The Second Oswald Read online

  Could Lee Harvey Oswald have fired 3 shots in 5.6 seconds with the inaccurate rifle he had—and hit a moving target? Did he even kill patrolman Tippit (the bullets in the body were smaller than the barrel of his revolver)? Was the brown paper bag made only to attract attention? Was Bullet No. 399 a plant? Suppose there was a Second Oswald—a man very similar physically and an expert marksman? Such a man was seen both before and at the time of the murder. Was there a rifleman on the knoll as well as at the Book Depository window?

  If so, this is one of the greatest—and most successful conspiracies of modern times …

  The Second Oswald has been called “the first plausible and significant argumentation on the Kennedy assassination”. It takes into account the recent books by Edward J. Epstein, Mark Lane and Harold Weisberg. Its author, Professor Richard H. Popkin, was Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of California. He goes beyond criticism of the Warren Report, to propound a theory of what actually happened on that fatal 22nd November in 1963.

  The Second Oswald becomes timelier with each passing year. The shortcomings of the Warren Commission report have been well established, but too often, sensationalistic and even absurd counter-theories have been offered. Unlike so many other books regarding the assassination, The Second Oswald is careful to discount the official story--and equally careful not to offer conclusions that cannot be supported by credible evidence.

  The Second Oswald

  Richard H. Popkin

  Introduction by Murray Kempton

  An imprint of C & M Online Media

  Raleigh, North Carolina

  Published by Boson Books

  Raleigh, North Carolina

  ISBN 1-932482-33-4 (print edition)

  ISBN 1-886420-27-0 (ebook edition)

  An imprint of C&M Online Media, Inc.

  Copyright 1996, 2006 Richard H. Popkin

  All rights reserved

  Cover art by Joel Barr

  www.joelbarr.com

  Design by Once Removed

  www.bosonbooks.com

  Acknowledgements

  I should like to take this opportunity to thank various people who have helped me in the preparation of this book. First, Mr. Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books for his editorial assistance. I wish also to thank Professor Stuart Hampshire for suggesting that I write the book, and Professor Daniel Gillis, Mr. Paul Hoch, Mr. Jones Harris, Mrs. Sylvia Meagher, and Professor Leonora Cohen Rosenfield for their kindness in supplying me with information after the case, especially while I have been abroad. I want also to thank the many people who have written to me with suggestions. Unfortunately I have not been able to write to them all personally, and so I take this opportunity to express my appreciation for their interest and ideas. I should also like to thank my colleagues in La Jolla for their patience in listening to me for many, many months on the subject, and for their helpful suggestions and criticisms. And I wish to thank the British Museum for the use of their set of the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission findings which they put at my disposition while I was working in London. And thanks to my family for their assistance, their patience and their fortitude, especially my wife, Juliet, for her editorial help, and my daughter Margaret for catching an egregious error in the galleys.

  Richard H. Popkin

  Paris

  October 31, 1966

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  One: The Theory that Everyone Accepted

  Two: The FBI Reports and Zapruder’s Film

  Three: The Mystery of the Back Wound

  Four: The Strange Career of Bullet No. 399

  Five: The Failure of the Commission and

  The Need for a Counter-Theory

  Six: The Brown Paper Bag

  Seven: The Second Oswald

  Eight: The Two Oswalds in Texas

  Nine: The Assassination

  Ten: After the Shooting: The Tippit Affair

  Eleven: The Remaining Questions

  Epilogue

  Afterword: Second Thoughts on The Second Oswald

  Appendices

  I: The Report on the Autopsy

  by FBI Agents O’Neill and Sibert

  II: Exhibit 385, The Commission’s Sketch of

  The Path of the First Bullet

  III: The Testimony of Mrs. Odio

  IV: The FBI Report on Mrs. Odio’s Story

  V: J. Edgar Hoover’s Letter

  to The Commission

  VI: The FBI Report on Mrs. Odio’s Visitors

  VII: Oswald’s Letter to the Russian Embassy

  VIII: The FBI Report on Miss Dowling of

  Dobbs’ House

  IX: Deputy Sheriff’s Report

  on a Second Oswald Fleeing

  From The Assassination

  Footnotes

  Illustrations

  Introduction

  Dr. Popkin’s small book brings us to the third stage of a great case that is never, one fears, to be formally tried but which endures enough to be endlessly cast over in the public mind. So it deserves annotation as though it were a real case, indeed as The Matter of the United States vs. The Ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald.

  For the adversary system of justice is a very tough old dog, even when suspended by the Chief Justice of the United States. The question of whether a dead man deserves a defense in court seems at first thought a trivial one to the utilitarian mind, since the best advocate can give such a defendant no very tangible service. And yet the whole history of U.S. vs. Ghost of Oswald makes a strong argument that the adversary system has one special utility: there is no other way to arrive at any finding which can long persuade us that it is the truth.

  1) The first stage of the case was assumed by the court to be the last; it was the issuance over Chief Justice Warren’s signature of The Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy.

