As I Was Saying
By Leo Sauvage
The New Leader,
9 November 1964, pages 11–13
I am glad Thomas Buchanan has given me an opportunity to
set a few things straight. Since through a sheer accident of timing my criticism
of his theory appeared in The New Leader
almost at the moment the Warren Report was being released, some people have
mistakenly concluded that I am in accord with the Commission’s findings. And
this impression was strengthened when the magazine subsequently endorsed Karl E.
Meyer’s approval of the Report (“The Triumph of Caliban,” NL, October 12)
in “Between Issues”: “No one who has followed the spate of outrageously
irresponsible magazine pieces and books concerning President Kennedy’s
assassination (e.g., Thomas Buchanan’s Who Killed Kennedy?,
demolished in the September 28 NL by Leo
Sauvage) can help but join in the
widespread praise with which the efforts of Chief Justice Earl Warren and his
associates on the Commission have been greeted.”
But the unhappy truth is that after having carefully studied the Report
I, for one, cannot agree with Meyer that it is “solidly wrought” or
“overwhelmingly backed by fact” or “persuasive in its parts” or
“coherent as a whole.” I also have the depressing feeling that, like
religion and baseball, the Warren Report is now an American taboo. Even the rare
Americans who dared to criticize it—such as Murray Kempton or
George and
Patricia Nash in the same NL issue carrying Meyer’s piece—do so only after
precautionary introductions. I therefore thank The
New Leader for letting me state that in my opinion the Commission has in
no way proved that it was Lee Harvey Oswald who actually killed President
Kennedy.
Although I do not wish to be rude, I shall not thank Thomas Buchanan for
the nice things he says about me at the beginning of his rebuttal. I do not know
him personally, and I have no idea how he rates as a human being or baseball fan
in private life. I am certain, however, that he is no credit to the writing
profession. So it does not flatter me at all—indeed, it rather disturbs
me—to be considered “one of France’s most distinguished journalists” by
Thomas Buchanan.
I need not repeat here the absurd inventions and grotesque affirmations
which are the essence of the so-called “Buchanan Report.” It is sufficient
to point out that while he admits “some errors,” Buchanan does not discuss a
single one of the inventions and affirmations I mentioned in my examination of
his work. His excuse now is “I did no original research in Dallas. I have
never claimed to. The material I studied was the work of hundreds of reporters,
some of whom occasionally were mistaken.” That is not true.
To be sure, Buchanan did not claim any original research, and he
admitted—shall I say “honestly,” or is “cynically” the word for
it?—that he first went to Dallas after having published four installments of
his “report” on what had happened there. But he did not prevent L’Express
from declaring that his demonstration was based “on facts, and facts alone.”
He himself also explained that the subject of his “analysis” was “the
official thesis upon which the Dallas police and the fbi
have finally agreed,” and that where “certain speculations advanced by press
investigators” were discussed, they would be clearly identified.
Again, in the book version of his weird lucubrations he insists (and I
quote here from the British edition of Who Killed Kennedy?): “Insofar
as it is possible, the thesis which will be described hereafter as
‘official’ will be that upon which the police of Dallas and the fbi
appear to be in general agreement. The analysis which follows is not based on
mere press speculations, but on these official sources. Where hypotheses
advanced by news reporters are discussed, they are identified as speculative and
their source is given…” The italics are Buchanan’s.
As far as I can see, Buchanan does not cite any news reporters (many were
quite often mistaken, but none as regularly, as completely and as unashamedly as
he is), nor does Buchanan cite any “official sources” when he states, for
instance, that “from a building belonging to the city government and
administered by it, a municipal employe shoots at the President of the United
States.”
Buchanan has an explanation for one “error”: He did not mistake the
town of Irving for “a private residence,” one of his translators did. And
because there are some limits, even to the patience of Françoise Giroud,” he
hurries to inform us triumphantly that the guilty translator was fired.
Was anyone fired because Buchanan wrote that “the neighborhood had been
emptied of police in order that Accomplice Number 5 could operate in peace,”
or insinuated that Oswald was purposely allowed to get to his room so that he
could pick up a revolver and give Patrolman Tippit an excuse for killing him in
self-defense? For here is what Buchanan writes in English, where there is no
“unfortunate young man” to take the rap as translator: “The first act of
this play went according to script. Oswald went to his room and got his gun, as
he was meant to.…”
Besides the “insulting” Mister Irving, Buchanan’s
rebuttal refers to only one other matter I raised in the course of what he
perhaps accurately describes as “swatting gnats with baseball bats,” and
that concerns my samples of his mathematics. I wrote that I did not need his
Accomplice Number 3 to explain the origin of the first description of a suspect
sent out over the police radio. I also stated—and I repeat here—that prior
to the publication of the Warren Report there was only one explanation which
could be considered as official in the incoherent Dallas mess: Namely, that the
first description was furnished by Roy Truly, the manager of the Texas School
Book Depository, who had seen Oswald in the second-floor lunchroom and then,
noticing his absence, informed the police. This was not merely what I heard
directly from Dallas officials; it was told to me personally by Roy Truly
himself.
