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

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

Blowup: Was the shadowy form under the tree leaves the head of an assassin holding a rifle?

originated in a hoax, hatched in December 1963 by two Texas newsmen and a Dallas assistant D.A. who suspected the bureau of tapping their phones. As one of the reporters, Alonzo Hudkins, recounted it, the three set out to prove their suspicion by staging a conference call, referring to Oswald as an informant and debating what his number was—S-179 or 172. Sure enough, said Hudkins, an agent materialized within a half hour, dropped a few off-the-point questions, then asked casually: "Say, have you heard anything about a secret payroll number Oswald may have had?" Hudkins played dumb, and heard nothing more of the tale until a New York newspaper printed Hoover's denial—before the charge had ever reached print.

The 'Dirty Rumor': The commission's critics maintain that, whatever the merits, it did not pursue the agency connections hard enough, and instead took the FBI and CIA denials at face value. Their exhibit A is a lately surfaced transcript of a closed-door commission meeting in January 1964, at which staff director J. Lee Rankin began unhappily: "We do have a dirty rumor [about Oswald as informant S-179] ... and it must be wiped out insofar as it is possible to do so by this commission." What follows is a long, unflattering debate in which the commission wobbles indecisively between offending Hoover by mounting its own investigation, or merely accepting his word—even on the advice of former CIA director Allen Dulles that Hoover would probably lie if it were so. They settled on a "marriage" of the two approaches, but critics charge they did precious little independent inquiry.

The Flaws: The "rumor" was an insubstantial one to start with, as the commission staff may have sensed from the first; one of the Texas lawmen who reported it to them, in any event, was the assistant D.A. who had helped make it up. Most accounts of the meeting, moreover, unkindly omit a second sentence from Rankin's opening remarks, in which he admonishes the commission that the country will expect it "to try to find out the facts... [so it] can fairly say, 'In our

opinion, he was or was not an employee of any intelligence agency of the United States.' If the ensuing inquiry did not go much beyond Hoover's flat denial, it did substantially undercut the tale that Oswald drew down $200 a month. The commission published an exhaustive 100-page anatomy of Oswald's finances over his last seventeen months, during which he earned $3,655 and pinched every penny of it; it uncovered no evidence that any hidden benefactor was doubling his income under the table.

The No-Oswald Theory: For years, various conspiracy theorists have posited the possibility that there may have been two or even three Oswalds, one the real article, the other (or others) assigned by unknown conspirators to prepare weeks and months ahead for his frame-up by planting incriminating clues about him. In the new wave, Peter Dale Scott, a Berkeley medievalist and assassination buff, has added an ingenious new wrinkle: that there may have been no real Oswald at all. One principal source of this speculation is that Oswald's height—5 feet 9 at his death—fluctuates in various physical-examination records over four years between 5 feet 8 and 5 feet 11. Says Scott: "I'm really intrigued that the only reality of Lee Harvey Oswald is some documents, a passport which was used by different people. Who was Lee Harvey Oswald? Who ever

Superbull--Both JFK and Connally?

happened to be carrying the passport."

The Flaws: Such records are often carelessly made; the one that says Oswald was 5 feet 8, for instance, is accompanied by a photograph of Oswald standing against a wall grid on which his height is 5 feet 9. In any case, if there was no Lee Harvey Oswald, who is the woman who for 35 years has been claiming to be Lee Harvey Oswald's mother?

The Plumber Connection: A number of conspiratorialists, notably comedian Dick Gregory, have promoted the theory that Watergate conspirators E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis may have been present—and in fact briefly detained—at the assassination scene. Their "evidence" is a press photo of the Dallas police with three unidentified "tramps" in tow; the shortest of the three looks to some doubters like Hunt, the tallest like Sturgis. The implication: the plumbers to-be were somehow associated with the events that bloody noonday in Dallas.

Tha Flaws: The look-alikes, on close inspection, don't. The "Hunt" figure seems older in 1963, when he would have been 45, than he does now at 56, and the "Sturgis" Doppelgänger is craggier and fairer than his real-life incarnation.

What the doubters have confirmed, after a dozen years' labor, is that the Warren inquiry was a flawed and at critical moments a timid one. What they have yet to provide is a satisfying alternative to the official theory—a hypothesis that does not require whole squads of assassins vanishing into thin air and whole platoons of lawmen conspiring successfully over a decade and more to protect them. The conspiracy theorists may, as they claim, have raised enough reasonable doubt to warrant reopening the case, in a committee of Congress or some other open and independent forum. But it would be perilously wishful thinking to expect such an inquiry to lay all doubts to rest—to make order of the chaos of Dallas, Nov. 22, 1903, or to promulgate some final, symmetrical "truth" about the death of John F. Kennedy.