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The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest/Counterplot/Legend
This new edition includes the entire text from Epstein's three important books dealing with the Kennedy assassination--Inquest, Legend, and Counterplot--with a new introduction for the volume, new epilogues for each book, and commentary on the movie JFK.
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First published October 1, 1992
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About the author
Edward Jay Epstein
72 books69 followersEdward Jay Epstein (born 1935) was an American investigative journalist and a former political science professor at Harvard, UCLA, and MIT. While a graduate student at Cornell University in 1966, he published the book Inquest, an influential critique of the Warren Commission probe into the John F. Kennedy assassination. Epstein wrote two other books about the Kennedy assassination, eventually collected in The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend (1992). His books Legend (1978) and Deception (1989) drew on interviews with retired CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton, and his 1982 book The Rise and Fall of Diamonds was an expose of the diamond industry and its economic impact in southern Africa.
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November 9, 2021
It took me a bit of time to decide what I really thought about this book, actually a republication (in 1992) of three separate works: Inquest (1966), Counterplot (1968) and Legend (1978) in one volume. Each of the three has merit and even originality, and this volume allowed the author to add various epilogues and appendices to clarify his thoughts as they evolved. Ultimately, however, the collection is dated and unhelpful in furthering an understanding of the assassination of President Kennedy.
Inquest is considered one of the four original literary works in the “canon” of Warren Commission critiques. Unlike the other three – Whitewash by Harold Weisberg (1965), Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane (1966), and Accessories After the Fact by Sylvia Meagher (1967) – Inquest is not primarily an indictment of the way evidence was treated, but more an explanation of the inherent limitations of the Commission based on the way it was formed and the conditions under which it operated.
This is certainly interesting. I’d never read anywhere about the specific duties of each legal counsel, and Epstein’s description of how the “Single Bullet Theory” was developed by Arlen Specter is worth reading. Epstein secured interviews with both the legal counsel and the actual Commission members, producing candid and illuminating responses. That said, Inquest contains a passage which can only be described as astonishing based on facts that have come to light since it was written, even prior to Inquest’s republication in The Assassination Chronicles.
Whether a feat is “possible” is not a controlling factor in determining culpability under the law, which is meant to guarantee a presumption of innocence. But Epstein goes further.
Ball “proved” nothing. The presidential limousine (vital forensic evidence) was tampered with by Secret Service agents almost immediately after President Kennedy’s body had been removed from it at Parkland Hospital, when agents began cleaning the interior (there are photos of them doing it, a bucket on the ground beside them). The car was then taken to Love Field, flown to Washington, and parked in the White House garage. Since the homicide had occurred in Dallas, the car should have immediately been taken into police custody there. Yet the car was examined by no law enforcement until about 1 AM, when LBJ’s Secret Service allowed FBI agents into the White House garage. Except in Epstein’s legal universe, this is a broken “chain of evidence.”
As for who ordered the gun, this was never “proven” either. Despite prevailing law at the time, the post office kept no record of receipt by either Oswald or “A. J. Hidell,” the pseudonym Oswald supposedly used when he ordered it. This was a firearm, and under regulations governing firearms sent through the mail, the post office was legally obligated to retain the signed receipt for at least three years from the time the recipient took possession. In other words, Oswald was set up.
Finally, the “palm print” on the rifle was found in an area where it could have been left only when the rifle was disassembled. “Hard” evidence? Even the Warren Commission reported that the Dallas police identification bureau couldn’t find Oswald’s prints on the rifle at the scene. This led to speculation that Oswald’s palm print had been placed on the rifle after it had been in police custody (the official identity of the rifle only changed from Mauser to Carcano after it had been in the possession of the FBI). Epstein is so trusting of the Dallas police and every other concerned institution of state throughout all three books that the reviews should include one of those single-word versions, like “Riveting” or “Spell-binding.” For Inquest, it should be “Credulous.”
Counterplot deals exclusively with the trial of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw and is essentially a cover-to-cover, scathing indictment and take-down of late former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. This is sad, because although clearly Garrison was a showman, the flamboyant DA – despite having failed to convict the defendant of conspiring to murder President Kennedy – did capture the public’s imagination for years. Epstein excoriates Garrison as a “demagogue,” and whether or not this is true (the term is subjective), how could Garrison have become such a high-profile firebrand, garnering so much attention for so long? Answer: enduring public outrage over the assassination.
