Coda to "A Certain Type of Book"

Here are some additional comments about books on the assassination of JFK. A few of these titles are very obscure, but with Internet sites like abebooks.com they're still obtainable, so a commentary is not without value.

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Eyewitness to History, by Howard Brennan and J. Edward Cherryholmes, is one of those books I wanted to see for a long time. But I could never justify its list price ($17.00), since I assumed it was unadulterated BS. So I left it in the same category as Case Closed, meaning I figured to find it in a used bookstore someday for fifty cents.

As it turned out, someone gave me a copy.

Howard Brennan: "Ol' Four Eyes"

Howard Brennan was one of the Warren Commission's star witnesses. He was a Dealey Plaza eyewitness who claimed to have seen Oswald, armed and dangerous, in the Texas School Book Depository's sixth floor window.

In Eyewitness to History (Texian Press) he does not veer far from the official story. Readers get the lone nut, and the second lone nut; they get the noble and wise President's Commission sifting countless facts in search of the awful truth. All of that was to be expected. Readers also get weird punctuation and repeated misspellings ("Dealy" Plaza and J.D. "Tippett") which were not expected and could almost be overlooked – except that this is such a dishonest book.

There is very little value to Eyewitness to HIstory. Brennan, the titular eyewitness, states at several points that he long declined all opportunities to tell his story. But with the guidance of his minister (J. Edward Cherryholmes, the book's co-author) he decided to "set the record straight for history."

Uh...didn't he do that with his Warren Commission testimony?

Maybe not.

The only thing Eyewitness to History has to offer that might be important is an observation Brennan said he kept from the Warren Commission and to himself for many years. Shortly before the assassination, Brennan asserts, he observed a car parked on Houston Street next to the TSBD – a spot supposedly closed to all vehicles by Dallas Police. It was a 1955 to '57 Oldsmobile with a lone, white middle-aged male at the wheel. As Brennan watched, a cop walked over to this car and began chatting amiably with its driver.

Just after the motorcade passed and the shots were fired, Brennan says he grabbed a second cop and told him, "The man you want is in the building!" Then, "I glanced back towards the street to the side of the building. The car I had seen PARKED there before the motorcade passed WAS GONE. Although only a few moments had elapsed and all exits were blocked except one, the car had disappeared ... I have always felt that he was somehow involved in the assassination" [emphasis in original].

Yet he didn't tell the cops or the Warren Commission about this possible getaway car.

Brennan claims he noticed Oswald in the alleged sniper's nest before the shots. After the third shot he hit the ground and looked back to the sixth floor of the TSBD.

"To my amazement the man still stood there in the window! He didn't appear to be rushed. There was no particular emotion visible on his face except for a slight smirk. It was a look of satisfaction, as if he had accomplished what he had set out to do."

Elsewhere in the book, Brennan goes to great pains to tell us his vision is "unusually good; I am one of a select few who, for some reason, are gifted with extraordinary eyesight." Yet he wore glasses.

Howard Brennan admitted to the Warren Commission that before he was taken to a police lineup he had twice seen Oswald on TV as a suspect, and that "I told them I could not make a positive identification." In his book he explains this away by saying he believed the assassination was "a communist activity," and he and his family would be in danger if he made his positive ID right off the bat.

Eyewitness to History was published in 1987, four years after Brennan's death. It is worth noting that among those listed in this book's acknowledgements are Forrest Sorrels of the Secret Service, Earl Warren, Gerald Ford, and "Mrs. Mohammad Bob Threlkeld, sister of the late Shah of Iran ... my best wishes to her."

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Oh, What a Time!

I was browsing through a used book store in San Francisco a number of years back when I happened upon a novel I'd not seen before. I wasn't reading much fiction at the time, but A Time to Remember got my interest because it dealt with the Kennedy assassination.

I bought it. I read it. I hated it.


Written by Stanley Shapiro, A Time to Remember is basically Back to the Future meets the Warren Report. Be forewarned, I'm going to spill the beans on this one. If you don't like spoilers, you'd better stop reading right now.

I should mention first that this book has been kicking around for a while. It was published in 1986; the copy I found (for $2.50) is a Signet paperback.

