The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Formal Debate
Moderated by David Mendelson
Virtual Radio Network, 1993
ANNOUNCER:
The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Formal Debate. The proposal for this
debate will be: President Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy.
Taking
the "pro" position will be Peter Dale Scott. Peter Dale Scott has
called for a new investigation of President Kennedy's assassination. His
hypothesis, that United States' Vietnam policy escalated with the assassination,
was dramatized by Oliver Stone in the movie "JFK."
Peter
Dale Scott has written many books and articles investigating U.S. involvement in
Central America and Southeast Asia, including Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies,
and the CIA in Central America. He is also a poet. He is a former Canadian
diplomat and is currently a professor of English at the University of
California. Peter Dale Scott's latest book is called "Deep Politics and the
Death of JFK," published by University of California Press.
Taking
the "con" position will be Gerald Posner. Gerald Posner's new book is
the best-selling "Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of
JFK," published by Random House. The book, and Gerald Posner's appearances
on "20/20," "Today," and "The ABC Evening News"
with Peter Jennings, have dramatically turned the spotlight away from the many
assassination theories back onto the "lone assassin theory."
Gerald
Posner is a former Wall Street lawyer, and co-author of "Mengele: The
Complete Story". He wrote an expose' of the heroin trade, "Warlords of
Crime: Chinese Secret Societies—The New Mafia." He has authored a novel
and a collection of interviews with children of Nazi officials called,
"Hitler's Children." Gerald Posner's latest book is, "Case
Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK."
And
now, The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Formal Debate; moderated by David
Mendelson.
DAVID
MENDELSON: Welcome to Mr. Scott, Mr. Posner, and our listeners across the
country. A formal debate was chosen because it best reflects the seriousness of
the subject. The two participants are among the most knowledgeable in this
field. And their willingness to engage in a formal debate speaks well for them.
Before
we begin, however, a brief introduction may be useful for those who are
unfamiliar with the work of the authors.
Mr.
Scott, speaking for the proposition, examines the "deep politics" of
the early 1960s, both internationally and domestically. By "deep
politics" he means the links of mutual interest between Hoover and the FBI,
organized crime, big business, and the intelligence community that he believes
led to McCarthyism, Watergate, Iran-Contra, as well as the JFK assassination.
Mr.
Posner, speaking against the proposition, believes that new information he has
gained through interviews with Marina Oswald, Dallas policemen and FBI agents at
the assassination site, and KGB defector Yuri Nosenko and others, as well as
studies of new computer and laser enhancements of the Zapruder film,
definitively and finally prove that Oswald was the lone assassin.
The
format of the debate will be 8 minutes each for opening arguments, 6 minutes
each for rebuttal, followed by 2 questions by each participant, and finally, 6
minutes each to close.
We
begin the debate with Mr. Scott. You will have 8 minutes to present your case.
PETER
DALE SCOTT: I can't really present, in 8 minutes, the case for a conspiracy
because it is so huge; it lies in every direction. I've been studying the case
for 20 years. And if I've learned anything it is that the more you study, the
more you know that you don't know—but you know things have gone wrong.
We
know that Oswald's career was much more than appeared on the surface: both in
his defection to the Soviet Union and, more specifically (as I'll get back to
later), in his brief flurry of appearances on the media, in New Orleans, in
August 1963.
We
know that Jack Ruby, presented as a "loner," in fact had very
extensive connections with organized crime—as was revealed in over 1,000 pages
of documentation presented by the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
And
most disturbing of all, we know that in both the FBI files on Oswald and the
very extensive CIA files on Oswald there were extraordinary anomalies in the way
they were treating Oswald—which escalated significantly, and I would say
sinisterly, in the 5 weeks preceding the assassination.
So
that's a little airy and wide-reaching for our listeners. So I'd like to begin a
bit closer to the events in Dallas.
I'm
sure Mr. Posner would agree that if there was a conspiracy to kill Oswald in the
Dallas Police basement, that it makes no sense at all to argue that Oswald was a
"lone nut" trying to kill the President. And I think it's reasonably
clear, and the House committee stumbled on this, that there was, in fact (as
they suggested in their report), collusion between [Jack] Ruby and the Dallas
Police to get into the police basement where he shot Oswald. If you don't
believe this, you have to be what I would call a "coincidence
theorist." One of the "coincidences" is that, despite the prior
warning that Oswald would be killed and the resultant flood of security for
Oswald, there was a door into the police basement that was left unlocked. Mr.
Posner says, in his book, that it was not clear if it was left locked or not.
But I can assure him, it is quite clear, it is not an issue, the Dallas Police
have admitted to me personally, that door was left unlocked. And I heard that
from the sergeant who was in charge of the security there.
But
that's the least of it! Much more sinisterly, there were 2 policemen guarding
that door until about 10 minutes before Lee Harvey Oswald was brought down into
the basement. Suddenly those 2 policemen—the policemen guarding the unlocked
door, mind you—the policemen guarding the unlocked door were re- deployed,
told to go outside and direct traffic.
Well,
if that doesn't suggest a conspiracy, I don't know what would. Mr. Posner
wonders how Ruby would have known when Lee Harvey Oswald was brought down into
the basement. Well the very easy answer is he would have known when these 2
policemen, who had been guarding the door, emerged out in the street. And that
might have been all the signal that he needed.
Now,
having been aware for some time of this collusion on the spot between Ruby and
the Dallas Police, that leads to the question of "What was Ruby's relation
to the Dallas Police?" And we have a number of sources that suggest it was
intimate and it was, in a sense, "functional." Note there are 2
narcotics detectives (one of whom is a very major figure in this case) who have
both admitted that they used Ruby as an informant on narcotics matters. I'm sure
he was a narcotics informant for them.
And
if I had time, I would argue he was a narcotics informant on the federal level
as well. And this would explain why one of the very few pre-assassination FBI
reports on Ruby says that he was the man who gave the O.K. for a major
international narcotics deal coming through Dallas from Mexico. And if there's
time later on, I will talk about the involvement in narcotics of the Mexican
Security Police, who conducted an investigation—a very, I would say,
malevolent investigation—of the assassination right after it occurred. Mr.
