Washington Decoded

A Single Photograph Disproves Oliver Stone’s Conspiracy Claim

 

The Unfounded Attack on CE 399’s Chain of Custody

 

 

By Steve Roe

 

 

    Some people, when they are responsible for creating a disaster, apologize and slink away. Others attempt to make amends. A few double down.

    Oliver Stone’s new pseudo-documentary, JFK: Destiny Betrayed, proves the nothing-if-not indefatigable director belongs firmly to the double-down school. He first unveiled his conspiratorial take on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in JFK, a 1991 feature film. At that time he proclaimed the film ought to be accorded as much weight as the Warren Report. Now Stone declares that his “conspiracy theories are now conspiracy facts.”[1]

    One of the outlandish claims in JFK: Destiny Betrayed concerns a most important piece of ballistic evidence. This artifact is Warren Commission Exhibit (CE) 399, the spent bullet fired from Lee Harvey Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to the exclusion of all other weapons. This bullet, after penetrating the president’s upper back and exiting his throat, traversed Texas Governor John Connally’s torso and wrist before lodging itself superficially in his left thigh. During the chaos at Parkland Hospital, the bullet fell out onto the stretcher cart being used to transport Connally to the operating room. Within an hour or so a Parkland employee noticed the bullet on the stretcher, and it was eventually handed over to a Secret Service agent before finally reaching the FBI Lab on the evening of November 22nd.

Above: A frame from the Zapruder film shows President Kennedy and Governor Connally an instant after they were struck by the second bullet fired.                                         

Below: CE 399, the second bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald.                                                                                                                .                                                                                              

    Stone and James DiEugenio, who wrote the screenplay, would have everyone believe, however, that CE 399’s provenance can be impeached, and that unnamed conspirators planted a key piece of evidence that was the focus of every federal investigation. As Stone asserted during a March interview with an all-too-credulous Boston Herald reporter, “Nothing matches. There’s no chain of custody—of a bullet [CE 399] or a rifle or fingerprints. Nothing was done right. It was a completely botched investigation . . . .[2]

    In point of fact, there is no chain of custody issue. The Warren Commission worked hard in 1964 to establish how CE 399 got from Parkland to the FBI Lab on the night of November 22nd. The House Select Committee on Assassinations corroborated the accuracy of the commission’s findings in the late 1970s. The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) reaffirmed these findings in 1996. And most recently, the National Archives (NARA), which preserves all assassination artifacts, acted in concert with the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to employ state-of-art imaging that enables researchers to examine CE 399 as never before.

    The issue comes down to whom do you believe: Oliver Stone? Or your own eyes?

When Is the News Media Going to Catch On?

Print

 

The National Archives keeps releasing assassination-related records, and the press keeps getting the story wrong.

 

 

By Robert Reynolds

 

    Now that we are roughly mid-way between the last release of JFK assassination records from the National Archives, and the next round, scheduled for December 2022, it seems a good time to take stock of the news coverage we have gotten so far.

    The good news: the fiasco that marred coverage of releases in 2017-2018 was not repeated. The bad news: coverage was still an embarrassing failure.[1]

    Virtually none of the stories this time around accurately conveyed the small amount of new information that was released in December 2021. Instead, story after story about the release of records from the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection (JFK ARC) featured long summaries of documents previously described in newspapers and government reports from the 1990s, the 1970s, even the 1960s. These summaries were presented as if they were news. This spectacle occurred in publications ranging from the New York Post to The Washington Post, from the Daily Mail to the Daily Beast. Even the venerable AP and that supposed newspaper of record, The New York Times, were not immune.

    Not every outlet faltered, to be sure. Author Gus Russo, writing for the website SpyTalk, observed that “there doesn’t seem to be a truly new document in the batch, just cleaner, transparent versions of previous releases.” Substitute “open in full” for “transparent” and Russo was correct. Meanwhile, Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, told CNN the same thing during an interview, provoking host Michael Smerconish into calling him a “buzzkill.” CNN seems to have listened to Posner, broadcasting fewer decades-old news stories than other outlets.

    After eight rounds of releases from the ARC since July 2017, however, the question remains: why did so many news outlets still get the story so wrong, publishing “olds” instead of “news”? The fundamental reason is that they didn’t understand what was new in the releases. Instead, they thought these “secret” documents were all new information.

    An old saw in journalism, however, is that a story is no better than its sources. Without excusing the reporters who wrote and the editors who published, a major part of the responsibility for the latest misleading news quotient must rest with the sources reporters depended upon—the authors and researchers who actually delve through the assassination-related and cold war documents that constitute the collection. They are one of the primary reasons why so many news organizations do such a poor job of explaining what the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is actually doing.