The problem with Epstein is that nothing outrages him. Watch interviews with him: he’s the kind of slow-gesticulating, smartest-guy-in-the-room intellectual at all times. Everything has a reasonable explanation that’s easily within his reach, even if no one else thinks things are quite that simple. That tone permeates everything Epstein writes, and it inspires neither hope nor confidence.
The best critique of Jim Garrison I’ve read is in Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years by David Talbot, who writes:
For Garrison to have ignored Marcello as an accomplice in the assassination is inexcusable, yet Epstein’s indictment of Garrison has nothing to do with overlooking Marcello. In fact, Marcello is only mentioned once in Counterplot, and only to point out that David Ferrie was Marcello’s employee as a way of somehow dismissing Garrison’s charge that Ferrie knew both Oswald (photographed as a teenager with Ferrie at a Civil Air Patrol cook-out) and Shaw (the two are photographed together in New Orleans twice). Garrison focuses on Oswald’s relationship with Ferrie and Shaw, ignoring Marcello; Epstein ignores Marcello and dismisses the idea that Oswald knew Ferrie and Shaw. In fact, Epstein treats Oswald’s five months in New Orleans in 1963 (April to September) as irrelevant to any discussion of the assassination. But since the 1992 publication of The Assassination Chronicles, too much has come to light to take this approach seriously. The omission seriously impeaches Epstein’s credibility and makes it look like he’s just venting a personal beef against Garrison.
The 1963 segment of the assassination saga played out in three cities: Dallas, New Orleans and Mexico City. Garrison launched his case when he discovered that Oswald had been in New Orleans for an extended period in 1963, and however badly he ended up going about the prosecution (often described as a ‘circus’), he was hardly misguided in launching it. Garrison’s most convincing commentary in his memoir, On the Trail of the Assassins, is that – if the CIA were trying to build a “legend” for Oswald as an assassin – there could be few better ways to do that than by making sure he was witnessed in the company of men (e.g. Shaw and Ferrie) who were overheard discussing the assassination of the President. Shaw was on the CIA’s “Domestic Contacts List.” He might indeed have been alerted by the CIA of the arrival of Oswald in New Orleans in April 1963.
To this day, Epstein still publicly calls Garrison a “fraud,” and while Garrison may have been a deeply flawed human being, just watching his half-hour speech on NBC in 1967 lays waste, I think, to Epstein’s portrayal of a man who didn’t believe in what he was doing:
Jim Garrison’s NBC Response on JFK Assassination
Garrison did “go mad,” but he also believed. For Epstein to devote so much time and ink to vehemently denouncing Garrison raises suspicion, naturally, that Epstein himself is the real “fraud.”
There is little point in going into Legend, the third book in the volume. It’s basically the prototype for Gerald Posner’s infamous Case Closed. At least with Case Closed, however, the author’s literary coloration is clear. To quote Ray and Mary LaFontaine in Oswald Talked, Posner is a “Warren pitbull”: he’s out to savage any and all “conspiracy critics” (i.e. anyone questioning the integrity of the Warren Report). That gives Posner a kind of “camp” or comic appeal. Epstein, by contrast, is more sinister.
In my own readings on the JFK assassination, I’ve encountered otherwise agreeable writers and researchers who refer to this or that person as a “good friend” even when the “friend” is on the diametrically opposite side in explaining the assassination. The great forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht describes the late Arlen Specter, who devised the obscene “Single Bullet Theory,” as having been a “good friend” of his (more recently I saw him praise the odious Dr. Anthony Fauci). Likewise, Roger Stone, author of The Man Who Killed Kennedy (about Lyndon Johnson’s role as mastermind of the assassination), has referred to Gerald Posner as a “friend” he’s had over to dinner at his home and so forth. I’m not aware of Epstein referring to anyone who disagrees with him on a fundamental issue as a “good friend,” but he does say that the late James Jesus Angleton, chief of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff, was his “friend.” What sort of “friendship” was that?
