Chapter 1

MORE SHYLOCK THAN SHERLOCK

Sanctimony, arrogance, self-righteousness, omniscience, contempt for others expressed in various ways and an absolute certainty that all they make up, usually out of the most profound ignorance of the established fact, is instant fact the minute they make it up, characterizes just about all of the many who sought to commercialize and exploit the assassination and with that gain fame and fortune, a recognition not possible for most of them any other way.

Most have been men but amongst the most arrogant are a few women who seek to exude the feeling of their superiority they genuinely feel and usually disclose if they if they do not express it openly.

This manuscript addresses Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK.1 It is a book glorifying Howard Donahue, ghosted for him by Bonar Menninger. It was published by St. Martin's Press in 1992.

It is a wretched business, this deep subversion or misrepresenting to the people about the coup d'etat they suffered, what any assassination inevitably is, and in this one seems to have been intended to change policy. That is inevitable in a coup d'etat.

Misrepresenting hell -- these two lie. And lying to the people about a subject like a coup d'etat — one in particular that turned the country and the world around -- is as deep a subversion as is possible for a writer in a society like ours.

The use of straightforward words that do not seek merely to deprecate, that are not intended to say and mean less that is intended, is frowned on in commercial writing as it is in most scholarship. I use the word with the intent of imparting the emphasis and understanding I think is more that indicated, what I think is required by the seriousness of the offense against decency, against honor, against national interest and against the understanding of the people, which is the very basis of any democratic society.

The simplest definition of "lie" in the Oxford American Dictionary2 is "A statement the speaker knows to be untrue." While for most purposes this simple formulation ought be enough, because I do use the word, when I use it, intending emphasis, intending to reach the reader's mind with what I believe is the greater seriousness of it is on this subject, I also include the more elaborate and inclusive definition provided by the Random House Unabridged Dictionary3:

lie n., v., lied, lying. --n. 1. A false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood. 2. Something intended or serving to convey a false impression; imposture: his wig was a lie that deceived no one. 3. The charge or accusation of lying; a flat contradiction: He flung the lie back his accusers. 4. give the lie to, a. to charge with lying; contradict. b. to prove or imply the falsity of; belie; His work gives lie to his claims of experience. — v.i. 5. intend to deceive. 6. To express what is false, or convey a fake impression. [ME; OE lyge; c. G Luge, Icel ljge; akin to Goth Liugn]

— v.t. 7. To bring, to take, put, etc., by lying (often used reflexively): to lie oneself out of a difficulty; accustomed to lying his way out of difficulties. 8. lie in one's throat or teeth, to lie grossly or maliciously; If she told you exactly the opposite of what she told me, she must be lying in her teeth. [ME lie[n]. OE leogan; c. G lugen, Icel ljuga, Goth Liugn]

— Syn. 1. Prevarication, falsification. See falsehood, 5. Prevaricate, fib. — Ant. 1. Truth.

This definition concludes with another simplification, that the antithesis of lie is truth.

While there are many lies in Mortal Error, and we soon deal with a few of that many, the most outrageous of all, the most indecent, really inhuman of all, is that a Secret Service agent of the White House detail, George W. Hickey, a man who had the responsibility of protecting the President, of keeping him alive, is the one who killed him. That they say he was the assassin by accident does not diminish the shame they heap upon him and his family throughout history by those who believe these lies nor did it reduce the severity of the blow it was to this brave and dedicated man who, along with the others of that detail, always had his life at risk to protect the President.

There is nothing scarcer than truth in most of the books said to be about the assassination and are more often about their authors. Some, like the one who interests us in what follows, have ghost writers. It is not uncommon for these hired pens to glorify the one whose book they write even more than the less immodest of those who do not believe they need a hired pen.

Sometimes this self-promotion is more effective if it is made to appear to be self- deprecating or self-questioning or to seem to express some degree of uncertainty, of groping with the evidence and the conclusions reached based on it. The skilled writer, like Bonar Menninger does use these and other devices to make the one about whom he is writing, in this case Howard Donahue, appear to be more human, more modest, more probing and questioning, more uncertain until in the written version, it is intended to be and to most readers is a certainty beyond real question.

Many devices are used to accomplish these and similar ends and after some experience in their use and after setting the mind to work that what they come rather automatically to the ghost, to the hired pen.

In this writing for the record for our history we have examined various kinds of thieves, including those who can't even steal straight. We have seen and examined the proofs of their subject-matter ignorance, a quality that permeates and often is more conspicuous when the claim is made of greater expertise and subject-matter knowledge. We have seen some who, by normal standards, are not really rational. Not a few with exalted opinions of themselves. Some pretend to be hiding this but are careful not to. These exalted opinions , of course, extend to their books, whether or not they did their own writing.

Common characteristics are ego, ignorance and dishonesty. With the dishonesty, lying, deliberate dishonesty, is commonplace. Purposeful as distinguished as coming from ignorance which, alas, is in varying degrees characteristic of by far most of those whose names are on books supposed to be about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and its investigations, whether or not they in fact are.