Assassination: As American as Apple Pie?

Print

 

In every campaign [it has been determined] that there have been people—for lack of a better word—stalking candidates with ill intent.

                                                                                                        Eljay B. Bowron
                                                                                                        Director, Secret Service, 1993-1997

 

 

By Mel Ayton

 

    There have been notorious, as well as unknown, assassination attempts, plots, and threats against incumbent US presidents throughout American history, from George Washington to Barack Obama.

    Much less well known is that there have been numerous assassination attempts, threats and plots against men and women running for the presidency, as well as holders of and candidates for the office of vice president. Many of these plotters, fortunately, changed their mind at the last second when confronted by tight security. But some would-be assassins nearly succeeded.

    The Secret Service investigates literally hundreds of assassination threats against candidates during presidential election cycles, and also threats to assassinate vice presidential candidates. Since the agency steadfastly refuses to discuss protective intelligence and methods, no one will ever know for sure though how many plots have been thwarted. One presidential candidate, John Schmitz, once likened the Secret Service to a lighthouse: “you don’t count the ships they save.” Former agent Joseph Petro has opined about the “many times” an attacker was waiting to strike but then aborted his or her mission because of the heavy bodyguard protection around a candidate.[1]

    Many potential assassins have possessed the “means, motive and opportunity” to carry out their act but their plans have been foiled before they could gain any proximity to the candidate. Other armed threateners have gained proximity to their targets and have been in a position to attack. An “attempted assassination,” therefore, can be defined as an armed individual who has approached a presidential candidate with ill intent or waited for an opportunity to kill a candidate even if they have been foiled at the last minute by stringent security or other circumstances. Many would-be assassins who fall under this category are well-known and include the men who shot presidential candidates Robert Kennedy and George Wallace. However, little-known to the general public are the attempts to kill vice presidents, and presidential candidates such as Barry Goldwater, Ted Kennedy, John Lindsay, Eugene McCarthy, George H.W. Bush and Gary Hart.

Vice Presidents

    A general assumption exists that no one has ever attempted to assassinate a sitting vice president, on the grounds that the holder of this office has no real political power and a low profile. An assassin would preferably go after the person with the real power: the president.

    Yet at least two attempts to assassinate a vice president have been documented. One involved Abraham Lincoln’s vice president, Andrew Johnson (in concert with a simultaneous attack on the president). The other was on Woodrow Wilson’s running mate, Thomas Marshall.

The Making of Richard Nixon

Print

 

Campaign of the Century: Kennedy, Nixon, and the Election of 1960
Irwin F. Gellman
Yale University Press. 473 pp. $35

 

By Donald A. Ritchie

 

    Unlike the last presidential election, the loser in 1960 did not insist the election was rigged and stolen from him, did not press state officials to overturn the results, and did not whip his supporters into taking mob action, even though he had more legitimate claim to protest. Irwin F. Gellman argues that vote fraud in Illinois and Texas corrupted 1960's “campaign of the century.” His account depicts John F. Kennedy as less of a hero and Richard M. Nixon as less of a villain than they are typically portrayed.

    Gellman takes issue with nearly everyone who has written about that election, and counters with his own prodigious research in a wide range of manuscripts and oral histories. He believes that scholars have favored East Coast sources, particularly the accommodating Kennedy Library, to the detriment of the West Coast-based Nixon Library, whose records he describes as less helpfully organized and more difficult to find.

    Most of all, Gellman rejects the romantic notions of the campaign perpetuated by Theodore H. White’s immensely popular and influential book, The Making of the President 1960. He accuses White of having been seduced by Kennedy, who gave him ready access during the campaign, while Nixon, suspicious of White’s politics, repeatedly declined to be interviewed. Gellman dismisses White for distorting the candidates and the issues and offers his own account as a corrective.

    The election of 1960, whose popular vote was one of the closest presidential contests in history (although the electoral margin was wider), reflected voter uncertainty about both candidates. After eight years of the grandfatherly Dwight Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon represented a younger generation, more risky and less reassuring. Both were political centrists and Cold War anticommunists. Both straddled parties that were internally divided between liberal and conservative wings. And both tried to appeal to black voters in the North without alienating white segregationists in the South. Kennedy faced suspicion due to his Catholicism, Nixon for perceptions of past cutthroat politics. Doubts about both candidates persisted and the polls remained evenly divided throughout the race, with the lead tipping back and forth as Americans tried to make up their minds.

