What's in a pronoun?

[Mark Ulrik]

This is small potatoes, I know, but I was intrigued by the Danish angle in this blog post by Fred Litwin. The post consists entirely of a 3/31/67 Reuters story that, under the headline “Author Lane Says He Knows Who Killed JFK (But Won’t Tell),” summarizes a Danish newspaper article by Lane. The implication is that Lane’s supposed knowledge stemmed from privileged access to extensive evidence amassed by Jim Garrison and his staff.

That is, however, slightly misleading. The Danish article (see below) does indeed run under the headline “HE KNOWS WHO SHOT KENNEDY,” but the “HE” plainly refers to Garrison, not Lane. And the headline was almost certainly the work of a copy editor, not Lane himself. According to the article, Lane had a candid conversation with Garrison (in a wine cellar in New Orleans) and left convinced that Garrison was the real deal. It offers no indication what, if any, concrete evidence was presented. Lane appears to have been shrewd enough to climb aboard the Garrison bandwagon while preserving just enough plausible deniability should it later go sideways.

Ekstra Bladet, March 30, 1967, pp. 22-3:

[SUMMARY] The truth about the assassination is so explosive that no government would ever risk making it public, Mark Lane writes from New Orleans. He says that District Attorney Jim Garrison, in private conversation, shared with him what he knows about a conspiracy to commit the murder.

A REPORT BY MARK LANE FOR EKSTRA BLADET

*** HE KNOWS WHO SHOT KENNEDY ***

NEW ORLEANS (Ekstra Bladet) — The flight from San Francisco stopped briefly in Dallas before heading straight on to New Orleans. And just like the plane, the investigation into the Kennedy assassination has now shifted from Dallas to New Orleans.

While I was in Dallas, I found myself thinking back to my first arrival at Love Field more than three years earlier. The mood back then had been openly hostile. The authorities were intent on persuading the country that Lee Harvey Oswald had killed President Kennedy. And that he had acted entirely on his own.

When I first arrived in Dallas, I brought nothing more than a cheap Japanese tape recorder, hoping to uncover the facts. Henry Wade, the Dallas district attorney, had gone on television to present what he claimed was conclusive evidence that Oswald was the killer, acting entirely on his own.

I left Dallas, only to keep coming back, each visit leaving me more skeptical of the official story.

Now, however, I had arrived in New Orleans, where District Attorney Jim Garrison was saying very little to the press about the case he was pursuing. He and his small team were fully occupied tracking down witnesses and digging through files and records.

The atmosphere was nothing like Dallas. The mayor had even announced that he intended to present Garrison with the city’s golden key and eventually name him an honorary citizen. Reporters armed with notebooks, tape recorders, and TV cameras bombarded me with questions the moment I arrived. And unlike in Dallas, I received so many invitations to speak at public events and on television in New Orleans that I couldn’t possibly have handled them all in a single week.

When I told the reporters that I was there to meet Jim Garrison, they insisted it couldn’t be done. —Garrison hasn’t spoken to anyone outside his own staff for weeks, they said. He won’t even pick up the phone.

Yet despite this, much of the American press has accused Garrison of being a publicity seeker.

When I arrived at my hotel, I phoned the DA’s office and was told that Mr. Garrison couldn’t be reached. Ten minutes later, however, he called me himself, saying he was very eager to meet.

—I’ve read that you’ve called me the most important man in America, he said. —That’s not true. You’re the one who set all of this in motion. Your book opened the doors. You’re the one who deserves to be called the most important man in the United States.

At 5 p.m. Garrison arrived at my hotel, and we were given a quiet room in the wine cellar where no one would interrupt us. We exchanged a few pleasantries, talked about the American media’s dishonest handling of the case, and before long we were deep into the tragedy that has shaped our lives so profoundly.