Posner says it wasn't like that at all, it was just a friendly relation. His
source is a local Assistant District Attorney called Wade Alexander. But Wade
Alexander…in his book, Posner admits, is an admitted liar. Alexander tells
Posner how he had lied at the time. And much more importantly, Mr. Alexander
also told Posner how he had told the press that he was going to indict Oswald as
a part of an international communist conspiracy. That, to me, is more important
than the fact that he lied. Because the second area of proof of conspiracy are
the cables—I have to say the falsified cables—that started to pile up in CIA
files about Oswald immediately before the assassination—starting on October
the 8th, which is only 5 weeks earlier—suggesting plausibly (but I would say
falsely) that Oswald had met with a KGB agent in Mexico City by the name of
Kostikov, who was certainly a KGB agent. But much more importantly [Kostikov]
had been identified by the CIA about that time as a specialist in
assassinations. Mr. Posner says in his book, "a specialist in
sabotage," but it is extremely relevant and absolutely clear in the CIA
files that it is consistently "sabotage and assassinations." Worth
mentioning.
So
you had a situation, when Oswald was identified as the killer: Here was all this
apparent evidence in CIA files that he had been plotting with a KGB
assassination expert.
And
most of our listeners may not know, but the United States went on a red nuclear
alert after that assassination. We were facing the risk of a nuclear war. And
Earl Warren, in his memoirs, has said that the reason he took the job he did not
want of being head of the Warren Commission was because Johnson persuaded him
that the rumors that were around presented the risk of nuclear war. If the
rumors had just been lying around "in the streets," they would not
have presented any risk at all. The problem was that these rumors were being
energetically supported and almost forced on the U.S. government by senior U.S.
officials at the heart of the government. You could not have done that if Oswald
was a "lone nut" pushing books around in the school book depository
and nothing more.
And
I may say I have just seen a set of the new declassified documents that have
been released this year [1993]. And the more we see of this matter, we see how
many, literally, tens of people were looking at every single Oswald document in
the CIA and were magnifying, rather than diminishing, the idea that he might be
part of an international communist plot.
MODERATOR: Thank you, Mr. Scott. Mr. Posner, you have 8 minutes.
GERALD
POSNER: What I think Mr. Scott does in his well-written book Deep Politics is
commit a sin that many conspiracy theorists do in the Kennedy assassination,
which is, they look far beyond what is credible evidence. They go beyond the
record. They go into areas of speculation, of trying to find people that may be
able to provide linkages in what they think happened in the case as opposed to
what actually happened.
And
I would say that a review of the credible evidence in this case, the evidence
that is both primary documents and eyewitness testimony, shows not only in the
life of Lee Harvey Oswald…which is the overlooked part of this case in book
after book, because people don't want to look at the life of Oswald. This is a
disjointed life of somebody who is a sociopath…has troubles from the earliest
days. As a matter of fact, I have half…300 pages of my book focuses just on
Oswald. It's very interesting that, even as a child, you have him pulling a
butcher knife and chasing his brother; pulling a knife on his sister-in-law;
punching his mother in the face.
A
psychiatrist gives us the first professional look at young Lee Harvey Oswald at
the age of 13: Renatus Hartogs. But I look in Mr. Scott's book, in the index,
and I don't find the name Hartogs. It's not even listed. Because he [Mr. Scott]
doesn't disclose to you that this individual is already somebody whose life is
firing out of control even as a youngster.
You
go into his Marine Corps existence (where he thinks he's gonna change his entire
life) and he's court-martialed twice. It's a disaster for him. His fellow
Marines think he's homosexual. They throw him in the shower and they call him
"Mrs. Oswald." They call him "Bugs." They abuse him
constantly.
Kerry
Thornley, one of his Marine colleagues, talks in detail about the fact that he
was a committed communist at this point who was considered very eccentric. I
look in Mr. Scott's book for Thornley, but I don't find the name. It's not
listed there because the testimony that he gives is very, very damaging.
If
you go through Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union, there's something that we
have today that we didn't have before just a year ago, which is information,
now, from the KGB files. The largest single archive on Oswald that's existed in
the world. It provides not only surveillance on Oswald for nearly a two year
period…Although they thought he was crazy, they said, "Ah! He looks
crazy, but maybe he's an American 'sleeper agent'." And while they follow
him for two years, in terms of the electronic surveillance, video surveillance,
having agents go and talk to him, planting informants around him at work and in
his personal life—what do they come to the conclusion of? Not what Mr. Scott
would have you believe, that Lee Harvey Oswald was, in fact, part of American
intelligence; but that, in fact, he is the eccentric sociopath he appeared to be
when he first defected to the Soviet Union in 1959.
At
one point, his radio breaks. And he's getting Voice of America (it's not being
jammed at the time). And he attempts to fix it. He can't. And a friend comes in
and fixes a plate in the back and adjusts it. It literally doesn't take anything
more than moving the screw. The radio's working. And the KGB agents go out (this
is in the file). They laugh hysterically about this because it indicates that
Oswald didn't even have what I call "Spy 101." He didn't know the
basics of radio communications.
And
by the time he returns to the United States with Marina, in a very abusive
relationship where he's beating her so badly that by the end of 1962 she
attempts suicide. And he catches her fumbling with the rope and he pummels her
again.
He
[Oswald] has, by the beginning of 1963 (when he orders both a rifle and a
pistol), settled in his own form of leftist politics combined with a heavy dose
of anarchism. He's writing in his own book, in his own handwriting, he ruminates
about what it might be like if, in fact, all of society was ripped down and we
could start from scratch—start without having any of the structure of society
around. He settles on political assassination as his focus. This is his goal.
The
goal, the target that he picks, is General Edwin Walker, a retired army general
in Dallas who has been removed by President Kennedy for his right-wing
activities in NATO. So I go to Mr. Scott's book and I look for General Walker.