The story of A Time To Remember is pretty simple, and indeed might appeal to science fiction fans. David, our hero, longs for a revered dead brother, who was killed in Vietnam. When David's path crosses with a Mad Scientist who has invented of a time machine, ba-boom – David decides he'll travel back to 1963 and stop Oswald from killing JFK. In the world of this novel, no Oswald means no assassination means no Vietnam war means no revered dead brother.

This same idea – stop Oswald to save the dead brother – could have worked with a conspiracy theory, and even provided a nice plot twist. Oswald could have been somehow neutralized by David – kidnapped or killed, or trapped inside an elevator perhaps – but, surprise! The assassination goes down anyway. What would David have done then?

But that isn't how it happens. Not only does David fail to stop Oswald; he finds himself the prime suspect in the assassination! David's girlfriend Laura comes back from the future to rescue him, but she too fails to alter history, and for a while Laura and David are both on the lam in Dallas, the prime suspects in the assassination.

The Kennedy assassination plays out several times during the course of A Time to Remember, but each time, our heroes fail in their quest to stop it.


Finally, after a few hard-to-swallow developments – David and his cohorts gaining an audience with new President LBJ, for example, and convincing him they're from the future – November 22 dawns yet again. Lee Oswald rises in the Paine home, leaves $175 and his wedding ring on a bureau, then heads out to the Paine garage to get his Mannlicher Carcano. He is still the Oswald according to Earl Warren.

Tense, almost fevered by the malice within him, he enters the garage, where he has hidden the rifle. Disassembled, it lies concealed in brown wrapping paper. Picking it up, he feels its hardness beneath its paper sheath. Soon it will bring him the sense of self-worth he has so desperately sought all his life.

Not so fast, Lee! The Mad Scientist inventor of the time machine has come back to save the day! Like Jack Ruby, he has stalked Oswald; unlike Ruby, he is a genuine good guy driven to murder. He is unfamiliar with firearms, so after consulting with the gun dealer "remembers the advice to aim and then fire." He drives off, leaving the gutshot Lee bleeding in a gutter.

He knows he will die on that curb, unnoticed, unknown. He is filled with outrage at this last cruel turn of a star-crossed life. He curses a fate that always stopped him just when he was about to make a move that would have given that life meaning. He dies wondering why anyone would have wanted to kill him.

But it's okay, because everyone else lives happily ever after. Kennedy is not slain, and goes on to a second term. The Vietnam War, fought only by the Vietnamese, is over by 1966. The revered brother doesn't die. David is reunited with him – not as his brother, since as a time traveler David has a time-space problem – but as a sort of surrogate brother. With his knowledge of the future (unaltered, even though history has been changed), David makes a killing on the stock market. He marries Laura, who is obliged to stay with him in 1963. All is well in the world. It is indeed a time to remember – but a book to forget.

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My list of "good" assassination books contains, at position #2, Conspiracy, by Anthony Summers. Conspiracy was first published in 1980 and has been revised and updated several times. Some people love this book. Others do not.

Supposedly, Summers has since declared himself an "agnostic" on the question of conspiracy. That may be one reason why the latest reprint (in 1998) bore a new title, Not In Your Lifetime. This new title is derived from an astonishing remark by Earl Warren in February 1964, when he headed the commission that (informally) bore his name.

In the preface to Not In Your Lifetime, Summers calls it "outrageous" that, as of the mid-1990s, certain government agencies had still not made public all their records relating to the assassination of JFK. "What security-related secret of 1963," Summers asked, "can possibly be justifiably withheld today?"

It fascinates me that this very same question was posed by Theodore Roscoe in 1959, in a book about the Lincoln assassination called Web of Conspiracy.

There are some remarkable parallels to the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations. I do not mean the silly stuff, like the oft-cited, "Lincoln's assassin killed him in a theater and ran to a warehouse, while Kennedy's assassin killed him from a warehouse and ran to a theater!" That sort of crap reinforces lone nut mythology.

I refer, instead, to the fact that in both cases, the government moved in after each assassination, embargoed most of the evidence, and buried it.

A final comment: Anthony Summers is decidedly anti-Jim Garrison. Many in this field use Garrison as a sort of litmus test on an author's reliability or integrity. Since Conspiracy and Not In Your Lifetime give great weight to the New Orleans milieu, it seems quite strange to me, if not suspect, that Summers could refer to the Garrison case as a "grotesque, misdirected shambles."