Many regard themselves as Sherlock Holmes returned and their books represent them that way when they and their books are not, of course, of that character.

There are many authors of many books, with and without ghosts. Some were of earlier fame, as most were not. Some are quite sincere, are genuine, and are lost in the subject beyond all rescue or salvation. There may be no kind of lying that is not represented in these books, a dubious distinction for the subject-matter and a tragedy for the nation.

One who embodies most of these qualities, arrogance in particular, and who lies with knowingness, with deliberateness and for his own purposes -- one who makes his lies up for his own petty reasons with no basis for them at all is the one who in this manuscript takes our interest. He is also different because he can, as he does, lay claim to a related expertise. He is self-made in that area, having no formal education in it but in some aspects of it he is a legitimate and a recognized expert. While from his own account the official recognition by the police and by the courts is skimpy, Howard Donahue is not reasonably described by his publisher as "a ballistics expert and firearms examiner." He is also an expert rifleman, one who can shoot more rapidly and more accurately than most.

The man who wrote his book, Bonar Menninger, lives in Kansas City, Missouri. That is quite a distance from Donahue's residence in Towson, a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland. Menninger is a former reporter for several business journals. The book's dust jacket states he has won unspecified awards "for in-depth investigative" business writing. There is no evidence of his use of those talents in the book he wrote for Donahue. It is conspicuous to anyone with any investigative experience that there is much Menninger should have known about and avoided.

This is also true of Donahue who is in that book, as his publisher does on the dust jacket, separates himself from those deprecated as "amateur sleuths." His publisher attributes to him "bulldog-like tenacity" that Menninger "chronicles" in Donahue's claimed "twenty-five years" of alleged "investigation of President Kennedy's death [sic]." Their book, they boast is "one of the greatest true-life stories ever told" that "offers solutions to questions that have haunted America for nearly thirty years" as of the time of the publication.

There is no truth to any of this. Their book is a work of fiction.

While fake and exaggerated claims are not unusual for a publisher anxious for the dust jackets to attract interest and to sell books, and it may even by that there were those at St. Martins who believed it, what Donahue conducted is not by rational definition "an investigation of President Kennedy's death." What the book "offers" as the solution to those "questions that have haunted" the nation is no better that gross and deliberate fraud by both men. They publish the proof of this in their book while making these exaggerated claims for their book.

They do not lie by accident. Their lying is obvious and is proven by what they "offer" as that "solution." The lying begins with the very first words of it as we see.

Donahue and Menninger use the book to get even with those who had the temerity not to fall down on their knees and pray to this self-conceived great man as he is presented, to those who dare not agree with Donahue.

Of whom I am one, perhaps the first one.

Because writers owe their readers honesty and the admission of what can be regarded as prejudice, I state at the outset and that they lied about me to defame me and my work and that they made their lies up out of nothing at all. I do assume that the fabrication was by Donahue but the obligation to know that what he wrote was the truth was Menninger 's and he never spoke to me or had me questioned about that nastiness of Donahue's that he put on paper and to which St. Martin's did all it could to get maximum attention.

St. Martin's did this without any to effort to learn whether what they were about to publish defamed people or was intended to be honest, fair or even truthful. Publishers have that responsibility. But, as St Martin's explains itself and its publication of this assassination atrocity in a long publisher's note,4 all of its efforts were expended to get Hickey to confess to the impossible: that he was an assassin. With this confession they would have had that which they hoped: a best-seller — and make them much money — while seeing to it that he had no basis for suing them.

St. Martin's avoided — had to avoid, really — if it was to publish this undiluted evil, what was once the respected tradition of nonfiction, a competent peer review. St Martin's could not have a competent peer review and still publish this rotten, evil book from which it hoped to make its best-seller money.

To me Donahue is a nobody who by skilled propaganda made himself acceptable as what he is not, an assassination expert. If I had really cared about his stinkingly bad behavior and his deliberate dishonesties intended to ridicule and defame me I would not have delayed five years in writing this commentary on it and on him. He is, to me, but one of the many who have sought to corrupt this great tragedy of our history for their personal benefit, that benefit being to most fame, fortune or both.

It is to be honest with the reader who may regard me as prejudiced because of his lies about me and my work that I begin this commentary with a verbatim reproduction of those deliberate lies. This also serves another purpose in my presenting it at the outset: it puts the reader in a better position to judge what Menninger put on paper for Donahue; to judge their truthfulness and their intent to be truthful or not to be.

And their attitude in general.

That includes a little wise-guy stuff and dependence upon some of the most disreputable of authors and books that would not be mentioned in any serious work because of the reputations of their authors or their ignorance of the subject matter.

The first reference in the book to me, according to the index, is to a page on which my name does not appear. It may have at one time because the titles of several of my books are on that page. Along with a pamphlet that Donahue and Menninger refer to as a book. This raises questions about whether either of then ever laid eyes on it.

They do devote about half of page 25 to a quotation from my first book, which dates to 1965.