And I find him mentioned a couple of times. But I never find out that, in fact,
Lee Harvey Oswald in April of '63 had attempted to shoot General Walker and that
the only reason the assassination failed is because a bullet deflected on a
window frame and just missed Walker's head. You'd never know by reading Deep
Politics that, in fact, Marina [Oswald's wife] recounts in great detail the fact
that Lee had left a note for her that said, "If I'm arrested or I'm in
jail, it's the jail across the river. You know where it is. Contact the Soviet
embassy if there's any problems."
That
he [Oswald] came home in great excitement and thought that he'd killed Walker.
That it was Marina who then had him moved to New Orleans because of her fear
that he would continue to stalk Walker.
And
it is in New Orleans where Oswald, attempting to start the "Fair Play for
Cuba" committee, passes out thousands of leaflets and fails to get a single
convert to his new cause.
Although
he has a picture over his sofa of Fidel Castro, although he argues with Marina
about naming his second child "Fidel," although he practices
(something else you won't find in Deep Politics) the thought of hijacking a
plane to Cuba—truly in a revolutionary manner, by running around the apartment
and trying to strengthen his legs. Marina eventually saying to their daughter,
"I think our papa's out of his mind."
And
instead, he abandons his hijacking plans, goes down to Cuba—to the
embassy—(And I'll mention this in just a second.) He's rejected when he
finally goes down to the Cuban embassy. He lay's out his entire life's work
(he's a Marxist) and says, "Here I am. Please accept me." And the
Cubans say, in so many words, "Get lost."
And
he goes over to the Soviet embassy—and this is very important. Mr. Scott, in
his opening remarks, talks about Kostikov, a KGB agent who was responsible for
assassinations in the western hemisphere. That wasn't the only agent that Oswald
met with. As a matter of fact, he met with Kostikov, Nechiporenko, and Yatskov, 3 KGB agents. They thought he could
be working for Russian intelligence—he showed up, he spoke somewhat
rudimentary Russian, he said he had lived there for 2-and-a-half years, he had a
Russian wife. They cabled the KGB in Moscow. (It's in the KGB files.) Guess what
the KGB in Moscow said? "Give that nut a turn away." (a diplomatic
turn away) "Send him away. We don't want anything to do with him."
One
of the individuals, Nechiporenko, has written a book (it's currently out)
together with the help of Kostikov and Yatskov, that…they have used their
documents from 1963. Oswald actually was considered by them unstable. They knew
he was irrational. He pulled out a pistol and started to wave it around inside
the Soviet embassy, saying that the FBI was trying to kill him. This is the man
who returns in October of 1963, with his life spiraling out of control.
Now
there's something very important on this. We can talk later about whether, in
fact, there was collusion at the Dallas jail when Jack Ruby came in. There
absolutely was not. If you ever have a case of happenstance…If Lee Harvey
Oswald had not changed his sweater—requested to change his sweater—so that
the television cameras would see him in a different set of clothes, he would
have left 10 minutes before Jack Ruby (who was down the block) had even left the
Western Union office.
But
more importantly is that there's a fundamental difference here tonight between
my view of the assassination (which is really found in Lee Harvey Oswald's life)
and the view that Mr. Scott has (which is a larger view of American politics in
general). I, I look in his own book and in the end, the number of people that he
says are involved in the Kennedy assassination. I will just briefly give you: He
not only has Trujillo—and this is according to page 221-222—Hoffa's
teamsters, the Somoza, Nicaragua, the Texas rich, the CIA, Castro, Nixon, the
Mob. We have Mexican security police, Nicaragua, the United Fruit Company,
Standard Fruit Company…Democratic party represented by Lyndon Johnson, J.
Edgar Hoover. In part of the cover-up we have Edward Bennett Williams, Thomas
Corcoran, James Rowe, Eugene Wyman, Morris Shenker, Dean Acheson, Clark
Clifford, Fred Black, Robert Thompson and Thomas Webb. We also have (it's very
interesting) the Secret Service and the FBI—again he goes back to Hoover—but
he says that "this does not mean that the killers themselves are
necessarily to be found in this specific coalition because I haven't mentioned
yet the anti-Castro Cubans or the defense contractors."
In
the end, the real title of Mr. Scott's book should be "Who Didn't Kill
JFK." In this vast conspiracy of a secret government of thousands of
conspirators, I do not think it would have survived for 30 days, much less for
30 years.
MODERATOR: Thank you, Mr. Posner. Mr. Scott, you have 6 minutes for rebuttal.
PETER
DALE SCOTT: Our audience has just heard the kind of people that Mr. Posner
believes in: The KGB and (I'll come back to this later) Marina Oswald.
Marina
Oswald, for whom, by the way, I have great compassion at that time, was being so
obviously coerced by the very people who were interviewing her at that time,
that she changed her stories repeatedly at that time. It was quite obvious she
was trying to tell what the government wanted her to tell in order to avoid
being deported. The Warren Commission knew this, and wrote a memo n February of
1964 saying, "Marina has repeatedly lied on matters of serious concern to
this commission." And it's very revealing, I think, that when they knew
this in February, when they came to write their report in June and July, they
had such trouble linking Oswald to the gun and to the act of shooting
anyone—let alone General Walker—that they had to rely on the testimony of a
liar. And uh so, unfortunately, does Mr. Posner.
Mr.
Posner believes in the KGB. Let me tell you, the readers, that he believes even
more in the CIA. And, in fact, [he] tells us that he got certain things from the
CIA. He says, for example, Mr. George De Mohrenschildt (a friend of Oswald's
with obvious intelligence background—although he had other aspects to his
background as well), he says, "had no intelligence connection to the
CIA." How do we know? Mr. Posner says, "Because the CIA has told us
so."