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Who Killed Kennedy?, by Thomas G. Buchanan, began as a series of newspaper articles published in l'Express in Paris. Buchanan was an American expatriate. There are two versions of the book; neither, I'd wager, are very easy to find nowadays. It was published first in the UK by Secker & Warburg. Later, it was published in the USA by Putnam.

Each edition came out before the Warren Report.

The material is presented somewhat differently in the two versions. I read the American edition first, because it was lying around the house. (This goes back a couple of eons.) I thought it had a very powerful ending, culminating with the line, "It is not the light that we must fear; it is the darkness."

Imagine my surprise when reading the UK version, I found this climactic sentence moved to the end of the Preface, on page 8!

Some of the other content was juggled around, too.

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There are other assassination books worth mentioning, especially for those who might not read anything else on the subject. I think Jim Marrs' Crossfire is a good primer on the subject. So is Stewart Galanor's Cover Up, which is not be be confused with Cover Up by J. Gary Shaw and Larry Harris – also a serviceable primer, if you can find it. Others of note include Henry Hurt's Reasonable Doubt (in spite of an unworthy chapter about a self-proclaimed assassination participant) and JFK: The Book of the Film, by Zachary Sklar and Oliver Stone.

JFK: Mrs. Paine's Mirage (Or, How I Learned to Hate Mrs. Paine's Garage)

Mrs. Paine's Garage, published back in 2002, is an unfortunate little book. I have a distant connection to it, one that I regret.

In July 2001 its author, Thomas Mallon, sent me an email introducing himself. He briefly described his project – a sympathetic look at Ruth Paine, a figure in the JFK assassination – and asked if I could put him in touch with Mrs. Shirley Martin, who had known Mrs. Paine many years before.

Mallon had apparently Googled Mrs. Martin and found no contact information. But the Internet, in its infinite thoroughness, linked my name to hers, presumably due to some research I was then conducting. So I wrote to Mrs. Martin about Thomas Mallon, and she agreed to talk to him.

Thomas Mallon's motives for undertaking a book about Ruth Paine are unknown to me, and I won't speculate on them. But I find it hard to understand how he could write Mrs. Paine's Garage without playing at least a gentle form of devil's advocate with his subject. Such a role, which some would consider the writer's duty, might have elicited valuable information that would have greatly enhanced the resulting narrative, even if he stuck to what I am convinced was a preconceived conclusion.

As it developed, there was no devil's advocacy, and consequently no real depth to Mrs. Paine's Garage. Mr. Mallon accepts the official story of the JFK assassination and, it follows, the official story of Ruth Paine and her role in that cataclysmic event.

That role, in sum, is that Ruth Paine was, in 1963, a good-hearted Quaker woman who happened to befriend Lee and Marina Oswald at a critical juncture in their lives. She allowed the pregnant Marina and one daughter (soon two) to live with her in suburban Dallas while misfit Lee dreamed the dreams of the perpetual loser, finally exacting a psycho-sicko revenge on society by murdering President Kennedy.

Thomas Mallon refers to Ruth Paine as "a vessel of disinterested kindness." Others see Mrs. Paine in a different light.

Ruth and her husband Michael "maintain a delicate balance between intimacy and distance as concerns Lee Harvey Oswald," wrote researcher Barbara LaMonica in 1995. "They exploit their role as intimate when they want to condemn Lee, and take on the mantle of being expert witnesses as to his character, and how violence-prone he was, and how capable he was [for committing] the assassination. But they conveniently distance themselves from him when they want to avoid scrutiny."

After his arrest, a desperate Lee Oswald telephoned Mrs. Paine from jail and asked her help in contacting a lawyer named John Abt. "I was quite stunned that he called at all or that he thought he could ask anything of me – appalled, really," Ruth testified to the Warren Commission.

Yet she did, in fact, try to reach John Abt on Oswald's behalf. Asked by the Warren Commission whether she informed Oswald she had been unable to contact him, this vessel of disinterested kindness replied, "I made no effort to call the police station."

