The Buffs
by Calvin Trillin
The New Yorker, June 1967, pp. 41–71
Josiah Thompson is an assistant professor of philosophy at
Haverford College, near Philadelphia. He graduated from Yale, Phi Beta Kappa,
ten years ago; served two years as a naval officer (in 1958, when the Marines
landed in Lebanon, he commanded the frogman detachment charged with beach
reconnaissance); spent a year in Denmark, doing research in the works of the
philosopher who has become his specialty, Sören Kierkegaard; and returned to
Yale to complete his doctorate. At Haverford, he teaches courses in the
Philosophy of Existence and the Phenomenology of Existence plus an introductory
philosophy course; his dissertation, a study of Kierkegaard called “The Lonely
Labyrinth,” is scheduled to be published by a university press this year. A
boyish-looking young man whose friends call him Tink, he lives on the top floor
of an old house on the Haverford campus with a wife, two small children, and
perhaps the only complete set of Kierkegaard first editions in the United
States. He is an authority on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Thompson has learned to use an Abney
level, a tool invaluable in measuring angles, including the trajectories of
bullets, and he has gone to Dallas, stood on Elm Street, early on Sunday morning
when the traffic is light, and measured the angle from the sixth floor of the
Texas School Book Depository. Like many other academics, he has published a
letter in the New York Review of Books that both commented on a review
and displayed a vast and esoteric knowledge; in his case, the comment was on a
review of assassination books by Richard Popkin, another philosophy professor
and lay authority on the assassination, and the knowledge displayed was of
pathology and ballistics as they relate to the course and impact of a
6.5-millimetre bullet. Although his interest in firearms had never extended past
what he was required to learn in the Navy, he now owns a display board of the
various types of bullets that could have theoretically been used in the
assassination, and a rifle of the type Oswald was said to have used, so that he
can personally get some idea of how its bolt operates. He may refer casually to
the frames of amateur motion pictures taken during the assassination as
“Zapruder 313” or “Nix 24,” and he sometimes calls the Texas School Book
Depository the T.S.B.D. He is conversant with the technicalities of photographic
development and refinement. “It’s just like scholarship,” he said
recently. “There are good scholars and bad scholars. There are even analytical
scholars and inductive scholars. But the marvellous thing about it is that there
are no credentials. There’s no Ph.D. in the assassination. It’s pure
scholarship. You have to make your own credentials.”
Thompson is quick to point out that in the
community of assassination scholars he is a newcomer; he has been working on the
case steadily for only a little over a year, which means that he is far from
what the others sometimes call “a first-generation critic.” The
first-generation critics began to devote most of their spare time to the
assassination on November 22, 1963. Within a few weeks, Vincent Salandria, a
lawyer in Philadelphia, had built a file of newspaper stories that contained
references to any police agencies that had been involved. Raymond Marcus—who
lives in Los Angeles and was, at the time of the assassination, running a small
business for the distribution of “Keep off the Grass” and other household
signs to retail stores—began a newspaper file to keep track of the changing
theories about where the bullets came from. Anything that appeared about the
assassination in the New York Times, among other papers, was being saved
by Marjorie Field, the wife of a prosperous Beverly Hills stockbroker, and by
Sylvia Meagher, a researcher at the World Health Organization in New York. By
the first week in February, Shirley Martin, a housewife who then lived in
Hominy, Oklahoma, had driven to Dallas with her four children to interview
witnesses. Lillian Castellano, a Los Angeles bookkeeper who thought that reports
on the wounds indicated that the President must have been hit from the front,
had studied a picture of the Dealey Plaza area, discovered what seemed to be a
strategically placed storm drain in front of the motorcade, and called that fact
to the attention of a local news commentator, the Los Angeles Times, the
Warren Commission, and anyone else she could think of who might be investigating
what had happened.
Thompson, who was in Yale graduate school
at the time, had his own doubts in the first days after the assassination—they
were brought on by more or less the same aspects of the case that bothered the
other critics—and, briefly, he was even moved to act on them. “The first
flash over the radio was that Oswald was caught and seemed to be a
left-winger—in Dallas! It sounded crazy. We went to a friend’s house that
Saturday night, and he said, ‘Oswald will never live to stand trial.’ And
then we drove down to Washington on Sunday, to go through the Capitol Rotunda,
and we heard the news about Ruby on the car radio. There was a mixture of
frustration and anger and despair. So many people in this long quiet line had
the same feeling. We all thought, ‘It’s almost going to break. This is too
blatant and obvious. There are bright newsmen working on this thing.’ Well, of
course, it didn’t break. Then, on Wednesday, the New York Times
published an article based on an interview with one of the Dallas doctors that
said quite clearly that there was an entry hole in the front of the
President’s throat. The same day, Life came out with some frames of the
Zapruder film, and from those it was quite obvious that at the time of the
shooting the President was facing away from the Book Depository. So, with
some trepidation, with Life in one hot little hand and the New York Times
in the other hot little hand, I traipsed over to the F.B.I. office in New Haven,
and, in an embarrassed way, said, ‘Look, could I see an F.B.I. agent?’ They
were playing ‘The F.B.I. in Peace and War,’ of course—very polite. ‘Let
me take all of this down.” ‘Thank you very much for coming in.’ I’m sure
they must have died laughing after I left.”
