Reclaiming History (233 page)

The reason for Lane’s reluctance to release the tape of the conversation was now obvious. The tape had revealed his blatant attempt to improperly influence, almost
force
an uneducated and unsophisticated witness to say what he wanted her to say. Under oath, Lane quoted Mrs. Markham as having specifically told him that Officer Tippit’s slayer was “short, a little on the heavy side and his hair was somewhat bushy”—while the import of her words was something decidedly less than that.

We have all had the experience of sitting in an audience and feeling embarrassed for someone on the stage either because of his very poor performance or for some other reason. The latter was the situation when I debated Lane before a packed audience at Simmons College in Boston on the evening of December 2, 1986. Though the audience consisted mostly of conspiracy-leaning people, when I started to read to them Lane’s shameful questioning of Mrs. Markham, the embarrassment the audience felt for Lane was so pronounced that many began to dip their head, as you would to avert your eyes from someone you don’t want to look at. Halfway through my recitation of Lane’s performance, I mercifully said to the audience, “Have I read enough?” and the audience, by various sounds, let me know I had.

Lane was so embarrassed by it himself that when I debated him again at Nassau Community College on Long Island on April 15, 1992, and was about to read the Markham matter to the audience, he said something that not only reveals his knowledge of just how bad he was with Markham, but actually was funny. I started out by giving a fifteen-minute summary of the case. He commenced his fifteen minutes by saying that “everything Mr. Bugliosi said was a lie.” Later, during the question-and-answer period, I said, “What it comes down to is credibility. Who has credibility, the Warren Commission or Mr. Lane? I’d like to read something to you, Mr. Lane’s interview of a woman named Helen Markham, that bears on Mr. Lane’s credibility,” whereupon Lane interrupted and said, “I’ll sue if you get into this. It’s defamation,” adding that no one had asked me a question about it, and hence, I was just raising the matter myself, which he said I didn’t have a right to do. His position, of course, was utterly untenable, but he was so upset that I didn’t bother to go into the matter. Such a threatened lawsuit by Lane would stake out new legal ground. Not only is truth a complete defense against defamation, and I was about to read Lane’s own words, but defamation is when someone makes a false and harmful statement about you. Here, Lane would be arguing in effect that his own words defamed him, and therefore he didn’t want anyone to repeat them. I don’t know about you, but I think this is very funny.
*

On a companion matter, Lane had testified before the Warren Commission on March 4, 1964, that an informant told him that Bernard Weissman, a right-winger who had signed an anti-Kennedy advertisement in the
Dallas Morning News
on the morning of the assassination, had met with Jack Ruby and Officer Tippit at Ruby’s club, the Carousel, on the evening of November 14, 1963.
*
Weissman vehemently denied this and called into a radio talk show to ask Lane why he, Lane, had never “taken the trouble to contact” him and ask if it were true. Lane had told the Commission that he would try to get the informant to come forward, identify himself, and testify before the Commission.
⁴⁴
But when Lane came back to testify on July 2, 1964, he claimed that the informant would not give him permission to disclose his identity. When Rankin informed Lane that this was “no legal justification” for refusing to disclose the man’s identity, Lane responded, “I know that is true, there is no legal justification.” His position, however, was that “I have given my word to that person that I would not disclose his name.”

Chief Justice Warren: “We heard…when you were here in March—hopefully you would be able to tell us who this informant of yours was in Dallas concerning the so-called meeting between Jack Ruby and others in his nightclub. And we have been pursuing you ever since with letters and entreaties to give us that information so that we might verify what you said. Here we pay your expenses from Europe, bring you over here, and…you won’t answer that question. You come before the Commission and refuse to testify. Do you consider that cooperation?”
⁴⁵

