“(T)ruth is just not a matter of discovering objective facts.
Wikipedia. “Philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard.”
Restrictions had been off for a week when Goshkin returned to the café. The tables were spaced. The front door and windows were open. Less than a fifth of the chairs were taken. Few customers were masked.
“The Republicans want so’s you can’t discriminate against the unvaccinated.” Murray looked up, worried, from his Times.
“So they’ll die.” Large Victor bit his croissant.
“Guys. Shekit,” Goshkin said from the next table.
“Leave them the courage of their convictions,” Large Victor said. “Survival of the fittest. They’re right, they live. They’re wrong, we won’t have them to worry about.”
Goshkin was 79, with a bad heart, so he was at risk in cafés. On the other hand, he was 79, with a bad heart, so he was at risk, period. And he liked writing in cafés. It had taken 70-years, two heart attacks, one hallucinated (probably) leaving of his body to meet (some) departed, before he had allowed himself. He had closed his law practice; he and Ruth had IRAs and Social Security; he had run the numbers. Each morning, while she threw pots or added to her stature as Most Knowledgeable Tennis Fan in Northern California, he saw where the sitting and writing and miracle of each unwinding moment took him.x.
xxx
A few years before, he had blogged a critique – well, fuck modesty, a demolition – of a theory of the JFK assassination held by a small number of people, including a longtime friend – back to Coltrane at Pep’s – back to Cliff Anderson’s Big Five days – call him Ezekial. When he’d learned of Goshkin’s blogs, Ezekial declared him either a CIA agent or fool. Time healed their friendship to where he’d felt comfortable shaping his blogs into a more-or-less novel, Goshkin at Large;[1] but while Ezekial and he could comfortably discuss, say, Bill Evans or Steph Curry, they talked politics rarely and the assassination never.
There things had stood, him and it, until Goshkin read a five-star review of Josiah Thompson’s Last Second in Dallas. He recalled Thompson being well-regarded by Ezekial’s group, and his first book, Six Seconds in Dallas, praised by Vincent Bugliosi,[2] whose Reclaiming History Goshkin had relied on in his demolishment. That the review was written by a movie critic whose judgments about even movies he ignored (and whose expertise on the assassination seemed to consist of having seen Oliver Stone’s farcial JFK a half-dozen times) did not dissuade him from asking for a review copy. Maybe he’d been wrong. Could be good to know.
When the book arrived, he learned Thompson and Ezekial had fallen out over Kennedy’s throat wound – entry or exit – which, combined with Thompson’s Andover/Yale/US Navy pedigree had led Ezekial to finger him as CIA too. (Thompson, for his part, upon hearing Ezekial address a buffs’ convention, raised his hand during the Q&A to call his theory “Lunacy.”)
I.
The sound within the café was like a spoon had fallen with the beans into the grinder. But the sound came from a weeping woman in full-length sweater/coat, her back to him, at the long table. She wept and twisted her dark hair as if braiding it, but no braid formed. She wept and twisted, and when she was not twisting her hair, she turned on and off her iPhone without looking at anything revealed.
On Friday, November 22, 1963, Josiah Thompson had been a 38-year-old, ex-frogman, employed as a teaching assistant at Yale, while finishing a PhD thesis on Kierkegaard. By 1965, he had a doctorate in philosophy and an assistant professorship at Haverford College. Involvement in the anti-war movement had put him in the orbit of Ezekial’s circle, which believed the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-Marine, with a disjointed personal and professional history, had killed the president with three shots from a sixth floor window of a Dallas book depository, while Kennedy’s motorcade passed below, was a cover up for a security state conspiracy. Thompson already believed more one than one assassin involved because film shot by Abraham Zapruder, a spectator, seemed to show Kennedy’s body slam backwards, as if shot from the front, not the rear where the depository stood.
Goshkin had believed conspiracy thinking predominated among people who thought highly of Kennedy – or little of the United States – or both. Ezekial was in the second group, and Thompson seemed among the first. The murder, he wrote, represented “a kind of tectonic shift.” “After Dallas, it seemed nothing would ever be the same….” The more highly one thought of Kennedy, Goshkin reasoned, the more difficult to believe a lone loony like Oswald could kill him. The echoes that triggered within about a disordered, meaningless universe became too troubling. They had to be stifled.[3]
With the CIA or rogue CIA agents. With pro-Castro or anti-Castro Cubans. With the Mafia or extra-terrestrials or Ezekial’s military-intelligence-corporate web.
xxx
But grief had not been universal.
