Chapter 4

Wanna Buy The Alamo Cheap, Mr. Brown?

Pretending that his "solution" is not a theory, Brown explains, or thinks he does, why he begins his book with them. It is because they are:

different visions of what led up to those horrible six seconds, what occurred during those six seconds, and what has been done since then to preclude a realistic understanding of those few seconds. For these reasons this manuscript will be a menu of the theories that have developed over the years. . . . Each theory will be discussed with an eye toward saving what is valid and discarding what is not. Source materials will he documented, but will also be subjected to a collateral question, 'What is logical?' . . . logic is a powerful argument and cannot be destroyed. . . . logic is common sense writ large . . . (page 18).

With his logic to be so important in his book Brown makes clear to begin with that he has no concept of what logic is.

To write a book about the assassination there is no need at all to go into all the so-called theories, no such need at all. In this he also displays no rational concept of "common sense" and there is none in his book. What he called logic is not that at all, nor is there common sense in his pretense that to be able to write about the assassination he has to begin by going into all that is not "logic" or "common sense writ large."

All he need do to write about the assassination, "about those terrible six seconds, and what has been done since to preclude a realistic understanding of those few seconds" is write facts. That is the only way to provide a "realistic understanding of those few seconds," with facts, not with theories, what is imagined.

But this is beyond him. As we have seen he has deliberately ignored all the vast amount of information that began being available as soon as the Archives could begin processing the Commission's files. He has no less deliberately ignored the enormous volume of information that began to be available when several of us began using the Freedom of Information Act and then when I was able to file all those lawsuits by means of which I was able to obtain and make public several hundred thousand pages of FBI assassination information. By the time he wrote this book there were more than a half million pages of information available, quite possibly a million or more that he ignores and pretends does not exist.

This being the case, and it certainly is except in the very few instances in which he picks up a few smidgeons of that information from the use and misuse of it by others, it simply is not true that he will either recount "what happened during those six seconds" or give "a realistic understanding of those few seconds" or is able to.

That cannot be done other than by using all the information available.

And it certainly can't be done by any use of all the nuttiness that has been written about the assassination that he pretends are theories when they are not even that.

This applies in particular to his own. About it he persists throughout his book in pretending that his preconception is not at best no more than a theory.

It also is not true that "source material will be documented." To a large degree he just makes it up, citing no source, no source existing.

Moreover, the kind of claptrap he depends upon is not in any sense what can either "logically" or reasonably or factually be referred to as documentation.

What he treats as sources is also laughable, like that fake book of the French counterpart of the CIA.

Or that compendium of nuttiness by Jim Marrs titled Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. It is not about "a" plot, it is about all the nutty theories and poor, well-intended, Marrs cannot get the straight or keep them straight. In any event, his is not a book about the assassination. It is about those theories.

Or Hugh McDonald's Appointment in Dallas: The Final Solution to the Assassination of JFK. That one is a deliberate fraud. I was asked for a peer review. That publisher then offered to do the book as a novel but not as nonfiction, which it wasn't, McDonald and his agent, no stranger to me, had visions of much more money and in the end they got it. After making a few changes, including of what I ridiculed. In the original manuscript McDonald had his nonexisting assassin he gave the name "Saul" lingering unseen for an hour before the assassination in of all places a ladies restroom in the county office building diagonally across the street from the Texas school Book Depository Building. A man there! Armed with a rifle! And at rush hour; which is lunch hour yet! With all those women needing to use it.

Or that fake Robert Morrow who from his limited CIA career went to jail for counterfeiting and had no connection with any of the things he writes about. That he made them up out of the profundity of his ignorance is obvious on any ready of his junk. Anyone who knows anything at all about the subject-matter and gets past the first two paragraphs of Morrow's first outrage, Betrayal, is an idiot. When Morrow was promoting it he agreed to do a talk show on a Pittsburgh radio station. He then learned I would be on it by phone. He was a no-show. He gave the show up rather than risk having me on it with him.

These are more like them are not legitimate sources and they can not be used to "document" anything except avarice, greed, ambition, and total indifference to decency by their authors and ignorance or worse on the part of those using them as real.

