor. It is only after this brief encounter with the law that Oswald is alleged to have fled the building itself. He supposedly walked several blocks to catch a bus, which he rode for several more blocks; he then hailed a taxi and rode four miles to his apartment. After taking a jacket from his room, he left; and some time later he shot a policeman, officer Tippit. Finally, it is alleged, Oswald entered a movie theatre where his ‘suspicious movements’ caused the cashier to call for the police. It was in the theatre that Oswald was arrested.

The official account of the Kennedy assassination consists of assertions about (a) the murder weapon; (b) the place from which the shots were fired, and the number of shots fired; © the escape of the alleged assassin; and (d) the murder of officer Tippit. I will critically examine each aspect in turn, questioning the plausibility of the official account and pointing out the significant discrepancies that appear when earlier explanations are matched against the final account that I have just outlined.

(a) Weapon

There is on file in Dallas an affidavit by the police officer who found a rifle on the sixth floor of the TSBD. That affidavit states that the weapon was a 7.65 mm Mauser. Wade, on November 22, stated that this was the murder weapon, and that Oswald’s palm-print was found on the weapon. The next day the F.B.I. released a report that Oswald had purchased a rifle in March under the alias Hiddel. But this rifle was a 6.5 mm Italian carbine. After this report, Wade reversed his position; the rifle he had in his possession was now an Italian carbine; it was no longer a Mauser. It was after this F.B.I. report that Wade announced that he knew Oswald used the alias Hiddel – because he had found an identification card in this name on Oswald’s person at the time of his arrest. But Wade did not explain why this alias was not released the previous day when he had asserted that Oswald used the alias Lee. The omission is most puzzling when one considers that the alias Lee was not immediately accessible to the Dallas authorities (as was the alias Hiddel), but had to be uncovered by a separate investigation.

Aside from questions about the rifle itself and the alias under which it was purchased, what evidence is there that Oswald fired the rifle? The results of paraffin tests, administered to Oswald to determine whether or not he had recently fired a weapon, are on record in Dallas. While positive results in such tests can be produced by contact with substances other than gunpowder, negative results definitely indicate that a person has not recently fired a weapon. The firing of a rifle leaves gunpowder traces on the hands and face, if it is fired from the shoulder. And it would seem rather ridiculous for a person to have fired a rifle with telescopic sights from the hip. The results of the paraffin tests were positive for Oswald’s right and left hands. The paraffin tests on Oswald’s face proved negative. Moreover, contrary to Wade’s assertion on November 22 about palm-prints, the F.B.I. now states that ‘no palm-prints were found on the rifle.’

(b) Scene of the Shooting

The crucial question here is to reconcile the nature of the wounds inflicted on the President with the unwavering contention that the shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository building. Let us follow the changing official reports as they attempt such a reconciliation.

The three doctors who attended the President at Parkland Memorial Hospital immediately after the shooting stated to reporters at the hospital that one of the bullets had entered the President’s throat ‘just below the Adam’s apple.’ There is a great deal of difference between an entrance and an exit wound, and all three doctors claimed to have dealt daily with gun wounds. The bullet, these doctors further stated, ranged downward without exiting. If the President had been shot as his car approached the TSBD along Houston Street, then the nature of the throat wound would be consistent with the allegation that the shots were fired from the sixth floor of that building. This was the first F.B.I. interpretation. But all the witnesses as well as the photographs of the shooting made clear that the car had already made the turn and was heading towards the overpass when the first shot was fired in the President’s throat. Photographs indicate his car was seventy-five to one hundred yards past[i] the building. The F.B.I. next argued that the President had turned his head around (almost 180 degrees) and was looking back when the first shot was fired. Mrs. Connally contradicted this by stating that she was speaking to the President immediately before he was shot – and she was sitting directly in front of Mrs. Kennedy. The films also show the President facing forward as the first shot struck him. How, then, can a bullet shot from behind enter Kennedy’s throat from the front?

If the place of the shooting is fixed, if the posture of the President is fixed, then the consistency of the final account can only be achieved by altering the initial interpretation about the nature of the President’s wound. After the three physicians were questioned by the F.B.I. they issued a statement reversing their earlier view – on which they had been unanimous and definite. The throat wound, they now say, is an [i]exit wound. These doctors state that they are, however, unable to talk to reporters or to discuss the matter further.

