American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us by Jesse Ventura, Dick Russell Read Free Book Online Page B

guilty by the media. The headline in the New York Times : “Career of Suspect Has Been Bizarre.” In the New York Herald Tribune : “Left Wing Lunacy, Not Right is Suspect.” In Time magazine: “Evidence Against Oswald Described as Conclusive.”
    Here’s what media critic Jerry Policoff later had to say: “Thus, the press’ curiosity was not aroused when a 7.65 caliber German Mauser mutated into a 6.5 caliber Italian Mannlicher-Carcano; or when the grassy knoll receded into oblivion; or when an entrance wound in the President’s throat became an exit wound (first for a fragment from the head wound and then for a bullet from the back wound); or when a wound six inches below the President’s shoulder became a wound at the back of the neck. The press was thereby weaving a web that would inevitably commit it to the official findings.”
    Three months before the Warren Report appeared in September 1964, the New York Times ran a Page One exclusive: “Panel To Reject Theories of Plot in Kennedy Death.” They then printed the whole report as a 48-page supplement, and collaborated with Bantam Books and the Book-of-the-Month Club to publish both hardcover and paperback editions. “The commission analyzed every issue in exhaustive, almost archaeological detail,” according to reporter Anthony Lewis.
    The Times also put together another book, The Witnesses , which contained “highlights” from testimony before the Warren Commission. All these were aimed at shoring up the lone-gunman notion. In one instance, a witness who reported having seen a man with a rifle on the sixth floor had other portions of his testimony eliminated—namely, that he’d actually seen two men but been told to “forget it” by an FBI agent. Witnesses like Zapruder, who believed some of the shots came from in front, were left out entirely.
    Life magazine devoted most of its October 2, 1964, issue to the Warren Report , assigning commission member (and future president) Gerald Ford the job of evaluating it. In 1997, the Assassination Records Review Board would release handwritten notes by Ford, revealing that he had misrepresented the placement of the president’s back wound—raising it several inches to suggest he’d instead been struck in the neck—in order to make it fit the theory that a single bullet had hit both Kennedy and Connally. Otherwise, the entire lone-assassin notion would have collapsed.
    That same issue of Life underwent two major revisions after it went on sale. One of the articles was illustrated with eight frames from the Zapruder film. But Frame 323 turned out to contradict the Warren Report ’s conclusion about the shots all coming from the rear. So the issue was recalled, the plates broken and re-set (this was all pre-computer), and Frame 313 showing the president’s head exploding became the replacement. A second “error” forced still another such change. When a Warren Commission critic, Vincent Salandria, asked Life editor Ed Kearns about this two years later, Kearns wrote back: “I am at a loss to explain the discrepancies between the three versions of LIFE which you cite. I’ve heard of breaking a plate to correct an error. I’ve never heard of doing it twice for a single issue, much less a single story. Nobody here seems to remember who worked on the early Kennedy story... ”
    And so it went. Skeptics of the Warren Report were often labeled “leftists” or “Communists.” After Mark Lane’s book Rush to Judgment and Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas came out in 1966 questioning the official version, and became best-sellers, the New York Times decided to conduct its own investigation. One of its unit, Houston bureau chief Martin Waldron, later said they’d found “a lot of unanswered questions” that the paper then wouldn’t pursue. “I’d be off on a