A Note About the Past Decade
Since Case Closed was published in 1993, there have been several developments regarding the assassination. Long-sealed government records have been made public and more books charging a conspiracy have been published. None of the new material during the decade, however, has changed my original conclusion that Oswald, alone, killed JFK.
The most significant addition to understanding what happened on November 22, 1963, is the release of new records. In partial response to Oliver Stone’s far-fetched conspiracy film, JFK, the 1992 President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act had created the Assassination Records Review Board as an independent agency. It was charged with re-examining for release all assassination-related records that federal agencies had regarded as too sensitive for the public.
Five years after Case Closed had been published, The Assassination Records Review Board finished its work, issued a final report, and transferred all of the records it had collected to the National Archives. The Review Board’s accomplishments were prodigious. Among the more than 4,000,000 pages of documents made available, it managed to release more than 27,000 previously redacted records, including critical ones from the CIA Directorate of Operations; obtained another 33,000 assassination records from other agencies that had previously refused to open them for public review; acquired two sets of original notes from Oswald’s interrogation in the Dallas Police Department (prior to the Board’s existence, it was thought that no original notes existed); further clarified the controversial medical record of President Kennedy’s autopsy and his treatment at Parkland Hospital by deposing ten Bethesda autopsy participants, five Parkland Hospital treating physicians, and conducting numerous interviews of Parkland and Bethesda personnel; secured records of New Orleans’ District Attorney Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw for conspiracy to assassinate JFK, including Shaw’s diaries, records from Shaw’s defense attorneys, investigative records from the District Attorney’s office, and grand jury records; obtained the full release of FBI documents about the Bureau’s attempts to track Oswald in Europe before the assassination; sponsored ballistics and forensic testing of Warren Commission Exhibit 567, the bullet “nose fragment” from the front seat of the presidential limousine, (the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations had first recommended this test, but the testing was not conducted until the Review Board existed); permanently preserved all of JFK’s autopsy photographs in digitized form, and conducted sophisticated digital enhancement of selected, representative images; and reviewed IRS and Social Security tax, employment, and earnings records on Oswald, the authenticity of which had been questioned by conspiracy theorists who were not allowed access to that material.
In 1993, when Case Closed was issued, some historians and journalists told me they thought it was a brave book since the conclusion that Oswald had acted alone in killing JFK was still to be tested by the imminent release of these documents. I was a strong advocate for releasing all files that were remotely relevant, especially since the government’s longstanding, and usually indefensible, refusal to release such documents had exacerbated lingering doubts many people had about the assassination. I was confident that the release of the files would bolster my conclusion of Oswald’s sole guilt.
And I was right. But why has there been virtually no news coverage about the long-awaited release of the remaining JFK files? The simple answer is they did not provide the information long hoped for by conspiracy theorists. Not only were there no smoking guns establishing a conspiracy to kill the president, but many of the documents affirmatively reinforced the evidence that pointed to Oswald as having alone killed JFK. Without adding substantive evidence to any conspiracy theory, the files were conveniently ignored by many who had vocally demanded their release in the first place.
The files themselves often illustrate how a cult of secrecy had become an ingrained part of government bureaucracy, leading many to be suspicious about the government’s motives. Agencies steadfastly held onto documents even when they had absolutely no relevance. In August 1993, the CIA released a batch of long-classified documents, some of which were photocopies of published newspaper and magazine articles about the assassination. It is hard to overcome the barriers of a bureaucracy that is so steeped in secrecy and nondisclosure that it deems its own photocopy of a public article to be classified. The inherent tendency of government agencies to withhold documents has worked to the detriment of establishing an early and conclusive truth in the question of who killed the president.