He, for instance, had not thought much of Kennedy. As far as tragedy went, he was more consumed by the girl – Ruth, in fact – who had dumped him nine days earlier. Kennedy had been a disappointment. The Bay of Pigs. The foot-dragging on civil rights.
“Here’s a new theory,” he’d told Ruth, mid-way through Last Second. “The NAACP martyred Kennedy to set the stage for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
“Here’s one for you,” she’d said. “Aristotle Onasis did it, so he could nail Jackie.”
At the time, he’d hoped only that a Jew hadn’t pulled the trigger. That evening, he’d been working on a paper about Fathers and Sons (“Nice try. B+,” Phillip Rahv would say), when Mick Magyar pulled him out of the college library to go drinking with him and Mad Dog.
No one at the Hillbilly Ranch was mourning either.
II.
The family of five zipped past on bikes, helmeted father in front, three children strung out behind, mother last, red pony tail whipping like a flag on lumber protruding from a truck bed, alerting motorists behind, protecting against calamity.
In 1976, Thompson resigned a tenured full professorship to become a private investigator in the Bay Area. He worked 35-years, roaming from Bolinas to Bombay. His clients ranged from the Oklahoma City bomber to the SLA. Throughout, he kept abreast of – and participated in – assassination-related developments. Last Second delivered his verdict.
Kennedy was killed by three men firing five shots. The first preceded the second by 2.55 seconds, and the second preceded the third by 1.05. Since FBI tests showed Oswald’s rifle took at least 2.3 seconds between shots,[4] “(T)his means the first and third shots could have come from Oswald’s rifle, but not the second.”[5] Thompson believed it came from a shooter in another building but isn’t sure which – or what happened to that bullet. The other two shots wounded Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally who rode with him.
Then 4.8 seconds pass. (Pass inexplicably, Goshkin thought, since, even by Thompson’s count, the first shooter had time to fire twice and the second once.) Then a third rifleman, behind a fence, on a knoll, in front of the limo, delivered the fatal bullet to the right front of Kennedy’s head; .07 seconds after that – 5.92 seconds since he last fired – shooter one struck the rear of the president’s skull.[6]
xxx
A problem for writers of “non-fiction,” Goshkin recognized, is their “characters’” refusal to say what their authors would prefer. More than 100 people gave statements to investigators or reporters or the police. Fifty-four believed all shots came from the depository; 33 believed either the knoll or highway overpass; three heard shots from the depository and the knoll. (No one seems to have heard shots from three locations.) Seventy-five-percent of people polled heard three shots; less than four percent heard four. (No one seems to have heard five.) A number of people saw a man point – even fire – a rifle from a depository window, and a rifle and shells were found there. No one saw a rifleman on another building; no rifle or shells were recovered from one. No one saw a rifleman on the knoll; no rifle or shells were found there.[7]
From these 100-plus, Thompson marshaled the support of six spectators, six police officers, and two employees of a nearby railroad. While most believed shots came from the knoll – and it is not always clear if they believed all came from there – none of the spectators or policemen heard more than three shots[8] and nearly everyone with an opinion believed the fatal shot was the second. Thompson gains most traction from the railroadmen and even it is slippery.
Lee Bowers was in a switching tower overlooking the knoll. The afternoon of the shooting, when his recollection was least corrupted by what he had heard or read or seen elsewhere, he described observing a parking lot full of cars, one row of which was three-to-five-feet from a wood fence, and hearing three shots “very close together.” (Where the shots came from was not addressed.) About nine months later, he added two men by the fence, 10-to-15 feet apart. Two years after that, he added “a flash of light or smoke” to his landscape.
S.M. Holland, a supervisor, was on the overpass. That afternoon, he signed an affidavit saying he heard a shot and saw a “puff of smoke” from trees on the knoll. He heard three more shots but saw no more smoke. (Where these shots came from and why smoke did not accompany them was not addressed.) Two days later, Holland told the FBI he’d heard three or four shots “simultaneously with the first shot.” (The location of the shots, the lack of smoke, and the suggestion that four or five gunmen fired simultaneously was not addressed.)