Sylvia Meagher was herself appalled, really, by this admission. "Her failure to notify Oswald that she had been unable to reach Abt, so that he would realize the urgency of obtaining legal assistance elsewhere, is unforgivable," she wrote in Accessories After the Fact.

There is more about Ruth and Michael Paine, a lot more – but I want to keep this short.

There are portions of Mrs. Paine's Garage which I find downright deceptive. In a footnote on page 57, Thomas Mallon cites an "assassinaton legend" that on November 22, 1963, Ruth Paine greeted Dallas Police officers with the words, "Come in, I've been expecting you." These officers had come to search Mrs. Paine's home several hours after the assassination, and the Paine garage yielded a trove of evidence damning Lee Oswald.

As Jerry Rose noted in a 1990 article in The Third Decade, the arrival of the cops at the Paine house was not, in and of itself, suspicious; Oswald listed the Paine address on his employment application to the Texas School Book Depository. It's her greeting that seemed so odd, even to the police. When they arrived at the Paine home, Lee Oswald had not yet been publicly identified as an assassination suspect.

In any case, Ruth Paine firmly denies the greeting attributed to her, telling Thomas Mallon, "I was not expecting them and I did not say that."

Maybe she didn't. But the allegation is not a "legend," which my dictionary says is an unverifiable story handed down by tradition. No, it comes from the testimony of one of the cops, Dallas Police Detective Guy F. Rose, who before he made it raised his right hand and swore that what he was about to say was the truth and nothing but, so help him God. Maybe Detective Rose made the story up. But this is not a legend, it is sworn testimony. And maybe it is true.

It is worth mentioning that Shirley Martin, who is now deceased, later told me that after making contact with her, Thomas Mallon said some things to her that may not be true. Shirley said he told her that he would be able to quote her letters to Ruth Paine in his book, whether Shirley gave him permission or not.

This is almost certainly false. Writers are strictly governed by what they can quote without permission. It is a matter of intellectual property. From what Shirley told me, Mallon at very least exaggerated how much he would be able to quote, and he probably knew better. This is a big reason why his smelly little book is on my list of the worst ever published on the JFK case.

"I hope," Shirley Martin said, "he is not another Posner."

He wasn't, but not for lack of trying. Mrs. Paine's Garage was duly published, and excerpted in The New Yorker, and lauded by the usual media sluts. It appears, finally, to have sunk into a well-deserved oblivion.

Cancer

The other night I saw a movie called Wit, directed by Mike Nichols. The screenplay was by Nichols and Emma Thompson.

Thompson stars as a literature professor who, in the opening scene, is diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The cancer has long gone undetected and is in its later stages, so right off the bat we know there isn't much hope.

It must be because of Wit that I had a really weird dream last night. (As I write this it is early in the morning, I've only been up a few minutes, the dream is still fresh.)

In the dream, I'm in the community rooms of a church. It's really crowded. I'm ready to leave, but I've ridden my bike there and am looking for a place to change back into my bike pants.

I bump into a friend of mine named Ivan. We say hello but chat only briefly. We'll be seeing each other later that evening at a writer's group we both participate in.

As we part company I notice that one of Ivan's hands is missing. He sees that I have noticed, and says, "Yeah, another piece of me is gone."

"My God, Ivan!" I cry. "This is terrible!"

"Oh, it really isn't that bad."

I know he's been sick, and the prognosis is not good. But I hadn't understood the gravity of his illness until now.

Then I see bruising around his eyes, which, as I look, begin to resemble puncture wounds.

By then Ivan is turning away from me and melting into the crowd. I can't say anything further, so I resume looking for a place to change into my bike pants. As I search, this nocturnal reverie becomes a typical anxiety dream. I wake up.

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The writer's group of the dream did, in fact, exist, and Ivan and I were part of it. For about six years we met weekly in a room at the local library. A core group of four or five, including Ivan, attended for most of those years. Countless others, who I (privately) thought of as satellite members, also took part – some for just a meeting or two, others for much longer.

And Ivan really did get sick.

It began a few years ago with a broken leg – his femur, as I recall. He was a volunteer bus driver at a senior center. One evening after driving a group to a restaurant, he got off the bus to help its passengers disembark. As his foot hit the ground, his femur snapped.