Besides the release of the files, there have been several other important developments in the case during the past decade. In late 1993, PBS’s Frontline aired a three-hour special investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK murder. As part of its work, Frontline gave an amateur film taken by a bystander at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, to a scientific firm that specialized in digitizing and improving the grainy image. The film of the presidential motorcade, shot from the corner of Main and Houston streets by the late Robert Hughes, covers the president’s motorcade entering Dealey Plaza, and also some of the assassination’s aftermath. It was long considered an important record because it briefly shows the far right corner window, the so-called sniper’s nest, in the Texas School Book Depository, only moments before the first shot was fired. For many years, researchers of the case examined the film hoping to decipher what some thought was movement behind the window of the sniper’s nest. But because the Hughes film was of such poor quality, it was not possible to determine whether the “movement” was merely an artifact on the film or the shadow of a real person. PBS made a breakthrough, however. A meticulous digitizing of the film allowed the scientists who had worked on it to reach an unequivocal conclusion on PBS: “There is movement in the sixth floor corner window indicating the presence of a person.”
That is the same location where Lee Harvey Oswald had last been left alone by his co-workers just a half hour before the assassination. It is also the same location in which three spent bullet cartridges were found, all of which came from Oswald’s rifle, which was ditched just across the sixth floor as he escaped. The frames from the Hughes film showing a person in the sniper’s nest only seconds before the first shot, provide a visual confirmation of both the physical evidence left behind by the killer, as well as contemporaneous accounts given to police by several eyewitnesses.
During the last ten years, several comprehensive private investigations of the case have either begun, or in some cases, finished. Max Holland, a fellow at the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization, and a frequent contributor to The Nation, has been working on an extensive history of the Warren Commission and the inner dynamics and politics of how the seven-member panel reached its conclusions. It is largely an untold story.
“If people knew what happened on the commission, they might be more at peace with the outcome,” says Holland. He also explains why the work of the Warren Commission fell into such fast disrepute: Chief Justice Earl Warren, who headed it, refused to answer any questions about it. “His attitude was,” recounts Holland, “‘I tell you this happened and you accept it.’ He acted like it was a Supreme Court decision.”
Warren did not appreciate that when a conclusion on something as momentous as the assassination of a young and popular president was handed down, it was not enough to expect the public to accept it on face value. The failure of the Commission to establish any mechanism for responding to the rumors and false information that quickly became widespread was a fundamental error. Holland’s groundbreaking study, due to be published as a book, explains how such elementary errors were reached, and how they helped fuel a conspiracy industry.
Another long-time JFK researcher, investigative journalist Gus Russo, published the results of his work in 1998. Russo’s book, Live by the Sword, is the only one I know of that makes use of all the files released since 1993. In his comprehensive study, Russo concludes that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. He also credibly solves the long-standing mystery of what happened to JFK’s brain, missing since the mid-1960s. Russo shows how Robert Kennedy, intent on avoiding any gruesome public display about his brother’s death, buried the brain with JFK when the body was reinterred at Arlington Cemetery on March 14, 1967.
Russo, who believes that Oswald likely killed JFK on behalf of Castro and the Cuban government, raises some questions about Oswald’s activities during a preassassination trip to Mexico City that can no longer be answered. Russo does an excellent job of skewering the CIA for giving a higher priority to protecting its assets in Mexico, as well as keeping secret its own plots with the mafia to kill Fidel Castro, than it did to assisting the Warren Commission. The CIA was the only U.S. agency with jurisdiction to probe what Oswald had done abroad. The documents released by the Assassinations Review Board further embarrass the CIA for its lackluster investigation. Laurence Keenan, the FBI supervisor J. Edgar Hoover sent to Mexico City, told Russo that once he arrived, “There was an impenetrable wall between the CIA and the FBI. There was not enough trust to coordinate the investigation.… There was no support [from the CIA].”
Russo’s work has persuaded me that I was too mild in castigating the CIA in Case Closed for its virtually nonexistent investigation. The CIA not only lied to the Warren Commission, but deliberately withheld evidence, not because it feared disclosing a conspiracy against JFK, but rather because it put is own interests first, and the public’s and government’s right to know, second. By so doing, CIA officials performed a disservice both to the country and to history.
