The Left and the Death of Kennedy: Five Professors

[Dawn Meredith]

The question that the work of Ray Marcus poses with Chomsky is this:

Why did he change his mind?

For as Ray notes, Chomsky at first only allowed him an hour in is office. But then he was so engrossed by his evidence that, he cleared his schedule. And Ray stayed more than double that time.

A second visit was scheduled and came off well. But recall what Bromberger said to Ray: words to the effect, these are pretty powerful forces at work.

Chomsky it appears chickened out. He decided to play the safe issue which was Vietnam.

Vince Salandria made a valiant effort with Chomsky as well. To no avail.

[Richard Coleman]

From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT (2013):

A GUN-PACKING ASSISTANT DA

The interlocking connections among various rightwing elements in Dallas and that area's political structure had their most visible focal point in the person of William F. (Bill) Alexander, one of Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade's top assistants. Wade described Alexander to me as having been his "number-one man" at the time of the assassination, although "on paper" Jim Bowie held that position.

Alexander was one of Dallas's most vocal and prominent rightwingers in the 1960s, a colorful figure who habitually wore a Stetson and packed a gun and often was involved in prosecuting death-penalty cases. Alexander had such extreme political views that eventually, in 1967, he was dismissed by Wade for publicly attacking Chief Justice Earl Warren, who for years had been the target of an impeachment campaign by his enemies on the right because of his and his court's liberal rulings in Brown vs. Board of Education and other major cases. Alexander lost his job after being asked for his views on whether Warren should be impeached. The assistant DA replied, "Impeach, hell, he ought to be shot." Alexander further suggested that the best remedy for the chief justice of the United States would be hanging.

In a later interview with Larry A. Sneed for No More Silence, Alexander seemed intent on outdoing himself: "People down here are probably more patriotic than your Eastern liberal types, and they've demonstrated that. There are a lot of people that strictly do not like Yankees. And as far as anybody giving a particular rat's ass about John Kennedy getting his ass wiped in Dallas, who cares? A goddamn Yankee comes off down here and gets killed, for whatever reason, big deal!" Perhaps even Alexander recognized how that sounded, for he added dutifully, "We respect whoever is the President of the United States," and "many" police officers "would have laid down their lives to protect Kennedy no matter what they may have thought about him personally."

"Bill was inclined to make wild statements," Wade told me, with considerable understatement, in 1993. But the former DA added admiringly, "He probably was the best one to prosecute a weak murder case. [Laughs] He used to say, I'd throw all the shit in there and let the jury decide.' These are cases where you had some self-defense in it or both of 'em drunk or something like that where it's not a heavy penalty case, there is some mitigating circumstances. He is about as good as you could find on those. He wasn't in a class with Jim Allen or Doug Mulder."

That statement by Wade is ironic, for Mulder was the prosecutor who railroaded the innocent Randall Dale Adams to a death penalty in the 1976 killing of another Dallas policeman, Robert Wood. That case led to Errol Morris's celebrated 1988 documentary film, The Thin Blue Line, which, partly by using material from Wade's own files to which the DA had granted access, exposed malfeasance in the DA's office and the DPD and led to Adams's exoneration and release. The shooting of Officer Wood and the events depicted in The Thin Blue Line bear many eerie similarities to the Tippit case, even to the involvement of some of the same people in the Dallas law enforcement community. A comment in the film by the appellate attorney for Adams, Melvyn Carson Bruder, seems particularly relevant to the way Oswald was railroaded for the murders of Kennedy and Tippit: "Prosecutors in Dallas have said for years, Any prosecutor can convict a guilty man. It takes a great prosecutor to convict an innocent man.'"