Thompson—figuring he had done what he
could, however embarrassing it had been—turned his attention back to his
dissertation and his teaching. His doubts were not assuaged by the Warren
Commission’s Report, and he did try to keep up with what was being written
about the assassination. He even pursued the investigation himself for a while,
doing research in the Yale Library after the Commission had released the
twenty-six volumes of testimony and exhibits upon which it had based its
conclusions. But in time he found that he was more interested in opposing the
war in Vietnam than in opposing the Warren Report. Then, last spring, Thompson
and some other Haverford faculty members were arrested during a demonstration
against the war, and the lawyer asked by the American Civil Liberties Union to
arrange their release was Vincent Salandria. Thompson had read and admired a
rather technical article Salandria had published in Liberation
challenging the Warren Commission’s conclusion that all the bullets fired at
the President had been fired by one gunman. Encouraged by his meeting with
Salandria, Thompson decided he might have time during the summer to go to the
National Archives for a more systematic investigation. That investigation led to
a manuscript that will eventually be published as a book, and the book contract
led to an arrangement to be a consultant to Life magazine in its
assassination research. Since the day he met Salandria, Thompson says, “I have
never fallen asleep at night without thinking, in those last moments before you
fall asleep, about where the hell those bullets came from.”
When the Warren Report was published, some ten months after
the assassination, most Americans seemed to accept its conclusions, most
editorialists praised it for its thoroughness and clarity, one or two reviewers
criticized it as taking the form of a brief for the prosecution, and perhaps a
dozen obscure citizens, unaware of each other’s existence, began to pore over
it to prove that it was wrong. Eventually, of course, critical books were
written on the Report by professional journalists such as Léo Sauvage, an
American correspondent for Le Figaro, and Sylvan Fox, the former city
editor of the World-Telegram & Sun; Mark Lane, the author of “Rush
to Judgment,” and Harold Weisberg, the author of “Whitewash” and
“Whitewash II,” became more or less professional critics; Edward Jay
Epstein, whose book on the alleged bungling of the Warren Commission
investigation, “Inquest,” is generally considered the single greatest
contribution to making criticism of the Report respectable, entered the field
through the orthodox routine of scholarship—in order to earn a Master’s
degree by analyzing the workings of a governmental commission; and James
Garrison, operating on the premise that the Warren Commission failed to fulfill
its duties, launched an investigation of his own as district attorney of New
Orleans. But in the two and a half years between the assassination and the
publication of Epstein’s book, most of the hours spent examining the official
version of the President’s murder were spent by people who had no professional
reason for their interest and no plans to make a full-time career out of
criticizing the Warren Report. They tend to refer to themselves (and the
professionals) as “investigators” or “researchers” or, most often,
“critics.” They are also known as “assassination buffs.”
The buffs were never alone in their
doubts. A Gallup Poll taken in the week of the assassination indicated that only
twenty-nine per cent of the American people believed that the President was
killed by Oswald acting alone; even in the days just after the Warren Report was
published, a Harris Survey showed that thirty-one per cent believed that Oswald
had acted with accomplices. But of the millions of Americans who doubted the
official version, only about a dozen felt strongly enough to try to prove that
it was incorrect. Most people were willing to go along with the Warren Report,
which, after all, had been produced by a distinguished commission with all of
the resources of the government at its disposal. Even before the Report was
published, an aura of unanimous acceptance had grown up around the official
version of what had happened in Dallas, and most Americans did not want to
listen to any theories that contradicted it. Most of the assassination buffs,
even those with a large circle of friends, suffered for at least a while from
the special kind of loneliness that comes from being obsessed by something that
nobody else seems to care about. “I thought I was the only one in the world
who had these doubts,” Mrs. Castellano recalled recently. “The first year,
thinking I was alone, it was terrible.” Mrs. Field eventually won over her
husband and children, but not her friends; one of Salandria’s friends began
saying that Salandria had lost his mind. Then, gradually, the buffs began to
discover each other. Mrs. Field found out about Mrs. Meagher through writing the
instructor of a course on the Warren Report that Mrs. Meagher had taken at the
New School; she had discovered Ray Marcus and Mrs. Castellano through an
appearance by Lane in Los Angeles. Salandria came to light through the piece in Liberation.
He immediately received excited letters from other critics; David Lifton, a Los
Angeles buff who thought he had made a discovery that supported Salandria’s
theories, could not wait for the mails and phoned at two in the morning from
California. At one point, when Mrs. Field stopped off in New York on the way to
Europe, Mrs. Meagher was able to gather together half a dozen critics to meet
her. In the days before what Mrs. Meagher has called “the dramatic transition
from taboo to dialogue,” the discovery that they were not alone struck most of
the buffs as monumental. They finally had somebody to talk to.
The buffs soon established an informal but
busy network for pooling information, decrying the indifference of the public,
and cheering each other up. Their discussions are often rather technical.
Assassination buffs sometimes speak of Lillian Castellano’s most important
contribution being her evidence that “the Willis picture lines up with
Zapruder 202 and not Zapruder 210,” and it is not uncommon to hear somebody
say, “We had a friendly argument about Frame 237.” There are a dozen ways of
discussing the limitations that the Zapruder film places on the number of shots
that could be fired from the rifle found in the Texas School Book Depository.