But
if Mr. Posner would do what I do, which is to look at the documents, he would
see that despite what he [De Mohrenschildt] told people, when he left Dallas in
'63, he went to Washington. He took part in a meeting with CIA agents and more
importantly, Army Intelligence agents, before going to Haiti as a
business…whatever it was…but certainly about Haiti. Since then, a CIA
contract agent has said it was about the overthrow of the government in Haiti.
And this is the sort of thing you won't find in Mr. Posner's book.
I
object very much to that long quote from my book, which was about how many
enemies Kennedy had in 1963. I certainly did not say that they all killed the
President. I said on the contrary that…You know, so many people think that I'm
saying the President was killed because of his Vietnam policy. And I was trying,
on the contrary, to "open it out," to say that there were many
coalitions that were angry with Kennedy in 1963—the joint chiefs and the
military being an important one. But organized crime, the teamsters, (and you've
heard the list) also…But I'm certainly not saying that they all killed the
President. I'm saying don't misread me to think that I have named the killers.
And I said, in fact, at the beginning of the book, Mr. Posner (if you'd started
on page 1), that I do not in this book try to say who the killers are!
So
now, finally, General Walker…I have written about General Walker in all of my
preceding books. And the bullets that you and I have both talked about—which
were too mangled to be identified in April when it was shot at General Walker,
but somehow has become identifiable in November of 1963 and was identified as
having been shot from Lee Harvey Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano [Italian rifle].
You didn't mention, Mr. Posner, that (I hope I get this the right way around),
that in April it had been identified as copper-jacketed but by the time it was
November it was now steel-jacketed. So that that bullet is just one example of
the kind of things that "happened" to evidence that were kept in the
hands of the Dallas police or later, in the FBI, and which are, for me, a major
part of the case that this was a conspiracy involving people both outside the
government shooting the President, and also people inside the government
guaranteeing an absolutely sure-fire case. That the truth would be so explosive
and the "phase 1" stories, as I call them, of communist conspiracy
would be so threatening for an unnecessary war, that all kinds of people would
be coerced to accept what I call the "phase 2" story—that Oswald
acted alone. A story equally false, but not as likely to lead to the death,
unnecessary death, of thousands of lives.
So,
it is true that you focus on the life of Oswald. I believe if you were to write
a book about the murder of Trotsky, you would probably write a whole book about
the character and the personality defects of the gunman who killed Trotsky! But
surely it's important to go back from the case and look at the links between
that gunman and Stalin back in Moscow.
And
I'm not, I think by nature, someone who begins with a conspiracy theory. But
having looked for so long at the Kennedy assassination—and particularly at the
anomalies in the relationship between Oswald and the FBI, between Ruby and the
Dallas police, and then the concerted effort to say that these people were
"loners" when if we know anything, that's exactly what they weren't.
That we absolutely are forced to look beyond the personality of Oswald in this
case, and try to fit together…And it's more than a conspiracy. It isn't a lot
of people who could have been identified, it's a...
[Moderator interrupts and tells Mr. Scott that his 6 minutes have expired.]
MODERATOR: Thank you, Mr. Scott. Mr. Posner, you have 6 minutes for your rebuttal.
GERALD
POSNER: The…Some of the points that Mr. Scott mentions I think are absolutely
critical because it's [a] fundamental difference between the two of us. And it
deals, again, with the evidence and an analysis of what is the credible
evidence.
In
the instance of the Walker shooting: Did Lee Harvey Oswald in fact shoot Edwin
Walker? Which to me is a key point because nobody has ever satisfactorily
explained to me why the CIA or the Mafia or the KGB or the anti-Castro Cubans
wanted Walker dead. But here's Oswald shooting at Walker in April of '63.
Mr.
Scott says a moment ago (It's in April), the bullet is described as fully
copper-jacketed. That's correct. That's the ammunition that Oswald used, is
copper-jacketed bullets. Matter of fact, we have something better than just what
was described by the Dallas police: there's the bullet. You can go to the
National Archives. You can examine it. I've been down to the National Archives.
It is a copper-jacketed bullet.
But
more importantly, I'm willing, with Mr. Scott, to throw out all the testimony
from 1963. That bullet is too mangled to determine ballistically if it matches
Oswald's rifle. But science intervened. In 1978, Dr. Vincent Guinn, the nation's
leading expert in neutron activation, a scientific test which compares the base
element of metals, came in for the House Select Committee on Assassinations,
took the mangled bullet and did neutron activation tests. Now he could have
proven that that bullet had nothing to do with the ammunition that Oswald used
later in the Kennedy assassination. But guess what? Lo and behold, it turns out
that that bullet comes from the same batch of Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5 mm shells,
made by the Western Cartridge Company, used in the Kennedy assassination. So
there's no question anymore where the bullet comes from. It's very interesting.
The questions could have existed in '63, but they've been solved by science
since.
One
thing that we do agree on. Mr. Scott says, "Look at Oswald's links." I
think that's key. I don't just give a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald. What am I
doing through the entire time? I'm looking to see if, in fact, there's a trail
of money, if there are telephone calls, if there are acquaintances. And what's
the key period? The key period is October and November of 1963. Oswald has just
returned from being rejected by the Cubans. His life is literally spinning out
of control. His wife is separated from him. He can't hold a job. Um, he's been
turned down by the Cubans. He's been turned down by the Soviet Union. And the
FBI's harassing him. He's a time bomb ready to explode. On September 26, when he
was on the bus on the way down to Mexico, the White House announced that Jack
Kennedy was visiting Dallas. Everything that happened in Lee Harvey Oswald's
life before September 26th took place before anybody knew that Kennedy was
coming to Dallas in November.
So
the key period is what happens in October and November of '63. Where's the
conspiratorial contact between Oswald and the plotters at that point? And this
is key: He's not living on his own. We know what he's doing. He's staying in a
rooming house at 1026 North Beckley and he has a whole host of rooming house
members and partners there with him; other people in the house, including a
housekeeper. And what do they say he did? Every night he's home by 5 or 6
o'clock and he never left a single night—except on Fridays when he would
disappear for the weekend. Sounds interesting, until you find out he was in
Irving, Texas, visiting his wife, Marina.
