Chapter 2

"The Government Robbed Us of The Truth Until Now!": Walt Brown

When I began reading his book I found it and him consistent with the impression I had from my limited contacts with him. He knows all there is to know. He writes as though the reader must bear in mind with every word he reads that Brown is still an FBI special agent ("agent" alone never satisfied Hoover) and thus is an authority on everything, every detail, and the reader must not question that. He flaunts his scholarship in this most unscholarly of books with italicized quotations that come from the least dependable of those who have written about the assassination; from Louisiana Mafia Don Carlos Marcello; with a selection from the popular television show "Mash"; and from George Bernard Shaw, Graham Greene, Benjamin Disraeli, Viscount Morley (not otherwise identified), Adlai Stevenson, Aeschylus (twice), Winston Churchill (twice), Alexander Pope, Shakespeare, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Lucius Calpurnius Piso (not quite as ancient as Aeschyllus, only 43 B.C.). Geoffrey Chaucer, Herman Goering, and Walter Lippman (twice), Henry Van Dyke, Allen Dulles, and "James Hepburn" (the name properly within quotation marks.

"Hepburn" is also included in Brown's bibliography (page 422) for his book Farewell America. He is quoted many times as an unquestionable authority. On page 260 Brown lumps him with other assassination "researchers." In writing about "elements" of the CIA" as involved in the assassination along with "power brokers" (page 62) Brown gives his only description of Hepburn as, within parentheses, "a pseudonym for a French attorney." Which he was not. This is, however, a fair example of the true scholarship of Walt Brown, Ph.D., professional historian, and of the benefits of his career as an FBI agent.

Of the many names he used, and a multitude of names is not the hallmark of the successful lawyer, "Hepburn" is best known as "Harve Lamarre." He was, in fact a spook of the French equivalent of the CIA, then known as SDECE, pronounced Sih-Dick, accent on the "Dick." He says of himself -- and I know him -- that he had been an editor with specialties not everyday in spooking. In Texas, I was told, without confirmation, that he was known as serving French petroleum interests. Brown's scholarship does not extend to French in explaining his pen name "James Hepburn" correctly, from what Lamarre told me. Brown writes that Lamarre adopted it because he "liked Audrey Hepburn," the actress. Lamarre told me he had a thing on her, was really hung up on her. As Brown put, referring to Lamarre's love for her, hence J'am Hepburn." That is supposed to translate "I love Hepburn." It would if he had used "aime" rather than "am."

Farewell America, one of Brown's prime and most authoritative of sources, is a fake book by the CIA's French counterpart. It was timed to get a mistrial in the Jim Garrison prosecution of Clay Shaw. Lamarre et al fed it to Garrison through the former FBI agent William Turner, then working for the magazine Ramparts after having been fired by J. Edgar Hoover (who fired few because he considered that a reflection on him and on the FBI), and Warren Hinckle, then a Ramparts editor. The sucker bait they and then Garrison swallowed was that it was the KGB that was going to tell Garrison all it knew about the assassination. Thus, those in California involved by these Ramparts suckers had a code name for the SDECE game in getting its fake to Garrison. It was "the San Diego radio station." Sure enough, in San Diego was the radio/television station with the call letters "KGB." I appeared on both in 1968.

Garrison was suckered by it too, amateurish as the whole operation was. He gave me a chapter to read once as I was about to fly home. I read it on the plane and wrote him immediately that it was a fake. Of the reasons I remember, one was that although "Hepburn" claims to have been in contact with those who were the real assassins, in that long book he barely mentions the assassination at all and then on only a page or so, and with all the details that the assassins knew better than anyone else missing on the little more than a page devoted to the assassination.

When Lamarre got his fake to Garrison it was titled, in French, L'Amerique Brule , or America Burns. The changed title was suggested by Garrison.

Or, he was really hooked.

It happens that by accident I was in New Orleans when Lamarre returned there shortly before the Shaw trial was to begin with a movie he had made of his fake book. It was also a fake movie, naturally. He was there to show it to Garrison, who had promised to endorse it for American audiences. That would have meant a mistrial in the Shaw case.

