TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/011392/0113600.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 15.8 KB | 315 lines

                                                                                HISTORY, Page 54

Taking a Darker View


The conspiracy theories reflected in JFK may not be persuasive,
but they churn up a murky underside of America

By RON ROSENBAUM


    Three weeks after its release, Oliver Stone's film JFK
continues to stir passions and debate, and to prompt calls for
the release of secret government files on the Kennedy
assassination. Last week the controversy drew a response from
President Bush, who said while traveling in Australia that
although he had not seen the movie, he had no reason to doubt
the Warren Commission's finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted
alone in shooting Kennedy. While no new evidence has emerged,
the film has focused attention on the band of mostly
self-appointed experts who zealously pursue theories of a wider
plot. This subculture is explored here by Ron Rosenbaum, a
contributing editor of Vanity Fair and the author of Travels
with Doctor Death, who has written extensively on conspiracy
theories.


    Some years ago, during a telephone interview, I finally
succeeded in badgering Jim Garrison into naming the Name. For
years Garrison had been telling people he had the whole case
cold: he knew who gave the orders, who fired the shots and from
where. Still, though he had talked a lot about the Big Guys
behind the plot -- intelligence agencies, the
military-industrial complex and the like -- he had never
publicly named the name of the man he believed fired the fatal
head shot from the grassy knoll.

    I won't tell you that name, because Garrison didn't give
me any evidence for singling out this person for historic
infamy. On another day, I felt, he might have picked another
name out of the hat.

    Still, for one guilty moment I had the kind of thrill that
assassination buffs live for: I had the Name everyone else was
looking for and no one else had. Of course, it wasn't an
entirely unknown name. Garrison told me the person had been
questioned extensively by Warren Commission investigators, and
when I looked him up in the Warren Commission testimony, I found
he plays a kind of Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern-level role in
the Warren Report, that of a peripheral figure in a key place:
he was a live-in manager and janitor at Jack Ruby's sleazy strip
joint, the Carousel Club. There's no doubt that the commission
investigators were interested in his story -- the transcript of
his testimony runs more than 200 pages -- but mostly because he
was a source who might shed some light on the peculiarities of
Jack Ruby's character (investigators repeatedly pressed the Name
on whether Ruby had any sexual interest in his beloved dog
Sheba).

    Though reading the testimony didn't give me much
intimation of an assassination revelation, it was a revelation
of another kind. In telling his life story, of how he wound up
in the Carousel Club in 1963, the Name was telling a story of
an American life -- of an America -- far different from the one
I'd known in my suburban hometown.

    It was a story of a guy who made his living in the
carnival world; he worked as a barker with small-time freak-show
acts like "the two-headed baby" and "the snake girl," he told
the Warren Commission. He bummed around looking for roustabout
jobs, met his first wife at a Salvation Army mission. When she
left him in the summer of 1963, he hitchhiked all the way from
the West Coast to Dallas looking for her. Picked up some work
at the Texas state fair in a carney sideshow called "How
Hollywood Makes Movies," which featured some of Jack Ruby's
strippers. Made some connections and soon found himself living
in the back room of the Carousel Club in the midst of Ruby's
strange menage, which included strippers, burlesque comics,
stage hypnotists and, of course, the dog Sheba.

    I remember reading this testimony, mesmerized by my sudden
immersion in a carnival-sideshow underbelly of American life.
(The 26 volumes of Warren Commission testimony are like a vast,
inchoate Great American Novel in that respect.) I didn't feel
I was any closer to solving the Kennedy assassination, but I did
feel I had learned more about the America that produced both
Kennedy and his assassin than was conveyed by the bland,
complacent sitcom image of the nation and its institutions that
prevailed in November 1963.

    And that, I believe, is the real legacy of nearly three
decades of revisionist Kennedy-assassination investigation. We
may not ever know with certainty the Name or the Names. But we
do have a much darker, more complex, less innocent vision of
America, produced by the murk that has been churned up by the
dissidents.

    Consider the FBI. In 1963 few dissented from the view that
its director, J. Edgar Hoover, was a peerless, incorruptible
leader, a gangbuster nonpareil. He said so himself. Now, we may
not want to agree with the conclusion of the latest
FBI-centered conspiracy-theory book Act of Treason: The Role of
J. Edgar Hoover in the Assassination of President Kennedy. The
author, Texas attorney Mark North, accuses Hoover of
deliberately withholding knowledge of a Mafia assassination plot
against J.F.K. because he hated the Kennedy brothers and had
enough dirt on L.B.J. to control him. But North's accumulation
of documentary evidence of the ugly blackmail intrigues Hoover
was weaving in the cellars of Camelot is perhaps even more
damning than the allegations of treason.