Three years after that, Holland told Thompson he heard a “loud” shot, a second shot, and, two or three seconds later, a third shot from behind the fence, and, almost at the same time, from up the street, “a louder report.” “(The third) wasn’t nearly as loud as the fourth report,[9]and it knocked Kennedy completely over; just almost turned a flip.”[10] Holland rushed to where he had seen the smoke and heard the third shot come from. He saw 400-to-500 footprints in the mud by the bumper of a station wagon parked two feet from the fence, what may have been two footprints on its bumper, and three-to-five cigarette butts on the ground.
xxx
Across the street, red lights flashed. Maybe, Goshkin thought, I have seen too many police procedurals, but, without more, where are we? Were the footprints from the same shoes? What were their make and size? Were the butts the same brand? Can a DNA sample identify the smoker? The Bowers-Holland pairing puzzled. What did Bowers’ men have to do with Holland? He’d recalled for Thompson “two sets of footprints” leaving the area, so two men may have been at the station wagon; but since all 400-500 footprints were within its bumper’s width, they couldn’t have come from Bowers’ men who stood 10-to-15-feet apart. And why was a second man at the wagon? Did the shooter have a personal assistant like a Hollywood A-Lister?
Knowing the smoke was “perhaps the most controversial element in Holland’s account,” Thompson had delved further into it. Holland said it lay under a clump of trees, the height of the fence – but 10-or-15-feet from it. In other words, in the three years between tellings, the shot and smoke had migrated from the trees to the fence; the smoke had shifted to the third shot from the first; and, with the gun now at the fence, the smoke had blown 10-to-15 feet without disbursing enough to have become unobservable. Goshkin would have liked an armaments expert telling him if an assassin’s chosen weapon was likely to emit enough smoke for someone, who stood where Holland had, to identify where it was being fired. He would have liked to hear that this smoke could travel 10-to-15 feet without vanishing. He would have liked to know – sound traveling faster than light – how long it would have taken Holland to hear the shot and, in that time, how far that smoke would have traveled. He would have liked to know the direction and force of any wind.
If you are going to base the existence of an assassin on a puff of smoke, Goshkin thought, it would be nice to add substance to it. He felt as though Thompson included witnesses because audiences expected them, like Alfred Hitchcock tolerated actors messing up his mise en scenes.
III.
“You know what an expert is? Some asshole from out of town with graphs.” – Randy, a litigation attorney in private (locker-room) conversation with the author.
Thompson’s reconstruction was, in fact, expert-built. Just not the one Goshkin wanted.
Among those Thompson engaged were acoustical engineers, ballistic technicians, forensic pathologists, and metallurgists. Among the material they brought to the job were blood splatters, blur illusions, comparative bullet lead and cartridge case-dent analyses, d-warp tests, echo and impulse patterns, involuntary startle responses, neutron activation analysis, photo-enhancement, stabilized film frames, pattern cross-correlations, and time-synchronous crosstalk. As Goshkin understood it, Thompson had matched sounds picked up on Dallas police radios to movements of Kennedy’s body captured by the Zapruder films, concluded these sounds were shots, the movements reactions to their impact, and the time between the shots and the directions of the movements proof of when and from where the bullets came.
Goshkin could see why the movie critic was wowed. Thompson had mastered a curriculum of weighty subject matter and fashioned from it a creation impervious to anyone who’d majored differently. Thompson’s dedication to his project – the depth to which he’d burrowed – the time he had spent tunneling – was stunning. Goshkin had never worked as long or as hard in devotion to any idea or cause. (He could perhaps credit himself with dedication to Ruth, but that seemed of a different order, one, probably Jungians held opinions on.) He could not imagine immersing himself in this science – these sciences – in service of a did-he/didn’t-he. If Thompson’s argument had been in Sanskrit, Goshkin would have been as likely to struggle to rebut it. Someone else would have to bat those balls back. Or rush to the net to shake his hand.
xxx
But one elephant in the room – or, rather, absent from it – was Oswald. His actions leading up to and on November 22 were reduced to being arrested.[11] Thompson accepts that shots were fired from the depository, but who that gunman was Thompson does not say. He accepts that “Oswald’s rifle” fired shots, but not that Oswald pulled the trigger. He accepts that three shots were fired from the sixth floor and that three cartridges were found there but says only two came from Oswald’s rifle, which was weird, since it meant either the shooter left two cartridges, removed one, and dropped a third he’d brought from elsewhere, or someone else fired a shot from the same window. And why three cartridges? If the idea was to frame Oswald as the sole assassin, didn’t that presume an advance knowledge how many shots would be required and how many most people would hear. The freaking Umbrella Man got more attention than Oswald.[12]
Ignoring Oswald seemed a reverse magician’s distraction. Like Thompson feared having him on stage would reveal the trick he was performing. Thompson did not saw anyone in half but cobbled together a team of professional hit men; and if you were assembling such a team, you would not include a loose-nut like Oswald, who was closer to your Mark Chapman/John Hinckley model assassin than the Eagle Who Landed or even James Earl Ray.