How Brown is going to be able to give his reader a ''realistic understanding of those few seconds" of the assassination from overt fakes he does not say. In fact, in making any use of them at all he proclaims the depths of his subject-matter ignorance.

This kind of awful literature, if the word is appropriate, can be used only by those with intentions no nobler than the fakers.

When he can, as he does, use as legitimate information such as godawful unconscionable frauds, commercializations and exploitations as those of "Hepburn," McDonald and Morrow is it not to wonder what he did to get his Ph.D. and what he got from it other than the right to boast that he has it?

As Brown continues in Chapter Two, "The Lone Assassin," he reflects no more scholarly a view of scholarship. He says that "the lone-assassin concept has been found wanting:"

Problem one, reduced to lowest terms is that if Lee Harvey Oswald committed the murder of President Kennedy completely on his own, it is unlikely that the Dallas police would have arrested so many other people or listened to reports from witnesses who has such contradictory stories" (page 22).

It could have made as much sense if Brown had asked, "Would you rather go to Atlantic City or by bus?" because there is no connection of any kind, other than the need Brown has to make up a case in support of the preconception with which he began, between the arrest of an accused assassin and other arrests made that day.

Moreover, some of those arrests were made immediately, before the police believed they had captured the assassin. In addition, the same police had no reason to assume and every reason to not assume that the alleged assassin was alone. So, they had to make all the arrests they did and the case can be made, if one knows the fact, that they should have arrested more.

If the people interviewed did not give "contradictory stories" there would and should have been suspicious about those people and those stories. It is more normal for people observing the same thing to recall and describe it differently.

It is not this childishness that comes from Brown's mind that represents "problem number one" about "the lone assassins concept." This silliness of his presents no problem to that "concept." What was and remains "problem number one" is that of which Brown is ignorant, the facts. The official facts. It is "problem number one" for the lone-assassin theory that is the basis of the Report that the facts themselves, as developed by the official investigations, prove beyond question that the crime was beyond the capability of any one person. That means and the official fact proves that there had been a conspiracy. And that is the very end of the "lone assassin concept." All the rest, all that Brown says, is with out meaning.

Except in terms of the bankruptcy in Brown's mind and in his book.

It is not impossible, except to childish minds, to substitute any notions anyone else had or may have had for fact, as Brown does here, to pretend a case against a lone assassin with other than fact of the crime. Indeed, he is unscholarly even in that. He attributes to Jim Garrison what I had published earlier, that the change of address noticed filed with the New Orleans post office was filed long after Oswald left New Orleans. Authentic scholars usually cite first publication. But Brown has a hang-up on that. And there are other conspiratorial possibilities for the time that change-of-address notice was filed (page 22). In itself it does not represent any conspiracy.

The endless silliness and sloppy writing that typify Brown's is illustrated on the next page, along with Brown's subject-matter ignorance which permeates, where he writes that

Despite his penchant for secretiveness and aliases, Oswald took the job at the depository under his own name, an exercise that hardly comports with the theory that he sought employment there to exercise his sniper skills. While it is true that Wesley Frazier [whose name is Buell Wesley Frazier] knew Oswald's real name, Oswald's excuse that his real name and "defector" background cost him jobs might have been enough to hoodwink Frazier into letting him apply as "O. H. Lee or " Alek Hidell ." But he didn't (page 23).

The smart- aleky of Brown's writing "sniper skills" also is throughout his book. He imagines himself a real wit, a veritable Milton Berle.

Oswald depended on his unemployment insurance and he could do that only under his name, not under an alias. There is no record of Oswald every applying for a job other than in his own name. Nor is there any reason to even suspect he ever did or would. He had no reason to and every reason not to.

"O. H. Lee" is the name under which he was registered at the rooming house. He could have done that because he wanted to avoid being located or it even could have been a mistake at the rooming house, with his name consisting of three first names. But none of this has anything to do with Frazier and Frazier certainly nothing to do with Oswald's getting or not getting that job. Oswald was hired because he made a good impression on Roy Truly, the Texas School Book Depository manager. And Frazier had no knowledge of Oswald as a "defector" or of his alleged uses of any alias. None of that got to be known until after the assassination.