He
never received a single telephone call, except for one, the weekend before the
assassination. Check the telephone records. It comes from…it comes from his
wife's house. He made a telephone call, one a day, in a foreign language. That
turns out to be to his wife, Marina. He never received a single visitor. Where's
the opportunity for the conspiratorial contact at a time that the plotters
supposedly know that Kennedy's coming to Dallas. It doesn't exist.
What
happens is, what Mr. Scott does (and other conspiracy theorists) is they have
very good evidence to show you that people hated Jack Kennedy. I agree with that
and that there may even have been a plot brewing. I wouldn't be surprised if
Marcello and Trafficante sat around the table and said, "Let's kill that
no-good President." What I'm saying in my book, the challenge that I'm
essentially making to conspiracy theorists, is to show me the credible evidence
that brings Lee Harvey Oswald into the plotters. That's what doesn't exist. If
there was a plot to kill Jack Kennedy and it was afoot in '62, it didn't involve
Oswald. And that's the key point. At the critical junction when Oswald would
have had to be part of it, he's just not.
And
when you look at Jack Ruby (and I think this is very important), Mr. Scott talks
about the fact that Jack Ruby knew a lot of police, and he knew a whole host of
gangsters, and he was "dirty" "up to his eyeballs." Guess
what? I agree with most of that. There's no doubt about that. It just has
nothing to do with why he killed Oswald. And that's the point. People take one
existence of facts about Ruby's connections and they say, "Therefore, he
killed Oswald and they must be related." And that's where the story falls
down.
Two
final points: In terms of Mr. Scott's view of this case, he also says in his
book something I fundamentally have to disagree with: that McCarthyism and the
assassination in Dallas and Watergate and Contra-gate are all connected, with
some of the same people involved. He says he doesn't have a conspiratorial view
of the world, but I have to disagree.
And
I think that what's important in this: he has a very unusual way of proving some
of the elements that he makes in his case—sort of linking people up by who
knew who, by who knew who—but also something he calls the "negative
template," which is, if you look at a piece of paper that has lists of
names, and one of the names you think should be there is not actually there,
that indicates maybe it had been removed as part of a cover-up or conspiracy.
The "negative template" means, in my view, that you can prove anything
you wanted to. If I was looking for a piece of paper that said Oswald had been
employed by the CIA and I took a CIA document and Oswald's name wasn't there, it
must mean that they had removed his name because, in fact, he'd been an agent.
The "negative template" does not, in fact, prove what he says.
MODERATOR: Thank you, Mr. Posner.
ANNOUNCER: You're listening to "The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, A Formal Debate," from the Virtual Radio Network. The proposal is that President Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy. Taking the "pro" position is Peter Dale Scott, author of Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Taking the "con" position is Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Your moderator is David Mendelson.
MODERATOR:
You are listening to "The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, A Formal
Debate," with Gerald Posner and Peter Dale Scott.
Each
of you will now ask alternating questions of the other participant. Mr. Scott,
you have one minute to ask a question.
PETER
DALE SCOTT: Mr. Posner has dug out of Warren Commission archives an Oswald
chronology that is in part faked, and at times faked by Oswald himself. In
August, 1963, there was a raid on an arms cache on Lake Pontchartrain. Now Mr.
Posner says that news stories talked about an armed training camp, but it's
important that this was never mentioned in the news stories. And yet, Oswald
went to a man called Carlos Bringuier of the DRE [Directorio Revolucionario
Estudiantil]—it had been a DRE training camp whose arms cache was raided. But
there was nothing about this in the press. And Oswald asked…offered to be a
trainer. Bringuier said, "He [Oswald] must have been an agent, because no
one else knew." And not only that, Oswald asked about organized crime,
about La Cosa Nostra. It took us 12 years for the rest of us to find that they
were involved.
How
did Oswald know these things?
MODERATOR: Mr. Posner, you have 2 minutes to respond.
GERALD
POSNER: I'm surprised at that, Mr. Scott. Because, in fact, there had been
extensive newspaper coverage (as you know) of the raid across the river. [Mr.
Scott says something, off microphone. Inaudible.] Absolutely. There had been
extensive coverage in the Times-Picayune.
And…very
important point: Although I'm not here to defend Carlos Bringuier, one of the
things that you do have in your book (as I'm sure you have issues with
statements that I've made)…In your book you have him [Bringuier] as a member
of the DRE, this anti-Castro group. I just spoke to Bringuier again the other
night on this very issue. It's absolutely not true that he was a member of the
DRE. And he takes great offense at that, because he was not. It's stated in the
book a number of times that he is. But that is not the organization that he was
associated with.
And
Oswald, at the time that he went in to see Carlos Bringuier, in August of '63,
in Dallas, was playing what I call, "the poor man's intelligence
agent." What does Marina tell us? (Although I know you don't like to hear
Marina, because you say she's a liar.) She tells us, in fact, that even at the
time he was in the Soviet Union he said, "I'd love the life of a spy."
The Russians, the White Russians [anti-Communist] who were near him in Dallas,
remember a book that said, "How To Be a Spy." He was, as Warren
DeBrueys tells me (one of the FBI agents in New Orleans), somebody he had seen
many times, who had this tendency to want to be, as he said, "a poor man's
intelligence..." He thought he was intervening in actually being able to
get inside his great foes at this time, the anti-Castro Cubans. His love of
Castro was running high. He was committed to the cause. And by getting inside
Bringuier's group he would enhance his credentials when eventually he wanted to
go to Cuba. By August of '63, Oswald was committed to going to Cuba because it
had been, for him, the "new nirvana." The Soviet Union was [his dream]
when he was 19. And he left in '59 to find happiness. And the Russians told him,
"Leave," before he killed himself—something else, of course, I
didn't see in the book [Scott's book]—but when he tried to slash his wrists.
