THE LOUSIEST BOOK ON THE JFK ASSASSINATION:

The Dirtiest, Meanest and Dumbest by a Self-Important Fool With A Sick Ego

© 1997

Harold Weisberg

Table of Contents

Forward

1.	More Shylock than Sherlock	1

2.	"Bombshells"	13

3.	Examining the "Firearms Examiner"	29

4.	Burkley, Not Borgia — a Figure of Speech?	47

5.	Donahue's Magic Bullet: It Does Not Make the Head Bleed	67

6.	Any Conspiracy to Assassinate the President Was Irrelevant: Howard Donahue	79

7.	The Twister's Infamous Twists	105

8.	What to Donahue Is a "Veteran Journalist"	125

9.	Donahue's "Proof" Is Disproved	135

10.	The $1,000 a Day Blabbermouthing Sleuth	157

11.	One "Issue" St Martin's Did Not Consider Is Truth	169

12.	"Through the Bottom of the Barrel" and "In the Sewers"	185

Epilogue	203

Sources	207

FOREWORD

When Mortal Error appeared I read it and then laid it aside with disgust and contempt. The disgust was because once again the people were being misinformed and misled and for other reasons some of which we come to. The contempt was for the man who did not give a damn about the evidence of the crime but believing himself a unique genius also believed that with the profundity of his resolute ignorance of most of the assassination information available he presumed to believe and then actually said that he had solved the crime.

By blaming it on an innocent man whose life was ruined by what happened and what followed it.

Howard Donahue is a man who has an exalted opinion of himself and who believes that the little knowledge he has of the assassination is more than enough because of what he believes are his unique gifts, his ability to see and to understand what mere mortals cannot.

He also believes that anyone who does not agree with him on almost anything has something wrong with him. In practice, in his ghosted book, he has nasty and frequently false, entirely made up criticisms of those who did not agree with him, as I did not, that are without any basis fact or in reason.

He is fast with a rifle and fast with his mouth and nothing else matters to him.

Including evidence. That does not matter if he believes other than the evidence indicates or proves. If the proof is other than this self-conceived rare genius believes, the evidence is wrong. If people who were there, as he was not, who were present and at the very scene of what is of great interest to him, because he made a theory, as he and his publisher call what he made up out of nothing, and if those people who were present, very close by, saw and state the opposite of what is essential to Donahue's fabrication, the witnesses are wrong and what he made up out of nothing at all is what is correct.

And this is his book, what it is, what it says, what it is based on.

There was more assassination trash published than I could keep up with in the turn my work took after a heart operation in 1989. I was writing critiques of works that misled, misinformed, and deceived the people and sought to rewrite our history. Most of those who wrote those books sought fame, fortune or both. Some had political objectives. All began, as does Donahue, with a preconception that is visible in what they wrote. And not one, Donahue included, had made official any effort to master the official information that became available after the Warren Report and its twenty-six volumes of appendix were published. Some, a rather large percentage, again including Donahue, did not even have that information published by the Commission but, and again Donahue is in point, less official evidence they had, as they wrote, the more they knew.

The information that became available after this initial publication was first, those of the Commission's files that were disclosed at The National Archives, in which the they had been deposited. The estimated volume was hundred cubic feet.

Then, with the passing of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) we could seek disclosure of what remained withheld by use of that most American of laws. It says the people have the right to know what their government does. While I was not the first to use that Act ( I tried to be but could not obtain counsel) I was the first of those who did not agree with the official solution to the assassination of President Kennedy to make use of that law and to go to court in using it. In the end I had sued many agencies. I recall the Department of Justice and its Federal Bureau of Investigation in particular of its component parts; the Central Intelligence agency; the National Archives; The General Services Administration; and the successor to the Atomic Energy Commission. There may have been other agencies I sued.

As the result of this litigation I obtained about a third of a million pages of assassination records that had been withheld. I would have continued those efforts if severe health problems had not required that I suspend them.

Although I sometimes acted as my own counsel, and I am not a lawyer, most of this legal work was done pro bono by my friend James H. Lesar. Jim took an early case of mine to the Supreme Court, where we lost, but in 1974 the Congress cited that case as requiring the amending of the what is known as the investigatory files exemption to make FBI, CIA and similar agency records accessible under that law.

In effect the Congress amended that law to make it possible for me to get — which means to make publicly available — the records I did get.

As a matter of belief I have always made all these records freely available to all writing in the field, and most of those who have used them are people with whom I do not agree. Gerald Posner, who wrote a book in support of the Warren Report, paid a rare tribute to the openness he found here and the entirely unsupervised access he had to the files and to our copier.