    Much of this has been reported earlier: the way Hoover
pressured the Kennedys into letting him bug the bedrooms of
Martin Luther King Jr.; how he subtly blackmailed the Camelot
kids over their bedroom sports, including J.F.K.'s romps with
the girlfriend of godfather Sam Giancana and (probably) with
Marilyn Monroe. We know that while Hoover was passing around
tapes of creaking bedsprings, he was letting the Mob grow
unchecked and was going easy on deep sewers of Washington
corruption like the Bobby Baker case to protect patrons like
L.B.J.

    Or consider the CIA. To those who knew of it at all in
1963, it was still living off the glamour of its wartime OSS
(Office of Strategic Services) legend -- the dashing
blue-blooded oh-so-social spies, American James Bonds. Even the
black eye of the Bay of Pigs fiasco could be attributed to
Kennedy's failure of nerve rather than to the Harvard and Yale
ole boys who drew up the plans. From almost the very beginning,
the CIA has been a focus of Kennedy-assassination conspiracy
theories (bitterness by some agents over Kennedy's Bay of Pigs
"betrayal" was an obvious motive). This year the first and most
relentless conspiracy theorist of them all, Mark Lane, has come
out with a book, Plausible Denial, which targets high-level CIA
figures as the plotters behind the assassination. Lane presents
what he calls new and conclusive evidence that the CIA was
setting up Oswald in the months before the assassination by
having an Oswald impersonator meet with Soviet and Cuban agents
in Mexico City, the better to frame him as a Commie assassin.

    Again, even if we don't buy Lane's conclusion about CIA
complicity in the Kennedy assassination, 20 years of
investigations have shown that the CIA was no stranger to
complicity in assassinations. We know how the best and brightest
blue bloods bonded with the bloodiest and dirtiest Mafia hit men
in plots to kill Castro. We know the freak-show side of the
agency that used damagmind-control drugs on unsuspecting
citizens; we know that the agency's own top counterspy, James
Angleton, paralyzed the place with his paranoid suspicions that
KGB moles and false defectors had penetrated the CIA in order
to, among other things, conceal the Soviets' true role in the
J.F.K. assassination. Even David Belin, the former Warren
Commission staff member who is fighting what he calls a "David
and Goliath battle" to defend the Warren Commission's
lone-gunman conclusion, declares in his book Final Disclosure
that the CIA blatantly deceived his beloved Warren Commission --
specifically that it "deliberately withheld evidence" of the
CIA-Mafia plots against Castro.

    Now consider the Kennedys themselves. Inevitably the
darker, carnivalesque vision of America that has emerged in the
wake of post-assassination investigations has not exempted
them. Curiously, otherwise skeptical assassination buffs are
among the last misty-eyed believers in Camelot. They still hold
to the primal scenario sketched in Oliver Stone's JFK: a
Galahad-like John Kennedy gallantly battling the sinister
right-wing military-industrial complex to bring the troops home,
ban the Bomb and ensure racial equality on the home front -- a
Kennedy killed because he was just too good to live.

    You can hear other echoes of this naive vision in such
conspiracy-theory compendiums as Jim Marrs' Crossfire: The Plot
That Killed Kennedy, which was a key source for Stone. Marrs
sums up his account of the Bad Guys in the plot, laboring to
leave no one out: "Who done it? . . . Powerful men in the
leadership of the U.S. military, banking, government,
intelligence and organized-crime circles ordered their faithful
agents to manipulate Mafia-Cuban-agency pawns to kill the
chief."

    But what's more interesting is Marrs' arcadian vision of
what America might be like today if J.F.K. had lived: "No
divisive Vietnam war . . . [no] Watergate, no other political
assassinations, or the Iran-contra-Pentagon-CIA attempt at a
secret government. Detente with communist Russia and China . . .
[would have saved defense dollars] that could have been put
to use caring for the needy and cleaning up the environment . . .
no organized-crime control over drugs, gambling . . . even
toxic waste . . ." One feels Marrs believes that if Kennedy had
lived the toxic waste just wouldn't have been as toxic anyway,
because of all the fine, purifying Camelot vibes in the air.

    By now, of course, an accumulation of sordid revelations
has made J.F.K.'s Washington seem less like Arthur's Camelot
than Capone's Chicago. J.F.K. himself, we know, was almost
literally in bed with the Chicago Mob, sleeping with the
godfather's mistress, for God's sake; his minions used Chicago
mobsters as hit men against a rival head of state. He was
enmeshed in sordid blackmail intrigues with Hoover; he was
implicated in bugging King's bedrooms. Far from a noble
peacemaker, he was a hawkish enthusiast for dirty tricks and
covert ops, so Machiavellian that -- according to Michael
Beschloss's new book, The Crisis Years -- he may even have given
his blessing to Khrushchev's building of the Berlin Wall. In
retrospect, J.F.K. resembles Marrs' Galahad less than a gang
leader like The Godfather's Michael Corleone -- the well-meaning
son of a shadowy godfather (Joe Kennedy, with his bootlegging
connections to the Mob), who can't escape his father's legacy
or his family's cutthroat character.

