The Critics
Some of the subjects of Praise from a Future Generation
Sylvia Meagher was a researcher for the World Health Organization. She created a Subject Index to the Warren Commission's 26 volumes of Hearings and Exhibits, published in 1966. The Commission had not provided such an index; thus Meagher's index became an indispensible tool for researching this official data.
Even as she created the index, Sylvia Meagher was working on a comparative study of the Commission's single-volume report, and its Hearings and Exhibits. This study became her landmark analysis of the case, entitled Accessories After the Fact. "Ordinary individuals," she wrote in 1964, "innocent of either political extreme, are deeply troubled by a case and now a Warren report which abound with misrepresentation, lacunae, implausibilities, and simple absurdity."
Penn Jones, Jr., a great admirer of JFK, owned and operated The Midlothian Mirror, a weekly newspaper in Midlothian, Texas, from 1946 to 1974. He was a World War Two veteran who served in the 36th Infantry, participating in Allied invasions in Italy and southern France. He recieved a Bronze Star and eight battle stars, and by war's end held the rank of Captain.
After the assassination Penn Jones became convinced that witnesses were being intimidated, and in some cases killed. His Mirror editorials began appearing in June 1965 and were later gathered into Forgive My Grief, Vol. I, and subsequent volumes. "I am trying to do an honest job of investigating this thing, as I think all journalists should," he once said.
After the Warren Commission published its Hearings and Exhibits, he bought copies to keep at home and at the Mirror offices. "We are so grateful for the many answers in the twenty six volumes of testimony," he wrote. "The answers are there for those who are willing to dig ... after spending several thousand hours knocking on doors, asking questions, meanwhile reading the Report, we believe audacious actions were taken by the Commission lawyers and the chairman obfuscating the evidence left after President Kennedy, Tippit, and Oswald were killed."
Raymond Marcus, in common with all the other early critics, was immediately skeptical about the reports from Dallas on November 22, 1963. "When the government put out the word the same evening that there was no conspiracy and the assassin was safely in jail, I knew they couldn't possibly know that, and my involvement began."
Marcus went on to study the ballistic and photographic evidence, including an intensive analysis of the Zapruder film. One of his early efforts was an unpublished study called "Hypotheses re: the Zapruder film," which was passed around to other critics. In 1966 Marcus published The Bastard Bullet, a painstaking study of CE 399, the so-called "magic bullet," which concluded the bullet had been planted on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital.
Following a discovery by David Lifton in 1965, Marcus gave attention to a detail of the Moorman photograph, which appears to reveal an assassin in the murky shadows of the grassy knoll.
Maggie Field developed a series of collages, or "panoplies" as she called them, which juxtaposed conclusions stated in the Warren Report with the evidence found in the raw data of the 26 volumes. The 26 volumes, she found, frequently undermined the single-volume Report. Random House agreed to publish Mrs. Field's material as a book called The Evidence, even paying Field an advance—but then broke the contract. The Evidence has never seen the light of day.
Maggie Field had a commanding knowledge of the Warren Commission's published evidence. "it is clear to me," she said in 1967, "as a result of my four years of study, that powerful forces were involved, but the Commission invariably failed to follow up leads...
"Until we can get to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination, this country is going to remain a sick country. No matter what we do. Because we cannot live with that crime. We just can't. The threat is too great. There are forces in this country who have gotten away with this thing, and will strike again. And not any one of us is safe."
Harold Feldman (at left, in the photo on the right) wrote "Oswald and the FBI," published in The Nation in January 1964. This was one of the first articles to raise the question of whether Lee Oswald had a clandestine relationship with the Federal government.
Feldman traveled to Dallas in the summer of 1964 with his then-brother-in-law Vincent J. Salandria (who took this picture), and his wife Immie (center). They met with Oswald's mother Marguerite (right), whom Feldman profiled sympathetically in "The Unsinkable Marguerite Oswald," published in The Realist in September 1964. Mrs. Oswald, he declared, was being treated poorly by the media and by the Warren Commision. "They snarl with mockery and menace. Their PR men cannot write three lines about her without suggesting that the proper place for this aging Antigone who cries justice for her murdered son is an asylum or a grave."