If Brown did not know this after allegedly reading all those books and going over those twenty-six volumes as he claims he did, there can be no safe assumption on the extent of his subject-matter ignorance which in his mind qualifies him to write a book.

In order to qualify for unemployment insurance payments the applicant must have a record of seeking employment. So aside from having to use his correct name, Brown and his special "insights" to the contrary notwithstanding, there is no record of Oswald ever applying for any job other than in his correct name. If he had he could not have qualified for unemployment insurance and there would not have been any credit to his social security of the future.

The record is quite clear, Oswald, especially in New Orleans, before he went to Dallas, applied for many jobs. His applications are public. They were always in his correct name and never in any other name.

Again as Brown should have known, Oswald always rented their living space under his correct name. He got their utilities under his correct name. Nobody knew of his "defector" record other than the FBI. He had no reason to use any other name and he did not.

None of this makes any sense at all other than perhaps to Brown, who did write it and more as his substitution for the actual evidence that disproves what he refers to as the "lone assassin concept" when it is in fact the basis of the official assassination conclusion.

As Brown rambles along and as usual attributes what he uses to other than their first uses he keeps making a show of the extent of his factual ignorance. He gets to new flooring being laid on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building. From it in the official story all the three officially admitted shots came from an alleged but non-existing "sniper's nest" at the easternmost of its windows. Of all that can be said about that new floor being laid Brown says what is not real, that it was "tenuous" and from that was a problem and that this new flooring was a "construction" (page 25).

That new flooring was of plywood. But rather than removing the old hardwood flooring the regular Texas School Book Depository working staff was nailing the plywood atop the old hardwood floor.

That made it anything but "tenuous." It made for a much less "tenuous" floor that the old hardwood floor alone was - and it was by no means "tenuous." It had been holding tons of books for many years. It was not any new "construction." It was a simple repair that made the floor stronger. Those twenty-six volumes hold many pictures of cartons of books, which are heavy, stacked next to each other as high as close to the ceiling before the plywood was added to the original hardwood flooring.

This and more like it is the nonexisting case Brown substitutes for reality as he addresses the "lone assassin concept" rather than address it with reality, with fact. He continues to with it for pages and with mistakes, some quite silly.

He pontificates about that Mannlicher-Carcano rifle saying it "was not designed as a sniper rifle" as rather few are although almost any of them can be used for sniping; he refers to it as a "blunderbuss,'' which it certainly is not. He gets more smart-aleky on this; saying that the telescopic sight on it "is about as appropriate on such a blunderbuss as caviar on war surplus crackers." He builds up to what is absolutely false, saying that the FBI "would prove" [his emphasis] that the rifle "certainly lacked accuracy" (page 26).

That rifle did not lack accuracy. Not the one attributed to Oswald and not the thousands and thousands sold to hunters throughout the world. Any lack of accuracy was separate from the rifle. That was correctable and with that rifle it was corrected. That rifle was not made for a telescopic sight. It was made, as were most military rifles, with open sights. They are more convenient and enable more rapid firing. The inappropriate telescopic sight — not caviar or baloney -- had never been adjusted for that rifle. Once the FBI did that, as its testimony in those twenty-six volumes of Brown's claimed expertise leave without any question at all and, as the FBI's ballistics expert, Robert Frazier testified, the rifle could be fired accurately and he and others did that.

It is no surprise that the name of FBI firearms Special Agent Robert Frazier, who gave much of the FBI's testimony to the Warren Commission, does not appear even once in Brown's book.

Brown does say correctly that the searches of Oswald's property did not turn up any gun- cleaning materials. He says that "the cleaning equipment was never found, although a blanket was" (page 29).

More caviar. There is no connection between gun cleaning and a blanket, which was hardly all that was found and recorded.

The point here that Brown's subject-matter ignorance emphasizes is that the rifle was well-oiled when it was found; had allegedly been kept wrapped in that blanket; and there was not a trace of oil on that blanket.