Lane, in his book, says that his informant first gave this information to Thayer Waldo, a reporter for the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
. Lane writes, “If the Commission had wanted [the informant’s] name, it need only have asked one of its witnesses, Thayer Waldo…[Commission] Counsel, however, did not ask Waldo about the meeting.” Lane doesn’t explain why he told his readers, but not the Commission, that it was Waldo who had this information. He also doesn’t explain how the Commission Counsel could possibly have asked Waldo about this alleged meeting when the Commission members had no way of knowing he had any information concerning it.
⁴⁶
But at the end of the deposition of Waldo on his observations of Oswald and Ruby at the Dallas Police Department on November 23–24, 1963, Commission counsel asked Waldo, “Is there anything you want to add further, sir?” and Waldo, with the opportunity to add at this time the explosive information about the alleged meeting between Ruby and Officer Tippit, answered, “No.” Waldo went on to say, “I would simply offer you this, if it’s of any interest,” whereupon he volunteered that he and a colleague had collaborated on a manuscript about the assassination that they had not yet been able to place with a publisher, and he would let Commission members read it if they liked.
⁴⁷
But not a word about the Ruby-Tippit meeting. Lane goes on to say, with bottomless audacity, that the information about the Ruby-Tippit-Weissman meeting from Waldo “was valuable as a lead, one that merited the serious attention of the Commission. This…it failed to receive, for neither the Commission nor its agents appeared willing to investigate it.”
⁴⁸

In referring to the Markham and Weissman situations, Chief Justice Warren said this to Lane: “It is a matter of great concern to this Commission that you are unwilling to tell us about those things that you considered bear upon the guilt or innocence of Lee Harvey Oswald. And it handicaps us greatly in what we are trying to do, because of the things that you do say when you are away from the Commission, and then when you refuse to testify before us as to those very things that you discuss in public.”
⁴⁹
Speaking of Warren, Commission member Gerald Ford said, “The one time I saw him get irritated, and I mean really irritated, at a witness, was Mark Lane.”
⁵⁰
In a 1964 press conference, Governor Connally said, “It is shocking to me that in the backlash of tragedy, journalistic scavengers such as Mark Lane attempt to impugn the motives of these members of the Warren Commission, cast doubts upon the Commission as a whole, and question the credibility of the government itself.”

Lane was up to his old tricks in 1978 when he represented Martin Luther King’s assassin, James Earl Ray, before the HSCA. Let’s look at what the HSCA had to say about Lane in its final report: “Many of the allegations of conspiracy the committee investigated were first raised by Mark Lane, the attorney who represented James Earl Ray at the committee’s public hearings. As has been noted, the facts were often at variance with Lane’s assertions…In many instances, the committee found that Lane was willing to advocate conspiracy theories publicly without having checked the factual basis for them. In other instances, Lane proclaimed conspiracy based on little more than inference and innuendo. Lane’s conduct resulted in public misperception about the assassination of Dr. King and must be condemned.”
⁵¹

Lane’s bona fides as a skilled and dedicated soldier in the fight for civil liberties, whether as a “Freedom Rider” arrested in June of 1961 in Jackson, Mississippi, or as a lawyer defending beatnik coffeehouses in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s from the harassments of officialdom, are unquestioned, and it’s been written he had a sincere belief that the buttoned-down establishment was always a force far more evil than good.
⁵²
However, when we couple his demonstrated infidelity to the truth, and his deliberate distortion of the evidence, with the fact that virtually all intelligent people who are knowledgeable of the facts (both of which Lane is) know that Oswald killed Kennedy and almost assuredly acted alone, one is compelled to conclude that from the very beginning, Lane was a fraud in his preachments about the Kennedy assassination.

As a direct result of the unprincipled work of Lane and so many other conspiracy theorists, the polls show that an entire generation of Americans now “believe” that President Kennedy died as a result of a conspiracy. The students who crowded Lane’s lectures in the 1960s and 1970s are the parents and teachers of today. Unless this fraud is finally exposed, the word
believe
will be forgotten by future generations and John F. Kennedy will have unquestionably become the victim of a conspiracy. Belief will have become unchallenged fact, and the faith of the American people in their institutions further eroded. If that is allowed to happen, Lee Harvey Oswald, a man who hated his country and everything for which it stands, will have triumphed even beyond his intent on that fateful day in November.