David Lifton—an energetic young man who studied engineering physics at Cornell
and has been in and out of the U.C.L.A. graduate school of engineering, as his
investigation of the assassination allows—likes to speak in terms of
“constraints.” He once reacted to a piece of news along the network by
saying, “Holy mackerel! They’ve broken the forty-two-frame constraint!”
The buffs toss around the names of assassination witnesses and minor Dallas
officials as casually as small boys discuss obscure baseball players. They can
all furnish a minute description of “399”—the bullet that was said to have
hit both Kennedy and Governor John Connally and is officially called Commission
Exhibit No. 399. Marcus has written a seventy-seven-page monograph on the
subject. In speaking of each other’s work, they often use the same terms that
are heard among research scientists—mentioning that some discovery is “in
the literature” or that somebody has done “solid work in that area.”
Although some of the buffs travelled to
Dallas—and some, sooner or later, to Washington to examine the exhibits and
documents turned over to the National Archives—most of them have found enough
to do in their own homes. They can study many of the documents at the National
Archives by sending for copies, and they can always use the phone to interview
witnesses and each other. They have built their own research libraries, mostly
out of newspaper clippings. Marcus constructed an ingenious research device
using a copy of a large surveyor’s layout map of Dealey Plaza that Mrs.
Castellano managed to buy from the surveyor who prepared it for the Commission.
Marcus’s copy of the map, mounted on heavy cardboard, includes marks to
indicate the precise location of each eyewitness whose presence can be verified
through photographs, shaded triangles to indicate the exact scope of each
photograph taken, a movable isinglass triangle corresponding to the movements of
Zapruder’s film, and a model limousine that has a representation of Governor
Connally mounted in a way that permits it to swivel to the side. Marcus, an
intense man of forty who concentrated almost from the start on the Zapruder
film, also built charts of enlargements of Zapruder frames, and spent so much
time analyzing them that he was able to tell that two frames had been transposed
in the Warren Report because there was an inconsistency in the shadow cast by a
little girl’s foot in the background. (Lifton had a friend write an
disingenuous letter about the transposition to J. Edgar Hoover, who acknowledged
the error.) Shadow measuring is not uncommon among the critics. They pass around
huge blurred closeups and peer at them for hours trying to ascertain whether a
mark on a curb is a stain or a chip, or whether a shape among the trees is a
shadow or a gunman.
Of
course, what most dramatically magnified the research opportunities of the buffs
was the publication of the Commission’s testimony and exhibits, usually
referred to as the Twenty-six Volumes. The Twenty-six Volumes contain eighteen
thousand pages—the largest body of source material any armchair student of a
crime has ever had. Most of the buffs sent for a set immediately, at seventy-six
dollars a set. Mrs. Field, whose home in Beverly Hills is rather spacious, has
saved some steps by buying an upstairs set and a downstairs set. With the
Twenty-six Volumes on hand, Mrs. Meagher—an extraordinarily serious-minded
woman who is considered by Thompson (and others) “far and away the best
scholar in the field”—has rarely felt the need to pursue her investigation
outside the confines of her living room.
For a while, a significant amount of the
buffs’ research was turned over to those who seemed to have a better chance to
reach the public. Salandria gave Mark Lane the results of his early trips to
Dallas; Lifton and Mrs. Field have sent quite a bit of material to Thomas
Buchanan, an American who lives in Europe and has written about the
assassination in a book and a number of European magazine pieces; and Mrs.
Martin sent tapes of her interviews to both Lane and Buchanan. Mrs. Meagher did
the index for Epstein’s book, and Sauvage and other professionals have
depended on her to check over their manuscripts. The buffs have been used as
consultants to magazines—first small-circulation left-wing magazines and
lately even large-circulation middle-of-the-road magazines. “You can compare
this to a company that has a public-relations program and a
research-and-development program,” Lifton has said. “The two puncture points
at the top—what gets public notice—are Lane’s book and Epstein’s book.
The r.-and-d. program is being done by a bunch of amateurs.”
Like Thompson, Mrs. Meagher will
eventually publish a book of her own on the assassination. She has already
published an index to the Twenty-six Volumes that most of the buffs consider the
most awesome accomplishment of the investigation, and she often reacts to
magazine articles about the assassination with long, detailed letters to the
editor. Other buffs have worked on their own magazine articles or, more often,
marshalled their evidence in charts or displays. In addition to constructing
charts of the Zapruder frames and writing monographs on them, Marcus, for
instance, has attempted to analyze two other key pictures. Because of his
suspicion that the well-known photograph of Oswald holding a rifle is a
composite, a suspicion based partly on the fact that the shadow of Oswald’s
nose and the shadow of his body do not fall in the same direction, Marcus has
taken dozens of photographs at all hours of the day, in all combinations of
shadows; he now has a scrapbook full of pictures of his son and various other
subjects standing soberly in his back yard, holding a rifle and squinting into
the sun. Marcus also has done what he calls a facial analysis of a blurred image
that the Commission says is Billy Lovelady, a Texas School Book Depository
employee, and that some of the buffs think is Oswald. Working on a clear-plastic
overleaf, Marcus marked twenty-six points to outline the features on an
enlargement of the blurred face; he then did the same on enlarged portraits of
Lovelady and Oswald, and compared the results on graph paper. “Whatever I
found may be due to the camera angles,” Marcus said recently. “It may mean
nothing. It’s possible that this is completely unscientific. But my answer to
people saying ‘You’re no expert’ is ‘Where are the experts?’”