At that point they refer to "the books critical of the Commission written in the first five years after the shooting."5 Donahue prefers Josiah Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas6. Donahue's book lacks any bibliography, so there is no way of knowing whether Donahue read all or most of those books that appeared in the first five years after the shooting. I alone published five of those critical books in that period but Donahue appears to have no knowledge of three of them from his writing and his end notes.

On the next page, for all the world as though it is the sine qua non of supposed investigation of the assassination, Donahue says he was "struck by the fact that although these [unnamed] authors were writing with ostensible authority about a gunshot murder, few, if any, apparently had any experience with firearms or ballistics."7 After noting that Mark Lane was a lawyer "and former New York State assemblyman," my name is misspelled as they dredge the cesspools of supposed assassination writing for what they intend of a wise-crack and putdown: "Harold Weisburg [sic] the dean of the critics and author of the Whitewash series, was a government intelligence analyst-turned-goose farmer."8 Their source note on this is to "Richard Warren and Lawrence Schiller, The Scavengers of the Warren Report.9 That trifle was not about the assassination, about which both coauthors were professionally ignorant. Schiller had conceived the correct notion that there could be money in ridiculing those who were critical of the official assassination mythology and he did that with the most deliberate and conspicuous dishonesty.

There did come a time when I decided to be a farmer. We had a poultry farm and between us, my wife and I won every first prize for the country in every aspect of poultry farming. She was the national chicken cooking champion, I was the national barbecue king and we won first and third prizes for raising chickens.

We had a few geese in addition. Our "wild" geese, Canadians, also known as "honkers," grew so tame they came when I called them and they ate pieces of bread from my mouth without biting me. They also brought their young to me to feed them. Before I knew of the precedential animal behavior work of the German, Dr. Konrad Lorenz, I had duplicated his work known to psychologists as "imprinting." I even tape-recorded the communication between the female goose and her goslings about to emerge from the eggs.

Some of my behavioral work, more with chickens, was actually used at an international symposia by scientists of the National Institute of Health.

What Donahue and Menninger do not mention in their effort to pretend that none of those who wrote these books had what they regard as a proper background for it is that I had been an investigator for the United States Senate and was accredited to give testimony for it; had been borrowed from the Senate by the Department of Justice to assist it in the most sensational criminal case it had before the courts in 1938; and had been an investigative reporter.

Donahue may from time to time shoot a bit more than bull, but knowledge of shooting is not the only, or in this case even the major, knowledge required, and there are other essential areas of investigation besides of the shooting.

On his part, aside from not having the other qualifications required for the task he undertook, Donahue did not even get the twenty-six volumes of its evidence published by the Commission, and when he cites its Report, he cites other than the official printing of that Report so those who began with serious purposes and did what authentic scholars do, obtained and used the official copy, cannot check his citations unless they go out and try to find the short-lived commercialized reprinting of that Report that he uses.

This man who is critical of just about all others was so wretchedly cheap in his so-called inquiry he did not even get the official evidence published by the Commission. When he used it he cites it from other uses of it!

Imagine citing the official evidence with some of the incredible trash he used as sources. Some are not even on the assassination but are supposedly on the theories and their authors cannot even be get them straight!

But cheapskate Donahue, critical of others, was too damned cheap to buy and use those twenty-six volumes the Commission published of its testimony and evidence. He even writes that he drove from Baltimore to the National Archives in Washington to consult some of it.

With those volumes containing an officially-estimated ten million words, he did not live and work in the Baltimore suburb of Towson and study much of those ten million words!

Of course I would not expect him to have used it but years before his book appeared the Department of Justice told the federal court in a lawsuit he knew I filed and to which he refers, without having ever taken the time to even glance at what I obtained in it — and I quote from one of its filings in Civil Action (CA) 75-22610 -- that I was "perhaps more familiar with events surrounding the investigation of President Kennedy's assassination that anyone now employed by the F.B.I."

The point here is not to brag. Rather is it to give Donahue the credentials he has for shooting - the bull, rather than the fact of the assassination.

Having given Donahue the credit that is his due, I note that knowledge of firearms is far from the only qualification required for investigating the assassination or its investigation and that Donahue does not even claim any other relevant expertise. But he criticizes just about all others for not being a firearms expert.

This is a criticism that applies no less to all the Members and staff of the Warren Commission; most of the Secret Service and the FBI; and to many — if not most — of the lawyers in the Department of Justice.

Having the expertise he claims does not qualify Donahue in all of the other many areas of evidence in the assassination and its investigations and as we see, having that expertise, which we can grant him, did not preclude his misusing it to deceive and mislead his readers and to defame an innocent man as he undertook to rewrite our tragic history for his own self-glorification, if not also enrichment.

Donahue had the evidence of that man's innocence but with his genuine belief that he is a real-life Sherlock Holmes, he just ignored the official evidence that proves him wrong.

His self-portrayal is more of Shylock than Sherlock as we see!

He does not mention judges but if his is a legitimate criticism then no judge can sit on any case involving firearms without being a firearms expert and a firearms examiner.

In this egomaniacal nonsense he is trying to get the idea across that he is the only legitimate expert when as we see he is not an expert on the assassination or the assassination evidence, including the shooting, at all.