One of the very most popular and durable myths about the Kennedy assassination that conspiracy theorists have successfully peddled to millions of Americans is that witnesses who knew things that the conspirators who killed Kennedy didn’t want anyone to know met “mysterious” or “suspicious” deaths. The myth has many inherent weaknesses, just one of which is that once someone has already told his story, the cat, as the expression goes, “is already out of the bag.” And that’s one of the main reasons why the conspiracy theorists’ mysterious-deaths argument, first brought to national attention through a promotional campaign for the 1973 movie
Executive Action
, is lame on its face. Many of the witnesses who allegedly died mysteriously had already told their stories.

When I was a prosecutor, there were several occasions where witnesses of mine were afraid to testify because they thought they would be killed if they did. If the witness was fearful of retaliation because his testimony would destroy a friend or relative, and I was unable to provide adequate protection for him, I would never, of course, put pressure on him to testify if he was unwilling to do so. We are all aware of the many examples of people killing others to “get even” with them for “squealing,” betraying a trust. But if the witness before me had no relationship at all with the person or group of people against whom he would be testifying, I was always able to convince him of the logic that the very safest thing for him to do
would
be to testify. If the person or group the witness feared knew he had something to say that could destroy them, the only legitimate fear was that they would kill him to
prevent
him from talking, that is, silence him
before
he talked. But once the witness talks and it’s part of the public record, not only wouldn’t the person or group achieve anything at all by killing the witness, but it could very definitely end up jeopardizing them. They would immediately be drawing attention and suspicion to themselves, since the person who testified
against them
had been murdered.

The genesis of the mysterious-deaths allegation goes back farther than the movie
Executive Action
. Penn Jones Jr., the late editor of a small, four-page weekly newspaper, the
Midlothian Mirror
, with a circulation of about five hundred
¹
in Midlothian, Texas (a semi-rural, one-yellow-page town of around 1,500 twenty-five miles southwest of Dallas), believed deeply in Oswald’s innocence.
*
In 1966 he self-published the first volume of his four-volume
Forgive My Grief
series in which he started alleging that people connected to or associated with the assassination in some way were suffering untimely and mysterious deaths—for instance, Earlene Roberts, the housekeeper of the rooming house where Oswald lived. But as the HSCA said, “There is no indication in the records relating to her death, or in Mr. Jones’ book, as to what exactly was mysterious about a 61-year-old woman with large calcium deposits and a case of pneumonia, dying of acute heart failure. The same is the case with other deaths cited in the same book, for example, Dr. Nicholas Chetta, the coroner…at David Ferrie’s death, and Thomas Howard, Jack Ruby’s attorney, both of whom died of heart attacks [Chetta in 1968, Howard in 1965].”
²
Jones tells his readers that his book “gives names and details of the strange deaths of…people who knew something, learned something, or saw something that was supposed to have remained secret.”
³

The biggest supporter of Jones’s fantastic charges was
Ramparts
magazine, a onetime Catholic quarterly turned New Left monthly out of San Francisco. After interviewing him several times and conducting what the editorial staff suggested was a thorough investigation, they bought his allegations completely, publishing many of his articles on mysterious deaths word for word and concluding “that Penn [Jones] was right when he said the Warren Report was a waste of paper.”
⁴
What gave tremendous aid to Penn Jones’s fantasies and mythology was a February 26, 1967, article in the
London Sunday Times
in which an actuary hired by the paper calculated that the odds of fifteen of the people Jones had listed as having died mysterious deaths (a list that included Oswald, Ruby, and Tippit) within a little over a three-year period after November 22, 1963 (up to the date of the article, February 26, 1967), were “100 trillion to one.” The article ended by observing that these “statistics are not proof of anything” but said that actuarial “science” pointed to foul play. The HSCA requested, in 1978, a copy of the actuarial study from the London paper and received a response on May 19, 1978, from the legal manager saying the article was “based on a careless journalistic mistake and should not have been published. This was realized by
The Sunday Times
editorial staff after the first edition—the one which goes to the United States and which I believe you have—had gone out, and later editions were amended…We asked [the actuary] the wrong question…what were the odds against fifteen
named people
out of the population of the United States dying within a short period of time…[instead of] the odds against fifteen of those included in the
Warren Commission Index
dying within a given period,” which they said would have been “much lower.” The editor said this was a “fundamental error…for which we apologize.”
⁵

Apart from the issue of fifteen
named
people out of the U.S. population as opposed to fifteen
un
named people from the Warren Commission Index (there are 2,479 people in the Commission Index),
⁶
the joker here is “named” people. For instance, if one were to ask what are the odds against one
named
person (out of any number, no matter how big or small) getting multiple sclerosis, they would be about 500 to 1, since about 1 out of 500 people in our population gets multiple sclerosis. However, if the question were what are the odds against one person (one person period, not one named person) out of 500 getting multiple sclerosis, they would be about 1 out of 1—in other words, it’s a virtual certainty, since 1 out of 500 people gets multiple sclerosis.