Although the assassination buffs are, by and large, people
who are sensitive to the possibility of government harassment, none of them
complains of being hounded by the F.B.I. or spied on or persecuted. Even as they
persisted in investigating a crime most people were trying to put out of their
minds and in questioning the integrity of a panel chosen precisely because its
members were so distinguished as to be above question, they received no hostile
phone calls or insulting letters. Salandria lost no clients. Instead, the buffs
experienced a lack of concern that most of them found more maddening than overt
hostility—particularly because they seemed to find the least concern among
those whom they might have expected to be sympathetic. “If one group was in
favor of accepting the Report, or at least letting the matter lie, it was the
liberals,” Marcus says. Salandria agrees: “I had all the liberal
credentials—SANE, A.C.L.U., and all that. But the idea that I should be
undertaking to denigrate a report prepared and endorsed and presided over by
Earl Warren scared my liberal friends. Some of them got very panicky and some of
them departed under the strain.” Salandria believes that the reluctance of
liberals to listen to arguments against the Report—a reluctance he still finds
today—is based on more than merely the desire to protect a man who has so
often been attacked from the right for his liberalism. “I think that this
assassination in many ways provides a mirror for this society and the roles of
different groups in this society,” Salandria says. “The liberal—with whom
I felt closely identified—really wasn’t what he purported to be. What he
purported to be was someone who wanted to mollify the misery in this society,
and alter the society so that it would become freer, more responsive to the
needs of the underdog, more egalitarian, and perhaps more peaceful. But as a
consequence of this assassination, I see the liberal as different. I see him as
being more interested in protecting government, in even apologizing for
government, surrendering the skepticism in favor of support for power—in, I
think, an honest belief that the governmental power provided is good
governmental power and that good governmental power can be translated to mean
power exercised by good men, good men translated to mean liberal men. That these
good men could do no wrong is a kind of religious feeling that the liberal has,
and therefore, if he is to serve society, he is not to be skeptical of
governmental power, not to question authority exercised by good men in a good
direction, but rather to accommodate himself and his ideas to this power, and
protect it against ‘unwarranted attacks.’ Any attack on this Commission was
‘unwarranted.’”
Salandria, a short, quick-moving man of
thirty-nine, values his independence—he runs his own law practice in
Philadelphia from an office in his own house—and he is not, by nature, an
accommodator. “If the government says ‘black,’ Vince figures
‘white,’” Thompson once said of him, fondly. “He’s a marvellously
skeptical man.” In talking about the assassination, which is almost all he
talks about, Salandria finds himself more at ease with conservatives than with
those who share his political beliefs. “I have found many honest
conservatives,” he says. “You confront them with the possibility of
governmental wrongdoing and they do not flare at you, in liberal fashion. They
will ask you what you have to offer by way of evidence, and they will listen to
you. They are not gullible, but they will not attack you for a suggestion that
something could be wrong.” Salandria, who does more public speaking than most
of the buffs, rarely appears before a liberal audience, but he is accustomed to
being received enthusiastically by such organizations as the North Penn Young
Republican Club, the Philadelphia County Dental Society, and the Lansdale Junior
Chamber of Commerce Women’s Club.
One afternoon last winter, Salandria
addressed the Omega Club, a small group of conservative lawyers that meets
regularly at the Adelphia Hotel, in downtown Philadelphia, for lunch. The
meeting was held in a private dining room off the hotel’s coffee shop, and
about fifteen members were present. They were having orange sherbet and coffee
and discussing the problem of Communist infiltration in the Catholic colleges of
the Philadelphia area when Salandria arrived. He was immediately introduced by
the chairman, who said, “The main point I want to bring out is that he’s
highly respected for his ability and everyone regards him as a man of great
integrity.”
Salandria made a few opening comments
about being happy to return to Omega—it had been the first organization to ask
him to speak after he had first published his doubts in the Philadelphia Legal
Intelligencer, the city’s law journal—and about having published
articles in magazines that the members had assured him were Communist fronts.
“But I have developed a healthy respect for the conservative mind in the
United States,” he said. “My hope for breaking this case comes not from the
left wing and not from the liberals and not from the government but from
independent Americans who are steeped in a heritage that bespeaks of a concern
about governmental power—excessive governmental power.”
“Amen,” somebody said.
Salandria explained that he had made a
specialty of the “shots, trajectories, and wounds of the assassination,” and
he launched into a straightforward account of the evidence. He spoke precisely
of angles of descent, the damage caused by each bullet, and the condition of the
bullets. At one point he drew out a large chart that had an outline of the
President’s body as seen in Zapruder Frame 316 superimposed on an enlargement
of Zapruder Frame 313—a demonstration of his contention that the President’s
body snapped back and to the left when hit by the fatal bullet—and at another
point he took off his jacket so he could better demonstrate the spot at which
the first bullet was said to have entered the President’s back. The lawyers
were attentive. Occasionally, they nodded their understanding of what Salandria
was talking about. When Salandria had finished his speech and called for
questions, a man asked why J. Edgar Hoover had stated his belief in the
Commission’s findings if any doubt existed, and Salandria quoted a number of
documents to demonstrate that the F.B.I. itself had contradicted the Report.
