Reclaiming History (391 page)

^*
Although Belli was the most famous trial lawyer in America at the time, he had achieved his fame in the practice of civil law, while Darrow had achieved his in criminal law.

^*
See endnote discussion for possibility that if I had waited to interview Marina, as I was going to do, I may not have gotten to interview her.

^*
On September 9, 1964, Marina told the Warren Commission, “I have no doubt that he did kill the president” (5 H 608). As late as November 23, 1980, she told Dan Carmichael of United Press International that her husband was “not innocent” of Kennedy’s murder. But I knew Marina had come a long way since she told
Dallas Morning News
reporter Hugh Aynesworth a few months after the assassination how “ashamed and sorry” she was for what her husband had done (
Dallas Morning News
, March 7, 1964, sect.4, p.1).
The first time Marina publicly asserted a change in her position was in a November 1988 interview in
Ladies’ Home Journal
, and she had only come three-quarters of the way to where she is today. “It was a very complicated plot, brilliantly executed,” she told the
Journal
. “Could any intelligent person believe that that kind of thing was organized by one man? When Lee was arrested, I remember he said, ‘I’m a patsy.’ I strongly believe that with all the evidence that has come to light, he probably was telling the truth…I don’t think that all this was about John F. Kennedy. It was more about Robert, who was going after organized crime, and who would not be attorney general anymore if his brother was killed. When I was questioned by the Warren Commission, I was a blind kitten. Their questioning left me only one way to go; guilty. I made Lee guilty. He never had a fair chance…I buried all his chances by my statements…But I was only twenty-two then, and I’ve matured since. I think differently. [I’m sure you do, Marina, but I didn’t know that all the things you told the Warren Commission and FBI you saw with your own eyes and heard with your own ears actually never happened. Your eyes and ears hadn’t “matured” yet at the tender age of twenty-two? In any event, and this is a critical point that has to be noted, other than her belief in her husband’s guilt,
Marina has never retracted any of the testimony she gave to the Warren Commission and later to the HSCA
.] Only half the truth has been told. I want to find out the whole truth. It may be a bitter truth at the end for me. But I want the truth. In America, a wonderful country, you should get the truth.” (Blythe and Farrell, “Marina Oswald, Twenty-five Years Later,” pp.183, 237) By 1992, Marina told
Time
that “Lee simply did not shoot anybody,” adding, “I do believe it was a conspiracy, carefully orchestrated and covered up” (“Marina’s Turn,” p.71).

^*
Indeed, the only compliment that Marina would accept from me in our two conversations was when I told her she was “a down-to-earth person.” “Thank you,” she said.

^*
The late Mary Ferrell, a conspiracy researcher from Dallas, said she had books in her collection saying that the Martians and Venusians were responsible for the assassination (
Dallas Morning News
, November 20, 1983). Ferrell is believed to have had the largest private collection of JFK assassination–related documents ever, but sold it to an individual named Oliver Curme from California for a sum in excess of $1.5 million (
JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly
, January 2003, p.35).

^*
At least one writer (not even a confirmed conspiracy theorist, but obviously eager to join in the confirmed silliness) posits the possibility that two assassins fired from virtually the same spot. “Even if it were determined,” Edward Jay Epstein says, “that all the bullets fired came from the same rifle—and microballistic analyses of the fragments recovered indicated they were fired from Oswald’s weapon—it would still be at least
theoretically
conceivable that the rifle was passed from the hands of one sniper to another between shots” (Epstein,
Legend
, p.334). Yes, and it is also
theoretically
possible that the assassin was a robed nun whose eyes were closed and who used her Catholic prayer book as a gun rest.

^*
No, really. Per
Newsweek
, someone at the November 1991 Assassination Symposium in Dallas argued that “Kennedy was shot by LBJ himself, who concealed his six-guns under a cape” (Gates with Manly, Foote, and Washington, “Bottom Line: How Crazy Is It?” p.52).

^*
After all, as early as 1947, an English physician diagnosed JFK’s Addison’s disease during his trip to Ireland, and when Kennedy returned to the states from London in September of 1947, “he was so ill that a priest came aboard the
Queen Mary
to give him extreme unction [the “last rites” of the Catholic Church] before he was carried off the ship on a stretcher” (Dallek,
Unfinished Life
, p.153).

†A variation of this notion is that spun by Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, to author Jean Stafford. Although she told Stafford her son had been “framed” for Kennedy’s murder, she allowed, “Now maybe Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin. But does that make him a louse? No. No! Killing does not necessarily mean badness. You find killing in some very fine homes for one reason or another. And as we know, President Kennedy was a dying man. So I say it is possible that my son was chosen to shoot him in a mercy killing for the security of the country. And if this is true, it was a fine thing to do and my son is a hero.” (Stafford,
Mother in History
, pp.12, 18)

^*
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, did not free a single slave since
almost all
the slaves at that time, close to four million, were in the South (all were below the Mason-Dixon line), which was then under the control of the Confederate Army.

†Though it is frequently stated in the many lists of Lincoln-Kennedy coincidences that Lincoln’s secretary was named Kennedy, his main secretary was John G. Nicolay. Lincoln’s only other secretary was John Hay.

‡ Nearly all Lincoln-Kennedy coincidence lists say that “Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, shot Lincoln in a theater, then fled to a warehouse. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, shot Kennedy from a warehouse and fled to a theater.” But Booth fled on horseback to the Maryland home of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, who treated Booth’s broken left leg. Booth was shot to death by a Union sergeant while hiding in a burning barn in Virginia twelve days after he shot Lincoln.

§ Contrary to what some lists say, Mrs. Lincoln was seated to Lincoln’s right, while we know Mrs. Kennedy was seated to Kennedy’s left.

^*
Though it is frequently stated in the lists of Lincoln-Kennedy coincidences that Booth was born in 1839 and Oswald in 1939, Booth was born in 1838. Also, it is frequently stated that Booth and Oswald were southerners. But though Booth clearly was on the side of the South during the Civil War, he was born in Maryland, the northernmost of the slave states that was nevertheless a part of the Union during the Civil War. Indeed, one of the biggest defeats suffered by the Confederate forces of General Robert E. Lee in Lee’s move north was the battle of Antietam in Maryland in 1862, when the Union Army repulsed the Confederate advance in what may have been the bloodiest single day (September 17) of the entire Civil War, with 23,000 Union and Confederate soldiers being killed or wounded. Although Maryland is below the Mason-Dixon line, causing some people to consider Maryland a southern state, the famous line separated the free states from the slave states, not the North from the South. Maryland was and is a “border state” between the North and the South, but I don’t believe it is considered a southern state in the public consciousness.

^*
At 6:45 on the morning of December 12, 2003, a fifty-year-old Dallas man, Richard E. Clem, fired a bullet into his head while standing on the white X on Elm that marks where Kennedy was fatally wounded in the head forty years earlier. Clem, a twenty-seven-year postal employee, was found by the police lying in a pool of blood, his feet, perhaps unintentionally on his part, pointing toward the grassy knoll. Clem left no suicide note and his son was reluctant to say that his father’s decision to kill himself was due to the president’s assassination. He did say his father often went to Dealey Plaza to think, had read many books about the assassination, and was “greatly interested how our president could be murdered in broad daylight, in front of hundreds of people, police officers, secret service officers, etc., and still leave behind so many questions.” Clem was not known to be part of the conspiracy community. (Michael Grabell, “Man Found Shot Where JFK Slain,”
Dallas Morning News
, December 13, 2003, p.1B)