For the use of others we had lights placed where they could sit and work at a table we provided for that work. We kept supplies for them to use on that table. And we never asked to see what they copied. We knew of their interests only when they asked questions or sought help and direction.

Beginning with severe circulatory problem in both legs and more with the of other medical problems, use of stairs became increasingly dangerous for me but those who came to use those files still had free run of our basement where all those FOIA files are.

Although they all have unsupervised access to our copier, some of those who have used those files have taken only copies. However, because as a matter of belief we believe that the law makes those who use it surrogate for all the people and because anyone writing in the field should have access to all the assassination information possible, all still do have that free access and have for the years I have not been to our basement.

I recall nobody other than Donahue who would not even look at those records!

There is one agency that did have relevant records that I did not sue. This is why I never filed suit against the Secret Service, which is part of the Treasury Department.

The late Thomas J. Kelley was an inspector at the time of the assassination and it was he the agency rushed to Dallas then. It is the Secret Service that is and has been responsible for the president's security. Among the first of the Commission's record that I examined, as my books reflect, are those provided by the Secret Service. I found what I regarded as gaps in them and did not see records I believed should have been included. I went to the Secret Service and Tom Kelley met with me. What impressed me is that he was willing to do and did do more than FOIA required of the Secret Service. (Kelley was a lawyer who was later assistant director). The law required access to existing records. Kelley got for me information that did not exist on paper. With this indication of good intentions on his part, when he told me they did not want to be sued under FOIA and would cooperate as fully as they could, I agreed not to file suit against them. He agreed to provide the records asked for.

What happened is that the Department of Justice and the Archives interceded and withheld from me what the Secret Service did in fact direct be given to me. Because it kept its word, I kept mine and I never filed suit against it.

When there was first attention to that weird product of Howard Donahue's sick ego in The Baltimore Sun in 1977 I wrote the reporter, Ralph Reppert, with some criticisms and questions and without his having asked it, offered him full and free access to all the official information I had obtained. I then was, still in court in several FOIA lawsuits in which the information I sought was relevant to what Reppert had written about what Donahue had made up. I offered, in writing, without being asked, for them to join in those lawsuits. That entailed no cost to then and made them as well as me the possessors of any information disclosed in them.

Donahue is clearly a man to whom information presents a possible problem, of interfering with if not of contradicting and disproving what he believes. He believes he has such a unique genius. He knows better than the evidence, as his book never stops reflecting, although it was written by the ghost writer in a way intended not to make that too obvious. So, he had no interest in being party to that litigation as a freebie and the Sun did not go further with it after my initial comments on the impossibility of what Donahue made up and did and does believe.

It was seven more years before Donahue was in touch with me, first to get a few of my books that were then about twenty years old and, although still unique in much of their content were unknown to him. Then he asked to come up. We invited him and his wife and they were here for a few hours one Sunday afternoon, including for lunch.

Donahue had but a single interest: persuading me to believe that what he made up and what from the unquestionable official evidence (most of which he had no inkling of) was impossible. I understated the reality, from his account, in telling him I knew of no information to support what he and his publisher refer to as his theory. In fact I told him of what disproves it. That made him unhappy and soon thereafter they left.

I offered him free access to all those records, about a third of a million pages of them, including copies I had duplicated and filed under titles appropriate to his fabrication but he would not even look at one of them.

Here was a man who was interested in writing in the field, a man who lived not much more than an hour away, and when offered access to what he saw, about sixty file cabinets of records on the subject of his professed interest, he refused to look at a single page it of!

Nor did he ask me for a copy of as little as a single page of what I had indicated disproved what he had made up.

For Donahue, if he makes it up, no matter how wrong it is, no matter how much or how completely it is proven wrong, he is right no matter how wrong he is and there has to be something wrong with what proves him to be wrong!

His is that kind of self-concept, that kind of sick ego.

I referred him to pictures that disprove what he made-up, and I refer to it this way because he did just make it up -- and there is no reference to any one of those pictures as I referred to them in his book. Copyright precludes including copies of them in this.

But it is without question, there is a contemporaneous record in pictures that leave it without question that what Donahue made up is not possible.

Despite this and more like it, I did not intend to spend any time preparing any manuscript on his assassination mythology of his own fabrication. It is palpably false, palpably. Anyone with any knowledge of the accessible evidence, knows it is impossible, so I laid his book aside and for a while forgot about it.

In his book Donahue states that the former Secret Service agent and driver, George Hickey, fired the fatal shot to the President's head by accident.