There were no other questions that reflected any doubt about Salandria’s
contention that the Commission’s version of the assassination was “patently
wrong.” When Salandria said, “I urge upon you that our President was, in
fact, killed by a team of skilled professional assassins,” two or three men
nodded and one man down the table whispered, “Communists.” The presence of a
conspiracy seemed to be taken for granted; the questions were about who was in
the conspiracy. There was strong sentiment for suspecting the Communists—one
man noted that the Worker had suggested a commission headed by Warren
before one was actually announced, and another asked Salandria if there were any
known Communists on the Commission—but, for a while, nobody seemed to object
to Salandria’s theory that the conspirators were “neither left nor right”
but “elements whose purpose was to perpetuate the Cold War when Kennedy was
trying to arrive at an accommodation.” Reading some items from the Times
of that morning about Vietnam, Salandria attempted to show that the deep
American involvement in the war made no sense economically, politically,
legally, or morally—“no sense, unless you trace it back to the
assassination.” The lawyers seemed to accept that theory rather calmly. Then,
suddenly, one man, almost shouting, said, “This thing boils down to a supposed
attempt to frame the right-wing military! This is the international socialist
propaganda line that hasn’t changed in over a hundred years!” Everybody
seemed to shout at once, but after Salandria denied the charge, and answered one
or two more questions about why he did not think the Communists were involved,
the subject seemed forgotten. The Omega members listened respectfully as
Salandria answered polite questions about how the Commission worked and why the
conspirators chose the Dallas motorcade as a time to murder the President. When
the chairman got up to close the meeting, Salandria received enthusiastic
applause, and several members stayed around to compliment him further.
The assassination buffs do not always find their criticism
of the Warren Report received with compliments; they are used to being
challenged by people they sometimes call the counter-critics. It is often said
that the buffs fail to realize that dozens of inconsistencies can be found in
the most open-and-shut case for the prosecution, that they tend to fit all
events into a conspiratorial pattern without allowing for coincidence, and that
they are sometimes carried away by their enmity toward the Establishment. The
buffs, of course, vary in acuteness, but it is true, for instance, that many of
them, like most Americans, often credit the printed word as it appears in
newspapers with more authority than it deserves and tend to interpret such
institutions as magazines and television networks too much in terms of
monolithic design and not enough in terms of human caprice. “Most of these
people are not trained as lawyers, and that makes a big difference,” Wesley J.
Liebeler, a lawyer who worked for the Commission and has often debated with
various critics, said not long ago. “For instance, they fail to distinguish
between different types of evidence, and they’ll put as much value in the
recollection of a witness as in a scientific report.” It is not unusual for a
buff to move easily from an explanation of why some meticulous measurements are
evidence that the President was shot from the front to an explanation of why
some of the President’s speeches in the months before he went to Dallas are
evidence that the murder was carried out by those in the government who wanted
to prevent a change in the American position on the Cold War.
Even counter-critics agree, however, that
the buffs can be quite effective when picking apart the conclusions of the
Warren Report. (There is general agreement among assassination buffs that the
Report was, in Marcus’s words, “the most massively fraudulent document ever
foisted on a free society,” although they have various opinions as to how
aware the commissioners were of the fraud, and one or two of them have some
doubts about whether this is a free society.) Epstein—who is considered a
turncoat by the buffs because he has stated that Oswald was probably
guilty—says, “The thing about these people is that they’re honest.
Although some of them are kind of strange. Somebody like Lane will distort
things, but the buffs can be trusted on the facts, even though some of their
conclusions are silly. Lying would ruin the game for them. Sylvia Meagher’s
index of the Twenty-six Volumes might be one of the rare examples of a polemical
index, but that’s more than the Commission provided, and I found it useful.”
Liebeler has said, “They fit facts into this kind of strange framework, but,
on the fact-observation level, some of these people are very good; sometimes
they have noticed facts that other people haven’t noticed.”
Some of the arguments that public figures
and respectable magazines have put forward for holding a new investigation of
the assassination are those that were published by the buffs a long time
ago—such as the physical evidence Salandria presented in his Liberation
piece for believing that more than one gunman could have been involved—but in
the public mind the buffs are still associated more with demonology than with
scholarship. Even articles that basically agree with their position on the
Warren Report ordinarily dismiss the buffs in a sentence or two as crackpots or
conspiracy-mongers, and then begin the next sentence “But even reasonable
people….” If there is suspicion among reasonable people about the
conclusions of the Warren Report, there seems to be equal suspicion about those
who suggest alternate conclusions that involve complicated conspiracies, and, as
it happens, most of the buffs believe that President Kennedy’s murder was the
result of a high-level plot. Almost all of them believe that the assassination
and the American policy in Vietnam are connected. Almost all of them think that
Oswald probably did not fire a shot at the President, and that he was, in one
way or another, an employee of the F.B.I. or the C.I.A. or some other
governmental agency whose operatives could have arranged to set him up for the
frame. In general, they look to Garrison’s investigation for corroboration of
their views.