Before Alexander's dismissal as an assistant DA, his assignments included prosecuting Jack Ruby for killing Oswald on live television. Ruby was convicted and sentenced to death but had his sentence overturned by an appellate court on the grounds that a change of venue should have been granted and that inadmissible testimony had been allowed. It has been suggested that the poorly conducted prosecution was a setup to help free Ruby, who was awaiting retrial when he died in 1967. Asked about that case, Wade told me he had to interview many of the witnesses himself before they went to court because Alexander had failed to do his "homework" with them. "You see, I always worried about the Ruby trial," said Wade. "There wasn't any question he's the one that shot [Oswald], but I was wondering what a juror or his reaction'd be to [someone] killing a man that killed the president. He might get a light sentence. But we got death on that. A lot of people say, Ruby got death.' It was the statement of the attorneys everywhere around here that Although Ruby got death, the jury really gave Belli death.' [Laughs]." Melvin Belli was the flamboyant San Francisco attorney who represented Ruby and was resented by many Dallasites for his showmanship in defending the killer of Oswald.

"Bill Alexander is my friend," Ruby forthrightly told the Warren Commission during his testimony on July 18, 1964. Ruby requested Alexander's presence that day during a polygraph examination ordered by the commission, even though Alexander had earlier convinced a jury to put him to death. The Warren Report notes with a studied lack of interest that Ruby had met with Alexander on the afternoon of November 21, 1963, and claims the meeting was "about insufficient fund checks which a friend had passed."

On the afternoon of the assassination, Alexander jumped into a squad car at the Texas School Book Depository shortly after the report of an officer's shooting in Oak Cliff came over the police radio at 1:16. It was unusual for a member of the DA's office to investigate a crime personally, but the Tippit shooting was a magnet for high-profile law enforcement personnel. It also drew two FBI agents, Robert Barrett and Bardwell Odum, to Oak Cliff along with many members of the Dallas police. Alexander, who told me he was traveling in the squad car with two policemen, Sergeant Calvin Bud Owens (Tippit's immediate superior) and "Jerry King" (actually Sergeant Gerald Hill), made it quickly to the scene of the Tippit shooting. Alexander also claimed that when he first heard about that incident, he immediately made the assumption that the same man had shot both the president and the police officer. Alexander told Henry Hurt, "We all knew the same man who killed the President had killed Tippit. We had made up our minds by the time we got there." This extraordinary conclusion, made without the benefit of evidence, was explained by Alexander, Hurt writes, as stemming from the rightwing assistant DA's belief that "the two acts were so similarly drastic and unusual that it was virtually impossible that they were committed by separate killers." "They all say that," Dallas researcher Larry Ray Harris told me in 1992. "Every policeman I've ever talked to says that: We just knew. I knew instinctively.'''

But Henry Wade told me he did not find that a logical assumption: "Not to me. You couldn't assume anything." Similarly, when Chief Curry was asked by the Warren Commission whether he associated the first reports of the Tippit shooting with the president's assassination, the chief replied, "No; I didn't at the time." Detective Jim Leavelle insisted to me, "Nobody connected the two until later on. The officers will tell you now, some of them who was over at the School Book Depository, Oh, yeah, we knew he was going to be a suspect in the president's shooting.' That's a bunch of bullshit, they didn't do it. Because I can show you the worksheets that they turned in, they didn't put it on there. This is the man that is the suspect in the shooting of Officer Tippit.' That's all they had on there. If they'd known it was going to be the president, they'd have put on there him too. The truth is, I didn't know it. When I walked in [to Captain Fritz's office to help interrogate Oswald] and I started talking to him about the shooting of Officer Tippit, I had no idea whatsoever that he was going to be a suspect in the presidential shooting. Not a bit."

And yet the same assumption Alexander made that the two killings were connected was made by at least some Dallas police officers, perhaps ones who were among the more emotionally or ideologically motivated in the department. Johnny Calvin Brewer, the manager of a shoe store near the theater who led the police to Oswald, testified to the Warren Commission that during the ensuing scuffle, "there were a couple of officers fighting him and taking the gun away from him, and they took the gun from him, and he was fighting, still fighting, and I heard some of the police holler, I don't know who it was, Kill the President, will you.' And I saw fists flying and they were hitting him."

