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

The mystery of the mortal wound: Kennedy, still clutching at his throat wound, is hit with explosive force from behind . . .

# Dallas: New Questions and Answers

They are a breed apart—an odd-lot assortment of skeptics and ideologues, rationalists and fantasts who have never believed that Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed John F. Kennedy and have invested up to a dozen years of their lives in trying to disprove it. They flowered first in the middle '60s, then fell into discouraged retreat with the collapse of former New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison's jerry-built attempt to prove their case in court. But the true disbelievers are back now, more numerous and insistent than ever, with their three-Oswald and four-assassin scenarios and their dizzying exegeses of every scrap of paper and every frame of film on the JFK shelves in the National Archives. And this time, in a nation still traumatized by the crimes and lies of Watergate, they have found their widest audience yet for their demand that the inquest be reopened.

Their doubts, reasonable or not, have inspired at least two dozen nonfiction books, four novels, three feature films, several national conferences and a recent freshel of articles in journals ranging from Penthouse to Rolling Stone. A bootleg copy of the famed Zapruder home movie of the assassination-blood, brain fragments and all-has played twice this spring on network TV and numberless times to smaller audiences around the nation. A group of Old New Leftists in Cambridge, Mass., embraced

the cause and booked 250 campus lectures (at $780 each) in a single year. A Warren commission staff alumnus, who still believes that Oswald acted alone, has urged review of the case—and now Texas a U.S. Rep. Henry Gonzalez has formally proposed that Congress undertake the rehearing.

The Warren verdict is indeed threaded through with unanswered questions and unresolved anomalies. What its detractous offer in its place is one or another alternative hypothesis far tidier than the commission's one-man, one-gun analysis. But their sort of tidiness has its own vices. Supposition is elevated into fact; accident becomes criminal design; evidence is accepted on faith if it fits a conspiracy theory and rejected as manufactured if it does not. The doubters, moreover, have never harmonized their own doubts about whether or not Oswald was involved at all, or how many assassins fired how many shots, or who might have put them up to it—the CIA, or the Mafia, or the Communists, or Texas oil, or some other party or parties unknown.

Still, amid the mélange of fact and guess, reason and imagination, there are provocative questions:

## DIO OSWALD DO IT?

The Voice Test: "I didn't shoot anybody, no sir," Oswald told an interviewer at Dallas police headquarters, and many

doubters have always chosen to believe him. Now they have been joined by a sometime CIA computer analyst, George O'Toole, who played a tape of Oswald's denial to a Psychological Stress Evaluator—a device that supposedly measures and charts tension in a person's voice—and found none of the bunched-up, hedge-shaped clusters of squiggles that commonly accompany lying. In Penthouse and in a newly published book, "The Assassination Tapes," O'Toole rendered his unambiguous judgment: "Quite clearly, Lee Harvey Oswald was telling the truth."

The Flaws: The PSE, while gradually gaining acceptance, remains controversial among experts in lie-detection; neither the FBI nor the CIA uses it, and Dr. Joseph Kubis, a Fordham psychologist who tested it extensively for the Army, came away doubting its validity. There remains, moreover, the powerful circumstantial case that Oswald was involved, alone or not. The only known murder weapon, a 1940 Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, was traced to him and bore his palmprint; the only recovered cartridges and bullet fragments were traced to the rifle; the revolver that killed Dallas police patrolman J.D. Tippit was in Oswald's possession when he was arrested in a movie theater 80 minutes after the assassination. Even some conspiracy theorists concede the case, and David

Oswald's voice chart: Did the absence of stress signs amid the squiggles prove his innocence of murdering JFK?