    The question was how accurately voters perceived the choice. Gellman faults the media for not presenting a more honest picture of Kennedy’s dicey health and philandering, and of the immense amount of money his wealthy family poured into the campaign for legitimate and illegitimate expenses. Although most newspapers endorsed Nixon—who was favored by their conservative publishers--the leading national news reporters liked Kennedy and distrusted Nixon, shaping their coverage. At the time, reporters followed a code that the private conduct of a politician was off limits unless it affected public behavior. Like alcoholism, adultery was a bipartisan failing, which kept the parties from exploiting it as an issue. Libel suits also posed potential peril in the days before the Supreme Court’s Sullivan decision in 1964. Even if reporters had tried to file such stories, editors would have kept them from print.

Once More ‘Round the Plaza

 

Print

 

By Robert Reynolds

 

    Once again the National Archives is preparing to release previously redacted documents from the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection (JFK ARC). And once again the idea is becoming rampant that significant and newsworthy information on the assassination of President Kennedy 58 years ago will soon be revealed.

    News coverage of the coming releases started out muted this time around compared to the last big releases, which occurred from July 2017 to April 2018. It picked up markedly, however, when President Biden released a memo on October 22 that spelled out short- to long-range plans for the collection.

    The memo called for a first release of redacted documents that agencies no longer wish to withhold in mid-December, then another, larger, release by December next year. The memo also mandated a boat-load of paperwork for agencies to fill out if they want to postpone anything past that date. A longer-range element of the plan calls for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the federal agency that houses assassination-related materials, to scan the entire collection and put it on-line. How long that will take is not spelled out in the memo.

    Reaction to Biden’s memo ranged from yawns to apoplectic complaints that Biden has sold out to pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and is suppressing incriminating documents.

    That a collection of mostly paper documents can stimulate such passions is a tribute to the depth of the national trauma inflicted by the assassination. Given the confusing result of the last releases, it is also understandable that people might think there are still important documents left unreleased. A closer look at NARA’s latest data on the ARC, however, reveals just how unlikely this is.

 

The JFK Database

    The 2017-2018 releases from NARA were confusing, first, because it was unclear how much material was from documents previously withheld in full, and second, because it was equally unclear how much was from documents that had been previously released in part. This should not have been the case.[1]

    The primary reason for the uncertainty was outdated information in the JFK database, the computer listing of metadata for most records in the collection. The creation of the database had been mandated by the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, the 1992 public law that established the JFK archival collection in the first place. The purpose of the database was to provide a detailed index to the contents of the collection, including basic information for every record, such as the title and date of the document, the agency that generated the record, number of pages, and so on.

    The main problem that led to the confusion was a failure to update the release status of each record. Why was this data field not better maintained? During the five years the database was being assembled, 1993 to 1998, there were frequent changes in the status of records. Agencies argued with the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), the limited-term panel created to oversee the assembly and release of the JFK records, about which documents counted as assassination-related records, and what standards should apply for withholding documents in full or redacting portions of their text. These status changes were not always recorded in the database. With more than three hundred thousand records in the database, that should not be surprising.

The Homophobic Backdrop to Garrison’s Persecution of Clay Shaw

 

Print

 

Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime
Alecia P. Long
University of North Carolina Press. 247 pp. $28

 

 

By Martin J. Kelly, Jr.

 

 

    Conspiracy accounts of the JFK assassination in 1963 have flourished for almost six decades since the Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman. A range of conspiratorial scenarios, vivified by books, movies and TV docudramas, orbit public awareness as cultural truisms. While Jack Ruby’s murder of the assassin in Dallas on live TV, two days after JFK was gunned down, provided the initial thrust for the conspiracy movement, it is Jim Garrison’s New Orleans 1967-69 prosecution of Clay Shaw for JFK’s murder that seems to thrive as an iconic modulus against Oswald’s status as the sole perpetrator.

    Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK, used the Garrison prosecution as the Rosetta stone to construct a three-hour narrative of conspiracy. Garrison was not only an advisor but made a cameo in the film as Chief Justice Earl Warren, a cruel casting if there ever was one. JFK spun a vivid tapestry of plots and sub-plots populated by flamboyant characters and exerted a strong influence on the public sensibility about the case. The film was a catalyst behind The John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act of 1992, which mandated that an independent panel review all the government’s assassination-related records, particularly documents still protected for reasons of national security.