Millions of Americans are unaware of the above, and one hears, to this very day, everyday Americans who have accepted the mysterious-deaths allegation asking, “What is the likelihood that all these people connected with the assassination would end up dying mysterious deaths? One out of a trillion?”

When I asked Robert M. Musen, vice president and senior actuary at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York City, what the likelihood was that 15 out of 2,479 people aged forty (I just hazarded a guess of the median age of the 2,479 people in the Warren Commission Index, and I thought that forty would be a fair age to both sides in this debate) would die within a three-year period, he reported back to me that “based on the United States Life Tables from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for the closest years, 1959–1961, the likelihood that at least 15 would die would be 98.16 percent; that is, 1 out of 1.2.” (Musen said that the “U.S. Life Tables were based on data from the 1960 U.S. Census [180,671,000 people] and deaths occurring in the U.S. from 1959 to 1961.” The next census was ten years later.) For those who figure that age forty is too high, the numbers, per Musen, for thirty-five years old would be 57.09 percent and 1 out of 1.75. If forty is too low, the numbers for forty-five years old, he said, are 0.999996 percent; in other words, 100 percent, or 1 out of 1.
⁷
All of these figures are several light years away from “100 trillion to one,” right? So we learn that the number of people somehow associated with the Kennedy case who had died at the time of the
London Sunday Times
survey was completely normal—it was not unusual in any way.

P
erhaps the most prominent mysterious death the conspiracy theorists have cited is that of fifty-two-year-old
New York Journal-American
newspaper gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen,
*
who died in her New York City townhouse in the early morning hours of November 8, 1965. The reason for her prominence in conspiracy lore is that according to the theorists, she had interviewed Jack Ruby alone in the judge’s chambers during his trial and was about to break the case wide open; that is, assuming she had a story to tell, she had
not
yet told it.

Because the whole mysterious-deaths issue is nonsensical, with no merit to the charge ever being found for any of the deaths, and because the Kilgallen death is, as
Newsweek
correspondent Charles Roberts said, the
pièce de résistance
of the mysterious-deaths allegation, hers is the only one I shall devote a modest amount of time to. To give similar treatment to the other hundred alleged mysterious deaths would require a book in itself.

It should be pointed out that the
only source
for all the factual allegations surrounding Miss Kilgallen’s death (other than her actually dying, of course) is Penn Jones Jr., the original and leading proponent of the mysterious-deaths allegation. Jones writes in his
Forgive My Grief
series that “shortly before her death, Miss Kilgallen told a friend in New York that she was going to New Orleans in five days and break the case wide open.” Therefore, Jones says, Miss Kilgallen had to be silenced. But Jones gives no source for his allegation.
⁸

It should be noted that even if Kilgallen had interviewed Ruby (more on this later), for him to tell her anything that would break the case wide open presupposes that Ruby had anything to say. But since there’s no evidence whatsoever that the mob or anyone else got Ruby to kill Oswald for them (in fact, being who he was, he would be among the very last people to employ for such a mission), other than his psychotic ramblings (“Chief [Justice] Warren, your life is in danger in this city, do you know that”; “The Jewish people are being exterminated at this moment…a whole new form of government is going to take over our country”; etc.),
⁹
*
what valid, earth-shaking thing could Ruby possibly have told Kilgallen? And even if he did have something to say, if he didn’t want to tell it to the Warren Commission, or to any of his brothers and sisters whom he spoke to while in custody, why would he want to tell it to Miss Kilgallen, a gossip columnist?