  That was, in essence, the case against Oswald’s memory as gathered by the police and prepared for trial by the prosecution. It was as persuasive as statements for the prosecution usually are when the trial begins; and it carried singular weight because there would never be a trial. There has ever since been the assumption that the Warren Commission Report was universally accepted as a final judgment by all persons except the most alienated. This is not quite true; there were criticisms at the beginning. It was not ever possible to read these findings without becoming at once aware of the special defects of the prosecutor’s mind. I myself was able, on the day the Report was issued, publicly to set down ten examples of the unfairness which is built into the business of making any case—a special kindness to the contradictions of one’s own witnesses and a cold dismissal of any witness whose recollections might not fit the carpentry; a fondness for any colorful detail, however implausible, because colorful detail seems so circumstantial; the use of tests whose only purpose was to elevate the implausible into the probable and therefore had to be defective in their conception. I mention this less because I am proud of my acumen than because I remain puzzled that persons I generally assume to be my betters did not at once recognize anything so obvious as this was. I have since been confirmed in my low opinion of the critical faculties necessary to this judgment by reading over what I wrote at the time; my strictures, while sound enough, were by no means so deep or so substantive as those of persons who worked upon the text longer and with more absorption.

  I did not question either the autopsy or the ballistics evidence, for example; I have so abiding, although unbased, a faith in such things that I did not look at the exhibits. And having understood that it was impossible that such things would be faked, I quite neglected to recognize anything so obvious as the fact that a mind as clo
sed as the Warren Commission’s clearly was might read them with disabling prejudice. For, after all, like most of us, I believed that Lee Oswald was guilty alone—partly because any alternative seemed impossible and partly because any alternative was so uncomfortable. My only concern was a fair trial for Oswald’s ghost; and it was an especially comfortable concern because it was assured that a fair trial would find him guilty.

  2) So there was never any substantial reason to congratulate the Warren Commission for its performance; after saying that, however, the mind did not automatically move to the duty of trying the job itself. To say that the Report was not objective is, after all, no terribly compelling argument; the prosecution is not required to be objective. The second stage of the trial—the one that counts—is the discovery that the prosecution has not been honest. That stage was a long time appearing; we owe its achievement almost exclusively to the work of Edward Jay Epstein whose Inquest was published by Viking this year and who receives his thoroughly deserved appreciation from Dr. Popkin in these pages.

  Epstein did what every troubled journalist should have done; he went beyond the deficiencies of the document to examine the deficiencies of the men responsible for its preparation. They were men with far fewer deficiencies than the rest of us; it is, for example, curious enough to be crucial to our understanding that the statement of the case against Oswald, loaded with only the flimsiest attempt at concealment, was written by Norman Redlich, of the New York University Law School, a man who, in other circumstances, has demonstrated the noblest passion for the rights of the defendant and who can be trusted, in any other case, to go on demonstrating it for the rest of his life.

  If Redlich could suspend the standards of his life in the service of the national compulsion to dispose of this horror as the act of one deranged outsider, it is difficult to think of any lawyer who would not. Actually, Redlich and other members of the staff were handicapped by the very condition that so much of their previous experience had been with the defense; they did not know enough about the function of prosecutors to avoid even those rashnesses against which the better district attorneys have learned to protect themselves.

  Epstein’s report of the recollections of the Commission’s staff is of men, driven to wind up their business, without time or inclination to examine alternatives to the theory they brought to the case, with no thought of anything except to make the pieces fit and to persuade, even when they knew nothing that gave them the right to do more than surmise. The result is more destructive of the Commission’s case than if it had never tried to seal the case at all. When witnesses are seen to have been believed for reasons of convenience rather than of notable credibility, an overwhelming curiosity arises about those witnesses who were not believed because their testimony happened to be so inconvenient. In truth, nearly every witness in this case has now become as good as any other; our only duty is to bring a standard for credibility to the dissenting witnesses higher than the Commission established for its corroborating ones. For, if the Commission had not, from its inner necessity, disregarded the incontestable fact that the witnesses Howard Brennan, Marina Oswald, and Helen Markham had each lied to an agent of the investigation at one time or another, it would have had almost no spoken case at all.

  Some of the mute witnesses have been left in no better condition. When Dr. Popkin argues, for example, that the spent bullet, essential to support the Commission’s argument, could not have traveled the path imputed to it and been left in the almost intact condition in which it was found, he has taken the theory that Oswald acted alone, difficult to believe at best, and rendered it close to impossible.

  3) So now we arrive at the third stage of U.S. vs. Ghost, so unexpectedly continuing—the presentation of the defense’s alternative theory of the crime. It is not, to be sure, a complete statement of the defense; neither Popkin nor Epstein believes that the event could have been accomplished without some complicity on Oswald’s part.