—I’m going to tell you everything I know, Garrison said. —Who organized the assassination, who planned it, and who killed Jack Kennedy. Dallas is the starting point. You saw that right away. And anyone with average intelligence who has read your book knows that the Warren Commission’s report has nothing to do with the real facts. Of course the shot was fired from the fence along the route.

—Who fired the shot? Who planned the assassination? I asked Garrison if he could answer those two questions.

He looked at me for a moment, as though weighing whether he could be completely candid with me.

—Yes, I know who planned it. I know how it was done. And I know who was standing behind the fence, Garrison said.

I listened as he laid out the case in detail — one astonishing event after another, a story so shocking that it could shake America to its core like nothing before it.

It soon became obvious to me why the Warren Commission had kept the truth hidden. It is the kind of truth no government would ever willingly expose.

But the truth will come out. Jim Garrison is a brave and determined man who refuses to believe that anything good can come from concealing it.

For as long as he lives, no one will be able to stop him from telling a New Orleans jury who stood behind the fence with the rifle that fired the fatal shot. And, above all, which powerful forces were behind the assassination of the president.

That is why Jim Garrison is the most important man in America today.

[John Corbett]

Mark Lane was a charlatan. Nothing more. Nothing less.

[Mark Ulrik]

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

[Benjamin Cole]

Mark Lane approached the JFKA the same way the WC did: As a biased lawyer, arguing a case.

Mark Lane played the role of defense lawyer, and the WC (with larger resources) played the role of prosecuting attorney.

For example, the WC argued that a Western Cartridge 6.5×52mm bullet (a large slug, 1+1/4 inch long and more than a quarter-inch in diameter), after ramming through Gov. JBC's chest, then ripped through JBC's right wrist, "tumbling" as it went through.

The impact and entry by the large slug caused a compound comminuted fracture (shattering) of the distal portion of his right radius, a major forearm bone, leaving bone fragments in his wrist.

But the WC claims that JBC maintained his grip on his Stetson hat, in his right hand, after receiving that wound. The sole affirmation for this tale is an account by Nellie Connally, JBC's wife.

So, we see JBC gripping the hat at Z-272, despite the purported serious wrist wound. The WC holds that JBC was shot somewhere back around Z-222. Really?

I have reasonable doubts about the above scenario drafted by WC lawyer, Arlen Specter. Specter's job was to present the LNT-SBT narrative. So he did.

Was the Stetson hat merely near JBC's hand after he was shot? Was his badly injured wrist merely, by chance, resting atop the Stetson hat? Who knows? Did Nellie fabricate "Texas lore"? I lived in Texas i the 1970s, and the Stetson hat and being Texan are synonymous.

Lawyer Mark Lane took equal latitudes to the WC in his JFKA narratives, and Garrison in his.

A lawyer's job is to present a case, not to present a fair review of the case. In fact, I suspect Mark Lane sometimes breached the public trust, knowingly. Garrison may have believed in what he was doing.

In the JFKA, initially we had the WC---the prosecutor's case---but no defense counsel narrative, no cross-examination of witnesses, no presentation of other evidence dug up by the defense counsel.

In fact, I suspect LHO was central to the JFKA.

But the WC (and President LBJ) wanted LHO to be a LN'er. So that is what the WC found.

[Mark Ulrik]

I have reasonable doubts about the above scenario drafted by WC lawyer, Arlen Specter. Specter's job was to present the LNT-SBT narrative. So he did.

Would it kill you to simply call them "doubts" and leave it to others to make judgements about their reasonableness?

[Lance Payette]

Propinquity, it's all propinquity. Or as we say when we visit Denmark, "nærhed." No, I think we'll keep saying propinquity even when we visit Denmark.

[Mark Ulrik]

To be clear, I wasn't defending Lane, just wanted to point out that the Reuters story was a bit deceptive in that it shifted perspective from third person (Garrison) to first person (Lane). Clearly, Lane and Garrison were both horrible. Maybe not as horrible as the current POTUS and his henchmen, but still pretty horrible.