Feldman also wrote "51 Witnesses: The Grassy Knoll" (The Minotiry of One, March 1965) which documented the fact that most Dealey Plaza witnesses heard gunfire from the area of the grassy knoll.
Vincent J. Salandria wrote one of the earliest critiques of the Warren Commission's published data, an article appearing in The Legal-Intelligencer, Philadelphia's daily law journal, in 1964.
Salandria was convinced early on that there was much more to the assassination than was reported in the press. "Dealey Plaza," he said, "reeked of conspiracy."
In the summer of 1964, he went to Dallas with his then-brother-in-law Harold Feldman, and Feldman's wife Immie (see above). Among the witnesses they interviewed was Helen Markham, the Warren Commission's star witness in the murder of Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit. They came away convinced that Markham had been intimidated into giving testimony that conformed to the Warren Commission's lone gunman thesis.
Salandria later published incisive articles in Liberation and The Minority of One. He served in an advisory capacity to Jim Garrison during the New Orleans' DA's investigation into the Kennedy assassination.
Harold Weisberg was liquidating what had been a successful poultry farm in Maryland when JFK was killed.
Weisberg was a former journalist and Senate investigator; he concluded the assassination was never properly investigated by those government officials entrusted with this enquiry. "You want to know what they killed him for, you can certainly say that to get different policies in the White House was a possibility," he once told an interviewer. "We don't know these things, because the crime was never investigated. But you can't ignore it."
Weisberg's own private investigation resulted in Whitewash and a number of other books. The overall thrust of his work, he believed, demonstrated that in a time of great crisis, the institutions of American society all failed. "I think that it is important for the people to know that their government malfunctioned," he said. "How it did, why it did—and I think it's important for, at some point, for government to recognize that, and be honest with the people. If that day ever comes, it will do more to restore the missing faith in government than anything I can think of."
Mark Lane was a criminal defense attorney and former member of the New York State Assembly when JFK was assassinated. He wrote a "defense brief" for Oswald that was published in The National Guardian in December 1964. After Marguerite Oswald saw the defense brief (see below), she asked Lane to represent her dead son before the Warren Commission. He agreed to do so, but the Commission would not allow it. The experience, however, drew Lane further into the case.
Lane coordinated early, unofficial investigations through his Citizens Committee of Inquiry, dispatching volunteer investigators to Dallas in the spring and summer of 1964. He simultaneously embarked on an ambitious speaking tour to raise funds for the research, and to draw attenton to the weaknesses in the official version of events. In December 1964, just after the release of the Commission's Hearings and Exhibits, Lane debated former Warren Commission staff lawyer Joseph Ball in Beverly Hills, California. During this encounter Ball conceded a critical Commission witness was "an utter screwball."
Mark Lane wrote a book on the case called Rush to Judgment, which was a best seller in 1966.
Shirley Martin recalled that "my suspicions did not take long surfacing" that something was wrong in Dallas. Her great concern was that Lee Oswald was being railroaded. In late 1963 she clipped a newspaper article she saw about Mark Lane and sent it to Marguerite Oswald, thus playing a pivotal role in a series of events that drew Lane deeper into the case. She packed up four children and a dog and drove to Dallas from Oklahoma to investigate things for herself.
It was the first of many such trips to Dallas. In the summer of 1964, Mrs. Martin interviewed Acquilla Clemons, a witness to the slaying of Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit. She also visited Ruth Paine, with whom Marina Oswald was staying before the assassination, and in whose garage Lee Oswald stored belongings that Mrs. Paine later turned over to the police.
"I still feel that Lee was innocent," Shirley Martin said late in her life. "And there's something about that that just haunts me. I think to myself, imagine being shot down, and murdered, because of something you didn't do. And it makes me so angry."