Case Closed: a letter to Gerald Posner (re: Kennedy assassination)

I paid no attention to the many television programs broadcast this past week on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. The reason for my lack of interest was that the questions about the assassination that had obsessed me all my life—and not only the factual questions, but the deeper moral and emotional issues left by Kennedy’s killing—were resolved for me by Gerald Posner’s 1993 book Case Closed. Here is a letter I wrote to Posner about his book ten years ago, shortly after the 30th anniversary of the assassination: December 15, 1993

I would like to tell you how deeply grateful I am to you for your magnificent book, Case Closed.

Over the years, I had shared the general sense that we did not have the truth about the Kennedy assassination. While I never gave credence to the various wild conspiracy theories, I did feel that there was probably a second gunman, and perhaps Mafia involvement. But it seemed impossible ever to get closer to the truth. A year or two ago there were new television programs and articles about the assassination with some interesting information, but trying to follow the issues that were raised only led one into a morass of confusion.

One of the problems was that, while the conspiracy proponents seemed a contemptible bunch (especially Oliver Stone, who I think is truly evil), the defenders of the Warren Commission report, such as David Belin, also seemed fishy. They just went after the most obvious weaknesses in the conspiracy theories while blandly and self-righteously insisting on the “total correctness” of the obviously flawed Warren report. (It was that same sort of bland defense of the Warren report, the glossing over of its many troubling flaws and gaps, that had helped set off the conspiracy paranoia, along with the general suspicion of our government, back in the mid 1960s.) The Warren defenders never responded to the hard questions that continued to trouble me and everyone else who thought about the issue; and they never seemed to appreciate the fact—which you certainly bring out in your book—that there were many odd events surrounding the assassination that could reasonably give rise to suspicions of a conspiracy. It was all terribly, deeply frustrating. It seemed that this mystery would last forever, and that there was no point in even trying to figure it out.

Then one day this past September, at the National Airport in Washington, D.C., I picked up the U.S. News and World Report with the long excerpt from Case Closed. Reading the article on the shuttle flight back to New York, I experienced an epiphany. The clarity of your presentation, your story of Oswald, the fascinating new information about the timing of the shots and many other things all added up to an account that for the first time in all these years had the ring of truth. The magazine excerpt, of course, did not answer all my questions (I had to wait to read the book for that), but it did satisfy me that Oswald did it alone. Oswald emerged as a totally believable, real person, not this shadowy figure upon whom the conspiracy theorists could cast any fantasy they wanted.

There is another, perhaps unintended, benefit of Case Closed. Reading it made me realize that for years, all the bedeviling issues surrounding the assassination had blocked the assassination itself—the horror and tragedy and poignancy of it—from full consciousness. The conspiracy theories had become the main historical event, not Kennedy’s terrible death and what it did to the country. But your account, by clearing away those questions, has restored the assassination itself as an event in my experience and I think our collective experience as well. It was as though I began feeling the trauma and the meaning of Kennedy’s death afresh, undiminished after three decades.

Apart from the tragedy of the event itself, it was truly a fateful turning point in our country’s history—but, I believe, in a sense exactly opposite to what Oliver Stone imagines. Rather than marking the rise of Stone’s fictional militaristic right-wing to national power, it marked the rise to influence of a left-wing culture of alienation typified by people like Oliver Stone himself. These members of the adversary culture, unable to absorb Kennedy’s murder as the terrible event it was, chose to see it as a confirmation that America itself was evil, that America would always block the exaggerated hopes for unlimited individual fulfillment and social progress that Kennedy seemed to personify for many people. It was shortly after Kennedy’s death that the deadly notion became current that the “system” was blame for everything, thus turning Americans against their own country. Of course, the rise of black rage, the Vietnam war and so on were also important parts of this historic catastrophe, but the Kennedy assassination was crucial.

The unresolved assassination puzzle also fed the alienating notion that truth is indeterminable, that all we can know are self-serving narratives. This idea opens the gates to all kinds of viciousness. For example, the egregious Stone could present his paranoid fantasy as a revelation of “hidden truth” to a mass audience of millions of unformed, suggestible minds, and at the same time cover himself with the elites by saying that his movie was a mere “counter-myth,” not intended to be a factual presentation. Thus he got to convince millions of people that horrible lies were the truth, while denying that that he was doing anything of the kind. With Case Closed, you have not only uncovered the specific truth of the assassination; you’ve demonstrated that truth itself exists and can be known.

But for me, what is most remarkable about Case Closed is that this old festering sore of uncertainty and discouragement surrounding the assassination, which I never expected to be cured, has been cured. In bringing the truth to light out of all that confusion, you have performed not only a great public service, but a heroic act.

EYEWITNESS FROM PARKLAND AND BETHESDA IDENTIFY THE LOCATION WHERE THEY OBSERVED A MASSIVE BLOWOUT TO THE BACK OF THE PRESIDENT'S HEAD.

TOP ROW (left to right)

Beverly Oliver: "The whole back of his head went flying out the back of the car."

Phillip Willis: "It took the back of his head off."

Marilyn Willis: "A red 'halo' [was] coming out the back of his head."

Ed Hoffman: The rear of his head was gone, blasted outward."

Dr. Robert McClelland: "It was in the right back part of the head -- very large .. a portion of the cerebellum fell out on the table while we were doing the tracheotomy."

SECOND ROW

Dr. Paul Peters: "... right there, occipital parietal."

Dr. Kenneth Salyer: "The wound extended into the parietal area."

Dr. Charles Carrico: "There was a large -- quite a large -- defect about here [pointing] on his skull."

Dr. Richard Delaney: "It was up in this area."

Dr. Charles Crenshaw: "The wound was the size of a baseball."

