Still on the Case
Conspiracy Buffs live in a world of uncertainty, haunted by goat’s heads, a pristine bullet, and bouncing skulls. But the most haunting uncertainty of all is this: who was Lee Harvey Oswald?
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This particular missing-witness story concerns Oswald’s whereabouts at the time of the shooting. No witness has ever placed him on the sixth floor any later than 11:55 a.m., 35 minutes before the gunfire. Oswald maintained that he was on the first floor throughout the shooting. And one witness, Bonnie Ray Williams, who was eating fried chicken on the sixth floor, stated that as late as 12:20 p.m. he was alone up there, that there was no Oswald on the sixth floor. Where was Oswald? The Warren Commission implied that he must have been hiding on the sixth floor in his sniper’s nest from 11:55 on, while the Fried Chicken Man was chomping away.
But Gary Mack tells me about a witness, never questioned by the Warren Commission, who contradicts that hypothesis. She is Carolyn Arnold, now a resident of Stephenville. Back in 1963 she was executive secretary to the vice president of the Book Depository. She knew Oswald well by sight. She says that she came upon Oswald sitting alone, eating a sandwich in the employees’ second-floor lunchroom at 12:15, just ten minutes before the motorcade was scheduled to pass the building. Her timing of this sighting has been corroborated convincingly by other employees, who noticed when she left her office to go to the lunchroom.
If Oswald was planning to assassinate the president from the sixth floor, what was he doing calmly eating lunch four floors below, right before the president was supposed to come into view? Could he have been that hungry, that calm? And if that was Oswald in the lunchroom, who were the figures spotted moving around on the sixth floor by witnesses across the street from the building at just about that time?
Whatever the significance of the Carolyn Arnold story — and perhaps it can be explained by eyewitness error — just listening to Gary Mack tell it brings me back to that peculiar sense of dislocation that attracted me to the JFK case in the first place. That frisson of strangeness.
Bring up the Twilight Zone theme. It’s summer 1964. I’m seventeen, and I’m in a small crowded theater in New York’s Gramercy Park section. A fierce man strides across the stage with a pointer, gesturing contemptuously at a huge blown-up slide projection of Lee Harvey Oswald. It’s the famous Life magazine cover photo, the one with Oswald posing in his back yard with a rifle in one hand, a copy of the Socialist Workers Party paper, the Militant, in the other, and a pistol on his hip. He’s got that weird, glazed, grim-faced grin.
But there’s something else going on in this picture, the man with the pointer is saying. Something going on with the shadows. Look at the direction of the shadow of the gun, he commands us. Now look at the direction of the shadow cast by Oswald’s nose. Different angle. Something’s wrong. This picture has been faked. It’s part of the frame-up. That’s Lee Harvey Oswald’s head but someone else’s body. The man with the pointer is, of course, Mark Lane. He has just come from Washington, where he has been representing Oswald’s side of the story before the Warren Commission at the request of Oswald’s mother, Marguerite. And investigating the case himself. Already he has turned up some stories the authorities don’t want us to hear, he says. Stories that suggest deep currents of complicity between the Dallas police and the conspiracy to frame Oswald.
The Earlene Roberts story, for instance. Roberts was the landlady of Oswald’s shabby Oak Cliff rooming house. She recounted an incident that occurred a half hour after the shooting. Oswald had returned home and disappeared into his bedroom, and she was sitting in her parlor watching coverage of the assassination on TV when a Dallas police squad car pulled up in front of her place. The car paused, then honked its horn twice and left. Shortly thereafter, Oswald emerged and headed off in haste, only to be intercepted — accidentally, according to the Warren Commission — by Officer J. D. Tippit, who was shot dead while attempting to apprehend him.
The police department denied that any of its vehicles passed or stopped at Oswald’s address. The only car in the vicinity at the time, they said, was driven by non other than Officer Tippit. Just what was going on between Oswald and Tippit?
Whoa. Twilight Zone again. Most Americans remember exactly where they were and what they felt when they first heard that John Kennedy had been shot. I’m no different; I do, too. But I have to confess that I remember even more vividly where I was and what I felt when I first heard the Earlene Roberts story. I remember feeling a chill, feeling goose bumps crawling up from between my shoulder blades. There was a kind of thrill too, the thrill of being let in on some secret reality. Shadowy connections, suggestions of an evil still at large that ordinary people were not prepared to deal with. Dangerous knowledge.
