Collection of Assorted Newspaper and Magazine Clippings: Jfk Assassination, Conspiracy Theories, Etc

--these are some particular

with regard to the fact that we

are not the only one who is

reading on the Hill. We are not

and one day have added up a little side

time and presented it to our students

in Boston. After that, he got more invi-

tations, moves from college groups.

Katz and his friends started learning all they could about the assassination of JFK and the Warren Commission's investigation and they were puzzled and excited by what they heard. In the fall of 1973, after the Senate Watergate hearings, Katz, with the help of his Suddies, went national with a slide lecture called "Who Killed JFK?"

At first," says Dave Williams with disarming frankness, "I was just a pig. Just something to do. Maybe make a little money. Then we started getting more dates than one man could handle. We realized that the young people were hungry and thirsty for the truth. They had a feeling they'd been conned about the assassination. We put three teams on the road." In 1973 and 1974, the A18 hit more than 150 college campuses, from Maine to Hawaii. And the crowds kept getting bigger.

In the fall, after Nixon's demise and the succession of Gerald Ford, the kids crowded into the AIB lectures as never before. "You guys only charging $750!" said the campus honchos in charge of booking lecturers. "You're getting bigger crowds than anybody. You oughta charge more." The AIB didn't charge more.

Said Oglesby: "We think it's up to us to politicize this question. We want to take the information to a wide audience. We want the people at large to get so interested in answers that every presidential candidate in the '76 campaign will be forced to take a position on reopening the case. We want to make it a central issue of the campaign."

The ALB took a step toward that goal early in February by organizing a conference on the assassination. They assembled some of the nation's better-known critics for three days of open meetings and discussions. The list of invites was hardly a safe one; the ALB invited some whose work has already been discredited as a passel of lies and/or paranoid fabrications. "It's all right," said Oglesby. "Competition for the truth is good, because it forces everyone to make the best possible case."

Oglesby looks to the Sixties for his model. Our movement is likely to express itself like the Antiwar Movement did — with teach-ins all over the country.

Does Ogleby feel that veterans of the Awful Movement might be

I tell you I want to not involved because I believe there was a compd dictat in Park which has opposed our politics ever since. Since then, we've had a history of clandestine politics in the U.S.—and we're fighting that, too."

## V. THE PRESS OPERATION

Who will force the issue! It must begin with the press. Without pressure from the press, government officials do little. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst promised that the Justice Department would attack Watergate with "the most extensive, thorough and complete investigation since the assassination of President Kennedy." The Justice Department did that—and went no further up the line than Gordon Liddy. But the press didn't accept that official truth as the whole truth. The Washington Post went after the story and so (later) did the rest of the national press. Finally and almost reluctantly Congress acted.

Now, 11 years after the assassination of President Kennedy, the press must get back on the story it was once covering. Black in August 1966, an aide to the Kennedys who had served as a speechwriter for both President Kennedy and President Johnson, Richard N. Goodwin, called for a reopening of the case—and added that other friends of the Kennedys agreed with him.

By early 1967, both Life and the Saturday Evening Post did stories blasting many of the Warren Report's conclusions. Life used frames from the Zapruder film to make a case for a new official investigation. And the New York Times organized a task force of reporters under Harrison Salisbury "to go back over all the areas of doubt and . . . eliminate them."

But Salisbury and his team didn't eliminate the areas of doubt. In a recent interview, Salisbury said his task force got about halfway through the investigation when a standing request he had made for a visa to Hanoi came through at last. He put the JFK project on the shelf ("I was the only one who held all the strings;" he says, "and I didn't want to give the thing to anyone else") and flew off to Paris and Hanoi. Salisbury's dispatches from Hanoi caused a furo in Washington, and after he returned, he had to testify before congressional committees.

By April of 1967, Salisbury says, he and his team had simply "lost interest" in their JFK project. "Nobody told us to stop," he says. "We just felt that nobody cared."

Given notice he had returned out that he had not have much Salary does not remember that Goodsworth's activities were a factor in his decision to drop the investigation. As he tells us, there won't even an overt decision to drop it. He not had other than you do.

Good News. As new executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, was a member of Salsbury's team. He says now, "We took all the critics' complaints and we did our own investigation and we couldn't find anything that really held up." Martin Waldron, still a reporter for the Times in Texas, was another member of the team. He says that he and others came up with "a lot of unanswered questions." He doesn't know why the Times didn't bother to pursue them. He says he's not even sure that the Times ever made much of a decision to start looking in the first place. "I'd be off on a good lead and then somebody'd call me off and send me out to California on another story or something. We never really detached anyone for this. We weren't really serious."

After reporters from the national press saw Garrison at work (and the menagerie of assassination freaks that seemed to hover around Garrison), the media in general began to have less and less time and space for assassination stories. Editors began to classify every conspiracy theorist as a nut. Says the Washington Post's executive editor, Benjamin Bradlee, explaining why he has yet to put an investigative team on the JFK assassination story, "Ron Kessler did a recent story knocking down the second gun theory in the Robert Kennedy assassination and nuts from both coasts were all over me. Letters, telegrams, phone calls, personal visits. I've been up to my ass in lunatics." Bradlee's failure to commit the reportorial and financial resources of the Post (which also owns Newsweek) to any methodical investigation during the last dozen years is especially puzzling in view of the Post's courageous handling of Watergate and the intimate friendship Bradlee had with President Kennedy.

Editors, of course, sometimes categorize movements by pinning pejorative labels on the most extreme elements in each movement. Warren Commission critics became "paramoid conspiracy freaks" and, by the time Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy died at the hands of other assassins, the press was already committed to ignoring conspiracy talk. Quick denials of a conspiracy, in fact, became part of government protocol. The gov-

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