In an interview on YouTube with Epstein, at about the 44:00 mark, author Jefferson Morley (biographer of Angleton) asks Epstein whether – with all that has come to light about the role of Angleton in the Oswald mystery since Angleton’s death in 1987 – Epstein still trusts the answers Angleton gave him when he interviewed him many years ago. Epstein’s reaction (it isn’t really an answer) is uncomfortable to watch, but I think says a lot about the sort of person he is. This is not someone who cares about “truth” as an end in itself. He isn’t going to treat the assassination of President Kennedy as potentially the greatest American crime of the 20th Century, because that would only be true if it was the result of a conspiracy involving institutions of the American state (i.e. regime change). Epstein is, rather, someone who kicks up dust among those speculating, pondering, and agonizingly trying to reach a conclusion about a very painful episode in America’s history, but who then walks away. He doesn’t really answer any enduring questions, but he still rakes in “sensation money.” He’s not someone whose company I would choose if I could avoid it.
The most illustrative example of this sadistic indifference is his attitude toward speculation of the source of shots in Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination. At the same time that he dismisses the notion that any shots could have come from anywhere but the Texas School Book Depository, Epstein dismisses the Single Bullet Theory. Yet if Kennedy and Connally were not hit by the same bullet, and there was not enough time for a single shooter to fire off two shots in the time that the Zapruder Film shows Kennedy and Connally each being struck, then more than one gunman must have been firing from the Texas School Book Depository. In other words, there must have been a conspiracy.
Epstein doesn’t discuss conspiracy. In fact, he clearly recoils from the entire notion, because to delve into the subject would demote this haughty intellectual to the level of “common folk.” Only “common people” entertain “conspiracy theories.” If Epstein did that, he’d be like Jim Garrison, the angry populist lashing out in the dark on behalf of the “common man.” Epstein doesn’t give a damn about the common man, so he never entertains the notion of conspiracy – CIA, Mafia or other.
Personally, I think there were at least three gunmen in Dealey Plaza on the day, and I think it’s very possible that shots originated from both the Dal-Tex Building and the Dallas County Records Building, as well as the “Grassy Knoll.” Contrary to what Epstein says, the available autopsy photos and x-rays are woefully inadequate for determining the truth about the number and trajectories of bullets that hit Kennedy and Connally (most photos and x-rays are still concealed from the public, as Epstein knows). Also, there is no way “forensics” based on what was “found in the President’s car” mean anything. Epstein’s credulousness extends to all government agencies as paragons of virtue.
The government is still lying to us because it fears that if the truth were ever made public, the loss of American “prestige” would cause the public to lose faith in the integrity of government institutions. Our “socio-economic elite" fears the whole edifice of state institutions might collapse like a house of cards. So Epstein joins in with elite propping-up of those institutions, so he can go on being part of that elite. He wants to cling on to the comfy “prestige” he's always enjoyed until the day he dies. For him, the treasonous murder of a head of state is insufficient cause to upset what, for him, has been a long, lucrative and comfortable ride.
Inquest is considered one of the four original literary works in the “canon” of Warren Commission critiques. Unlike the other three – Whitewash by Harold Weisberg (1965), Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane (1966), and Accessories After the Fact by Sylvia Meagher (1967) – Inquest is not primarily an indictment of the way evidence was treated, but more an explanation of the inherent limitations of the Commission based on the way it was formed and the conditions under which it operated.
This is certainly interesting. I’d never read anywhere about the specific duties of each legal counsel, and Epstein’s description of how the “Single Bullet Theory” was developed by Arlen Specter is worth reading. Epstein secured interviews with both the legal counsel and the actual Commission members, producing candid and illuminating responses. That said, Inquest contains a passage which can only be described as astonishing based on facts that have come to light since it was written, even prior to Inquest’s republication in The Assassination Chronicles.
Since a policeman had encountered Oswald on the second floor shortly after the last shot was fired, there was also a question of time. Could Oswald have descended from the sixth to the second floor in the time it took the policeman to rush up to the second floor? In the reconstruction, [Commission Counsel Joseph] Ball clocked both the assassin’s and the policeman’s movements with a stopwatch and thereby showed that it was possible for Oswald to have been the assassin.
Whether a feat is “possible” is not a controlling factor in determining culpability under the law, which is meant to guarantee a presumption of innocence. But Epstein goes further.
To prove that Oswald was the assassin, Ball relied mainly on scientific evidence. This “hard” evidence was judiciously and methodically developed by Melvin Eisenberg before the Commission itself. The chain of evidence was indeed compelling.
Bullet fragments found in the President’s car were definitely matched by ballistic experts to the rifle found in the Texas Book Depository. The rifle was traced to Oswald, and handwriting experts helped confirm that Oswald had ordered and paid for the gun. In addition, fingerprint experts identified as Oswald’s a palm print taken from the rifle, and thus it was established that Oswald had had possession of the rifle. In short, the chain of evidence indisputably showed that Oswald’s rifle was used in the assassination.