It is not to wonder, again and endlessly, whether Brown ever really was an FBI agent if this is lost upon him and if he was, what in the world he did to be so ignorant of the most basic evidence.

Not that this is all his ignorance on that matter.

Oswald allegedly carried that rifle into that building that morning in a hand-made brown paper sack. That sack was allegedly found. It was examined with care by the FBI's vaunted lab. And that lab found that well-oiled rifle that had not left a trace of oil on that blanket also left not the tiniest traces of oil on that paper sack in which Oswald allegedly carried that well-oiled rifle to work that morning.

Brown appears to have learned nothing about shooting in his FBI training and experience. Still writing about that lone-assassin "concept," he gives his supposedly expert opinion. He writes about an alleged "crease" allegedly found on what he does not say, a packed and firm carton of books. The official account of that the crease was caused by the recoil of a rifle. Brown writes:

The "crease" in [sic] that one box troubles me, and would trouble the vast majority of marksman because no shooter worth his Marine Corps sharpshooters badge would use for a gun rest anything that was unstable enough to let itself crease. Why would anyone use a virtually collapsible carton when there exists a solid brick window sill . . ." (page 32)

From the official evidence this is more like arsenic than caviar, aside from what Brown made up or got than from the mishmash of those crazy books that he prefers that range from complete fakes to trash, there is no doubt at all that the crease did not come from the use of that carton as a gun rest.

But that was not an empty carton. It was not "virtually collapsible." And it was not in any sense "unstable". We return to this.

Brown pontificates, again from his professional incompetence as well as well as his perpetual ignorance, that an expert rifleman seeks and uses the most rigid possible gun rest for accurate firing. (He means expert rifleman but he says sharpshooter when sharpshooter is the median grade in firing skills in the military. Expert rifleman is the military's highest grade.

I had to research that very point for my earlier publication and the truth, the fact, is in it for the ignorant Browns to use freely. My source as I used it in Frame-Up (pages 227-9) was the National Rifle Association and the publication Guns and Ammo. It included an article titled "Know Your Nodes," with the subtitle "Taming Vibration - the Key to Rifle Accuracy." The article traces the effect of vibrations on accuracy all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci, more recently to British Ordinance. It is authoritative enough. I reproduced even the sketches of vibrations and the nodes (page 228).

All rifles have unique vibrations when they are fired. For the most precise shooting it is necessary not to interfere with these unique natural vibrations. An absolutely solid gun rest like solid bricks does interfere with the greatest precision in firing. In firing competitions the pictures most of us have seen, absolutely rigid gun rests are not used. What has some "give" is used instead.

While that carton of books and the crease in it are a part of the official assassination mythology, the fact is that because it was full of books and would accept such a crease it was much better as a gun rest for the most accurate shooting than a brick window sill, which had wood on it.

(What did the FBI teach Brown about shooting - if anything?)

From this Brown proceeds to condemn the Secret Service as "nonchalant at best and negligent at worst when they allowed the President" to go to Dallas. It had demonstrated hostility to others like Adlai Stevenson (page 32). Brown reports that "other researchers have documented the perceived threats to the President in Chicago and Miami the month he died and that is why the Secret Service should not have "allowed the President" to go to Dallas.

There was nothing the Secret Service could have done to prevent Kennedy from going to Dallas or anywhere else. If it had been able to do what it wanted, it would never have accepted Kennedy's orders to remove the plastic bubble from the limousine. While that bubble was not bullet-proof it would have deflected bullets and objects that could be thrown. Against its desire the Secret Service removed the bubble, which had been on the day before because of rain. It is not the boss. The President is.

I am those "other researchers," by the way. I brought those I alleged Chicago and actual Miami threats to light. Others merely used and misused my work, Brown included. But the one citation Brown has for all of this is to the fictional Nagel book by Dick Russell. Brown just loves it.

One of those Miami threats was real. Over it at the Secret Service urged Kennedy to cancel the motorcade three days before the assassination. He was flown by chopper to where he addressed the Inter-American Press Association. There were also other reported threats there.

