The Story Behind the Story
Did you ever wonder what was behind articles and critiques of the type presented in this web? I have. When I first read Dwight Macdonald's critique of the Warren Report, I was blown away by the depth of understanding that this film critic brought to the article. I could not understand how he could have produced the best critique of all (in my opinion, at least). It just didn't make sense. Well, Dwight Macdonald wasn't just a film critic, and he didn't just write this review from scratch. There is much more to the story than that. You can find part of it here and part in his biographical sketch. I hope you are as intrigued by the whole thing as I was.
For the story behind the story, I quote four pages from Chapter 17 of Michael Wreszin's A Rebel In Defense Of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, HarperCollins Basic Books, 1994. Enjoy! [KAR]
"Unlike Malcolm X, who claimed that Kennedy's assassination constituted
poetic justice for his administration's role in the coup that led to President
Ngo Dinh Diem's assassination in Vietnam, Dwight had no belief that history had
a rational pattern, certainly not one that could be equated with justice of any
kind. He did see two events as highlighting the cruel results of the realpolitik
he so distrusted, however. Immediately after Kennedy was killed, Dwight
suggested to Mary McCarthy that they form an independent committee to get at the
truth of the assassination, which was already engulfed in suspicions of
conspiracy and coverup implicating a variety of nations, national organizations,
and world leaders, including Kennedy's successor. When McCarthy showed an
interest and called her friend Arthur Schlesinger, he replied in effect:
"Why don't you amateurs keep your big feet out of history and leave it to
us pros?"
Schlesinger's dismissal would only have stimulated Dwight's
interest, given his penchant for amateurism and suspicion of experts,
particularly those whom he felt served the State. In the first months of 1964 he
began making a serious study of the Kennedy assassination and its meaning. While
he had always had a skeptical attitude toward Kennedy and particularly the
Kennedy mystique of pragmatic politics, he was, like most Americans, shocked by
such a brutal act that cut short the life of an attractive and energetic young
man. Not long after the assassination, Dwight described feeling worse than he
had when Trotsky and Gandhi were murdered. Both those men had lived their lives,
but Kennedy had just begun to assume his role on "the great stage." He
was handsome, vigorous, with a great deal of panache, and, Dwight added, he was
married to a woman who went through the days immediately following his death
with a style that approached heroism. The debutante beauty proved to be a
"Roman matron."
"The Warren Report is an American-style Iliad,
i.e., an anti-Iliad, full of anti-heroes, retelling great and terrible
events in limping prose instead of winged poetry." So began Dwight's
detailed dissection of the report. Dwight waded through the entire 912-page
document and consulted the twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and
artifacts. Throughout a good part of 1964 he gathered material for his long Esquire
article and for a book on the subject he contracted to do for Harper & Row.
Dwight concluded that the Warren Report was a "slovenly mess," a
careless and inept investigation. He believed that the overwhelming factual
evidence confirmed the report's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald shot the
President, that he acted alone, and that there was no conspiracy. Although ten
years later, after wading through a mass of new material, his confidence that
Oswald acted alone was shaken, Dwight never officially changed his mind.
Dwight's analysis in the Esquire piece rejected the
conspiracy theories of Marxist leftists and liberal ideologues that resulted
from their belief that "history is an understandable working-out of the
conflict, dialectically progressive, between large, dignified and abstract
forces, and is definitely not a chancy game in which small, trivial individuals
can absurdly and accidentally affect the outcome." They believed this to be
the case because otherwise history would "make no sense." Dwight
insisted, as he had when he initially speculated on nations and dictators, that
history was indeed a "chancy affair." There was no sense to it. It was
perfectly "reasonable" that an incompetent loser like Oswald could
change the course of history.
Citing Homer, Plutarch, Poe's "Purloined Letter," a
veritable library of literary and historical references, and a survey of all
other presidential assassinations in America, Dwight put the tragedy in the
historical context of an evolving mass society. He explained the risks taken by
the president as due to the need to make contact with the crowd. A nation of 200
million could not really be governed democratically; the decision making was
confined to a few men at the top, with everybody else passive observers, and
exposure helped bridge the gap between the powerful and the powerless. Pressing
the flesh was a "ritual compensation for an imbalance that makes both sides
uneasy." The rhetoric of democracy insists that the president is the
citizens' equal. They are his "people." But in that open car in Dallas
they had suddenly become Hamilton's "Great Beast." The assassination
under such circumstances, carried out by such a prototype mass man, fit every
theory Dwight had about mass society and the underlying threat of violence and
totalitarianism.
In the modern mass media world there was an obsession with
image and how one would be counted in History. The irony was that both Kennedy
and his killer harbored the same obsession with their images in history. The
assassination was also history in the making, and not only Oswald but his wife
and mother were soon part of the action. Dwight recorded Marina Oswald's
negotiations with her agent over contracts, book and movie rights, and all
matters pertaining to publicity, public relations, and advertising. As an expert
on cinema, Dwight speculated that "The Americanization of Marina
might make an interesting movie." Marguerite, or "Mother Oswald,"
as she was quickly dubbed by the media, "rather like Mother Macbeth,"
stepped quickly onto the stage. The only problem is that she was flaky and
incoherent. Dwight could imagine her doing a duet with Mark Lane, the conspiracy
fanatic, before the commission. Dwight held Lane in total contempt; he was
either mentally ill or a con man, who blatantly or stupidly or perhaps insanely
manipulated "the facts" to fit his conspiracy theses. He was called
upon to vet the manuscript of Lane's book Rush to Judgment for Viking
Press; he wrote a devastating attack on the man and his work and credited
himself for their decision not to publish the book.
This bizarre cast of characters drew Dwight into the absurd
aspects of history, its gratuitous and unpredictable nature. Individuals may
have focused motives, but they have no control over the historical consequences
of their acts. He compared Jack Ruby, who shot down Oswald in the inexcusable
bedlam of the Dallas police station, with the "anarchist scatterbrain"
Van der Lubbe, who torched the Reichstag, and the "ultraleft
simpletons" who had recently plotted to blow up the Statue of Liberty. All
had "pure" motives of one kind or another, and all expected to be
recognized as martyrs in a great cause. In each case these individuals let loose
furies totally opposite to their stated goals. They were "pole-axed by
History." Dwight had no problem concluding that the Kennedy assassination
had been carried out by a demented neurotic. However, given the handling of the
case, the stupidity and ineptitude of the police and the FBI, he was left with
the question: "Is Dallas America, or is it merely Texas?" Dwight
thought it would be comforting to think the latter, but he was obviously not at
all sure.
Dwight's piece on the Warren Commission was well received by
most of his readers. Only the hard-core conspiracy buffs, whom he had directly
challenged as psychologically incapable of believing that an isolated oddball
killed the president, saw him as offering support to the prosecution.
During his research he had gotten in touch with I. F. Stone,
his old "Stalinoid" nemesis, and they became amiable comrades in their
united belief in Oswald's sole guilt, and before long in their spirited
opposition to American foreign policy. Murray Kempton was another who took the
same stance. Norman Mailer nominated Dwight to serve on an independent
commission to investigate the assassination. Dwight's article was nominated for
inclusion in Crown Publishers' anthology of the best articles of 1965. Sargent
Shriver invited him to serve on President Johnson's National Advisory Council
dealing with poverty."
Back to Reactions to the Warren Report
Back to The WC Period