The bone had been weakened by cancer, and the cancer had metastasized. I had to look up  "metastasize." It means the cancer spread.

Ivan spent many weeks in the hospital. Began chemo and other treatment. The writer's group, or at least its core members, visited and telephoned and sent cards. The outlook was rather optimistic.

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In a way, Ivan always seemed like the conscience of the writer's group. A divorced and semi-retired engineer, he was remarkably even-tempered, in sharp contrast to my own volatility. Ivan was the first to admit his writing could at times be rather dry. Once he brought a patent application to share with the group. He was passionate about solar energy, and was also designing a new sort of voting machine.

Maybe the conscience-of-the-group thing was just me. But we all appreciated his fundamental decency.

Anyway, Ivan finally got out of the hospital, and soon returned to our writer's group meetings. At first he arrived in a wheelchair, but in time he was walking again. Once he even rode his bike, which I thought was nuts.

But the cancer stayed with him, and there came a very sad day when Ivan informed us that he probably only had a year or so left to live. His initial, good response to the chemo had leveled, maybe even dropped off a bit. And the side effects were becoming more than he could endure. So he quit the treatment.

A few months later, due to what I now see as inevitable personality clashes, the writer's group went on hiatus. The core group remained friendly; the trouble was with the satellites. So we suspended activities. This is a common fate for such groups.

I didn't see or hear from any group members for many months. Then in early 2010 Ivan gave me a call.

"I'm dying," he said bluntly.

I told him I already knew that.

Ivan's voice sounded a little hoarse, a little raspy, but strong. He said he wanted to re-assemble the writer's group, at least for an evening. He wanted to see us all again while he still had time. He was receiving hospice care but was still in his apartment. We could all come by, bring food, and hang out for a few hours.

And that's what we did. In fact, we did it twice.

United in our concern for him, Ivan brought us all back together. The core group decided we should start meeting again, more or less like we used to. We could bring writing samples to Ivan's place and critique them. By then Ivan was tethered to a couple of machines, including a ventilator and one that dispensed morphine. We all pulled chairs around his bed.

Food had always been an integral part of our meetings – mostly chocolate, but sometimes other stuff. Once I made some banana bread. Others brought their homemade delicacies, and once one of the satellites brought in some stuff she'd plucked from her garden. The library staff turned a mostly blind eye to this violation of the rules.

So we began bringing piles of food to Ivan's place – sandwiches, pizza, Mediterranean treats, and of course chocolate. We ate and read our stuff. This went on for several months.

Then one evening I showed up and Ivan wasn't there. He used to leave his door unlocked. I had arrived first, let myself in and found the place empty. All his stuff was there, but not Ivan – and I knew he was in no shape for a stroll around the neighborhood.

Luckily a guy from Ivan's church arrived. He was there to collect some of Ivan's things. Ivan's condition, he told me, had worsened, to the point where he required more attention than he could get from in-home hospice care.

Still, we were able to keep meeting. For the next month we met in Ivan's room at the hospice. The move from his apartment must have been a blow to his morale. Being home may have provided only an illusion of independence, but sometimes it's our illusions that help sustain us.

Ivan's spirits, it seemed, remained pretty good. So did his general health. But none of us were kidding ourselves. He was in a hospice, and that's where you go to die.

One evening I showed up for our meeting. I had written something new, something I was eager to read and get feedback on. I breezed past the reception desk and walked down a short hall to Ivan's room.

It was empty.

It was empty and all of Ivan's stuff had been removed. The bed had been stripped of its sheets.

I could guess what must have happened. But I walked back to the reception desk and asked. Two women there exchanged a shifty-eyed glance.

"I'm sorry to tell you this," one said. "But Ivan's condition declined over the weekend. He died two days ago."

I thanked them and accepted their sympathies. Then I walked outside. It was a warm evening in late May, the cusp of summer. I sat on the curb and waited for the other two core members to arrive. After I'd broken the news we sat on the curb together, eating chocolate and talking about our late friend.

A service was held the next day in the crowded church of my dream.

As the movie Wit nears its own inevitable end, the Emma Thompson character realizes that the most important thing in life is human kindness. Ivan already knew that, and always did.

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L-R: L2, moi, Ivan – 2008