  Once persuaded that the Commission’s standards for the witnesses it accepted were fatally defective, we have no alternative in conscience except to begin to hear out those witnesses it rejected. Among these discards, Popkin fixes upon approximately a dozen witnesses who remembered meeting Oswald under circumstances often highly suggestive of his guilt. The Commission decided to disbelieve them all, for one reason or another, generally because Oswald could not have been in the place where they had seen him. In any great case there are persons whom the vagrant air infects with the memory that they have seen the suspect, but a majority of these witnesses do not read like persons of that sort and the mystery of their hallucination survives its dismissal by the Commission.

  Now Popkin wonders whether these stories are true and whether or not there was someone who looked very much like the real Oswald and who made it his business to call what, after the fact, would certainly be suspicious attention to him. From here Popkin makes the leap to the theory that the two Oswalds were together at the Texas Book Depository and that each played his part in the assassination.

  It can be argued that this is a theory very much in the key of those constructed in the older mystery stories as the answer with which the amateur detective confounds the professional. But this happens to be a case where the professionals have forfeited their right to be contemptuous of the deductions of philosophers; by now, the various stages of the process have so discredited the Warren Commission as to leave its case much less plausible than Popkin’s theory.

  When the empiric evidence is finally seen as incapable of accounting for the circumstances, the speculative mind can only construct a new hypothesis and begin again with the empiric evidence. Dr. Popkin has begun that process, and his hypothesis already accounts for more of the unaccountable than the Commission’s does.

  It lacks, of course, the finality of the Commission’s original judgment; it sets us instead to traveling towards terrible unknowns. No wish for finality, however intense, can substitute for its achievement. The trip will have to be made, and it will be the more difficult and untidy because the Warren Commission was so desperate to be neat. But the adversary tradition, even when neglected, has a way of insisting on its rights.

  Murray Kempton

  One

  The Theory That Everyone Accepted

  In one of Victor Serge’s last works, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, written over fifteen years ago, the Russian equivalent of the Oswald story is set forth. An alienated young man unhappy with the many aspects of his life in the Soviet Union—the food, his room, his job, etc.—acquires a gun, and manages to shoot Commissar Tulayev one night when he is getting out of a car. An extensive investigation sets in, followed by an extensive purge. Millions of people are arrested and made to confess to being part of a vast conspiracy against the government. The actual assassin is, of course, never suspected, since no one can imagine him as a conspirator. He continues to lead his alienated unhappy life, while the government uncovers the great plot.

  In contrast when John F. Kennedy was assassinated a solution emerged within hours; one lonely alienated man had done the deed all by himself. The investigation by the Dallas Police and the FBI then proceeded to buttress this view, and to accumulate all sorts of details about the lone assassin, some false (like the murder map), some trivial (like his early school records), some suggestive (like the bag he carried into the Book Depository), some convincing (like the presence of his rifle and the three shells). From its origins in Dallas on the night of November 22, 1963, the career of the theory of a single conspirator indicates that this was the sort of explanation most congenial to the investigators and the public (although the strange investigation of Joe Molina, a clerk in the Book Depository, from 2 A.M. November 23 until the end of that day, mainly for his activities in a slightly left-wing veterans’ organization, suggests a conspiratorial interpretation was then under consideration).

  The Warren Commission, after many months of supposed labor and search, came out with an anticlimactic conclusion, practically the same
as that reached by the FBI in its report of December 9, 1963, except for details as to how it happened. The Commission, clothed in the imposing dignity of its august members, declared its conviction that one lone alienated assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had indeed carried out the crime.

  The ready acceptance of this by then expected finding by the press and the public—except for a few critics—suggests that the American public got the kind of explanation it wanted, and perhaps deserved. For almost everyone the points that suggested a conspiratorial explanation were either disposed of by the “careful” work of the Warren Commission and the FBI, or by a faith that had grown up about the Report. Some of the early critical questions suggesting a conspiratorial explanation (raised by Buchanan, Joesten, Bertrand Russell, Trevor-Roper, etc.) were shown to be based on misinformation or misunderstandings, the result mainly of what the Dallas Police and the District Attorney had said, or what had appeared in newspaper accounts and interviews.

  Other questions, based on the Report itself and what it failed to resolve (raised by Leo Sauvage, Salandria, Sylvan Fox, Mark Lane, etc.), were swept aside by faith—faith, first of all, that these matters must have been settled by the mass of data in the twenty-six supplementary volumes of testimony, depositions, and documents. The twenty-six volumes seemed to be so imposing, and were, in fact, so impenetrable, that they resolved most doubts. Finally, as Dwight Macdonald pointed out, if the critics of the Report and of the evidence in the twenty-six volumes supposedly supporting it managed to reveal how tendentious, one-sided, and inadequate some of the solutions were, the ultimate faith of the public rested on the integrity of Justice Warren and his fellow commissioners, the capabilities of the FBI and of the Commission lawyers. It was just too implausible that such irreproachable talent could have doctored the case or have come to the wrong conclusion.