But there remain other pieces of information which officials have not reconciled with the latest statement of the doctors. The first police bulletin, overheard by a reporter waiting for the President’s motorcade at a point farther along the route, was that ‘all firing appears to have come from the overpass’ – in front of the car. The first radio accounts of the assassination stated that a policeman rushed to the overpass and was seen chasing two persons on the overpass. Ominously, nothing further is ever mentioned about this report. The front windshield of the President’s car had a bullet hole in it. The Secret Service prevented reporters at the hospital from coming close enough to determine the direction of the bullet. The car was then flown back to Washington and remained in the custody of the Secret Service. Eight days later, the windshield of the car was replaced. (It is not known whether the shattered windshield was destroyed.) Finally, four reporters of the Dallas Morning News, witnesses to the assassination, who were standing between the overpass and the TSBD, all claim that the shots were fired from in front of the President’s car.

How many shots were there altogether? According to the official report three shots were fired. But there appears to be five bullets. A fragmented bullet was found in the car (this is most likely the bullet which struck the President in the head and then exited); there was the bullet that ‘struck’ the President in the throat; there was the bullet that struck Governor Connally; there was a bullet found by the Secret Service on a stretcher, presumably the President’s (although its origin is by no means definite); and there was a bullet found by a Dallas policeman in the grass at the point where the other shots struck the President and the Governor. Did Oswald now fire five shots in five and a half seconds, when rifle experts are highly sceptical that an excellent marksman could have accurately fired three shots in that time?

© The Escape

Is it possible for Oswald to have done everything the official account attributes to him between the time of the shooting and his arrival at his apartment? The shooting took place between 12.30 and 12.31. Oswald arrived at his apartment, according to his landlady, at 12.45. Another account states he arrived at 1.0 p.m. This report also mentions ‘choked downtown traffic.’

According to the official version, Oswald’s taxi ride was about four miles. In uncongested traffic, the taxi could average twenty miles per hour, and the journey would then take twelve minutes. Thus if Oswald arrived at 12.45, he would have had two minutes to (a) hide the weapon; (b) walk from the sixth floor to the second floor; © find coins and get a coke from the machine; (d) converse with a policeman; (e) leave the building and walk four blocks to a bus; (f) ride the bus several blocks; and (g) get off the bus and hail a taxi. But if the traffic were congested, a taxi could only average about ten miles per hour. Even if we allow that Oswald did not arrive in this case until 1.0 p.m., he would still have not more than five minutes to accomplish these same acts.

It does not seem too plausible that the alleged sequence of events could have taken place within the allotted time. But official reversals cast even further doubt on the validity of their interpretations. According to Wade’s first account, the taxi-driver who picked up Oswald was named Darryl Click. But when private investigation indicated that Mr. Click had never driven a taxi in Dallas, District Attorney Wade reversed his statement. The name of the taxi-driver was now given as one William Waley.

If Oswald were the assassin, what motive would he have for returning to his apartment? Was it only to pick up his jacket, which is the police account? Mrs. Kennedy complained that afternoon of the ‘sweltering heat.’ If Oswald was returning to facilitate his escape, why, then, did he leave 150 dollars in the dresser of his room? He had only thirteen dollars in his pocket when he was arrested. For a man who had supposedly planned the assassination and carried it out so successfully, he was remarkably ‘unplanned’ and chaotic in making his escape.

(d) Murder of Tippit

Oswald, it should be remembered, was first arrested for the murder of officer Tippit. This, too, was a ‘water-tight case.’ District Attorney Wade claimed that he had sent twenty-three men to the electric chair on less evidence than that which he had against Oswald. After making several conflicting statements about where Tippit was shot, Wade ultimately acknowledged he didn’t know the scene of the crime. The one witness of the Tippit murder has sworn an affidavit describing the murderer as ‘short, stocky, and with bushy hair.’ I would describe Oswald, from the pictures I have seen, as slight, balding, and perhaps short. And what of the pistol with which Tippit was murdered? No statement was made by the police as to whether the pistol found on Oswald at the time of his arrest was the pistol which fired the shots killing Tippit. A strange omission in a ‘water-tight case.’ Wade did claim, however, that the police had a marked bullet which ‘mis-fired’ when Oswald supposedly tried to kill the arresting officer. The policeman himself gave a different account of the arrest, stating that he prevented Oswald from firing the pistol at all by placing his finger behind the trigger before Oswald could pull it. Confronted by this contradiction, Wade yet again changed his version to accord with that of the policeman. Thus at one moment Wade claims to have a marked bullet in his possession; the next moment he denies he has such physical evidence. In the Tippit case, as in the Kennedy case, there is distortion, a reversal of interpretations and a mishandling of crucial physical evidence.

