When reading about the Kennedy assassination, the idea of conspiracy and cover-up are always waiting in the wings even if the author doesn’t mention it. I figure it is best to go ahead and embrace that fact. As part of my reading, I what to read the best evidence from those who disagree with the official story. The first stop has to be Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment. It appeared the year after the Warren Commission Report and proceeds from the supposition that any truth the Commission uncovered was not in the Report itself, but in the 26 volumes of recorded testimonies and statements made to the Commission’s legal team. Lane’s book, if nothing else, is a source for some of these extended interviews which offer readers a wider sample of what people said to the Commission. This quote from near the end of the book serves as a good abstract of Rush to Judgment:
“The Commission reviewed the testimony of 552 witnesses. Some of the testimony was inconsistent with other testimony, in sum or in part, and it was necessary for the Commission to evolve a standard for assessing it. I believe that it did so: testimony compatible with the theory of Oswald as the lone assassin was accepted, even when incredible, while incompatible testimony, no matter how creditable, was rejected.” p. 395
Mark Lane was hired by the Oswald family to represent Lee Oswald’s interests to the Warren Commission. Since there could not be a true trial owing to Oswald being dead, Lane acted as his defense attorney to the extent the Commission allowed. Having seen the sausage get made, so to speak, after the Commission issued its Report, Lane felt it was his duty to point out how far from “beyond a reasonable doubt” the Commission had actually proved its case. Lane points out time and again how key witnesses for the Commission would not have survived cross-examination. Witnesses frequently changed their stories and sometimes were led by Commissioner questions and other times all-but admitted to being coached by lawyers for the Commission. He also quotes numerous ways in which the Dallas police and Federal government representatives gave statements to the press which would have hindered a fair trial.
Lane attacks virtually every element of the Commission’s conclusions. Playing the defense attorney, Lane seeks to show the bullets which hit Kennedy weren’t fired from behind. They weren’t fired by Oswald. They weren’t fired by the rifle found on the sixth floor of the building where Oswald worked. The rifle found didn’t belong to Oswald. Lane does not present alternative evidence, he is only trying to poke holes in the Commission’s arguments using evidence collected by the Dallas police and Federal investigators which the Commission didn’t quote in its Report. If Lane has a coherent alternate theory about what happened in this book it seems to be there was a shooter of some sort on the sixth floor, but also another behind the fence at the top of the infamous knoll. Neither of these two shooters was Oswald, who was out front of the building at the time.
Sometimes Lane mounts an effective defense, other times less so. Take a couple short examples. He is pretty convincing when describing how the rifle tests, supposedly performed under similar conditions to the day of the assassination, were actually from a different height and a different distance than from the Depository window to presidential limo. “Could Oswald have made the shots?” has always been a pretty important question so maybe it is important to know the shot wasn’t actually repeated by the Commission. A weaker point by Lane is the medical report which estimated a 60 degree angle of entry for the wound in Kennedy’s back proves the shot came from too high up to have come from sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. I read that and have to ask what is more likely; the medical report is wrong about the angle or a shot was fired from some imaginary sniper’s nest high enough above the street that a 60 degree angle was created? I must conclude, as the Commission did, that the medical report was inaccurate on this point.
Lane does his best work throwing question on exactly what happened (and when) that led to the death of Dallas police patrolman J. D. Tippit in the Oak Cliff neighborhood. The Commission’s reconstructed escape route from downtown is shown by Lane to go well beyond what can actually be proven. From the unfair police line ups where Oswald was picked as the man seen fleeing the scene of Tippit’s murder, to the conflicting witness statements in the bus and taxi Oswald supposedly rode to the fact two types of bullets were found in Tippit’s body; there are holes in a narrative the Commission simply papered over with heavy-handed lines like, “Nevertheless, the Commission has concluded...”
“Perhaps the Commission thought that if Oswald spent a single moment unaccounted for between the assassination and the time of his arrest, it would be unable to deal effectively with those rumors, current at the time, of Oswald’s participation in a conspiracy. Its criteria for investigating and accepting evidence were related less to the intrinsic value of the information, I believe, than to its paramount need to allay fears of conspiracy.” p. 175
I think Lane’s assessment of the Commission’s goal to “allay fears” is spot on. The Warren Commission Report presents a complete narrative of what happened on 22-24 November 1963 and comes as close to answering the question “why?” as they can, considering Oswald was killed. To reach this clear narrative, they left out some of the details. In essence, they sought the “best fit” line of evidence through a lot of conflicting testimony. Lane spends this book pointing out that not all the data points are on the “best fit” line. While some of these points are interesting in their own right, it doesn’t really change the overall narrative. There will always be data which isn’t on the line. That alone doesn’t mean the Commission’s conclusions are wrong. To take one example Lane mentions over and over again. After the shots were fired many people converged on the area of the parking lot behind the fence at the top of the knoll. Many witnesses thought the shots came from this direction. Many others said they moved to or looked toward the area because others were already doing so. Lane assigns great importance to these initial reactions. My question, though, is what evidence was found there? No shell casings. No discarded rifle. No reports of people running from the scene. The knoll is a data point not on the line.
While Mark Lane’s book failed to convince me the official story is wrong, it did its job is raising questions about the Report and the bias of the Commission. I think Lane’s biggest success is in pointing to the evidence of how hard the Federal government and, even more so, the Dallas police worked to minimize their own failings as relates to the assassination. They should have done a better job to protect the president (and later Oswald) and they could have; they just didn’t because of their own assumptions and some gross miscommunication. I don’t think Lane has uncovered evidence of a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, but it is interesting to see how much the Dallas police were working to save face by altering or omitting testimony and pushing time lines as much as possible and how much the Commission let them do so. To the extent there is a cover-up it is all in the mishandling of the evidence and witnesses after the event. That leads back to where this review started, the Commission couldn’t have proven its case in court, but for better or for worse, it never had to.
The last word will go to Lane himself, because I basically agree with him on this point. From page 207; “If historians are required to conjecture as to the meaning of the altered transcript,” or any of the other things which don’t quite add up, “the responsibility for such speculation must rest with the Commission.”