    When the independent panel (aka the Assassination Records Review Board) finished in 1998, the promise to completely release all government records by 2017 became another pacemaker for the incessant drumbeat of conspiracy in the assassination research community. After a large volume of records was made public in 2017, nothing new to the case seemed to capture the imagination of the research community. But, as if a coda, in July 2021 Oliver Stone appeared at the Cannes Film Festival with his new documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass. To the press he said, “. . . an important bookend to my 1991 film. It ties up many loose threads, and hopefully repudiates much of the ignorance around the case and the movie.” James DiEugenio, whose book, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case is a long and detailed defense of Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw, is listed as a writer of the documentary.

    Now Alecia Long’s monograph emerges as an interesting amplification of the Garrison case. Cruising for Conspirators is not a typical screed of conspiracy-or-not arguments that characterize the JFK assassination literature. Professor Long has produced, instead, a solidly researched and expertly written academic history book. Thirty years ago, before Post-Modernism opened up academic disciplines to include marginalized social groups, such an enterprise might not have seen the light of day. In our present historical moment, though, Professor Long excavates clearly the role played by homosexuality for cultural ideation in ‘60s New Orleans when Garrison launched his crusade against Clay Shaw, a gay defendant.

    Cruising uses primary sources such as official investigators’ notes, personal papers, newspaper and magazine articles by journalists in contact with Garrison’s prosecution, and diaries, court records, and trial transcripts. Material from well-researched secondary sources is also utilized to render a clear picture of the rational frailty of Garrison’s persecution of Shaw. Two books she cites, Patricia Lambert’s False Witness and Fred Litwin’s On the Trail of Delusion, are filled with primary evidence the Garrison investigation was “hoax-like” from its inception.

    Professor Long navigates through the capricious human contingencies that launched and supported the action against Clay Shaw. She intensifies the previous revelations of Garrison’s rash crusade as a kind of “Emperor’s New Clothes” by meticulous documentation and a fresh look at homosexuality as a factor in Clay Shaw’s prosecution. Her historical analysis of homosexuality in the Garrison context creates an indelible impression of the complexity of a case that turned out to have no evidentiary foundation. While she makes no psycho-historical leaps about Garrison, or his personal psychology, a salient attitude about sadistic gay men as perpetrators of baroque violence is unmistakably present in identifying Clay Shaw as a suspect and persists until his acquittal by a jury in 1969. And, in the course of her exposition, Professor Long sketches out the perilous atmosphere enclosing gays in New Orleans in the ‘60s: because homosexuality was illegal, all sorts of options for defense against charges were more difficult to muster.

The Nixon Precedent

Print

 

Nixon’s FBI: Hoover, Watergate, and a Bureau in Crisis
Melissa Graves
Lynne Rienner Publishers. 246 pp. $85

 

 

By James Robenalt

 

    Exactly one thousand twenty-five words comprise Article II of the Constitution, and most of them are devoted to how to select a president of the United States.

    The two hundred or so left over describe a president’s substantive powers. That the key phrase—“executive power shall be vested in the president of the United States”—has been interpreted generously is an understatement. It has become the basis for vast power since it confers unenumerated powers. By contrast, Article I, which governs the Congress, only vests all legislative powers “granted herein”—a limiting qualifier.

    Add sweeping clauses like “commander in chief,” and “he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” and you arrive at the dilemma posed in Melissa Graves’s new book, Nixon’s FBI, Hoover, Watergate, and a Bureau in Crisis. What are the limits of a president’s control over federal law enforcement, especially when the crimes at issue may involve the president in either his/her private or elected capacity? This issue, in turn, raises the question of the government’s power to surveil its citizens, including citizens who may be considered political dissidents and not seditious criminals. That question is at the heart of the present danger posed by domestic extremists or terrorists who have grown exponentially during the Trump administration.

    This makes Nixon’s FBI an important read.

    An assistant professor in the Department of Intelligence and Security Studies at The Citadel, Melissa Graves started out to write about the fundamental conflict between the FBI’s duties, as the premier federal investigative agency, and the fact that it answers to the president while also investigating said president from time to time. Her focus was the Nixon administration, when this conflict was in sharper relief, owing to the Watergate scandal, than at any other time save for the past four years. Eventually her research encompassed the courageous FBI agents who pursued the Watergate investigation despite all the headwinds from higher-ups to constrict the search for the truth—including, as it turned out, a higher-up named Richard M. Nixon. Special agents like Angelo Lano, John Mindermann, Daniel Mahan, Paul Magallanes, and John Clynick are profiled in an important chapter about the investigation of the break-in by the FBI’s Washington Field Office. These agents are depicted, correctly,  as being many steps ahead of Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. While Woodward and Bernstein are celebrated in history as the “intrepid” reporters who cracked the Watergate case, in reality it was the hard work of these FBI agents who simply would not be waylaid.