It might be argued in defence of the investigating agencies that in the atmosphere of excitement that followed Kennedy’s assassination contradictions and imprecisions were due to ‘honest’ confusion. Granted that confusion existed, why then should the officials be continuously certain of one thing, Oswald’s guilt? Why is Oswald’s presumed guilt the constant in this sea of incomplete and conflicting evidence? Now, supposedly, the confusions have been clarified into a single consistent and convincing account. But if the case is consistent and convincing, why should witnesses refuse to comment to the press after they have been questioned by the F.B.I.? Why has Marina Oswald been held in the custody of the Secret Service since the murder of her husband, more than two months ago? She has had no direct and personal contact with any of her friends, with her mother-in-law, or with any reporter. Every communication to her, and every statement by her, first passes through the hands of a public-relations officer and a lawyer appointed ‘in her interest’ by the Secret Service. Why, if the case is so convincing, has physical evidence, such as the windshield of the President’s car, been unavailable for public examination? An alternative hypothesis to that of ‘honest’ confusion is the hypothesis that the initial confusion and the present secrecy are attributable to incongruities between the presumption of Oswald’s guilt and the inadequacy and intransigence of the evidence which would validate such a presumption.

And if the evidence is ‘intransigent,’ as a critical examination of the official account seems to demonstrate, why have the Dallas police, the F.B.I. and the Secret Service been so unrelenting in their efforts to prove Oswald’s guilt? In the pressure for an arrest, did the Dallas police consider Oswald an appropriate scapegoat because he was first on their[i] list of ‘subversives’?

The Federal agencies may have different motives. One hypothesis, which certainly cannot be conclusively demonstrated, suggests that Oswald worked for Federal investigatory agencies such as the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. This hypothesis seeks to account for otherwise unexplained incidents in Oswald’s life. While Oswald was employed he worked at minimum wages; but more frequently he was unemployed. Yet somehow he had the financial resources to travel to Mexico, to print political literature privately, and to pay a stenographer to transcribe a book critical of the Soviet Union which he was writing. The F.B.I. early acknowledged that Oswald regularly received money through the mail; but it has not yet stated the source. If the money came from a ‘left-wing’ organisation, what reason could the F.B.I. have for keeping this secret? Oswald had in his possession the private phone number and the automobile license number of the F.B.I. official in charge of ‘subversives’ in Dallas. This information is not obtainable from the telephone directory. Moreover, the agent had contacted Oswald several times before the assassination.

Passports are not quickly granted; and Cuban sympathisers have found them particularly difficult to obtain. But despite Oswald’s ‘defection’ to the Soviet Union, despite his activity in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, he was able to obtain a passport ‘within a single day.’ With this passport he travelled to Mexico City to try to obtain visas to travel to Cuba and the Soviet Union. Both countries refused him entrance.

Most striking is the fact that Oswald was not under surveillance during the President’s visit. Supposedly, the greatest security precautions ever taken to protect a President were instituted in Dallas. (The night before Kennedy’s arrival, posters were pasted which showed front and side views of the President under the caption: ‘Wanted – Dead or Alive.’) People who advocated integration of Texas schools were under surveillance, but this ‘Marxist,’ ‘defector,’ ‘pro-Castroite’ was unwatched. One is led to ask: is the F.B.I. trying to close the case in order to hide the fact that Oswald was in their employ, or in the employ of another investigatory agency?

The Warren Commission – which includes Allen Dulles, former head of the C.I.A.; John McCloy; Senator Russell of Georgia; Congressman Boggs of Louisiana; Senator Cooper of Kentucky; Congressman Ford of Michigan – might be a source of some consolation if it were probing for an answer to these worrisome questions. Ironically, the Commission provokes more questions about its own operation than it allays about the operation of other agencies. Its hearings are conducted in secret; and it appears to be restricting itself to a re-examination of the F.B.I. and Secret Service evidence. The accused’s constitutional rights to due process of the law, to public trial, to a defence attorney, to the cross-examination of prosecution evidence and witnesses – all these safeguards institutionalised in court procedure have been ignored in the hearing of this Commission. Why, one must ask, does the Warren Commission judge [i]in camera, and by such arbitrary procedures?