Ball “proved” nothing. The presidential limousine (vital forensic evidence) was tampered with by Secret Service agents almost immediately after President Kennedy’s body had been removed from it at Parkland Hospital, when agents began cleaning the interior (there are photos of them doing it, a bucket on the ground beside them). The car was then taken to Love Field, flown to Washington, and parked in the White House garage. Since the homicide had occurred in Dallas, the car should have immediately been taken into police custody there. Yet the car was examined by no law enforcement until about 1 AM, when LBJ’s Secret Service allowed FBI agents into the White House garage. Except in Epstein’s legal universe, this is a broken “chain of evidence.”
As for who ordered the gun, this was never “proven” either. Despite prevailing law at the time, the post office kept no record of receipt by either Oswald or “A. J. Hidell,” the pseudonym Oswald supposedly used when he ordered it. This was a firearm, and under regulations governing firearms sent through the mail, the post office was legally obligated to retain the signed receipt for at least three years from the time the recipient took possession. In other words, Oswald was set up.
Finally, the “palm print” on the rifle was found in an area where it could have been left only when the rifle was disassembled. “Hard” evidence? Even the Warren Commission reported that the Dallas police identification bureau couldn’t find Oswald’s prints on the rifle at the scene. This led to speculation that Oswald’s palm print had been placed on the rifle after it had been in police custody (the official identity of the rifle only changed from Mauser to Carcano after it had been in the possession of the FBI). Epstein is so trusting of the Dallas police and every other concerned institution of state throughout all three books that the reviews should include one of those single-word versions, like “Riveting” or “Spell-binding.” For Inquest, it should be “Credulous.”
Counterplot deals exclusively with the trial of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw and is essentially a cover-to-cover, scathing indictment and take-down of late former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. This is sad, because although clearly Garrison was a showman, the flamboyant DA – despite having failed to convict the defendant of conspiring to murder President Kennedy – did capture the public’s imagination for years. Epstein excoriates Garrison as a “demagogue,” and whether or not this is true (the term is subjective), how could Garrison have become such a high-profile firebrand, garnering so much attention for so long? Answer: enduring public outrage over the assassination.
The problem with Epstein is that nothing outrages him. Watch interviews with him: he’s the kind of slow-gesticulating, smartest-guy-in-the-room intellectual at all times. Everything has a reasonable explanation that’s easily within his reach, even if no one else thinks things are quite that simple. That tone permeates everything Epstein writes, and it inspires neither hope nor confidence.
The best critique of Jim Garrison I’ve read is in Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years by David Talbot, who writes:
Throughout his years as district attorney, Garrison gave [New Orleans Mafia boss] Carlos Marcello a pass, going so far as to insist that the mobster, who called himself a tomato salesman, was “a respectable businessman.” In his 1988 memoir, Garrison wrote that he never came “upon evidence that [Marcello] was the Mafia kingpin the Justice Department says he is.” He conceded that the Mafia sometimes acted as a shadowy partner of the CIA, but the only significant role he believed the mob played in Dallas was as a convenient scapegoat for the intelligence agency. Kennedy had a more astute understanding of the way power in America worked: he recognized that institutions like the CIA sometimes became so entwined with the criminal underworld, it was difficult to tell them apart at the operational level.
For Garrison to have ignored Marcello as an accomplice in the assassination is inexcusable, yet Epstein’s indictment of Garrison has nothing to do with overlooking Marcello. In fact, Marcello is only mentioned once in Counterplot, and only to point out that David Ferrie was Marcello’s employee as a way of somehow dismissing Garrison’s charge that Ferrie knew both Oswald (photographed as a teenager with Ferrie at a Civil Air Patrol cook-out) and Shaw (the two are photographed together in New Orleans twice). Garrison focuses on Oswald’s relationship with Ferrie and Shaw, ignoring Marcello; Epstein ignores Marcello and dismisses the idea that Oswald knew Ferrie and Shaw. In fact, Epstein treats Oswald’s five months in New Orleans in 1963 (April to September) as irrelevant to any discussion of the assassination. But since the 1992 publication of The Assassination Chronicles, too much has come to light to take this approach seriously. The omission seriously impeaches Epstein’s credibility and makes it look like he’s just venting a personal beef against Garrison.