THIRD ROW

Dr. Ronald Jones: "My impression was there was a wound in this area of the head." When shown the faked autopsy X-ray, Parkland Hospital's Dr. Jones said, "There was no damage to the face that was visible... The X-Rays are incompatible with the photographs which show no injury to the face."

Nurse Audrey Bell: "There was a massive wound at the back of his head."

Theron Ward: "It was right back here."

Aubrey Rike: "You could feel the sharp edges of the bone at the edge of the hole in the back of his head."

Frank O'Neill: "...a massive wound in the right rear."

BOTTOM ROW

Jerrol Custer: "From the top of his head, almost to the base of the skull, you could see where that part was gone."

Paul O'Connor: "[There was] an open area all the say across into the rear of the brain."

Floyd Reibe: "...a big gaping hole in the back of the head."

Now go to the Zapruder film and you will see that every one of these witnesses was mistaken. It's as clear as day. Why rely on notoriously undependable eyewitnesses when we have a MOVIE of what happened?

In 1976 it was revealed that the Zapruder film was in the CIA National Photo Interpretation Center within days of the assassination, possibly on the night of the assassination. I consider the veracity of all those hospital workers more dependable than whatever comes out of the CIA photo lab. But that's just me. I'm sure some folks swear by the CIA photo lab.

We have a movie.
We do not necessarily have a movie of what happened.
We do not have a chain-of-custody for that movie.
What is your offer of proof that the movie is authentic and unaltered?

It should be noted that the Zapruder film not only disagrees with all those eyewitnesses, including hospital staff and autopsy doctors and witnesses, it also disagrees with other images of what should be identical scenes.

For example, frame Z-369 and the Nix film very closely coincide and each shows Jackie climbing out of the seat toward the rear of the limo. The people in the background appear different in quantity and attire. At least one film would appear to be phoney.

WHY are all the medically trained personnel at Dallas and Bethesda considered "notoriously undependable?"

If ALL the eyewitnesses, including the attending physicians, nurses, and hospital staff, as well as the people at the autopsy are notoriously undependable, WHY is the Z-film, after passing through the CIA photo lab, considered notoriously reliable?

The most reliable evidence is CE-399. No bullet ever smashed a bunch of bones and ended up looking like that one.

Why depend on a movie of dubious authenticity when we have PHYSICAL EVIDENCE less susceptible to tampering?

We have the aforementioned magic bullet.

We have the jacket which contained, per WR p.92, "a roughly circular hole approximately one fourth of an inch in diameter on the rear of the coat, 5 3/8 inches below the top of the collar and 1 3/4 inches to the right of the center back seam of the coat.

We have the shirt which, per WR p.92, "contained a hole on the back side 5 3/4 inches below the top of the collar and 1 1/8 inches to the right of the middle of the back of the shirt."

From Crossfire, by Jim Marrs, pp. 68-9.

The American public finally got the opportunity to view the Zapruder film only because of the Clay Shaw trial in New Orleans during 1967-69. During that turbulent trial (See THE GARRISON INVESTIGATION), New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison attempted to prove there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy and that New Orleans Trade Mart director Clay Shaw was a member of that conspiracy.

As part of Garrison's attempt to prove the existence of a conspiracy, he subpoenaed the Zapruder film from Time-Life Corp. Time-Life fought this subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, which finally ruled that the corporation had to comply with the legal subpoena. Time-Life grudgingly turned over to Garrison a somewhat blurry, copy of the film - but that was enough. Soon, thanks to the copying efforts of Garrison's staff, bootleg Zapruder films were in the hands of several assassination researchers. Finally in March 1975, a copy of the film was aired nationally about midnight on ABC's "Goodnight America". At long last, the American public was able to see for themselves the assassination of their 35th President.

Within a few years clearer copies of the Zapruder film became available to the public. From the beginning, researchers have used the Zapruder film as the cornerstone of assassination evidence - a virtual time clock of the events in Dealey Plaza based on the known average camera speed of 18.3 frames per second. However, today the Zapruder film itself has been called into question.

In 1971, author David Lifton was permitted to view an exceptionally good quality copy of the Zapruder in Time-Life Los Angeles office. He said the rear of Kennedy's head in the critical moments following the head shot appeared to have been "blacked out" and he discovered "splices on the film which had never been mentioned by Time-Life."

His suspicion that the film may have been tampered with by persons with access to sophisticated photographic equipment was heightened in 1976 with the release of CIA item 450. This group of documents, pried from the Agency by a Freedom of Information suit, indicated the Zapruder film was at the CIA's National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) possibly on the night of the assassination and "certainly within days of the assassination". One of the documents tells of the existence of either a negative or a master positive of the film and calls for the production of four prints - one "test print" and three duplicates. Interestingly, this number of prints is exactly what existed in Dallas the day after the assassination - one original and three copies.

Lifton wrote:

"In my view, previously unreported CIA possession of the Zapruder film compromised the film's value as evidence: (1) the forward motion of Kennedy's head, for one frame preceding frame 313 might be the result of an altered film, and if that was so, it made the theory of a forward high-angle shot...completely unnecessary; (2) an altered film might also explain why the occipital area (of Kennedy's head), where the Dallas doctors saw a wound, appears suspiciously dark, whereas a large wound appears on the forward, right-hand side of the head, where the Dallas doctors saw no wound at all."

Photographic analyst and researcher Jack White concurs with Lifton, stating he detected evidence of photographic retouching in some Zapruder frames.

If the CIA indeed tampered with the Zapruder film after the assassination, this piece of evidence - long considered one of the best pieces of evidence - becomes less credible. And like so much else in the assassination case, it is the suppression and deception involved with the Zapruder film which may eventually reveal more than the film itself.

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