He
now is ready to go to Cuba to find happiness. But the difference is that he
doesn't. He's not able to get into Bringuier's group; he's arrested a few days
later. It's all on the record. And I must tell you that it's very clearly on the
record. So that I find very little question about what happened in the summer of
'63.
MODERATOR: Mr. Posner, you now have one minute to ask Mr. Scott a question.
POSNER:
The…Uh, in Mr. Scott's book, it seems to me that the "deep politics"
that he talks about, what in essence is (and he'll correct me if I'm using not
the right terminology)…but what I view as almost the second government. This
secret government that essentially runs, with a combination of government
officials and intelligence organizations and drug traffickers and a host of
others, um, is almost so powerful that it's able to do things like the Kennedy
assassination and maintain it as a massive cover-up—no matter how many people
are involved.
Uh,
you say it's not conspiratorially minded, you aren't, when you approach these
subjects. But what I wonder is, is there any assassination, or attempted
assassination, that you think was really done by a lone assassin, in recent
American history? Uh, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, George Wallace, Huey
Long…Would those all be conspiracies, in your view, or were any of those lone
assassins?
MODERATOR: Mr. Scott, you have 2 minutes to respond.
SCOTT:
Well very quickly, let me say that I haven't studied those other assassinations
as much as this one. My mind is open to it, on the basis of what I have learned.
But I really haven't any idea.
Uh,
I'd like to clarify…because you didn't quite get what I meant by "deep
politics." I actually had a section in which I said, "No. It is not
the same as 'invisible government' or 'secret team.'" It is the constant,
everyday interaction between the constitutionally elected government and forces
of violence, forces of crime, which appear to be the enemies of that government.
But in fact, on a workaday basis—whether it's City Hall in a city, or the CIA
and the Mafia plotting against Castro—are, in fact, part of the governance of
this society.
And
I agree that an external conspiracy, whether it was Cubans or Nazis or even
organized crime itself, could never have killed the President and gotten away
with it.
But
we have ongoing, working relationships between, for example, organized crime and
the police in Chicago. Which meant in a 30- year period there was not a single
organized crime murder [that] was solved in that city. And I'm saying that this
sort of thing, which people know about and really accept, locally, should be
seen as part of the way in which our country works: that our country uses
violence, and the forces in power use violence. And although it is a very rare
event for people inside the bureaucracy to use violence against their own
president, that is what I do believe happened in 1963. And the reason that it
was—they got away with it—is that they have shared so many other crimes that
they got away, with part of the ongoing system.
MODERATOR: Mr. Scott, I have to caution you to try and use your time better. But, you have one minute to ask Mr. Posner a question.
PETER
DALE SCOTT: Um…there was…When Oswald went into the Soviet embassy in Mexico
City, a tape was made of the conversation. The CIA has lied and lied and lied
and lied about that tape. They said it was destroyed—2 weeks later, it wasn't.
Then they said it was destroyed right after the assassination. But Mr. Slawson
of the Warren Commission staff…And Mr. Posner believes in the Warren
Commission; he'd better believe Mr. Slawson when he says he heard the tape in
April of 1964. Members of [Winston] Scott's family and the chief of station have
said that [Winston] Scott and his wife listened to the tape later. James
Angleton came down to Mexico City in 1971 [and] took the tape away.
Now
on that tape, the man identified himself as Lee Oswald. And yet, as you say, he
was not Oswald. How do you explain this?
MODERATOR: You have 2 minutes.
GERALD
POSNER: Ah. But there's, there's a key difference. Uh, Slawson says he hears a
tape. And [Winston] Scott talks about it later. But nobody says—and this is
absolutely key—there's not a transcript of it. The man identifies himself as
Lee Oswald. Years later, people say that.
Here's
what's important: The CIA…and I'm not here to defend the CIA. I must tell you.
One of the things, one of the things that Mr. Scott does and others who have
criticized the book do, they say, "Ah. Posner believes everything the CIA
does. And since he supports the Warren Commission's conclusion, he must agree
with that." Absolutely false. I take the CIA at issue for a whole host of
things, including the fact that they distorted evidence and lied to the Warren
Commission, and they were trying to kill Fidel Castro and they didn't disclose
it. And I take them to task for all the bungling efforts that they do in Mexico
City.
But.
Very importantly (and you know this): They had a picture of a man in Mexico City
that was the wrong person. They thought they had identified Lee Harvey Oswald.
He was about 35 years old, 10 years older than Oswald, husky. He's much taller.
It's not Oswald. It led to 20 years of speculation, almost, [that] there was an
"impostor Oswald" in Mexico City. That issue has been dropped
recently, now that the Soviets have come out and said, "Guess what? The
Oswald we met with in our embassy is the same person who was, in fact, in Dallas
and arrested in November of '63." What it says, the very real possibility
that I raised in the book, which is that the CIA had not only identified the
wrong person as Oswald (because they didn't have a picture of him), but they
were also having surveillance recording the wrong Oswald, the very same person
who was inside the embassy. And that remains a real possibility to this day.
But.
I agree with you that one of the last great areas of real interest here—when
new information has to come out—is all the shenanigans in Mexico City. And
when I say "shenanigans," what I'm talking about is not a plot to kill
the President—that's key—but the CIA's and the KGB's desperate efforts to
cover up their own sources of information: their informants, the contacts inside
the Mexican embassy, whether they had double- agents inside the Cuban embassy,
how they obtained video surveillance at the time, and this overwhelming desire
of the intelligence agencies to protect…That type of history is what exactly
leads to the type of speculation you have in this case, that you have sort of
looked at and then said, "I see a conspiracy of murder."
MODERATOR: Mr. Posner, you have one minute to ask a question.
POSNER:
O.K. And in my minute I'm just gonna take 30 seconds, the first 30, to say, Mr.
Scott, that he didn't make a conclusion on the other assassinations. But in his
own book he says, on page 97, "Behind the deep politics of the Kennedy
assassination lie those of the [Huey] Long assassination." And on page 307
he talks about the comparisons between Sirhan Sirhan and Lee Harvey Oswald. So
for somebody who hasn't made up his mind, he has some very interesting
statements in the book.