Bill Alexander, the Dallas assistant district attorney who was the lead trial prosecutor in the Ruby trial, told me that the story that Kilgallen had a private interview with Ruby during the trial was “pure bull——. The sheriff’s office never let any of the reporters talk to Ruby.”
¹⁰

When I asked Hugh Aynesworth, veteran investigative reporter for the
Dallas Morning News
and
Newsweek
magazine who was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his coverage of the Kennedy assassination, Warren Commission, and Ruby trial,
†
what he knew about Kilgallen’s supposed interview with Ruby, he said, “I know it didn’t happen, and there was never any belief by the press corp in Dallas that it did.”

I asked Aynesworth whether Kilgallen herself had ever claimed to anyone or in any of her articles to having had a private interview with Ruby. “No,” he said, “never, not in any of her articles on the case, all of which I believe I’ve read, or to any of us who covered the trial. This allegation surfaced for the first time after Dorothy’s death when her New York hairdresser supposedly told Walter Winchell that Dorothy had told her she spoke to Ruby and was going to blow the case wide open.” Aynesworth, being a local reporter, knew the judge (“We were drinking buddies”), the DA, and the sheriff, and said if anyone had been allowed to speak with Ruby alone, it would have been he (he was the first member of the media to be granted an exclusive interview with Marina), but he added that no one in the media was allowed to speak with Ruby. “I and everyone else was turned down. The best we could do was shout questions to Ruby when he was being brought to the courtroom from the lockup.” When Sheriff Bill Decker (now deceased), whose office had custody of Ruby, heard of Kilgallen’s alleged claim to her hairdresser that she had spoken alone to Ruby, Aynesworth said Decker told him, “Hugh, it didn’t happen. These New York folks just make up stories.” Aynesworth said that the late district attorney Henry Wade also told him it didn’t happen. Aynesworth said the only person outside of Ruby’s family and close friends who did get into Ruby’s cell was a Los Angeles film producer who “somehow snuck in with Earl” (Ruby’s brother) and provided the audio equipment for Earl questioning Ruby for a documentary.

Aynesworth said if the authorities had ever granted any reporter an interview with Ruby, “like flies on a horse-dropping, they would have had to let all the rest of us in the media talk to him. It didn’t happen,” he reiterated.
¹¹

However, in her biography of Kilgallen, author Lee Israel says that Ruby’s co-defense counsel, Joe Tonahill, wrote her on January 12, 1978, that sometime in March of 1964, Kilgallen requested a private interview with Ruby. She told Tonahill she had a message to give to Ruby from “a mutual friend,” who Tonahill was led to believe was a singer from San Francisco. Tonahill made arrangements with Judge Joe B. Brown, who Israel writes was “awestruck by Dorothy,” for the interview to take place in a small office behind the judge’s bench. Kilgallen and Ruby spoke alone for about eight minutes. Israel wrote that “Dorothy would mention the fact of the interview to close friends, but
never
the substance. Not once, in her prolific published writings, did she so much as refer to the private interview.”
¹²

In any event, Jones’s story about Kilgallen having a story about the case from her interview with Ruby that would blow it wide open is wholly uncorroborated and very suspect. To make the tale even more malodorous, there wasn’t anything suspicious or mysterious about Miss Kilgallen’s death. Dr. James L. Luke, the Manhattan assistant medical examiner who conducted the autopsy, concluded in his report on November 15, 1965, that the cause of death was from “acute ethanol [medical term for alcohol] and barbiturate intoxication.” The quantity of alcohol and barbiturates in her bloodstream had not been excessive, but the combination had caused a fatal “depression on the central nervous system, which in turn caused her heart to stop.” There was no indication of violence, but it was “undetermined” whether the overdose was accidental or suicide. Dr. Luke told the
New York Times
that “it could have simply been an extra pill. We really don’t know. All we know is that depressants such as alcohol and barbiturates, one on top of another, are dangerous.”
¹³
About Kilgallen’s legendary drinking, Aynesworth said, “Dorothy was a very heavy drinker. I remember one night at one of Belli’s [Mel Belli, Ruby’s main defense lawyer] parties, she joked to me, ‘Hugh, you may have to write my story tomorrow.’”
¹⁴
Bill Alexander told me, “Whatever Dorothy Kilgallen said, she said through the bottom of a bottle of booze.”
¹⁵