The 1963 segment of the assassination saga played out in three cities: Dallas, New Orleans and Mexico City. Garrison launched his case when he discovered that Oswald had been in New Orleans for an extended period in 1963, and however badly he ended up going about the prosecution (often described as a ‘circus’), he was hardly misguided in launching it. Garrison’s most convincing commentary in his memoir, On the Trail of the Assassins, is that – if the CIA were trying to build a “legend” for Oswald as an assassin – there could be few better ways to do that than by making sure he was witnessed in the company of men (e.g. Shaw and Ferrie) who were overheard discussing the assassination of the President. Shaw was on the CIA’s “Domestic Contacts List.” He might indeed have been alerted by the CIA of the arrival of Oswald in New Orleans in April 1963.
To this day, Epstein still publicly calls Garrison a “fraud,” and while Garrison may have been a deeply flawed human being, just watching his half-hour speech on NBC in 1967 lays waste, I think, to Epstein’s portrayal of a man who didn’t believe in what he was doing:
Jim Garrison’s NBC Response on JFK Assassination
Garrison did “go mad,” but he also believed. For Epstein to devote so much time and ink to vehemently denouncing Garrison raises suspicion, naturally, that Epstein himself is the real “fraud.”
There is little point in going into Legend, the third book in the volume. It’s basically the prototype for Gerald Posner’s infamous Case Closed. At least with Case Closed, however, the author’s literary coloration is clear. To quote Ray and Mary LaFontaine in Oswald Talked, Posner is a “Warren pitbull”: he’s out to savage any and all “conspiracy critics” (i.e. anyone questioning the integrity of the Warren Report). That gives Posner a kind of “camp” or comic appeal. Epstein, by contrast, is more sinister.
In my own readings on the JFK assassination, I’ve encountered otherwise agreeable writers and researchers who refer to this or that person as a “good friend” even when the “friend” is on the diametrically opposite side in explaining the assassination. The great forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht describes the late Arlen Specter, who devised the obscene “Single Bullet Theory,” as having been a “good friend” of his (more recently I saw him praise the odious Dr. Anthony Fauci). Likewise, Roger Stone, author of The Man Who Killed Kennedy (about Lyndon Johnson’s role as mastermind of the assassination), has referred to Gerald Posner as a “friend” he’s had over to dinner at his home and so forth. I’m not aware of Epstein referring to anyone who disagrees with him on a fundamental issue as a “good friend,” but he does say that the late James Jesus Angleton, chief of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff, was his “friend.” What sort of “friendship” was that?
In an interview on YouTube with Epstein, at about the 44:00 mark, author Jefferson Morley (biographer of Angleton) asks Epstein whether – with all that has come to light about the role of Angleton in the Oswald mystery since Angleton’s death in 1987 – Epstein still trusts the answers Angleton gave him when he interviewed him many years ago. Epstein’s reaction (it isn’t really an answer) is uncomfortable to watch, but I think says a lot about the sort of person he is. This is not someone who cares about “truth” as an end in itself. He isn’t going to treat the assassination of President Kennedy as potentially the greatest American crime of the 20th Century, because that would only be true if it was the result of a conspiracy involving institutions of the American state (i.e. regime change). Epstein is, rather, someone who kicks up dust among those speculating, pondering, and agonizingly trying to reach a conclusion about a very painful episode in America’s history, but who then walks away. He doesn’t really answer any enduring questions, but he still rakes in “sensation money.” He’s not someone whose company I would choose if I could avoid it.
The most illustrative example of this sadistic indifference is his attitude toward speculation of the source of shots in Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination. At the same time that he dismisses the notion that any shots could have come from anywhere but the Texas School Book Depository, Epstein dismisses the Single Bullet Theory. Yet if Kennedy and Connally were not hit by the same bullet, and there was not enough time for a single shooter to fire off two shots in the time that the Zapruder Film shows Kennedy and Connally each being struck, then more than one gunman must have been firing from the Texas School Book Depository. In other words, there must have been a conspiracy.
Epstein doesn’t discuss conspiracy. In fact, he clearly recoils from the entire notion, because to delve into the subject would demote this haughty intellectual to the level of “common folk.” Only “common people” entertain “conspiracy theories.” If Epstein did that, he’d be like Jim Garrison, the angry populist lashing out in the dark on behalf of the “common man.” Epstein doesn’t give a damn about the common man, so he never entertains the notion of conspiracy – CIA, Mafia or other.