The buffs say that their plot theories are
speculation, not to be confused with the careful research they present of
factual inconsistencies in the Warren Commission’s version of the events. But
some of them tend to blur the difference, finding listeners more interested in
the idea of C.I.A. manipulations than in measurements of bullet angles. Several
buffs eventually came to believe that they had to present some alternative
“models” of the assassination that might account for the known facts more
logically than the Warren Report did—and some see the models as including not
only how the assassination was carried out but who might have had reason to
order it. Some of the more thoughtful buffs, aware of the loss of credibility
that comes with plot theories, have always favored keeping speculation to a
minimum. Although Mrs. Meagher’s recent article in the Minority of One
presents examples from the Twenty-six Volumes of what she believes to be State
Department favoritism toward Oswald, she does not speculate on the reason for
the favoritism. On the theory that even a model that limits itself to how the
assassination was carried out can bring a loss of credibility to the buffs if it
seems too extreme, a few buffs prevailed upon David Lifton a year or so ago not
to publicize his theory that the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza was hollowed out
for the assassination in a paramilitary operation that included the use of
artificial trees.
When expertise on the assassination changed from a bond
among lonely zealots to a commodity somewhat in demand, the fellowship among the
buffs did not survive completely intact. Although some critics continued to
exchange information as freely as they ever did, others became more cautious.
There have been one or two complaints about a critic’s publishing information
he acquired from someone else and neglecting to mention the source. Gradually,
as the members of the faithful emerged as individuals, each buff decided which
people he could work with and whose research he found reliable. There are
conflicting opinions among them about the case and those involved. Mrs. Martin,
for instance, is the most fervent admirer of John Kennedy among the buffs; she
is probably the only one whose house contains more books about Kennedy’s life
than about his death, and she frankly idolizes the Kennedy family. Although she
has worked with and respected critics she refers to as “my leftist friends,”
she is often at odds with them because of their criticism of the role of the
Kennedy family in the investigation or because of her recollection that the far
left subjected Kennedy to as much abuse as the far right. All of the critics of
the Warren Report are still kept together to some extent by having common
enemies—the Commission’s lawyers, Epstein, most members of what they tend to
call “the Establishment press”—and by being attacked as a group concerning
their motives.
The buffs react rather strongly to the
accusation that, whatever the standards of their research, they are being morbid
or unpatriotic or exploitative in engaging in it. A couple of the buffs have
used pseudonyms in magazine articles, but most of them see nothing wrong with
taking credit for the work they have done—noting occasionally that respectable
journalists would not be hesitating to take credit for it if they had done their
jobs. Some buffs will accept no money for anything they do, but most of them see
nothing wrong with making back through articles or books some of the money they
have invested in photostats, telephone bills, time taken out from other work,
and travel. Most of the amateur critics look upon their work as a financial
sacrifice in one way or another, and at least one—Salandria—qualifies as an
angel of the investigation as well as a participant. But they are quick to
defend anyone who has found criticism of the assassination to be profitable.
“It’s only when you show some skepticism that you’re a profiteer,” Mrs.
Meagher says. “Gerald Ford put out a book, after serving on the Commission,
and I haven’t heard one voice lifted in criticism of him. I had to buy it, on
top of all the other things I had to buy from my government, which conducted
this whole investigation, this fraud, this insult to ordinary intelligence, with
our tax money. I think if the government is engaged in something evil, it is the
duty of any person with concern for his country to work against it, and I
don’t think there is anything remotely illegal or immoral about it. I have no
apologies whatsoever to make for my work on this case. It’s been motivated by
a very simple thing—a concern for justice. And I hope we are not at the point
of having to surrender any regard for justice so that we won’t be called
unpatriotic, or profiteers, or any other ugly words.”
The critics still try to maintain a
relatively united front in public. In her review of Lane’s book in Studies
on the Left, Mrs. Meagher wrote, “Perhaps there is some slanting—but
those who are first to make the charge were strangely undisturbed by the blatant
slanting that deforms the Warren Report.” Most buffs accompany any criticism
they have of Lane’s method with the explanation that he is an admitted
advocate rather than an objective researcher, and a few of them were upset with
Sauvage for writing of Lane that “his unsupported statements, like the
‘scientific’ arguments of Thomas Buchanan…offered exactly the kind of
samples needed by Dallas to discredit the critics of its police and its District
Attorney.” One or two buffs will say that the early books by Buchanan and
Joachim Joesten were more or less worthless, but it is more usual for a buff to
explain that Buchanan had to deal in speculation, because at the time of his
writing it happened that few facts were available.
The grapevine still exists, even if it is
not maintained as passionately as it once was. (Work in research is also less
passionate, partly because many of the buffs are waiting to see just what
Garrison has.) Mrs. Field and Ray Marcus often talk on the phone two or three
times a day. Mrs. Field and Mrs. Meagher are still in constant communication.
Until recently, Salandria and Thompson talked things over several times a week,
although they had decided at one point that they could not collaborate formally
because they disagree on the origin of the President’s throat wound. Not long
ago, a high-school teacher from Berkeley wrote Richard Popkin, who was in
Israel, about a lead that might be investigated. Popkin included the information
in a letter to a classics professor at Haverford who had been sending him
newspaper clippings during his stay abroad. The classics professor, a friend of
Thompson’s, reported the information to Thompson, who discussed it with
Salandria, and together they decided it might best be checked by a journalist
who happened to be working on that aspect of the case. “That’s typical of
how it works,” Thompson said. “Of course, the frustration of the thing is
that you don’t really have the resources to do it right. With the same kind of
resources the government had on this, maybe you could wrap it up. You wouldn’t
have to rely on such fortuitous circumstances that this lead would only come
because of a lucky break.”
