JOHN CHUCKMAN
A note to readers: Normally, I post my book
reviews only on another site of mine, Chuckman’s Miscellanea of Words,
but because of the nature of this book and its being the 48th
anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination, I am also posting on this
site.
This is a modest book both in its aims and in its
physical size, but it is a book which makes a genuine contribution to
understanding the Kennedy assassination, and it is the best thing I have
read on the subject in some years.
The central finding of the
Warren Commission was that Oswald was Kennedy's assassin. So while Mr.
Ernest's aims seem modest, calling into question Oswald's movements in
the wake of the shooting, they work powerfully against that central
finding.
Here is a self-published book written by a man who
originally had not even planned to write a book, and it contains
genuinely new and significant evidence.
You will find here no
unproved theories against the officially accepted explanation, nor will
you find phony efforts to protect the official story. Books of both
those types have been published in abundance for decades, indeed to the
point where I long ago sickened of reading them.
Mr. Ernest
documents his long-term, off-and-on again efforts to satisfy his own
curiosity concerning the assassination and, particularly, to locate a
significant witness the Warren Commission went out of its way to
minimize, slight, and ignore, Ms. Victoria Adams. Ms. Adams worked in an
office on the fourth-floor of the Texas Book Depository in November,
1963. From a remarkable vantage point, she and some fellow workers
watched Kennedy's motorcade enter the Plaza and approach the fatal area.
Then they heard noises like fireworks and saw the president's car begin
to rush away.
As a side note here, just the fact that a group of
people, only about 40 or 50 feet above the motorcade, could gather and
open a window to look down on it tells us a great deal about the
terribly poor security arrangements made that day by all police and
protective agencies.
Ms. Adams and a co-worker suspected something
was wrong and quickly sought the stairs to the ground floor - the same
stairs Oswald is supposed to have taken immediately after the shots,
indeed the only full-height set of stairs in a building whose elevator
at the time did not operate. Her seemingly insignificant act proved to
have many serious implications.
Ms. Adams saw no one on the
stairs. She heard no one, even though the creaky and echoing nature of
the stairs and stair well meant that you always heard other steps on
them, no matter how many floors away. She was accompanied by one of her
co-workers, Sandra Styles, who could thus certainly corroborate or
contradict any of Victoria Adams' testimony, yet Ms. Styles was never
interviewed by any of the agencies investigating. The FBI made no
attempt to re-stage and time the path of these women, as they did for a
number of other people.
The author, after finally finding Ms.
Adams, gaining her trust (often a requirement with significant
Kennedy-assassination witnesses who have been badgered and even
intimidated in the past) and having her tell her brief story in fine
detail, succeeded also in finding her former co-worker, Ms. Styles, who,
indeed, corroborates Ms. Adams perfectly. She also provides a detail of
just what was happening in the Plaza when they decided to go down,
providing an amazingly accurate time marker for their descent's start.
Ms.
Adam's own words - recorded e-mail exchanges - tell any perceptive
reader that she was (she died a few years ago) an intelligent and
perceptive observer, the very kind of witness any attorney or prosecutor
likes to put on the stand.
The author also discovers a
transmittal letter at the National Archives that has Dorothy Garner,
office manager of the same text-book publishing company for which the
two women worked, seeing Roy Truly and Officer Marion Baker arrive on
the fourth floor after Victoria Adams and Sandra Styles left, an
important fact because these two had previously stopped on the second
floor where Officer Baker had a brief confrontation with a relaxed Lee
Oswald in the cafeteria as they raced up from the ground floor to
inspect the building.
Ms. Adams not only saw no one on the stairs,
but when she and her friend briefly went outside, she did see Jack
Ruby, a man she did not know until she saw the television pictures later
of him shooting Oswald.
Many of the more unhelpful and even
crazed books on this subject I sometimes think likely come under the
auspices of the very agencies who have worked so hard to promote the
official story: lunatic books help discredit all critics of the official
story. When I say lunatic books I mean books along the lines of The Man
Who Knew Too Much or JFK and the Unspeakable.
Worthless books
which seem to serve the opposite side include Gerald Posner's Case
Closed, which offers the pretence of tough-minded analysis, or
Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi, which is just a giant
prosecutor's brief supporting another prosecutor's brief, or Edward Jay
Epstein's Legend and Counterplot, both efforts to confirm the main
conclusions of the Warren Commission after the author's having gained
some credibility with his Inquest, a book which supports limited and
late criticism of the Commission.
For people coming to the
assassination for the first time, Mr. Ernest provides a few nice little
summaries of fact, the most important being J. Edgar Hoover's virtually
immediate acceptance of Oswald's guilt, his then having prepared within
weeks a report setting out the flimsy case. Lyndon Johnson's appointment
of the Warren Commission made the publication of his report
inappropriate, but that report provided the structure on which the
commission report was built, the commission itself never doing any
genuine investigation of its own. Indeed, since the entire Warren Report
was created in a few months, there is a prima facie argument for its
complete inadequacy to so demanding a task.
Readers who wish to
know more after reading Mr. Ernest's book cannot do better than the
books of Joachim Joesten, the finest and certainly the sharpest of all
early critics, and Anthony Summers' Conspiracy, which although dated
remains the best single book ever written on the subject.
Interestingly,
both these authors came from Europe. The Warren Commission Report
itself offers a valuable comparison for these and any other books on the
subject.
My only serious criticism of Barry Ernest's book is that he
failed to provide an index, an important omission. However, except for
that fault, I recommend this book virtually without qualification to all
people curious about the greatest unsolved crime of its time.
I
take this opportunity to remind readers of Bertrand Russell's
penetrating question, still never answered: "If, as we are told, Oswald
was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security?"
Further,
I remind them that if a matter so important as the assassination of an
American president in the mid- 20th century could be handled in so
careless and dishonest a way by government agencies, why would anyone
expect something more with other sensitive issues and what are the
limits of government's lying? That is why the assassination of 48 years
ago remains a timely matter.