Personally, I think there were at least three gunmen in Dealey Plaza on the day, and I think it’s very possible that shots originated from both the Dal-Tex Building and the Dallas County Records Building, as well as the “Grassy Knoll.” Contrary to what Epstein says, the available autopsy photos and x-rays are woefully inadequate for determining the truth about the number and trajectories of bullets that hit Kennedy and Connally (most photos and x-rays are still concealed from the public, as Epstein knows). Also, there is no way “forensics” based on what was “found in the President’s car” mean anything. Epstein’s credulousness extends to all government agencies as paragons of virtue.
The government is still lying to us because it fears that if the truth were ever made public, the loss of American “prestige” would cause the public to lose faith in the integrity of government institutions. Our “socio-economic elite" fears the whole edifice of state institutions might collapse like a house of cards. So Epstein joins in with elite propping-up of those institutions, so he can go on being part of that elite. He wants to cling on to the comfy “prestige” he's always enjoyed until the day he dies. For him, the treasonous murder of a head of state is insufficient cause to upset what, for him, has been a long, lucrative and comfortable ride.
July 16, 2024
A COLLECTION OF ONE JOURNALIST'S WRITINGS ABOUT THE JFK MURDER
Edward Jay Epstein (born 1935) is an American investigative journalist; this 1992 book is actually a republication of three of his earlier books ('Inquest: The Warren Commission and the establishment of Truth,' 'Counterplot: Garrison vs. Oswald, Ferrie, Shaw, Warren Commission, FBI CIA, the Media, the Establishment,' and 'Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald,' along with new material.
He asserts that the Warren Commission investigation was under "time pressure" to complete its report before the 1964 election, and that "instead of conducting the exhaustive, no-stone-left-unturned investigations that had been represented to the public, had presided over a hasty, limited investigation that had not always been able to insulate itself from political and national security considerations. The result was that it had failed to answer the primary questions of whether Oswald had acted alone or in concert with others." (Pg. 13-14)
While he generally praises the "laudable work" of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, he criticizes their conclusion that JFK was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy," because he claims the conclusion was "based on a single piece of new evidence"---an audio tape made AFTER the assassination, so that "The committee's experts... had simply analyzed the wrong tape, and the committee's revised 'conspiracy' conclusion, incredibly enough, proceeded from this error." (Pg. 22-24)
He later notes evidence that Oswald was "a poor shot" (Pg. 152); he is strongly critical of D.A. Jim Garrison's (author of On the Trail of the Assassins) suggestion that that autopsy material was classified by the CIA, or the Johnson administration: "the material was 'classified' ... by the Kennedy family." (Pg. 254)
This is a useful (and economical!) collection of writings, that will be of interest to those studying the JFK assassination.
Edward Jay Epstein (born 1935) is an American investigative journalist; this 1992 book is actually a republication of three of his earlier books ('Inquest: The Warren Commission and the establishment of Truth,' 'Counterplot: Garrison vs. Oswald, Ferrie, Shaw, Warren Commission, FBI CIA, the Media, the Establishment,' and 'Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald,' along with new material.
He asserts that the Warren Commission investigation was under "time pressure" to complete its report before the 1964 election, and that "instead of conducting the exhaustive, no-stone-left-unturned investigations that had been represented to the public, had presided over a hasty, limited investigation that had not always been able to insulate itself from political and national security considerations. The result was that it had failed to answer the primary questions of whether Oswald had acted alone or in concert with others." (Pg. 13-14)
While he generally praises the "laudable work" of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, he criticizes their conclusion that JFK was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy," because he claims the conclusion was "based on a single piece of new evidence"---an audio tape made AFTER the assassination, so that "The committee's experts... had simply analyzed the wrong tape, and the committee's revised 'conspiracy' conclusion, incredibly enough, proceeded from this error." (Pg. 22-24)
He later notes evidence that Oswald was "a poor shot" (Pg. 152); he is strongly critical of D.A. Jim Garrison's (author of On the Trail of the Assassins) suggestion that that autopsy material was classified by the CIA, or the Johnson administration: "the material was 'classified' ... by the Kennedy family." (Pg. 254)
This is a useful (and economical!) collection of writings, that will be of interest to those studying the JFK assassination.
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