Before then Louis Ivon, a regular New Orleans police sergeant detailed to the parish district attorney as chief investigator, decided that the book was a fake. I knew that because he used me to get a copy to one who worked for one of the Texans Lamarre claimed was a major factor in the conspiracy he and SDECE had invented.

Lamarre had as an associate and with him when he returned with his film, a young man then a movie major at UCLA, Steve Jaffe. Mark Lane had persuaded Garrison to hire the youngster as an investigator, a line of work that was foreign to him and remained foreign to him. They were looking for a projector on which to show the film to Garrison. I happened to be with the friend they'd phoned to ask if he had a projector they could borrow. Seeing a chance to abort the deal that was clearly intended to abort the trial I wanted very much to go to the jury, I offered to both get them a projector and provide transportation in New Orleans. I had a souped-up Chevy Two the police had taken from a gangster and had given to Garrison's office for its use. Nobody in the office would drive it, it was that unpredictable. So, Ivon usually had it serviced and gassed for me when I was there.

To make a long story I've told elsewhere short, I picked them up at the Pontchartrain Hotel and first drove Lamarre to an address he gave me in the French Quarter. He was there for a spell. When later I checked that address it was of the most unlikely of businesses. It sold bagged coal and wood from mid-morning until early afternoon only. In almost subtropical New Orleans. That in itself is suspicious of spooking for it certainly could not have been a profitable business. Whether it was spooking or womanizing, for the business was owned by a very young and attractive widow, from there, in taking Lamarre and Jaffe to Garrison's office, I managed to get us "lost" long enough to give them very little time before they were to take the plane to Los Angeles. I had promised to take them to the airport.

At Garrison's office I took them immediately to the office of one of his assistants, Jim Alcock. I knew Alcock knew the book was a fake. As soon as they were together I found Ivon , cued him in and when next I saw of Lamarre and Jaffe was when Ivon and another detective were giving them the bums rush down those long stairs and out of the building. My recollection after all these years may not be completely accurate but it is that Ivon had Lamarre by the seat of his pants and his jacket collar. I had to rush after them to open the trunk of the car so they could get their luggage.

And the movie titled after and made from the book was aborted, without Garrison's endorsement of it.

(I understand that Jaffe later became a successful Hollywood flack and that Playboy's Hugh Heffner was one of his clients.)

Brown quotes from Farewell America at the beginning of the lengthy section not indicated in the table of contents as a Book or as a part of a Book but separate from the book but before the epilogue on page 309:

President Kennedy's assassination was the work of magicians. It was a stage trick, complete with accessories and false mirrors, and when the curtain fell the actors, and even the scenery, disappeared. -- "James Hepburn," Farewell America, page 281.

All in all, this is not a bad description of Brown's Treachery in Dallas, as we see. Hopefully it may yet come to be Farewell Brown.

That this obviously fake book was regarded as a prime and dependable a source by Brown is not a bit unusual. If there is a single bad book supposedly on the JFK assassination not in his bibliography (pages 421-4) it does not come to mind.

This reflects the benefits of his formal education that includes his Ph.D. degree and of training and experience as an FBI to Brown, enabling him as they did to select the most substantial and dependable of sources for his book, for his readers to trust.

While his book is not "the work of magicians," it is a "trick," "not a stage trick," and it is "complete with accessories and false mirrors" that come from the fake books and from Brown himself,

His notes (pages 399-419), in fact list some of his "accessories and false mirrors." Whenever, and it is exceedingly rare, Brown cites any other kind of book it is a special selection from it.

Despite the length of his notes, most of what he writes lacks any source. What he writes as fact is his belief, what he wants believed, what argues his phony case, is made up. In short, what he made up, using what others made up.

His concept of scholarship, what he learned in the course of earning his Ph.D. in history is not to cite original sources but to cite those that use or draw upon them, often less than fully faithfully or accurately. As an example, although mine is the basic factual work on the assassination and its investigations, he does not have a single reference to a single one of the eight of my assassination books that had been published before he finished his own writing. He lists four of them only and he does not include at least one I know he had. Yet from two of the Whitewash series not in his bibliography he uses, unsourced or incorrectly sourced, what appeared in those two books and in them only. He also uses, without sources, what appeared in my other books only. This is to say he uses that as his own work.