The Earlene Roberts story certainly struck a nerve. And not just with me. Brian de Palma’s second film, Greetings, while ostensibly about the draft, featured a character obsessed by Kennedy’s assassination and by the Earlene Roberts story in particular. This guy was convinced, as is Penn Jones, that Earlene Roberts’ death, before she was able to give testimony to the Warren Commission, was the work of the People Behind It All.
Dangerous knowledge. It’s the recurrent theme in almost all of the assassination-conspiracy films that followed De Palma’s first. In Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View, in William Richert’s Winter Kills, in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, in De Palma’s later Blow Out, the hero begins by investigating the death of a Witness Who Knows Too Much, and soon be becomes a Witness Who Knows Too Much himself. His attainment of a darker, more truthful vision of the way things really are makes him a target for assassination. A way, perhaps, for us to approach the horror of being assassinated, the unassimilable horror of what JFK experienced at Dealey Plaza.
Let me return to 1964, because in the fall of that year, just two months after hearing the Earlene Roberts story, I was fortunate enough to get to know the assassination researcher whose methods and judgment I still respect above all others in the field. His name is Josiah Thompson, and he was my freshman philosophy instructor at Yale. At the time I knew him, he was becoming increasingly preoccupied with two mysteries: the often misinterpreted nature of the mind of the gloomy Danish antirationalist philosopher Sören Kierkegaard and the numinous hints of an alternate interpretation of the truth lurking in the shadows of the Warren Commission’s 26 volumes.
His investigation of Kierkegaard resulted eventually in a highly acclaimed biography and a study of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings called The Lonely Labyrinth. His investigation of the teeming labyrinth of the Kennedy case took him into the Warren Report, then out into the world and down to Dallas, where he reinterviewed the witnesses, reexamined the evidence, and found new witnesses and new evidence. He produced what many regard as the most scrupulously researched and carefully thought-out critique of the official conclusions, a book called Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination.
And so with Thompson as my model, I came to think of critics of the Warren Report—the best of them, anyway—as intellectual heroes, defying conventional wisdom and complacency to pursue the truth. I had lost track of Thompson during the past ten years, and I was having trouble tracking him down to see what he thought of the JFK case after twenty years. It wasn’t until I got to Dallas that I heard a strange story about him from one of the West Coast buffs who had found me in my hotel room through the buff grapevine. He’d heard that Thompson had abandoned his tenured professorship of philosophy and chucked his whole academic career to become a private eye somewhere on the West Coast. What the hell could that mean? Had he become a casualty of dangerous knowledge? Or had he fallen in love with it?
Next Morning. Rendezvous with Penn and Elaine at the Book Depository for the grand gunmen tour. The Texas Historical Commission plaque at the base of the building still astonishes with its frank rejection of Warren Commission certainty. This is the building from which “Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot and killed” JFK.
“You ever been in the military, Ron?” Penn Jones is asking me. We’ve moved to the top of the grassy knoll, and Penn is pointing out sniper’s nests in the buildings surrounding the killing ground down below.
There was hardly a building or tree that hadn’t bristled with guns that day, according to Penn’s vision of things. There were gunmen on top of the Dal-Tex Building, gunmen in the Records Building, even gunmen up in the skies.
“Look over there,” Penn says, pointing toward the top of the Post Office Annex. “That was an observation post. They had a man there overlooking things so he could assess the damage done” by the first nine gunmen in Dealey Plaza. If they failed, Penn says, he could alert the multiple teams of backup gunmen farther along the parade route. Or if necessary call in the airborne team.
“They,” for Penn, is the military. He believes that the military killed Kennedy. Not the Mafia, not the CIA, not Cuban exiles, not some of the fusions of all three currently fashionable among buff theorists.
“Why the military?” I ask Penn. “Because they thought he’d withdraw from Viet Nam? Or—“
“Shit, no. So they could take over,” he says.
Penn was in the military, a World War II transport officer in the North African campaigns. In some ways Penn is still in the military. Only, he’s a general now. A master strategist. As he surveys the landscape of Dealey Plaza, pointing out the teams of gunmen, as we retrace the motorcade route through the streets of Dallas, examining the locations of backup gunmen teams, Penn is like a general reviewing his troops, a battlefield strategist pointing out the logic of his deployments.
And they are his, in the sense that—to my mind, anyway—they owe their existence more to the conceptions of his own mind, his strategic intelligence, the logic of what the military would do if Penn Jones were commanding it, than to any mundane criteria of reality.
My Library