*For those readers who wish to pursue these arguments further, I refer them to the following articles: ‘Defense Brief for Oswald,’ by Mark Lane (National Guardian, December 19, 1963); ‘Seeds of Doubt,’ by Jack Minnis and Staughton Lynd (New Republic, December 21, 1963); ‘Oswald and the F.B.I.,’ by Harold Feldman (Nation, January 27, 1964).

The pre-Murdoch version of the NOTW, with a response to the above:

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.

G-men and police can deny all they like but people are still going to ask if Oswald was a scapegoat, if he had a strange if slight link with the FBI – a top operator’s “secret” phone number was found on him – and it was too easy for Ruby to get at him.

While Ruby’s trial went on in all the ballyhoo, august investigators sitting as the Warren Commission probed in private the murder of Kennedy.

Some details somehow leaked out, but neither the trial nor the Commission has ended the doubts and whispers. Just the reverse.

For overlooking the principle that a man is innocent until proved otherwise Jack Ruby, his gaolers and Judges have assumed that Oswald, that lonely, twisted young political delinquent, was a one-man assassination plot.

So easy

It was so easy, so glib, so open-and-shut.

But Oswald’s mother hit one big nail squarely on the head this past week when she tried, and failed, to get into the courtroom circus at Dallas.

“Lee Harvey Oswald,” she said, “should be up there now having a trial of his own.” How right ma’am, how right.

You remember that day a thousand years ago – or was it only one Friday last November? – when Jack and Jackie Kennedy drove through Dallas with Governor Connally of Texas in an open car.

There was a book warehouse on their route, and 175 yards of that was a roadway over another road – an overpass.

Almost midway between the two the shooting started and in five and a half seconds it was all over with two bullets in Jack Kennedy and one Governor Connally.

Doctors with experience of such things decided they had come from behind – from the warehouse where Oswald undoubtedly was.

Experts said that 100 yards more and the Kennedy car would have reached the safety of the overpass. But did safety lie there?

Because four voices which were small then but are now becoming strident said at the time, and they say it now that the shooting came from the overpass itself. Not from behind, but from the front.

In that case, it couldn’t have been Oswald.

The police were sure that only three shots were fired.

But up pipes a 20-year-old Dallas man, James Richard Worrall: “I don’t care what the police say, I heard four shots.”

And California sociologist, Rhodes scholar Mordecai Brienberg who has been probing events before and after the assassination, as many of us have, says there “appear to be five bullets”; one that went through Kennedy’s head into the car, one that lodged in his throat, one that hit Connally and one that was found on the grass.

Plus one that was found on the stretchers taking the wounded men to hospital; the report is not too clear about this.

But I think the bullet on the stretcher was the one that hit Kennedy in the throat…and came out. So I go along with witness Worrall: four shots.

The expert doctors have complicated things by doing a switch-around, first deciding that the wound in Kennedy’s throat was caused by the bullet going in then saying no, it was caused by the bullet coming out.

Now we know Kennedy was looking ahead when the shooting started so if the doctors are right this second time the bullet must have come from the warehouse.

Shattered

In that case it couldn’t have been anybody but Oswald!

And yet the windscreen of the car was shattered by a bullet from the front. Curiouser and curiouser.

Mr. Brienberg makes much ado about Oswald’s alleged time table which, if he was the killer, would have given him very few minutes to get back to his digs where, though it was a sweltering day, he collected his jacket and where, though he had only 13 dollars on him, he left 150 behind.

“For a man who supposedly planned the assassination and carried it out so successfully,” he says, “Oswald was remarkably unplanned in making his escape.”

I agree. But let’s not forget that Oswald was most certainly in that warehouse; a policeman saw him there and would have arrested him but for the owner saying: “He works here.”

A newspaperman swears he saw a rifle poking out of an upstairs window and a rifle was found there afterwards.

I know the police boobed here, first saying it was a German one of a certain calibre and then saying it was Italian, of different calibre.

Crazy ?

