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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Too late? Would it matter if it weren’t? Maybe that’s the real question. Maybe, after all, there’s no big secret, no clandestine conspiracy there to uncover. Immersed once again in the frustrations of the case, the frequent foolishness and apparent futility of the buff biz, I find myself almost longing to succumb to the simplicity and conventional comfort of lone-assassin certainty. To be able to stuff all the seething ambiguities, strange coincidences, provocative hints, all the suggestions, implications, curious connections, and mysterious sightings that the critics have turned up, just stuff them all in a drawer and say, “Case closed.”
Before I do that, though, there is one man I want to track down and talk to. A private eye. My onetime philosophy prof turned buff turned shamus: Josiah Thompson. What will the author of the Lonely Labyrinth have to say about the JFK case now, after twenty years, when it has grown more labyrinthine — and lonelier.
I have some misgivings about calling him. Afraid, I guess, that he has become another casualty of the case. Picturing him in some seedy Sam Spade-like office, embittered and cynical over his failure to crack the JFK case, trudging through the fog, doing divorce work or something similarly dispiriting. But after the first five minutes on the phone with him I know that Thompson is just the person I am looking for. He has emerged from the maze with his lively intelligence, judicious wit, and wry humor intact. And his private-eye work has given him new insights into the problems of the Kennedy case.
He begins by explaining why he chose to make the switch from professor to private eye. After the publication of Six Seconds in Dallas, after serving as a consultant on the evidence for Life magazine’s JFK reinvestigation in 1966 and 1967, he returned to a prof job at Haverford College, disillusioned by the fiasco of the Garrison investigation.
“Garrison just blew the critics out of the water,” Thompson tells me. “So I sort of gave up for a while in the late sixties.”
After completing his Kierkegaard biography in 1973, he turned his attentions to the complexities of that other twisted and tormented late-nineteenth-century thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche.
While he was on leave out in San Francisco writing a biography of Nietzsche, he had dinner with famed private investigator Hal Lipset. At the time, Lipset was being considered as a possible chief investigator of the newly formed House Select Committee on Assassinations. But Thompson found himself enthralled by Lipset’s discussion of his own cases.
“Just on a lark I hit him for a job,” Thompson tells me. “And he gave me one. Before I knew it, I was working for five dollars an hour doing surveillance in Oakland.”
He was good enough that when Lipset’s partner David Fechheimer formed his own firm, he asked Thompson to come to work for him and gave him a murder case for his first assignment.
“I started working on a really great case,” he tells me. “And I couldn’t give that up. It was too much fun.”
In a short time, it seems, he turned into an absolute ace of a private eye.
There’s on case in particular that pleases him. A Korean-born prisoner. Jailed for five years on a murder rap. Thompson reinvestigated the original case. Got it overturned. Got this man out of jail.
“He didn’t do it,” Thompson tells me. “I know who did it.”
Interesting: he got an innocent man off, and he knows the identity of the real killer, who is presumably still walking around.
Dangerous knowledge. It is gratifying to find that Thompson hasn’t fled from the frustrations of the seemingly insoluble but has instead embraced them. I envy him; I am tempted to hit him up for a private-eye job myself. But first I want to get his private eye-philosopher’s assessment of the state of the art of the JFK case.
A few years ago it looked as if Thompson might get credit for cracking that one too. When the House Select Committee came out with its report on the acoustical analysis of the Dallas police tape, it placed a gunman behind the stockade fence on the grassy knoll, exactly the spot Thompson pointed to in his book.
But, refreshingly, he’s willing to concede that the acoustical evidence that once promised such certainty now looks muddied.
“Uncertainty has replaced clarity,” he says wistfully. “We’re back in the swamp. Back in the morass again.”
“The lonely labyrinth?” I ask.
He just laughs.
And refreshingly, considering that he was one of the original Warren Report critics, he is prepared to conceded that in crucial aspects of the case, further investigation has proved him wrong and the commission right.
The much-ridiculed single-bullet theory, for instance. The whole lone-assassin theory depends on complex but definite ways on the Warren Commission’s belief that one bullet went through JFK’s body, smashed through John Connally’s fifth rib and wrist, and emerged unscratched. I have actually handled that so-called pristine bullet myself in the National Archives, felt how smooth and unmarked its surface is, and scoffed at the idea that it could have emerged so utterly unscathed.
But, as Thompson points out, recent neutron activation analysis of the bullet and the tiny fragments left in Connally’s wrist make it almost a scientific certainly that they cam from the same bullet.