He presents his as the definitive work on the assassination and he actually concludes the text saying that. His book has three parts and at the end he summarizes each briefly. The third of these with which he closes is White Lies." Of it he says, for all the world as those this one of his is the first on the subject, that it:

began the process of American citizens distrusting government pronouncements and robbed us of the truth until now (his emphasis, page 335).

In fact what he has written is a penny-dreadful of a novel he pretends is nonfiction by the use of so many sources no decent work of nonfiction would use other than in exposure of them.

If he had designed it to appeal to the nuts whose work he draws upon and, to those who like and buy their books he could not have done that better.

In his pretense of definitiveness, of having written the first book to tell "the truth," as both his text and his notes disclose, he has ignored far and away most of the official information that is available and that to his knowledge has long been available.

He does have and he does use the Warren Commission's twenty-six volumes of appendices, its testimony and its exhibits. But he does not use any of the commission's files that have long been freely available at the National Archives and of which hundreds of pages are reproduced in facsimile in my books. I ransacked those files thirty years ago. (He does not even know the extent of those files and when he mentions them is grossly incorrect on their extent.)

Under the 1992 Act of the Congress intended to make all assassination information available, hundreds of thousands of pages of government information have been disclosed and are, again, available at the Archives. He makes no mention of them and they are not in his bibliography or in his notes.

But he does, however, use them second-hand and uncredited, as his own work to which he gives no source as well as, infrequently, attributed to a source.

He and his wife Jill were here twice. He expressed no interest in all the once-withheld records I obtained by all those Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, about a quarter of a million pages on the JFK assassination. When I invited his inspection of them he declined. He did pick up a bit of that vicariously as he used the uses and misuses of them by others.

So far as he and his book are concerned, no government information about the assassination and its investigations has any relevance, any meaning to add to the fraction of all its records the Warren Commission published in 1964. For his book that he says is definitive, that tells the truth for the first time, all information disclosed after November, 1964 has no meaning and was not worth a minute of his time.

The Dallas County Historical Society set up an official archive in the Texas School Book Depository. It has been collecting information from all Texas sources, including the Dallas police. It has their disclosed records or the city archive does. Neither is even mentioned in this supposedly first definitive and truthful of assassination books.

It is his boast that he is a professional historian with a Ph.D. We see more of his concept of scholarship, of history and of how professional historians record our history.

It is also his boast that he is, as he described himself to me, a "former FBI special agent." He said no more about that and because it then made no difference to me I asked him nothing about it. It is his special investigative talent he wants it believed that enabled him. to see what others did not, to understand the meaning of what others did not and could not understand, to locate information others could not locate and then interpret it as no others did or could. (The book's dust jacket, in describing his as "A tour de force of inquiry and investigation," refers to him as "a former special agent; of the Department of Justice," not of the FBI.)

In general most of us believe that any special agent of the FBI has more than a basic understanding of what constitutes evidence, what is needed to make a case or for conviction, where and how to look for it and how to put it all together. We, most of us, believe that those FBI investigators are at the least good judges of what is and is not dependable, of what has and does not have credibility, of the kinds of people more likely to be truthful and those more likely not to be and, of course, of knowledge of sources and which are more likely to be dependable and which are not.

His book provides a first-rate means of evaluating him and as investigator.

It is an ideal means of seeing how his mind works as he investigates, if the word can be used\applied to this book of his.

He tells us what he sees as good and as bad information and sources.

I've read his book with some care. I have my own familiarity with evidence and people in the case. As with Lamarre, I've known most of those who have written books supposedly on the subject. This includes some of those Brown uses most and thus depends on most. I've read more of their books than I'd have preferred. I am familiar with his major source, the Commission's published evidence. My first books come largely from them, the first entirely from them.

In publishing based on the Commission's record I used and used in facsimile some of its most basic information. It does not appear in his book.