It may have been Thompson’s pride-in-elite-military-training speaking, but he had premised his beliefs on the assassination requiring “a professional hit.” “(M)ost amateur assassinations do not succeed, since single individuals acting alone cannot bring enough force to the point of attack.” This seemed an arguable proposition, with those likely to argue against it including Abraham Lincoln, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, Huey Long, Archduke Ferdinand of Sarejevo, Mahatma Ghandi, Yitzhak Rabin, Leon Trotsky, Bugsy Siegel and – oh yeah – Oswald.
As far as Goshkin knew, a professional’s go-to option was not a team of riflemen. For the Mafia, it was more like two-guys-walk-into-a-bar – or, think Albert Anastasia, barber shop – or, Joey Gallo, steak house. For the CIA, it was plane bombs, poison, or making it look like someone fell out a window or down an elevator shaft. (He couldn’t speak for Cubans but extra-terrestrials probably relied on death rays.) And why a team when one op would do? The more assassins, the more chance someone is spotted or recants or utters a death bed-confession or signs a six-figure book deal. Add a man behind the fence, another in the depository, and Thompson has 10 lips sinking ships.
And how damn “professional” were they? The fellow on the sixth floor fires two shots and barely wings a turtle-paced target. The guy from the mystery building hits air; and the marksman on the knoll, while careful enough to remove his cartridge, leaves behind cigarette butts and foot prints when, if the plan is to frame some doofus, why be obvious where you were skulking about?
And another thing…
IV.
“(T)he point of politics – and life – is not to quibble over facts; it’s to offer people a story they believe in.” – Boris Johnson
Goshkin would not have expected to find himself quoting Boris, but the cosmos had dumped those words in his lap, via The Atlantic, while he was pondering Last Second and he had learned to heed the cosmos. Thompson did not only ignore Oswald. He eschewed narrative, motive, story. (How did these strangers come to town? To where did they vanish?) He left every conspiracy alive, save the one where a Secret Serviceman in the limo shoots Kennedy. He didn’t even exclude three shooters, representing three different conspiracies, coinciding in time and space.
Thompson cleared the doctors who performed the autopsy of a cover-up, (In-over-their-heads and wishing to be on-board the existing Oswald-theory.) He cleared the panel which mis-evaluated the radio tapes. (Deference to an esteemed colleague.) He kept mum about the Warrens though. Innocently mistaken or concealing the truth – a truth? He must have an opinion.
“Suppose,” Goshkin said to Ruth, “somebody told you, ‘A scored 25 points; B scored 50; C didn’t score; but they won.’ Only you don’t know who A, B or C is or who they played for or what the game was. Wouldn’t you be asking yourself, like Lenny Bruce on The Esther Costello Story, ‘So what’s the moral?’[13] Isn’t it like Sherlock Holmes after deducing how Lord Pokingham was offed, without even assembling the suspects in the drawing room, and goes home to practice his fiddle.”
She reached across the bed and patted him. She was watching a recorded Roger Federer match and first things first.
V.
“If you say the study of history makes you feel good and proud, you probably are not studying history.” – Librarianshipwreck, on Twitter
Reading a book about the Kennedy assassination in a café was like wearing a Grateful Dead hat on Telegraph Avenue, except you were less likely to get hit up for a joint or hear how bummed someone’d been since Jerry passed. Sam, a house boat-residing pedal steel player, advised not overlooking “amazing mind control concerning the Oswald doubles.” James, a bus driver, on whose mustache you could hang an “Out to Lunch” sign, shared his belief in CIA involvement, then followed Goshkin out the door with tales of how it had also facilitated the rise of the Beatles. Lars, a real estate agent, asked if he’d read Fetzer.
“I have only this narrow interest in the assassination,” Goshkin said.
Lars nodded.
“And, straight up, Oswald did it.”
“End of discussion,” Lars said.
“Who do you think?”
“There were six shooters.”
“Well, Thompson’s got it up to three.”