But
Mr. Scott, what I really would wonder is (since I don't see it discussed in this
book and I know you have discussed it before): Why do you feel, if Oswald shot
at General Walker in April of '63, you
believe the evidence that he shot at Walker, and
why would he have shot at Walker? And the second part of the question is,
Do you believe the evidence that Oswald shot a Dallas policeman, J.D. Tippit,
after the assassination? And if so, why do you believe he killed Tippit?
MODERATOR: Mr. Scott, 2 minutes.
SCOTT:
...General Walker, who…Somebody shot at General Walker. Eyewitnesses said it
was 2 people. And if it was 2 people, then Oswald—if it was Oswald—then
Oswald was not a "loner."
Whoever
shot at General Walker, from about 15 feet away, did not shoot to kill him. I
think they shot to help make him more of a martyr than he already was. The
bullet in question, I will remind you, it changed jacket. It may have been
copper-jacketed in November, but the bullet was originally identified, then, as
being steel-jacketed. And I do believe that the bullets were changed, because I
think it is not hard at all to find other cases of the falsification of evidence
in that and other matters.
Now
the killing of Tippit: Um, again, I believe there's falsification. The bullet
thing is difficult to go into, but I think they rather botched the planting of
bullets at the scene. Um, you believe the eyewitnesses like Helen Markham and
Warren Reynolds. Let me just say, Warren Reynolds was asked if he could
recognize Oswald. He said that he was unable to do so. And then somebody shot
him through the head. And then the Warren Commission had the gall to ask him
again. And he said, "Oh yes! I remember now. It was Lee Harvey
Oswald."
Well
if you're going to rely on witnesses that have been coerced in that way, I think
you're prepared to grasp at almost any straw in really conceding that there was
no case.
MODERATOR: You will now each have 6 minutes to close. Mr. Scott, you have 6 minutes.
PETER
DALE SCOTT: The Warren Commission, and again, now, Mr. Posner, tell us that Ruby
and Oswald each were people who acted alone. What I've learned in my years is
that each of these two individuals take us to very important institutional
secrets that are part of what I call the "deep politics" of this
country.
To
start with Jack Ruby: He came out of Chicago, in the 24th ward of Jake Arvey,
which was a signal point of corruption in the Democratic party in Chicago and in
the nation. A man called James Ragen was killed in 1946. Oswald {1} knew the two
assassins intimately. One of them was used by the Chicago FBI to make the case
that Oswald {2} is not mob connected. They said that this man Dave Yaras…They
sent this memo out and it was sent on to the Warren Commission: "Dave Yaras
says that Oswald was not mob connected." They granted that Dave Yaras knew
Oswald, but [what] they didn't say was that Dave Yaras was a top syndicate
killer and that the killing of Ragen in 1946 (which he was guilty of) was one
which [J. Edgar] Hoover was personally involved in. And we have it from one of
Mr. Posner's own sources in the FBI that it was Hoover himself who dropped the
investigation when Mr. Ragen was investigated. I have a
of that case, because it is a signal event in the evolution of organized
crime in this country.
Lee
Harvey Oswald, in 1963, was involved with the most conspiratorial Cuban
anti-Castro group (such as Alpha-66), whose main target by then was not so much
Castro as Kennedy. Their…most of their raids were against Soviet ships in
order to embarrass Kennedy's policy of détente with Khrushchev. And the kind of
story that Mr. Posner will not tell you is that a Dallas sheriff had said that
Oswald had been seen with anti-Castro Cubans at a Harlandale address in Texas
which—in Dallas—which he says nothing more about, but which the FBI files
show us was the Dallas headquarters of the Alpha-66 in Dallas and that they had
been buying guns. And at least one of their milieu was an Oswald look-alike.
It
is a symptom that the investigation was mishandled; that this rather significant
lead which corroborates the leads in New Orleans of Oswald and anti-Castro
Cubans, all of whom were arms trafficking. That is probably the key to why
Oswald himself ordered guns. Because I believe that he was working part of the
government's campaign against arms sales.
Now
you tell me, Mr. Posner, that Bringuier denies his DRE connections. Mr.
Bringuier has also denied his connections to the Cuban Revolutionary Council [CRC].
(And I can't remember if that's in your book, but it's certainly in the Warren
Commission.) And yet I found a Cuban "Who's Who" of Cuban exiles, and
it's listed in Mr. Bringuier's biography, in print, that he was the propaganda
secretary for the CRC—as I report in my book. (And I hope you have a
refutation of it.)
If
we had more time, I would respond to what you said about my book. But yes, all
of these things are part of the deep politics. But they could also have been
lone assassins. You're drawing conclusions that cannot be drawn.
What
I have been trying to say and say is that the more we look into the, this case,
pressure has forced the FBI to "cough up" files. The…forced just
recently, the CIA to force up files. And the more documents we get, the less and
less and less Oswald looks like a loner. If he was a loner, why did every single
junky FBI report on him go over to CIA and get read in at least 10 sections of
the CIA? Why are there references that are still blacked out? Why are so many of
the crucial documents suppressed?
We
have a record here which we have to get to the bottom of. And, uh, I am
open-minded about this. I don't quite know how you prove someone is a loner
after you have already established that there's such intense and continuous
government interest in him—including documents we've been denied which are
only one and two days before the assassination.
But
I can tell you one thing: When the CIA called him Lee Henry Oswald it wasn't
from a clumsy accident, as you suggest. Because they had been doing it
consistently for 3 years in a file which were treated as unclassified ones. He
was a very special "defector" among those defectors. And the CIA
falsified not only his name [but] the name of his wife, the name of the city in
which he was born. The conclusion is unmistakable that he was part of some kind
of operation that was being kept secret even in CIA files. And if you're going
to prove me wrong, Mr. Posner, you're going to have to join with me in getting
the rest of the files declassified.