“That’s very powerful evidence that the single-bullet theory is correct,” he says. “It absolutely astonishes me, but you gotta look at what the evidence is. One thing I’ve learned from these years of being a private investigator is that I no longer place much faith in most eyewitness testimony to prove anything. If you’re gonna rely on anything, it’s the physical evidence and the photographs. Another thing I’ve learned is that it’s a waste of time to try to prove anything with government documents, the endless nit-picking that was done by the critics in the JFK case comparing discrepancies in what a witness said to the police or the FBI in a deposition and what they testified to later. You learn that the police get it wrong all the time and that nit-picking doesn’t get you closer to the truth.”
The truth. What does Thompson this is the truth in the JFK case? Is he actually leaning toward accepting the Warren Commission verdict that Oswald acted alone?
No, Thompson says. In fact, he still doesn’t think the evidence adds up to Oswald’s’ firing any shots that day.
“I think it’s maybe sixty-forty that he didn’t,” Thompson tells me. “Although I can see reasonable men taking the other position.”
“What, then, do you think Oswald’s role was that day?” I ask him.
“I’ve stayed away from analyzing,” he tells me. “What you have when you look into him is puzzle boxes within Chinese puzzle boxes. In the logic of intelligence circles, anything can mean anything. I think he was scheming in ways I don’t understand, and finally, when the president was shot, the curtain opened and he recognized a lot more was going on than he knew.”
And who does he think O. was scheming with? Thompson leans toward the mob-hit school of thought because of the new evidence developed by the House Select Committee about Ruby’s connections and movements. “If Ruby was given access to the jail, if Ruby was stalking Oswald, as it seems they’ve demonstrated, one has to ask the question, why? And you have to look at the statistics on organized-crime prosecution and how they dropped off after the assassination. One thing you can say about the assassination is that it’s been enormously effective. It worked. They blew his head off, and they got away with it.”
They?
“Why has nobody broken? And what group can enforce that kind of discipline? Nobody’s turned. Of course, maybe there’s nobody to turn?”
Is there anything his private-eye’s instinct tells him about the case that might solve it or explain why it’s unsolved?
“That goddam bullet,” he says, “That bullet just doesn’t fit. You have to consider the possibility that evidence was tampered with. I know when I was working on the Life project they left me alone with that bullet for fifteen minutes. I could have done anything with it. But once you raise that possibility that some pieces of the puzzle have their edges shaved off or pieces never in the puzzle have been brought in — you’re never gonna put that puzzle together. In my heart of hearts, that’s what I believe happened. And since we no longer have objective criteria of physical evidence, we’re left with an epistemological conundrum.”
An epistemological conundrum. Yes, that’s what it has always seemed like to El Exigente. Somehow the JFK case is a lesson in the limits of reason, in the possibility of ever knowing anything with absolute certainly. Godel’s Proof and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle all wrapped into one. That’s why El Exigente has always stated about the battle, observing the foibles of the buffs from a position of amused detachment, resisting the impulse to become obsessed with knowledge maddeningly dangerous for its unknowability. I’ve seen too many brilliant people — some of them my friends — self-destruct in the attempt. I’ve always been too cautious to risk becoming a passionate casualty of the case.
But now Thompson, El Exigente’s mentor, turns the tables on the Demanding One. In his modest but insistent Socratic way, he demands to know what I think.
I tell him I’ve gone into this most recent journey through the state of the art with the vague feeling that the mob-hit theorists probably have come closest to the truth of the case, but I’ve come out of it feeling that they have failed to nail it down. That the tail-and-the-dog story is as close as they’ll ever come but it falls short of being proof, and that the rest is all the usual suggestive connections of the sort that can support any number of unproven theories.
And, I tell Thompson, I find myself longing — because of the advent of the two-decade anniversary — to come to some conclusion instead of suspending judgment on the crime of the century forever. And that although I am resisting it, to my dismay I find myself tempted after all these years to give in and embrace the Warren Report conclusions.
“You’re right to say the conspiracy explanations are unsatisfying,” he replies. “And you’re right to recognize the urge to push it all into one pattern or the other for the satisfaction of having a conclusion. But,” he added, “you’re also right to resist that temptation.”
And so — for another ten years at least — I will. As far as I’m concerned, the case is still not closed.
Copywright © 1954 by Aldous Huxley, reprinted by permission of Harper & Row Publishers Inc.
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