What's sinister is the way Bugliosi misrepresents the details in order to fit his preferred narrative.
But Givens was interviewed several times by the FBI and the Secret Service between November and April. It wasn't until April that the story about going back for his cigarettes and seeing Oswald first popped up. And that was after Revill told Gemberling that Givens had been previously handled by the Special Services Bureau on a marijuana charge and he believes that Givens would change his story for money.
Reading Don Thomas’ rant against Bugliosi it appears to me that much of his “argument” hinges upon the last paragraph in the FBI report of their interview of Givens dated 11/23/63:
GIVENS said all employees enter the back door of the building when Jack Dougherty, the foreman opens the door at about 7 A.M. On the morning of November 22, 1963, GIVENS observed LEE reading a newspaper in the domino room where the employees eat lunch about 11:50 A.M.
So, how does one interpret the above paragraph? It appears that Don Thomas interprets the last sentence to mean that Givens said he saw LHO reading a newspaper in the domino room about 11:50. However, it appears to me that that really isn’t what that sentence says. I believe that, technically, the sentence says that Givens observed Lee reading a newspaper in the domino room that morning [no time given, however the preceding sentence is about early morning] and that the domino room is where the employees eat lunch about 11:50 A.M. A couple of commas would be required (before and after the phrase “where the employees eat lunch”) in order to technically correctly interpret that sentence the way Don Thomas apparently does.
I think that the somewhat similar construction of the first sentence (to the second sentence) supports the above argument. The writer of the report uses imprecise and less than ideal sentence construction which can be misleading and confusing. If we were to interpret the first sentence the way that Don Thomas appears to interpret the second sentence, the first sentence appears to say that all employees entered the building at 7 A.M. However, the testimonies of almost all of the employees indicates they normally arrive at about 8 A.M. So, it seems logical that the two somewhat similarly constructed sentences should be interpreted similarly because they were apparently written by the same person.
This argument isn’t easy to put into words that are easily followed. Hopefully, I have explained it in a way that makes sense.