With the passing of time I began to hear from another retired member of that White House Secret Service detail. He knew Hickey. He told me that the effect of all of this on Hickey was terrible. That he had developed severe emotional problems. Not he alone among those conscientious men who life was always at risk for the protection of their President, whoever he might be, regardless of his political party. I asked this agent why Hickey did not sue Donahue, Menninger and St. Martin's Press, which had published that book. He told me that Hickey had become a virtual recluse and could not think of going to court. I told this agent, a man I still have never met and whose telephone number I never asked him, that I thought the lawyer who handled my FOIA litigation and was overworked might handle a case if Hickey and his family decided to sue, as I hoped they would.

Then I heard from a woman who identified herself as Hickey's daughter. I told her the same thing and I sent her some records I thought they might find useful. I did not keep a record of her name or address or, if she gave it to me, of her phone number. What they had was a family problem and while I did offer a suggestion and any help I might be able to offer, I did not want to intrude and I did not.

Some time passed and I heard that Hickey had decided to file suit but by then the statute of limitations had run in some jurisdictions.

Then I was asked to give a deposition in that lawsuit. In what jurisdiction I did not ask and do not know. St. Martin's Press was represented by a specialist in that kind of law.

I did testify in deposition and there was no cross examination. Not even when I said that I did not remember a single opinion of mine that Donahue offered in his book that was not a lie.

I use that word through out this manuscript. It is the first of the many manuscripts I have published or leave as a record for our history in which I recall call the regular and deliberate use of "lie." It refers to what Donahue and his hired hack wrote about me. And not about me alone.

What prompted me to write this at this late date, so long after Mortal Error published, was hearing that on some kind if technicality I do not understand Hickey's litigation was dismissed because the statute of limitations was alleged to have run in jurisdictions in which it had not run!

There can be and there probably is in the law and in interpretations of it what non-lawyers do not understand but I decided that, with my life expectancy when I am past 84 years old and with all the serious medical problems my doctors have not expected me to survive and I have been fortunate in surviving that, albeit in haste, I would try to try to make a record to clear Hickey's name and that of his descendants from this most terrible of false accusations placed on him by Howard Donahue, his hack and his greedy publisher who shares the totality of the dishonesty of the other two, as I believe this manuscript makes clear.

Aside from deposit a with the rest of my work and records in a free public archive (about which Donahue made up one of his nastier lies) and a few copies I usually give others who are friends and work in the field, when I can get this retyped cleanly there will be a copy for the Hickeys.

As the reader will see there is not a shred of evidence, of real factual evidence other than the silliness of Donahue's wooden-dowel fakery for the path of a bullet, to support the Donahue fabrication that Hickey fired the fatal shot.

That, of course, was as horrible and as despicable a charge as could be placed against a Secret Service agent who was supposed to do all possible to keep the president he was protecting alive.

This entire fiction of Donahue's is based on that childish use of wooden dowels that, even if done accurately, do not mean what he says.

Once a bullet strikes a human body there is no predicting what it will do or where it will go. In the case of the fatal bullet, it fragmented and made a massive hole, massive for anything the size of the human head, of about five inches. Aside from the fact that on impact the bullet could have been deflected and often is, particularly when bone is struck, Donahue makes out that through the use of his dowel and a model of the head he had a trajectory that goes back to Hickey and to him alone.

Because the actual, existing, well-known and official evidence disproves what Donahue made up in the hope of both fame and fortune from what made up, we take no time for this in what follows. However, we do note that when Colonel Pierre Finck , the army doctor in charge of its wound ballistics branch, reached the Navy hospital where the President's corpse was autopsied, based on his extensive experience and on what is well-known among forensic pathologists, he had X-rays of the entire body made. That despite the fact that the bullet wound lowest on the President's body in the official autopsy and the official testimony about it was in his neck where it joins his back. That bullet, those pathologists believed, had exited the President's body through the front of his neck, through the knot of his tie. Yet because a bullet can do once inside a human body is so unpredictable (other than the special geniuses like Donahue with their special needs and self-concepts), X-rays of the entire body were made and were examined for bullets or fragments of bullets.

I do refer to Donahue as a liar and I do that repeatedly. I do not use mild words because what he and those associated with him did to an innocent, ill and deeply troubled man ought not be cushioned with less harsh words.

What they did to make money is despicable, truly despicable, because of the monstrous abuse of Hickey and because of the rewriting of the painful history they lie about in this lie of a book.

Throughout history people have done strange and unusual things to make money but doing that at the cost it meant to Hickey and his family and to our history that is so painful and so tragic is below contempt and cannot be referred to with words that are harsher than are justified.

They are the very dirtiest of the dirty!