Alexander was immediately belligerent in the first of our two telephone conversations in Dallas in December 1992, telling me that he was "totally pissed" at certain assassination researchers, including one he maligned as "nothing but a pervert and a liar," as well as "these assholes from the East Coast on a second swing through Dallas. They make me defend myself about everything I didn't do. There isn't a question about anything at the Tippit shooting, despite the fact that some of these shitheads from the East, they just didn't ask the right questions. I don't want to get in a piss fight with somebody as to whether the car was thirty-five or eighty-five feet from the corner. Helen Markham tried to tell what she saw. She had a sixth-grade education [she told the Warren Commission she went through the eighth grade]. She was there. She saw it." Alexander sarcastically announced to me that there was a new theory in the case: "The Warren Commission was right." But he added, "I don't know anything about what went on outside of Dallas, the Cuban connection, the bullshit about the Mafia."

The assistant DA's participation in the Oak Cliff police manhunt for Oswald included searches of a vacant house, the Abundant Life Temple, and the Jefferson Branch Library (Oswald had been known to frequent the latter) before that cluster of policemen, along with Alexander and the FBI agents, all focused on the Texas Theatre, joined by many of their other comrades. Despite the somewhat surprisingly quick presence of the federal agents in Oak Cliff, Alexander claimed, "What so many people don't realize is that there was no federal offense, so all the [federal] agencies treated the whole thing as if they could not get involved and just sat back." Later on November 22, Alexander was agitating for a filing against Oswald by the DA's office as a member of a communist conspiracy to kill the president. According to Manchester's Death of a President, Alexander "prepared to charge Oswald with murdering the President as part of an international Communist conspiracy.'" When I asked Alexander if he did advocate such a charge, he replied, "Yes, I did, directly due to the fact that we seized all that communist material and his correspondence with a guy named Stone nobody knew was a Communist at the time."

Alexander identified this man as I. F. Stone (1907-89), the leftwing independent journalist who had been accused earlier in 1992, apparently falsely, of having been a Soviet agent. This charge was made by a KGB major general Stone may have known as an innocent press contact. Somewhat surprisingly given his iconoclastic reputation as an independent investigative journalist, Stone vigorously defended the Warren Commission against its critics in 1964. Like many others on the American left, he may have been felt threatened by the fact that a supposed leftist was charged with the crime and have been anxious to dissociate himself and others from Oswald by helping stigmatize him as an aberrant loner with no coherent political motive or agenda. No correspondence between Oswald and I. F. Stone has ever been entered into evidence in the assassination case.

On October 5, 1964, shortly after the publication of the Warren Report, Stone wrote in his publication I. F. Stone's Weekly:

"All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting, in defense of the Left and of a sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology. Now I see elements of the Left using these same tactics in the controversy over the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission Report. I believe the Commission has done a first-rate job, on a level that does our country proud and is worthy of so tragic an event. I regard the case against Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone killer of the President as conclusive. By the nature of the case, absolute certainty will never be attained, and those still convinced of Oswald's innocence have a right to pursue the search for evidence which might exculpate him. But I want to suggest that this search be carried on in a sober manner and with full awareness of what is involved.

"It is one thing to analyze discrepancies. It is quite another to write and speak in just that hysterical and defamatory way from which the Left has suffered in the last quarter century or more of political
controversy. . . ."

While Stone went on to attack such pioneering and iconoclastic assassination books as Joachim Joesten's Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? and Thomas Buchanan's Who Killed Kennedy? as examples of the tendencies he deplored, it is clear that what made him most concerned about criticism of the Warren Report was that undermining its official conclusion would mean a possible reopening of McCarthyite witch hunting, or, as Stone put it, "conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology." The same anxiety is obvious in Richard Hofstadter's highly influential essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," which also appeared around that time and seemed similarly motivated. Both authors wanted to maintain an unquestioning climate in which the Warren Commission and other elements of the U.S. government, at the end of their sham investigation in 1963-64, would exonerate the left in general from suspicion by conveniently placing all the blame on one lone nut (albeit a seemingly leftist nut) for the assassination.