In criminal cases, particularly in murder cases, there is what lawyers refer to as the corpus dilicti or the body of the crime. Most important of that evidence, as surely a former FBI special agent knows, is the evidence produced by the autopsy and, with a shooting, the ballistics evidence. Neither is included in his book. In his book, drawing on his supposed experience as an FBI special agent and on his training to become a special agent, he has no need for the body of the crime to make his case. A less charitable way of putting it is that the book he decided to write cannot coexist with the established and official information about the crime and about its investigations.

So, and again this involves the skills and talents of the FBI's special agents, he omits what is uncongenial to the notion with which he began his book, that the Dallas police provided the actual assassins from their ranks. He refers to them in his book as "Blue Death" and that is the title of one of the book's Parts. His conclusion cited above in which he says his book tells the truth for the first time begins with these words; "Blue Death fired the shots that killed the president" (his italics, page 335).

Those shots and what relates to them are part of the body of the crime as we should be able to presume all FBI agents know. What was recovered from those shots was examined in the FBI laboratory. The FBI prepared reports on its examination and some of those reports were published by the Commission. They are included in the twenty-six volumes to which, other than to the books he uses, he just about entirely limited himself. In addition, because the FBI did not disclose all this part of the corpus dilicti and as Brown knows, I filed FOIA lawsuits to obtain what I could keep it from continuing to suppress that had not been given to the Commission or disclosed by the FBI under earlier compulsion. None of this is reflected in his book and when he was here he had no interest in those records he knew I had.

How he could say that "Blue Death fired the shoots that killed the president" without looking at the available information on those shots themselves does not seem to reflect what is required to be an FBI special agent. The training they receive or what they learn in the course of their work as special agents. Not one with any on-the-job experience. Not one who completed training at the FBI academy and was put to work with a badge and all that goes with it.

This may be wrong. It may be unfair, too. But it is the possibility that is obvious from a careful reading of his book and with thought about what he says and does not say about the FBI itself.

Then, too, it does seem a bit odd that with the experience of having been an FBI special agent, even if he was not involved in any of its more spectacular cases he makes no use of that experience to attract interest to his book or to sell it. Those are first-rate credentials and they do impress most people. We all know that not everybody can become an FBI agent. But he does not go into his FBI career, even this FBI connection, in his book.

He has what he says are "insights" and substitutes them for fact and for evidence that he does not have. That, too, is not what we expect from the FBI and its special agents. We do not expect to have insights but we do expect them to regard insights as no more than that, certainly not as evidence and as proof. Their insights, among other things, tell them who seems to be dependable and who does not; what information seems real and what seems not to be; where to look for evidence and how to regard and treat evidence.

But not as a replacement for any of these and those many other things required of all investigators, particularly in the creme de la creme, the FBI.

In any event, the reader will be able to decide on these and on related matters from what we take from his book and go into.

The reader will also be able to make an independent decision on whether Brown knows all there is to know about the assassination and its investigation as he represents in his book, Benjamin Disraeli, Aesechylus , Winston Churchill, Chaucer, and even Lucius Calpurnius Piso we can give him, yes and Shakespeare and Stevenson and Goering , too; but giving them to him gives nothing on what his book is supposedly about, the assassination of the President, and that, not the others, from antiquity to the French spooks, is what we examine.

While ordinarily it may not be a good practice to indicate before saying it what will be said, because of the subject matter and consistent with all my writing on the assassination I am as explicit as I believe I can be, I state in advance that despite Brown's credentials his is, for one so credentialed, one of the worst of the very badly written books by the professional scholars on this subject.

In this he is not unique.

Of the few books written by professional scholars not one comes to mind that can be called a decent book.

For all their professional credentials I recall not one of the few that is not downright stupid.

All are in varying degree dishonest, dishonest on the subject and professionally and personally dishonest. I have written about them elsewhere and do not here repeat that.

This is also true professional scholars as reviewers of assassination books. A conspicuous example is the respected Stephen Ambrose. He is seen often on television in historical commentary and in commentary on books and political developments. He wrote what turned out to be a remarkable self-condemnation for the dust jacket of Gerald Posner 's knowingly mistitled Case Closed (Random House, 1993)

Posner has done a great service, in the process proving that a single researcher, working alone, is always preferable to a committee. This is a model of historical research. It should be required reading for anyone reviewing any book on the Kennedy assassination. Beyond the outstanding job of research, Posner is a dramatic story teller. The recreation of Oswald's, and Jack Ruby's personalities is wonderfully well done. This case has indeed been closed by Mr. Posner 's work.

