In Los Angeles, bookstores hawk posters, buttons and bumper stickers that ask WHO MURDERED KENNEDY?
In Brussels, theatergoers are packing a new play, Dallas, 22 November 1963, 12:27 p.m., in which right-wingers and Dallas police frame Lee Harvey Oswald for John Kennedy's assassination. In publications from Esquire to Commentary, college professors, journalists, novelists and would-be hawkshaws are fairly stepping on each other's lines to find new ways to challenge the Warren Commission's conclusions, investigatory technique, language, logic, legal methodology and moral intent.
The Warren Report, issued more than two years ago after a ten-month investigation into the killing, said flatly that Lee Oswald—alone—shot Kennedy, wounded Texas Governor John Connally, murdered a policeman and was, in turn, shot dead by Jack Ruby, whom it pictured as a demented loner. The report was widely praised at first—but no longer. The discrepancies—real or imagined—surrounding the assassination have become an increasingly obsessive topic the world over.
Amateur Sherlocks. Recently, Pollster Lou Harris found that no less than 54% of all Americans now think the commission left "a lot of unanswered questions about who killed Kennedy." A sizable number of people are so concerned that they have in effect turned the quest for the "real assassin" into an evangelistic vocation. Self-appointed investigators are at work throughout the nation, hoping to trip over some bypassed pebble of evidence that will crack the case wide open. They pore endlessly over the 10,400,000 words contained in the commission's report and 26-volume collection of testimony and exhibits. (The Government Printing Office has sold 1,820 sets at $76 each, plus 145,266 copies of the report itself.) Amateur Sherlocks have besieged the National Archives with requests to see the President's autopsy X rays and photographs recently acquired from the Kennedys, even though the family ruled unequivocally that for five years the material would be available only to certified Government investigative agencies or private investigators approved by the Kennedys.
Minutiae & Half Truths. For cocktail party dissenters, as well as the burgeoning cult of parlor detectives, the chief stimulant has been an outpouring of critical books on the subject. The biggest seller of all (110,000 copies) is Attorney Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment, which in effect is a defense brief for Oswald. Actually, the author admits: "My book is not an objective analysis; I've never said that I believe Oswald did it or did not do it. I say that had Oswald faced trial, he would not have been convicted."
Like most of the current crop, Lane's book is essentially a staggering accumulation of minutiae and half-truths based on minutiae. Yale Law Professor Alexander Bickel, himself a critic of the commission, has dismissed Lane's opus as "peripheral and indiscriminate," concluded: "Great trial lawyers, like great detectives, have an instinct for the jugular; Mr. Lane has an instinct for the capillaries."