Stone even took it upon himself to defend the dubious behavior of individual commission members. He denied a charge by British philosopher and historian Bertrand Russell that Gerald Ford was "an associate of the F.B.I.," which turned out to be true, since it eventually became known that the future president was the FBI's inside man on the commission, leaking its doings to Hoover and his minions. Stone seemed especially outraged by Lord Russell's temerity in including in his attack on the probity of the commission the name of former CIA director Allen Dulles. Even though Stone admitted that he had criticized Dulles over the years, he insisted, "I would not impute to him or any other member of the Commission conduct so evil as to conspire with the secret services to protect the killers of a President." This blank check to exonerate the agency Dulles formerly headed rang especially odd in light of Stone's willingness to attack the CIA in other cases. With seemingly unconscious irony, he put in a box on the front page of his first issue after the assassination (on December 9, 1963, an issue headed, "We All Had A Finger on That Trigger"):

"The Real Test of Our Morality
"One way to demonstrate to the world in the wake of the President's assassination that we are a civilized people would be to pass a law forbidding the CIA ever, directly or indirectly, to finance or plan the killing of a foreign leader we dislike."

I. F. Stone's position on political assassinations, however, was more malleable than that statement would make it seem. When he was interviewed on camera by Ken Burns for his 1985 documentary Huey Long, about the U.S. senator and former Louisiana governor who was assassinated in 1935 under still-mysterious circumstances, Stone made this statement about Long: "I was very impressed with him. But it's a terrible thing to say, I was really glad when they shot him. I don't believe in terrorism or assassination, but he could have become an American dictator."

Stone's befuddled defense of the Warren Commission bore out the truth of what Lord Russell had written in his provocative article "16 Questions on the Assassination," published in the independent American journal The Minority of One on September 6, 1964:

"The methods adopted by the Commission have indeed been deplorable, but it is important to challenge the entire role of the Warren Commission. It stated that it would not conduct its own investigation, but rely instead on the existing governmental agencies -- the F.B.I., the Secret Service and the Dallas police. Confidence in the Warren Commission thus presupposes confidence in these three institutions. Why have so many liberals abandoned their own responsibility to a Commission whose circumstances they refuse to examine?"

From factually unsupported finger-pointing at I. F. Stone in our 1992 interview, the disgraced former assistant DA Bill Alexander went on to describe other materials he said were found in Oswald's possession that he considered reason to file a charge of conspiracy against the prisoner: "We picked it up, we had all the Communist literature. It had the right names and the right phone numbers, including the Russian embassy. What else are you supposed to think?" Where did they find the material?, I asked. "Oak Cliff," he replied, referring to Oswald's rooming house, adding, "I don't know what they got out of Irving," where other authorities said they found much more leftwing material among Oswald's belongings at the Paine residence. When the Dallas sheriff's and police departments first searched the Paine residence on November 22, they reported seizing file cabinets of information on alleged Cuban sympathizers from the garage, possibly evidence of Oswald's infiltration activities (or information collected by Ruth Paine and her husband, Michael Paine, who was known to attend both left/liberal and rightwing political gatherings), but those files soon vanished from the evidence. Sheriff's Deputy Buddy Walthers reported that the local authorities confiscated, along with "Cuba for Freedom" literature, "a set of metal file cabinets containing records that appeared to be names and activities of Cuban sympathizers." Deputy J. L. Oxford reported that they seized "about 7 metal boxes which contained pamphlets and literature from abroad." My telephone interview with Alexander ended with him indicating that he'd be happy to talk again the following week, but when I called him then, he refused to meet with me or talk further.

Do you have copies of A Minority of One? It was my introduction to alternative/left politics. I eagerly anticipated each issue and still remember the newsstand where I bought it! Copies don't seem to be around.

[Jim DiEugenio]

Arnoni was an interesting guy.

From what I understand, one day he just picked up and left America.

But he published some of the best anti WC articles in America at the time.