The Commission has now come up with a completely new version. According
to its Report, the description provided by a man named Howard L. Brennan, who is
called “an eyewitness” to the shooting, “most probably led to the radio
alert sent to police cars.” The Commission does not explain why it could not
track down the origin of the broadcast more precisely than “most probably.”
Yet it would seem that all the Commission had to do was locate the broadcaster
on duty at Dallas Police headquarters at the time the message was sent out and
ask him the source of the description.
We now have three different versions relating to this particular
question:
1. The Buchanan version, built on early police statements about a “roll call” and on mistaken information as to the time of the broadcast. This led to the mathematical deduction, concerning the man responsible for the broadcast that “next to Mr. X himself, this is the key conspirator, and there are no extenuating circumstances for him.”
2. The Dallas version, considered as official from November 25 or 26, 1963 to September 27, 1964, attributing the description to Roy Truly.
3. The Warren version, rejecting the Truly explanation because his report was given “probably no earlier than 1:22 p.m.,” and stating that the radio alert sent at “approximately 12:45 p.m.” was based “most probably” on information that had been provided by Howard L. Brennan.
My personal conclusion is that today we are left with no explanation at
all for that first police broadcast. As I implied in my chief objection to the
Warren Report, graciously quoted by Buchanan, I cannot share the Warren
Commission’s notions concerning “eyewitnesses” or its conception of the
circumstances under which an “identification” may be rightly considered
valid.
In the Tippit case, for example, the Report states categorically that
“nine eyewitnesses positively identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the man they
saw.” Then we are told that five of these nine eyewitnesses did their
“identifying” in lineups the same day (in some cases late in the evening
after Oswald had already appeared on television); that one identified him the
next day; and that “three others subsequently identified Oswald from a
photograph.” Finally, we are given to understand that “subsequently” may
mean two months later.
Thus, Mrs. Mary Brock: “When interviewed by fbi
agents on January 21, 1964, she identified a picture of Oswald as being the same
person she saw on November 22. She confirmed this interview by a sworn
affidavit.”
As for Howard L. Brennan, the Commission’s new star witness, we are
told that he made “a positive identification of Oswald as being the person at
the window.” Here is an “eyewitness” on the sidewalk who pretends to be
able, and whom the Warren Commission believes to be able to describe—weight
and height included—a man behind a half-closed sixth floor window. The
sixth-floor man was furthermore kept at least a foot away from the window by
some book cartons, and the rays of the midday sun were striking the window at
just the right angle to transform its closed upper part into an opaque mirror.
Finally, besides describing the various retractions and contradictions of this
extraordinary “eyewitness,” the Commission also admits that “prior to the
lineup, Brennan had seen Oswald’s picture on television.”
In short, Thomas Buchanan is entitled to be sarcastic about
what he calls my “misfortune,” but is really the misfortune of all
those who—not being Buchanans or Mark Lanes or Bertrand Russells—were hoping
to be convinced by the Warren Report. In the specific case of the first police
broadcast, I believed what I was told by Dallas officials and by Roy Truly
because the story seemed to me perfectly plausible. The Warren Report now says
it is not true, but the substitute explanation it gives is not plausible. I
therefore leave the speculation, as far as this point is concerned, jointly to
the Warren Commission and Thomas Buchanan. As to the other questions in the
case, my own views are presented in a book, The Oswald Affair, which will
be published next month by Les Editions de Minuit in Paris.
Buchanan has been kind enough—and for this I really wish to thank
him—to give New Leader readers
large excerpts of my September 28 comments in Le Figaro. The translation
is substantially correct, with one slight omission. I had written, thinking
precisely of Buchanan, that certain adversaries of the United States have no
intention of giving up their sarcastic comments “in any case,”
meaning that these individuals were ready to go on criticizing even if the
Warren Report had not been as unconvincing as I think it is. And when I deplored
the Warren Commission’s refusal to meet “the serious objections,” I wanted
to emphasize the fact that it concentrated on refuting non-serious
objections, of the type provided by Thomas Buchanan.
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