{1}
Scott says "Oswald" here. He may mean "Ruby". Due to
pressure of allowed time, Mr. Scott may have inadvertently mixed the names.
{2}
Again (see note #1, above), Mr. Scott says Oswald, but may have meant to say
"Ruby."
MODERATOR: Thank you, Mr. Scott. Mr. Posner, you have 6 minutes.
GERALD
POSNER: The last statement Mr. Scott makes is one that, uh, one of the few
things tonight that we can agree on and agree on wholeheartedly, which is,
getting the files.
I
happen to think that one of the things that's happened in this case is the
government is its own worst enemy. They're holding onto material for 30 years,
in instances, because there is a cover-up in the Kennedy assassination. I say
this in so many words in my book. There's a cover-up of the government
incompetence that took place in both the FBI and the CIA. There's a covering of
behinds, in essence, of these bureaucrats who are running for cover. And the
FBI, because they were so petrified that J. Edgar Hoover would be coming down to
Dallas and saying, "What? You had an open file on Lee Harvey Oswald? You
were interrogating his wife and you didn't know he was a 'lone nut' capable of
killing the President?" And of course, Hoover did censure 17 agents and
discipline them for that very thing that the agents feared. They destroyed
evidence. They lied about what happened. And that's what, largely, those files
are gonna show. They will show the extent of that cover-up. The difference is in
the interpretation that we have as to whether, in fact, it was the cover-up of a
murder (which I don't view it as that), or what I typically view in this case,
from the…my alma mater where you are now a professor, at Berkeley, from my
work in the early '70s as a political scientist, that, in fact, government is
primarily inefficient and bungling. And this is exactly what you expect in a
case of this magnitude, where people do run.
The…some
of the things that are mentioned…I think it comes down again to this very,
very fundamental look at "What is the evidence?" And I think that Mr.
Scott says 2 things in his last 6 minutes segment that really shows you the
basis of what happens in conspiracy theory. If there isn't an answer for it,
what you do is you speculate and say, "Here's what might have
happened." And this is what Oliver Stone does very effectively in his film,
"JFK."
On
the Walker shooting, Mr. Scott says, "Well I think that the bullet was
swapped. It's not the same bullet that existed in '63." The problem is that
there's no evidence that it was swapped. So his point is, what might have been
swapped. We can't prove that it wasn't. And of course, you can never prove
that…the negative, that the bullet wasn't swapped. But what I ask for always,
as an investigator, as an attorney, is—just show me a piece of credible
evidence to indicate that that happened. And that's what, what he can't produce.
He
talks about the Tippit shooting. And he says that he thinks that the police
actually botched the planting of the bullets at the scene. But again: it's
strictly speculation. There isn't any evidence. There's no testimony. There's
nothing to indicate that in fact the police had planted the bullets at the
scene. And this is where we go from hard evidence off to what I call
speculation. The Tippit case is a perfect example.
And
I must tell you that, as an attorney, it's one of the most "open and
shut" cases I've ever seen. Thirteen eyewitnesses—not just the two that
he wants to talk about with Helen Markham and Warren Reynolds (and each of those
I could respond to)—thirteen eyewitnesses see Oswald either do the shooting
[of Tippit] or escaping from the scene. Six people pick him out of a lineup that
night. He's discovered a few blocks away, with the pistol. It is tied
ballistically into the murder of Tippit, to the exclusion of any other gun in
the world. How he ends up in that theater, with the pistol that just killed
Tippit, where 13 people just saw him running away, is hard for me to imagine. Is
it an impostor Oswald? Has somebody coerced all 13 people? Did they put the
pistol on him and he didn't know it? You know, the answer is, in fact (although
I see Mr. Scott nodding "yes"), it's too much to imagine. He, in fact,
did kill J.D. Tippit. He, in fact, did shoot at General Walker. And he was the
only person in Dallas, November 22nd, 1963, on the 6th floor, in the southeast
corner of the Texas school book depository—not only with the motive to kill
Jack Kennedy (to place himself in the history books; to throw this "monkey
wrench" into the system) but with the capability of doing it. With his own
rifle which was found up there. That he used to sit on a porch, according to
Marina, and for hours at a time practice "dry runs," what experts call
"dry runs." Operating the bolt action so that he was proficient with
it. And with the capability. In the Marines, having been both a sharpshooter and
a marksman. Meaning that he was capable of hitting a 10-inch target at a
distance of 200 yards, 8 times out of 10, without the benefit of a telescopic
sight.
And
in Dallas, the assassination targets are less than half of that distance. His
longest shot is some 90 yards, and he has the benefit of a 4-power scope. It
becomes for Oswald an easy sequence of shots. And even then, only one of them
actually does the trick and ends up killing Kennedy.
The…One
of the very important points, I think, in this, is when we come down to the
question of association with these individuals, uh, I believe that as the
American people have a right to demand, after 30 years of looking at this case,
we have a right to demand of anybody, "What's your evidence to support your
conclusions?" I lay out a scenario of what I think happened in the
assassination. I presented the evidence: some 80 pages of source notes, the
evidence that I rely on. What I think we have to ask conspiracy theorists in
this case—whether they have Mr. Scott's view or whether they have a different
view of what happened—is, "What do you rely on?" "What's your
proof?" "What's your documentation?" This case has been examined
more extensively, by more researchers, than any other case I know of. And after
30 years of thousands of people looking at the evidence and talking to
witnesses, we still don't have an iota of credible evidence to show us, in fact,
there was a conspiracy to kill Jack Kennedy. I say that it's time to "close
the book" on this case in the sense that we still have more historical work
to do, but we can come to the overall conclusion that, in Dallas, as we approach
the 30th anniversary of this death, the man responsible for it was one man,
alone: Lee Harvey Oswald.
MODERATOR:
Thank you, Mr. Posner.
Mr.
Scott, Mr. Posner, on behalf of our listeners across the country, thank you very
much.