For many who believe that there was a conspiracy to assassinate John Kennedy in Dallas, the most mesmeric argument of all is that an extraordinary number of people involved in the case —however remotely—have since lost their lives under mysterious circumstances. As of last week, the toll had, in fact, reached 14. To conspiracy theorists, the clear implication is that the victims knew too much and were systematically liquidated.
Chief mythologist and drumbeater for this theory is Penn Jones Jr., 52, the diminutive (5 ft. 2¼ in.) editor of a Texas weekly newspaper, the Midlothian Mirror (circ. 765). In 1965, Jones began a seemingly inexhaustible Mirror series intended, as he put it, to "bring into some intelligible whole all the events surrounding the assassination."
This month, San Francisco's slick Ramparts magazine, a onetime Catholic quarterly turned New Left monthly, also carried several of the Jones reports, along with the outcome of what the magazine breathlessly describes as an eight-month probe by "a team of Ramparts editors, aided by researchers and trained investigators," who "traveled to Dallas a dozen times and interviewed nearly 100 people throughout the country knowledgeable about the assassination." Oddly enough, a majority of the people most closely involved in the incidents reported in the Ramparts article never heard of the magazine or its "team." Thus it is not so odd that the Ramparts-Jones non-history is riddled with factual errors and perverse conclusions. Items:
> Earlene Roberts, 60, the fuzzy-minded housekeeper who ran the Dallas rooming house where Lee Harvey Oswald lived—and proved a helpful witness before the Warren Commission—died last January. Ramparts says that she had been subjected to "intensive police harassment," adds with sinister implication of foul play that "no autopsy was performed." In fact, Mrs. Roberts had severe heart disease, throat ulcers and cataracts. The cause of death, "acute myocardial infarction," was determined after an autopsy by a doctor at Parkland Hospital.