Washington Decoded

Assassination Chronicle

Reclaiming History: The Assassination
    of President John F. Kennedy
By Vincent Bugliosi
W.W. Norton. 1612 pp. $49.95

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By Max Holland

   

    What exactly happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963?

    You may have thought that the debate over the Kennedy assassination was settled long ago. Vincent Bugliosi would disagree, although he’d like to settle it now. Reclaiming History is less a work of historical reclamation than a very, very long — and passionate — argument about what historians and investigators have claimed and counterclaimed over the years.

     The argumentative design should not be surprising because, as an attorney, Mr. Bugliosi comes to the subject steeped in the adversarial process as the finest way to arrive at the truth. His fascination with the Dallas murder, in fact, began in 1986, when a British TV company asked him to be the prosecutor in a mock trial of the presumed-guilty-but-never-tried assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Mr. Bugliosi, the Los Angeles district attorney who famously prosecuted Charles Manson and his cult, won a unanimous verdict in that case in 1971 and went on to write a book about it, the best-selling Helter Skelter. Now, after 20 years of intermittent effort investigating the JFK assassination, he is prosecuting this case in the court of public opinion.

     It took that long partly because Reclaiming History is unlike any other book on the assassination ever produced by a single author. Rather than compare Mr. Bugliosi’s work with, say, Gerald Posner’s Case Closed (1993) — another effort by a lawyer to, well, close the case — it is probably much fairer to shelve Reclaiming History alongside the two massive federal investigations of the assassination.

    The first, of course, was the Warren Commission’s final report and 26 supplementary volumes, published in 1964, and the second was the final report and 12 supplementary volumes issued by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979. Mr. Bugliosi is a much better and more curious writer than the legal teams that produced these federal texts, and while his output might first appear modest by their standards, for a lone author writing about a lone gunman the output is staggering. (I should note that Mr. Bugliosi mentions my work in his book, mostly favorably but not always so.)

    The printed text of Reclaiming History alone runs 1,612 pages. The book includes a CD-ROM with an additional 958 pages of end-notes before the whole prolix enterprise comes to a merciful end with a mere 170 pages of source notes. If printed like a regular book, in a normal-size font and on regulation paper, Mr. Bugliosi’s work would take up 13 volumes. At $49.95, this encyclopedic work is a bargain.

The Power of Disinformation: The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination

 

 

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By Max Holland

    The 1967 arrest and indictment of Clay Shaw for conspiring to kill President Kennedy was one of the greatest travesties in the history of American jurisprudence.

 

    That much was understood by 1969, once Shaw was acquitted after 54 minutes of deliberation by a New Orleans jury. What was not understood until fairly recently, though, was the lie at the core of DA Jim Garrison's persecution of Shaw. Garrison was duped by a  false allegation published in a  Communist-controlled Italian newspaper, Paese Sera. The Garrison saga would be almost laughable, given how the DA was so easily fooled, save for the tragedy inflicted on Clay Shaw, and the lasting damage Garrison wrought to the public  perception of what happened in Dallas on 22 November 1963.

 

    Garrison forever changed the terms of public debate on the assassination. Before the New  Orleans district attorney became involved, the worst criticism made of the U.S. government was that it had not been sufficiently devoted to, or diligent about, finding the true  perpetrators. Garrison made the U.S. government--specifically, the CIA--complicit in the assassination itself.

 

    Click on the title to read “The Power of Disinformation: The Lie That Linked the CIA to the Kennedy Assassination,” which appeared in Studies in Intelligence in 2001.

 

    Oliver Stone, whose 1991 film JFK exalted Jim Garrison, critiqued the Studies article in a 2002 paid advertisement that appeared in The Nation magazine.

 

 

© 2001 by Max Holland

Deep Throat 3.0

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By William Gaines and Max Holland

    June 17, 2007 will mark the 35th anniversary of a “third-rate burglary” at the Watergate office complex that burgeoned into the downfall of Richard Nixon. If past were prologue, the anniversary would surely have sparked off a whole new round of speculation about the identity of the fabled secret source known as “Deep Throat.”

    But two years ago, the “source to end all sources” was unmasked after three decades of more or less successful anonymity.[1] Deep Throat turned out to be W. Mark Felt, the number two man in the FBI hierarchy at the time of the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.[2] And with the guessing game over, the 35th looms as the first major anniversary where the thrill is gone. The Watergate scandal is now relegated to history, where it firmly belongs. Perspective can finally displace a national fixation.[3]

    Some recently available documents, as well as older ones, when taken together, paint a far different portrait than the one Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have long propagated about Deep Throat’s role in the investigation that brought them accolades, fame, and fortune. Mark Felt was far from being just one of many sources, and an ambivalent, reluctant confirmer of information. At critical junctures, he provided vital guidance, knowledge, and leads. He sharpened and expanded upon information reported to him by Woodward. On occasion, Felt would even supply raw information, known only to the FBI, which could be popped into The Washington Post virtually unchanged. All of these contributions were instrumental to Post's leading coverage of the Watergate break-in. It’s fair to say that but for Deep Throat, in 1972 the Post would have been just another groping member of the press pack rather than its crucial, and mostly solo, leader.

    A revised look at Deep Throat also raises some long-neglected questions regarding Woodward and Bernstein’s protection of the most fabled confidential source in journalism history. When a newspaper reporter negotiates an understanding with a source, does that agreement extend to only the newspaper medium? If the reporter wants a change of terms, is he or she honor-bound to obtain the source’s express permission? Or are silence and the absence of protest sufficient? And finally, what is the effect of the passage of time? Does it give license to a reporter to re-interpret an understanding unilaterally? At several pivotal moments, Woodward amended the terms of the “deep background” agreement to suit his, Bernstein’s, or the Post’s best interests, but not necessarily Felt’s.

The Making of Two Myths

    During the 31 years Washington’s favorite parlor game lasted, Woodward and Bernstein stoutly maintained that for all the sound and fury, Woodward’s über-secret source was far less important than everyone believed. Deep Throat’s contributions were famously described in 1974, when All the President’s Men was published and revealed the existence of the source dubbed Deep Throat for the very first time. In the book it was claimed that Woodward’s discussions with Deep Throat were “only to confirm information that had been obtained elsewhere and to add some perspective.”[4]

    That formulation or some variant of it would be repeated endlessly for the next three decades, despite the fact that any careful parsing of the text would have revealed many internal inconsistencies.[5] As recently as 2005, Woodward would tell a C-SPAN interviewer that Deep Throat “was one of many sources. He provided a context and explained that Watergate was much larger and much more abusive. Others hinted at that but didn’t quite have the concept of the scope and magnitude.”[6]

    The hyperbolic counter-myth about Felt’s role seemingly had its origins in the taut film version of All the President’s Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, and written by William Goldman. Actor Hal Holbrook’s menacing portrayal of Mark Felt dramatized the secret source all out of proportion to his actual significance. Deep Throat became a mythic figure, to the point where the popular mis-impression was that Woodward and Bernstein had only one source. Or as one critical Post editor put it, it was as if Woodward “did little more than show up with a bread basket that Deep Throat filled with goodies.”[7] That Felt had been dubbed with a “sexy moniker,” borrowed from a pornographic 1972 movie that was the first crossover X-rated film, didn’t hurt the myth-making either.[8]

     But while the popular fable about Deep Throat was obviously wrong-headed, the account offered up by Woodward and Bernstein also needs revision.