The buffs’ difficulty in separating their suspicions
about a plot from their careful analysis of the hard evidence may stem partly
from the fact that, by and large, the suspicions came first. Most of the buffs
suspected the announced version of what had happened before any mention at all
was made of precisely how the President and the Governor were wounded and where
the shots came from; the details that followed only provided some contradictions
that confirmed their initial doubts. (A few of them later discovered that
whatever contradiction it was they had first seized on had an innocent
explanation after all, but by that time they had discovered other
contradictions.) Mrs. Castellano, who says she was first struck by the
inconsistency between the wounds and the position of the accused assassin, felt
the matter was significant partly because of her belief that thorough
photographs of the area were being withheld from the public. The doubts of most
critics began with the announcement that the President had been killed by a lone
leftist. They thought the combination of a left-wing assassin in a right-wing
city was, in Mrs. Field’s words, “just too pat,” and they never believed
that Oswald was simply a crackpot. The same facts about Oswald’s past that
convinced many Americans that he was a sick man who happened to fasten onto the
left made Salandria suspect that he was an agent provocateur. Any
suspicions about Oswald’s role were of course multiplied by his violent death,
but even before Ruby entered the Dallas police station, some of the buffs were
outraged at what seemed a presumption of guilt without the formalities of a
trial. Mrs. Field says, “I saw Oswald on TV, being paraded through the station
back and forth like an animal, and they asked him why he killed the President
and he said, ‘I didn’t kill anyone.’ I believed him. I really didn’t
have anything to go on then, but I was convinced that it was a political
conspiracy and I was convinced that Oswald was not the assassin. I’ll tell you
another thing: If one man can be picked off the street and arrested and jailed
for two murders he didn’t commit, then not one of us is safe. I saw one lawyer
after another turn his back on the deprivation of every basic human right. One
or two attorneys spoke out, but where were all the other lawyers in this
country? Where was the press in this country—swallowing this whole thing and
not raising its voice?”
The suspicions of two or three of the
women who were drawn to the investigation were mixed with deep feelings for
those involved. Mrs. Castellano—a quiet woman with gray hair who still speaks
with the accent of Dallas, where she was born—had never worked on a political
campaign before 1960, when she worked for John Kennedy in her neighborhood in
Los Angeles. “I was proud of him,” she said not long ago. “He had an air
about him. I was so proud that he was the President.” Mrs. Martin, who was
made suspicious by the juxtaposition of Dallas and a Marxist assassin, was
pulled toward the case not only by her feelings for Kennedy but also by her
sympathy for the family of the man who was said to have killed him; her first
real involvement came when she found herself phoning Marguerite Oswald to assure
her that someone else believed in her son’s innocence. Mrs. Martin, who now
lives in Owasso, a small town outside of Tulsa, said recently, “I’m deeply
disturbed when I see something done an injustice to—Lee Harvey Oswald, a
little dog, children in Vietnam, it doesn’t make any difference.” (She
manages to find room for twelve dogs that were once strays or residents of the
Tulsa pound, she and her husband have adopted an American Indian boy, and she is
currently less interested in the assassination than in trying to assist a
program to bring Vietnamese children who have been burned by napalm to America
for treatment.)
“I think that once people start one of
the things that keep them going is the puzzle,” Thompson says. “You never
start with the intention of going all the way—at least I never did—but you
keep finding pieces and putting them together. You make progress all the
time.” The investigation of the assassination has provided the buffs with the
same kind of absorption they would find in any other kind of puzzle-solving;
Mrs. Meagher, who lives by herself in Manhattan and used to spend much of her
spare time at the ballet, doubts if she would have become so involved with the
Twenty-six Volumes if she had not felt the loneliness brought on by some deaths
in her immediate family. “With somebody like Sylvia Meagher, reason is the
equalizer,” Thompson says. “It’s like the six-gun in the old West. The
only weapon is your own mind, and you can actually break the case.”
Most buffs remain excited by the
possibility of breaking the case—finding a piece of evidence that the public
and press could not ignore. They are constantly coming across something like a
new process for clarifying photographs or a new connection between some of the
people involved; for a while Salandria and Thompson spent most of their time
investigating a man they believed to be the killer of Officer Tippit. Lifton
gave up the case completely at one point and then returned because he thought he
was on the verge of a breakthrough. Although Thompson has occasionally stepped
back and wondered on how bizarre it is that he is investigating the murder of
the President of the United States, more or less as an avocation, the level at
which the case has to be discussed—its effect on powerful men and powerful
nations, for instance—seems to generate an excitement of its own for many
buffs. Most of them are proud of knowing more about such a case than anyone
else—they sometimes speak of each other as recognized critics—and they seem
constantly aware of the place in history reserved for whoever solves the puzzle.
The buffs speak of history a good deal, and the case most often mentioned when
comparisons come up is not any of the previous assassinations but the case of
Alfred Dreyfuss.
Although few of the buffs would deny harboring a desire to
be the hero who solves the crime of the century, most of them would probably not
still be interested in the case if the government had not claimed to have solved
it already. Many of the buffs are, like Salandria, people who suspect not only
what the government says about Oswald, but what it says about almost anything.