Several other books during the past decade have had added to smaller aspects of the case. Dale Myers’s 1998 book, With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J.D. Tippit, is a 700-page scholarly study, filled with new details that conclusively establish Oswald as the killer of the Dallas police officer Tippit within an hour of the assassination. And Pat Lambert’s 1999 book, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK, is a meticulous deconstruction of District Attorney Jim Garrison’s conspiracy theories. The book, based on new interviews and fresh information, exposes Garrison as a complete fraud and even includes the first-ever interviews with the children he had molested.
In March 2001, conspiracy theorists were temporarily excited when an article by JFK researcher D. B. Thomas was published in the peer-reviewed Science and Justice, a quarterly publication of Britain’s Forensic Science Society. Thomas argued that the House Select Committee had been correct after all when it concluded in 1979 that there was acoustical evidence of a fourth shot at Dealey Plaza. The Washington Post gave the Thomas article substantial coverage. But Thomas’s methodology—when subsequently examined by other acoustic and photographic experts—was found to be based on multiple errors when he tried matching photographs of the motorcade to available police audio tape. Few news outlets reported the demise of his analysis, however.
Besides the work of serious researchers during the past ten years, charlatans have also tried to keep milking the assassination for all it is worth. A woman who claimed to have been Oswald’s co-worker at the Texas School Book Depository, as well as his lover, peddled a book proposal for nearly a year, but gratefully there were no takers. Another woman in New Orleans, who claimed to have secret letters from Oswald as well as evidence of his undercover role in a massive plot, was exposed as a fake even by conspiracy theorists. A convicted murderer, Jim Files, who has spun an elaborate theory about how he killed Kennedy, almost sold his story to Dick Clark for an extended television special. Only late in the preproduction process did several researchers convince Clark that he was being duped. Purported first-time pictures of the assassination at Dealey Plaza were offered for sale by a respected southern auction house in 2000, but they were pulled when the auctioneers realized they were merely photos someone had taken while on the set of the Oliver Stone film. These are only a few of many such examples. Fake audio tapes, doctored pictures, bogus interpretations of existing records, and false confessions continue to plague the JFK case.
Yet, as a result of Case Closed, many long-time conspiracy theorists modified their arguments during the past decade, and especially during the past two years. New conspiracy theories, complete with “witness” accounts, contradict most earlier conspiracy plots but also try to take into account what was accomplished in Case Closed. For instance, when I used the Zapruder film—the so-called home movie of the assassination taken that day by Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder—to establish that the only shots that hit Kennedy came from behind, most of the buffs just dismissed it. But when the new scientific work set forth in Case Closed was examined more carefully, many conspiracy researchers realized the digital enhancements of the film were indeed evidence of shots only originating from behind JFK. As a result, a growing number of conspiracy theorists try to explain away that evidence by contending that the Zapruder film must have been somehow doctored.
It is the essentially the same argument used over JFK’s autopsy X rays and photographs. Since those also prove that the only bullets that struck the president were fired from behind, conspiracy theorists often charge they must be fake. The original proponent of such arguments, Robert Groden, also got involved in a new case during the past decade. He testified for the defense in the 1995 O. J. Simpson trial, saying that a photograph of Simpson, wearing a pair of Bruno Magli shoes at a football game, was doctored. By the time the prosecution finished introducing a series of such pictures, at different times, Groden’s self-proclaimed photographic expertise was nationally exposed as woefully insufficient.
Other conspiracy theorists now acknowledge that Oswald was indeed in the sniper’s nest, with his rifle, but have gone so far as to conjecture that he shot only blanks. Although there is no evidence to support the new theories, it is the only way some buffs, who refuse to acknowledge the simpler truth, have figured out how to answer the void left in their field by Case Closed.
There has simply been no information or developments during the past decade that have changed the conclusions reached in Case Closed. Rather, the release of millions of pages of assassination related documents have bolstered the history originally set forth in the book. When a reporter for the German newsweekly Der Spiegel recently asked if I was still comfortable with the bold title Case Closed, I answered that my only change for the fortieth anniversary of the assassination might be to call it Case Still Closed.