At one time, specifically in regard to the questions being raised about Craford in connection with Tippit, I researched him as best I could, all the way up to his death many years later. He was a complete nobody all his life. He was about as much a hitman as my grandmother and about as unlikely a Tippit assassin as one could imagine.
What do you do about his confession that he was a hitman c. 1960-1961?
I questioned his daughter closely on that. First, was it true that he had told his brother--her uncle--that, and she said yes that was true, he had told her uncle that. Curtis (that is what the family called him incidentally, "Curtis") had not told anybody else in the family that to her knowledge, not her and she did not think he had told her mother that, but he had told his brother that. Second question, was Craford--her father--a raconteur type, a make-up-stories type, a bullshitter in bars type? She was serious that the answer to that was "no". I asked if she believed her father had been a hitman at that stage of his life. She said she did not know. I asked if her uncle--Craford's brother--believed it was true. She said yes he did believe it was true.
I think Craford had a rough early life, dodged a couple of bullets (not caught and charged), remarried in Oregon and was straight the rest of his life.
Lets just say your cheerful total confidence at your distance that Curtis Craford had never been a hitman any more than your grandmother was not shared by family members who were sympathetic to him. But you just know from your distance, don't you, you can just tell? :-)
How many innocent persons in history have been wrongly convicted on the basis of narratives that sounded simple and sensible. Only problem was the person didn't do it. Innocence Project issues. That's my caution here on Oswald on Tippit. And I know if anything is considered airtight in the JFKA range of things, its Oswald on Tippit. But he never got a trial and I have brought out a few things that never were investigated. And for me, its not because of any fun out of being contrarian. Its because, rightly or wrongly, I'm actually after the truth.
And because I did my master's thesis at Cornell under the late Martin Bernal, author of "Black Athena". Smart man. He aroused the ire of the entire classics profession by challenging the "Greek miracle" model of Western civilization, in which western civilization comes from the Greeks and the Greeks started by themselves. Bernal said the Greeks didn't start by themselves, that the Greeks themselves plus everyone else anciently saw Egypt as the source prior to Greece. Bernal said that was changed in intellectual history in the 19th century for racist reasons. Bernal said classicists today are liberal and not racist, it is scholarly conservatism (that's not meant politically) which is the explanation for today inheriting an historical construction "born in sin" in the 19th century born out of racism. The week after I signed Bernal to be my thesis advisor, a review came out in the New York Review of Books by a major-name classicist literally likening Bernal to the devil. No kidding--cited Milton on Lucifer ascending to challenge God, as Bernal ascending to challenge the veritable truths of classicists. A line drawing illustrating the review drew a caricature portrait of Bernal with pointed Spock ears, to make him look like he was the devil. Bernal (from England, whose father was a famous scientist and whose maternal grandfather was Sir Alan Gardiner, one of the world's greatest Egyptologists) answered back that if classicists though he was Lucifer in that Milton analogy, who did that mean they thought they were?
Anyway, Bernal talked to me a lot about "sociology of knowledge", of how knowledge is not only about facts but about how it is constructed. Neither here nor there on JFKA and Tippit really, just a bit of my background comparable to your interesting Roswell history.
Anyway I'm not going to press this further, thanks for your comments.
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