The force keeping most of them at their research has been a desire to
demonstrate that the official version of the assassination is a lie—not only
in order to make it possible for the truth to emerge but also in order to expose
the fact that the government has been engaged in what Mrs. Meagher calls “a
deliberate, outright, demonstrable fraud.” (The fact that the government
itself—through the Twenty-six Volumes and the Archives—has been their most
useful ally in this quest can strike the buffs as either cheering or ironic. The
publication of the Twenty-six Volumes convinced Salandria that those who
conspired to kill Kennedy do not have complete control of the government; it led
Marcus to remark that “this is still a free country;” and it convinced Mrs.
Meagher, who had not made up her mind about the Warren Report until she read the
Twenty-six Volumes, that the commissioners did not realize what was in them.)
Most of the buffs are people who have been concerned with the veracity of the
government for years. They reserve their final scorn for anyone who is not
willing to admit the possibility of doctored evidence or a high-level cover-up.
Like most Americans, they see the assassination to some extent as a symbolic
event, and for them the final acceptance of a lie about the
assassination—especially a lie they consider so transparent—would be
intolerable. “It would mean that the society was closing up completely,”
Salandria says. “It would mean that 1984 was with us and our experiment with
democracy was ended. I really think this involves the very nature of our
society, and that I couldn’t live in a society that could pull a swindle of
this kind.”
For some critics, the Warren Report
represents not only the last straw in what they see as a practice of lying but
also the best opportunity to change that practice. “I saw in it a sort of
climax of believing lying in the past twenty years,” Marcus said not long ago.
“I have felt for a number of years that we’ve been more wrong than right,
that we’re headed for disaster—not just a war but a nuclear exchange—and
something had to blast us off the track. If I was basically in favor of our
foreign policy, I wouldn’t be doing this work. But people have believed lies
and those lies are going to kill us all. If people become aware of this, maybe
they’ll start to demand other answers. Maybe they’ll ask about the
Rosenbergs, Hiss, the whole Cold War. Maybe we can get clean and whole. But if
this stays down, there’s no hope.”
Most—although not all—of the critics
of the Warren Report think of themselves as being somewhere on the left
politically, and it often charged that their criticism stems from a refusal to
accept the idea that Kennedy was murdered by a leftist rather than by the
right-wing extremists of Dallas. This feeling is obviously not totally missing
among the buffs, but a desire to prove that the government lied about Oswald, no
matter what his politics, is much more relevant to their political outlook. The
buffs are in the rare position of being able to exercise a political passion
through careful, factual, objective research. “These people are generally
hostile to the government and they don’t believe a damn thing the government
says,” Liebeler has said. “If the government says that the plane lost was a
weather plane, there’s nothing they can do to check up on it. But here—with
the Twenty-six Volumes—in a finite, specific way, they can actually do
something.” Lifton—who began his research about a year after the
assassination, after attending one of Lane’s lectures out of curiosity—says,
“I wasn’t really interested in politics, although once I was very interested
in the philosophy of Ayn Rand, and I’m still a free-enterpriser economically.
I really just got interested the same way I was interested in Scouting once, or
once ham radio. But I have been affected politically. I was talking to Ray
Marcus about Vietnam—it’s hard to talk to Ray without talking about
Vietnam—and he was saying the newspapers aren’t telling the truth about
Vietnam. I said, ‘I find that hard to believe.’ And he said, ‘Why do you
find it so hard to believe about Vietnam and so easy to believe about the
assassination?’ I told him that was a pretty good question.”
The polls now show that a majority of
Americans do not fully believe the conclusions of the Warren Report. A number of
influential people and influential publications have joined what the buffs
sometimes permit themselves to call the bandwagon asking for a new
investigation. This could mean that most Americans acknowledge that the buffs
were at least right to question the Report—giving them a place within the old
American tradition of the private citizen pitting his brain against the
authorities, thinking that one man can make some difference. But the buffs are
not, by and large, people who fit the mold of the American Hero. Most Americans
would undoubtedly prefer that the questioning had been done by a square-jawed,
young, non-political attorney who happened to notice an inconsistency in the
evidence and could not rest until the record was set right. In a society
accustomed to putting its trust in organizations and experts, of course, not
many square-jawed, young, non-political attorneys are willing to believe that a
distinguished governmental commission investigated the murder of the President
for eight months and then did not tell the truth about it. Asked not long ago
whether he expected many other people to begin investigating the assassination,
Marcus said, “Most of them won’t be able to get over the hurdle that the
autopsy report was falsified.”
“This is an obsession,” Thompson says.
“And happy, typical Americans aren’t obsessed. Jack Armstrong isn’t
obsessed. There’s a fantastic way in which the assassination becomes a
religious event. There are relics, and scriptures, and even a holy scene—the
killing ground. People make pilgrimages to it. And, as in any religious event,
what happened there isn’t clear; it’s ambiguous, surrounded by mystery,
uncertain, dubious. I think there is a feeling within some of us that it has to
be clarified. It’s the symbolic status of it that’s important. Somehow, one
hopes to clarify one’s own situation and one’s own society by clarifying
this. I think some of us feel that Fortinbras hasn’t arrived and that
everything is somehow incomplete. And that’s what we want: we want Fortinbras
to arrive.”
—Calvin Trillin