    In this respect the assassination theorists who seem most
prescient, or at least realistic, are the odd couple of Malcolm
X and L.B.J. It was Malcolm who provoked a storm of obloquy in
the aftermath of the Dallas shooting when he said J.F.K.'s
killing was "a case of the chickens coming home to roost." And
it was L.B.J. who 10 years later gave a kind of gritty
geopolitical substance to Malcolm's metaphor when he told an
ex-aide that J.F.K. was "running a damned Murder Incorporated
in the Caribbean" -- all those CIA assassination plots -- and
that he believed one of these plots must have backfired, or
doubled back on Kennedy, in Dealey Plaza.

    Perhaps this gets a bit too close to blame-the-victim. But
could it be that the cumulative blackening of the sepulchers of
Camelot is responsible for one of the most curious new trends
in conspiracy-theory history -- the increasing number of people
coming forward not merely to claim they know who did it but to
confess they did it?

    One of the first to try this gambit was Charles V.
Harrelson, the Texas hit man who happens to be the father of
Cheers star Woody Harrelson. Cornered by cops seeking to arrest
him for assassinating a federal judge in Texas, Harrelson,
according to Marrs, told lawmen that he was the guy who killed
Kennedy. By the time he backed off the story, assassination
buffs had already convinced themselves that they had
photographic evidence of Harrelson's presence in Dealey Plaza
that day. They had "positively" identified him as one of the
mysterious "tramps" arrested near the crime scene after the
assassination -- conveniently forgetting they had previously
"proved" that two of the tramps were actually Watergate burglars
E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis.

    Next to confess was Robert Easterling, a Mississippi
ex-con who told journalist Henry Hurt in 1985 that he killed
Kennedy on behalf of Fidel Castro. And then, in 1989, there was
the son of a Dallas policeman who pushed his own (now dead)
father forward as the grassy-knoll assassin, introducing some
curious confessional documentation he claimed to have found in
an attic. (The credibility problem of assassination buffs has
not been enhanced by the double standard with which they seem
to accept indiscriminately every self-proclaimed assassin or
grassy-knoll eyewitness who comes forward, but tear to shreds
any evidence or testimony that might support the lone-gunman
theory.)

    Recently, after seeing JFK, I found myself curious about
what had become of the man Jim Garrison once named as the hit
man. I consulted some of the assassination buffs still speaking
to me (though an agnostic on whether there was a conspiracy, I
had written skeptically about the methodology of some of them),
and one told me of a buff in Canada who made a specialty of
tracking down lesser known figures in the case who might
otherwise disappear into the mists of history.

    Yes, the Canadian researcher told me, he had traced the
still wandering whereabouts of the Name. And he wasn't the only
one interested, he said. A former Warren Commission attorney
had told him he still couldn't figure out why the Name made
such a hasty exit from Dallas: 36 hours after the
assassination, he left town and hitchhiked 2,000 miles north to
Michigan. Another buff had theorized that the Warren Commission
was interested in the Name because he bore an eerie physical
resemblance to Oswald -- which might have been an innocent
explanation for some of the "Oswald" sightings in Ruby's
Carousel Club. Other buffs wondered if he might not be one of
the mysterious "Oswald impersonators" who was setting up the
real, innocent Oswald to be the assassination patsy.

    Declining to be led into this labyrinth of suspicion, I
nonetheless asked the Canadian buff what had become of the
Name's life after he fled Dallas. It seems he couldn't really
escape -- Nov. 22 continued to haunt him. The FBI followed him
to Michigan and questioned him repeatedly; he had to go back to
Dallas for Ruby's trial; he never found the wife he'd lost. And
then in the early '80s, just when his life seemed to have
settled down, renewed interest in the J.F.K. case made his name
an object of speculation again: it appeared in a book on the
organized-crime connections to Ruby and the assassination. His
new wife read the book and began to get a little paranoid. She
wondered about the serious car accident they had had: Was it
really an accident? Eventually, things began to go awry: his
marriage broke up, he lost his job. Last thing the Canadian buff
heard, the Name was working as a night security guard in a mill,
"boarding with some people," without a traceable phone number
of his own.

    Looking back, it doesn't seem that much of a mystery why
the poor guy fled Dallas so abruptly. His life took a wrong
turn down there and never recovered. So did ours. We're all
still fleeing Dallas, but it's too late to escape.