When my friend and also professional historian David Wrone read this plug and Posner 's book he wrote Ambrose for an explanation of how he could speak so of Posner 's book, Wrone is the co- author on the only professional bibliography on the JFK assassination. Here is Ambrose's response in full that is snottier than it is scholarly:

I too have read a lot of Kennedy assassination material. A year or so ago I reviewed a number of assassination books for The New York Times Book Review. In that essay I expressed my considerable doubts about many aspects of the case.

So I didn't read Posner out of context. I don't know Posner . I don't know his publisher. I have no ax to grind. I have no emotional involvement.

I read Posner in script and you know what my reaction was.

You write a book on the subject. I'm always open to new evidence and have long since learned that my mind is always changing as new evidence comes to light. As you would know had you read my Nixon work, I call them as I see them. Even when I have to eat crow.

On reading that Ambrose's sole claim to expertise on the assassination consisted entirely of having reviewed a few books I also wrote him. I asked him what he knows or what he had done as a historian that his describing Posner 's book as "as a model of historical research" that "should be required reading for anyone reviewing any book on the Kennedy assassination." I also asked him if he had read any of mine. Apparently Ambrose lost his scholarly appetite for crow because he then did not respond.

Then my Case Open appeared. I said in it a few things about that "model of historical research." Using his own publisher's definition I wrote that Posner was a plagiarist and a shyster and that he had trouble telling the truth even by accident. I did not hear from Ambrose or from Posner , not a word of complaint. Ambrose was without protest of any kind when I wrote that what he had described as he had was a crooked, dishonest fraud that included literary thievery.

Ambrose is a fair reflection of the abdication or worse of professional scholars when their President was assassinated and consigned to history with the dubious epitaph of a deliberately dishonest official investigation.

For wildness and utter irresponsibility in theorizing and pretending any kind of solution Brown rivals and in some way exceeds one of his oft-quoted professional scholar sources, Phillip Melanson . His book is Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U. S. Intelligence (New York: Praegger , 1990).

Melanson 's book was contracted by Greenwood, which has a long record of scholarly publishing. I was asked for a peer review. When I read the manuscript, prepared as I was for a scholarly and literary atrocity as I was from Melanson 's earlier writing, particularly his Murkin , on, supposedly, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., I was so aghast my review must have been at least as long as his book. Greenwood asked permission to give it to Melanson . I agreed and went further, I promised to respond in writing to any comment he might make on my review. I've not heard a word since then from Melanson . The book nonetheless was published, but not by Greenwood. It was published by Praeger , which owns Greenwood.

(My Frame-Up of twenty-five years ago remains the single factual book on the King assassination. After it appeared I became James Earl Ray's investigator. I conducted the investigation for the habeus corpus proceeding which succeeded and resulted in an evidentiary hearing. It was to determine whether Ray would get the trial he has never had. I also conducted the investigations, located and, prepared witnesses for those two weeks of evidentiary hearing in federal district court in Memphis, Tennessee in 1974. I spent days on end inside maximum security jails with Ray and had extensive correspondence with him. I was in a position to evaluate Melanson 's Murkin . In every way it is a very bad book and like them all offers the most awful junk as theories that suggest solutions.)

There is here no need to go into all of them, but as a general statement it is a fact that not a single Ph.D. has written a book on this subject that does not disgrace scholarship and himself. This applies also to other professional scholars who may not have that degree.

Enough of Brown's transgressions will be addressed in what follows so there is no need to detail them here. However, I do state explicitly what will be seen, that what he refers to as his "insights" are what he makes up or imagines and have no association no matter how remote with the fact was that readily accessible to him if he had wanted fact and not to exploit and commercialize the great tragedy and to build himself a name thereby.

And if this not offense enough, he also suppresses what he had to know that is not consistent with this wildest of fictions he made up, the wildness focused on the Dallas police but permeating his entire book.