“James Fetzer.”
Fetzer turned out to be a Holocaust denier, who believed no one was killed at Sandy Hook, that American intelligence and Mossad caused 9/11, that the Boston Marathon bombings, the Parkland and Pulse nightclub shootings, and the Apollo moon landing were hoaxes – and Paul McCartney died in 1966. Probably, Goshkin thought, unvaccinated.
xxx
His feeling was the book would close on the planet before this chapter ended. From where he stood, bad-hearted – friends teetering with strokes and dementia and Parkinson’s – names ringing from obit pages like hammers struck on anvils – he could not see that it mattered whether one, three or six men shot Kennedy. People still fought about how big a motherfucker – literally – Nero was, as if there was a point to resolving this. As if there was sense in anything beyond the fucking now. Oh, he knew about forgetting the past and being condemned to repeat it; but it looked to him like those who remembered the past repeated it too. Some tried to do good better; some tried that with evil. The morning line on who had momentum looked unfavorable.
A calm came from realizing it was no longer his world. From watching, detached, curious, how those in charge played it.
A hollow-cheeked, wind-browned man, in unbuttoned blue shirt hanging below soiled chinos, asked, “Can I come in?”
Postscript
While I was writing this, I posed several questions to Josiah Thompson. His publisher’s representative said he was “guarded with his time” and would want to know for whom I was writing. “Firstofthemonth.org,” I said and, in interest of transparency, though it seemed the equivalent of a discussion mute button, “I think Oswald did it.”
Thompson did not reply.
NOTES
[1]. Available at www.theboblevin.com., $10 (Cheap).
[2].”There is no better or substantive book on the assassination… than Josiah Thompson’s…” Thompson did not return the compliment. Last Second ignored arguments Bugliosi had rebutted and points Bugliosi had made.
[3].Ezekial believed Goshkin’s thinking shaped by defenses designed to protect him from recognizing the extent of evil within those who controlled the United States. The older Goshkin grew, the more weight Ezekial’s analysis carried.
[4].According to Bugliosi, it took 2.3 seconds only if you used the telescopic site. But using the iron site, which, for a qualified Marine sharpshooter like Oswald, firing at a slow-moving (11 mph), nearby within 90-feet) target like Kennedy, was likely, it took 1.6 seconds. As Thom Jones wrote: “The one thing a Marine can do better than anyone else is shoot.”
[5]. This seems wrong. Based on Thompson’s numbers, Oswald’s rifle could have fired shots one and two, but not three.
[6]. In Six Seconds, Thompson appears to have concluded the first shot came from the depository, the second from the Dallas County Records Building, the third from the depository, and the fourth from the knoll. There was no fifth shot. Times change; theories too.
[7]. All statistics in this paragraph, Bugliosi’s.
[8]. A married couple who, within 30-minutes of the shooting, had said there had been two shots at most, told Thompson, in 1966, there may have been four – and the fatal one was the third.
[9]. 170-pages later, Thompson quotes Holland: “It was like it came from a .38 pistol…” He did not explore if Holland was speaking metaphorically or saying he believed he heard a pistol – which no one else did. (In his quoted remarks, Holland never said he heard a rifle on the knoll. He said no more than he went looking for “a rifleman.”)
[10]. In the Zapruder frames reproduced in Last Second, Kennedy never comes close to flipping over. He falls against his wife, who cradles him.
[11]. Aside from omitting a boxcar – well, fuck decorum too –shitload of Oswald opportunity/ motive/means, Thompson does not disclose that, per Bugliosi, 15 of 16 doctors – and 13 pathologists – who reviewed medical records and autopsy photographs for assorted committees, plus four computer modelings carried out between 1976 and 2003, agreed Kennedy’s and Connolly’s wounds were consistent with their being caused by three shots from the sixth floor.
[12]. Thompson suggests the umbrella was a signal. (Others have proposed Umbrella Man shot Kennedy with a paralyzing dart, making him an easier target.) Thompson does not mention that, when the assassination was reinvestigated a fellow testified that he had been Umbrella Man. He had raised his to taunt Kennedy, whose father had been a Nazi sympathizer, by referencing Neville Chamberlain, who’d returned from appeasing Hitler at Munich, carrying his own lives-in-infamy bumbershoot.
[13]. For those who don’t recall this – probably unperformable today – bit, Bruce delivered that line after describing a movie in which, following her rape, a deaf/blind girl regains her senses.