The fact is that a picture exists of Oswald holding such an Italian rifle and wearing a pistol on his hip, too. Remember a pursuing policeman was shot dead with a revolver before Oswald was arrested in a cinema.

So what have we got?- People swearing that shots came from the front of the car, police sure that they came from behind.

Crazy?- or was Oswald just a “fall guy,” are the F.B.I. trying to close the dossier as quickly as they can, or were there in fact two gunmen in Dallas that day?

The accuracy of Oswald’s rapid-fire marksmanship was impressive but if two men were dividing the shots it would be easy!

The Warren Commission is still collecting evidence and it may be for months, which is a pity because while they sit in secret and the world waits, the rumours will grow. We don’t need them; we have mystery enough already.

And we are left with the thought that Jack Ruby’s greatest crime was not in killing Lee Harvey Oswald, but in making a mess of history.

[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.

[Paul Rigby]

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.

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

Allen Dulles wanted to place a copy of Robert J. Donovan's The Assassins (London: Elek Books Ltd., 1956) in the hands of his fellow-commissioners. Those more concerned with the truth recalled Eisenschiml's remarkable work of twenty years before:

Times Literary Supplement, 14 May 1964, p.407

American Assassins

Anonymous

THOMAS G. BUCHANAN: Who Killed Kennedy? 192pp. Secker & Warburg. 18s.

The jacket of this odd book asserts its author’s thesis that “a vital clue to Kennedy’s murder…is to be found in previous attempts against American Presidents from Lincoln onwards.” This thesis justifies the devotion of a great part of a short book to the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. This space is wasted, since Mr. Buchanan is a remarkably bad historian. Thus he seems to accept the view that the Confederate government was involved in John Wilkes Booth’s crime. He must be the only believer in this slander alive today. It is revealing that his only source is the highly partisan life of Lincoln written by his secretaries, Nicolay and Hay (the two authors are run into one and become Nicolay Hay). There is no discussion of the role of Stanton, central to the problem, although there has recently been published an admirable new life of Stanton by Mr. Thomas and Mr. Hyman. But there was a conspiracy behind the assassination of Lincoln (no one, despite the blurb, ever doubted this). There was no conspiracy behind the murder of Garfield despite Mr. Buchanan’s attempt to drag in Roscoe Conkling. Characteristically, Conkling is twice accused of personal corruption. Conkling was deeply unpopular, tolerant of graft, involved in a public-private sexual scandal, but he was never accused of personal corruption. He was not Blaine. Even Buchanan finds it hard to dig up a conspiratorial origin for McKinley’s murder and he ignores the “strange case of Ambrose Bierce and William Randolph Hearst.”

Mr. Buchanan, in addition to being a very bad historian, is not well informed about political assassinations in general. He seems to think that the only assassins of public figures, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, were anarchists of the Bakunin school. Was Lenin’s brother of this school, or the group that removed Alexander II? He asserts, dogmatically, that Marxists and Communists do not go in for assassinations. This may be true in general. But Mr. Buchanan might look at the story of the bomb outrage in Sofia Cathedral – or at the murder of Trotsky.

When Mr. Buchanan gets away from bad history and turns his attention to Dallas, he does rather better. He has no difficulty in showing that the Dallas police were fantastically incompetent – or worse. Mr. Buchanan thinks they were worse, that they were accomplices in a great crime and that they are busy covering up their tracks now. By a method rather like that of the construction of an “identi-kit,” Mr. Buchanan describes “Mr. X,” the brain behind the crime. He is a Texas “gambler” i.e., an oilman “wheeler and dealer.” Kennedy was removed because he might do a deal with Russia and because he might tamper with the sacred tax depletion allowance. Signor Mattei of the Italian oil monopoly, it is strongly suggested, was also murdered to protect American oil interests. Some of the examination of the police story is useful. But Mr. Buchanan overplays his hand. We shall be better advised to see what the Warren Committee reports and what the Attorney-General, Mr. Robert Kennedy, does. Meantime, Mr. Buchanan might do worse than look at Dr. Otto Eisenschiml’s Why Was Lincoln Murdered? It is an amateur’s book. Dr. Eisenschiml is a chemist while Mr. Buchanan is a manager of computers in Paris (France). But although it is hard to believe Dr. Eisenschiml’s thesis, his book is a tour de force. Mr. Buchanan’s book merely darkens counsel.