Those Chicago threats were not threats at all and I did not use those I used as Brown uses the one he knows about. I used them to reflect the poor quality of the investigation.

The real point here is that such threats, real and unreal, are everyday. They are a reality of modern political life in this country. Another real point is that, contrary to what Brown writes, the president is no the captive of the Secret Service and is not required to accept their advice. Sometimes Kennedy did not.

Before that Texas trip that was fatal, many people urged him not to go to Dallas. For his own political purpose he wanted to go there and he did.

It is not unusual, from Brown, scholar and former FBI agent with all that should be learned about such matters in getting his Ph.D. in history and in his training, if not experience, as an FBI agent we are to suppose he had, it is indecent for him to make such indecent accusations as blaming the assassination on the Secret Service for its "negligence" or even "nonchalance."

There is no end to Brown's making a spectacle of himself through his ignorance of the established fact and his ego in which he conceives himself Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes combined. He reflects this when he gets to his silly conjectures about the shooting of the assassination as he pretends he settles those matters once and for all. However, beginning as he does with his preconception of blaming the Dallas police for the assassination, the one thing that distinguishes his trashing of our history from all the others who have done that is that he has little choice.

He has to make up - and he does make up - his version of the shooting that he presents as the unquestionable fact. With, naturally for him, significant and established details that destroy what from need he made up entirely omitted.

Although I refer to it throughout as above with Brown's spectacular ignorance about shooting, here I emphasize his claimed training and experience as an FBI agent, where he is not writing about shooting in general but gives his shooting solution of the assassination that is absolutely essential to his making up his case against the Dallas police as the assassins.

This also, and again I add emphasis, involves honesty, simple honesty, both personal and professional. He has been easing into it with a concatenation of the most dubious information and misinformation, some from the least dependable of sources. He gets to what he makes the nitty- gritty beginning with the silliest of conjectures based on his interpretation of the Zapruder film (page 36). It is all downhill from there. Here he begins to lean heavily on the House Assassinations Committee of the late 1970's. It, whether his scholarship being what it is, Brown perceived it, began with the official presumption of Oswald's guilt. It never abandoned that and it never even made a pretense of trying to discover whether anyone else fired the shots. So, it had its own contorting to do and that it did.

As one example, and relating to what Brown makes a big deal of, that magic bullet, Commission Exhibit 399 of the official history that is unequaled in either science or mythology, the bullet of that single-bullet theory that is the core of the official assassination mythology. Fragments allegedly of it were recovered and the FBI kept them. The assassins committee got one of the country's foremost authorities on nuclear activation analysis to subject them and a little more to that test. He then testified to the committee that none of the specimens he was given to test matched its official description. Knowing that he was not testing fragments that were described in their official descriptions, in that great tradition of professional experts who learned long ago how to testify to what those paying them wanted testified to, Guinn's testimony about those fragments is as though without any question at all they were the original specimens of that exhibit. As he actually testified they were not.

The House assassinations were no less principled. Having this testimony from its own expert it proceeded to forget all about it, and wrote all it could about that bullet and its alleged fragments and history for all the world as though Guinn had validated rather than completely invalidated them.

Not that without Quinn's testimony that official history had not already been established as the official mythology about that bullet it has yet to be proven was fired during the assassination. (While this evidence appears throughout all my books, see in particular about the imagined history attributed to that bullet Never Again! (Pages 231-3 and 291), what the Army's top expert had said about it.)

What is officially attributed to that bullet of such unprecedented magic is what Brown's scholarship persuaded him not to burden his readers with in his made-up case against the Dallas police. It is required to have entered the back of the President's neck a little to the right of center, where the neck joins the shoulder, to have transited the President's neck without striking bone, then to have exited the front of his neck through his shirt collar and the knot of his tie whence it entered Governor Connally's chest under his right armpit and before leaving the Governor's body to have smashed five inches of his fourth rib. From there it entered the top of the Governor's right hand, smashed those heavy wrist bones, and then to have somehow snuck into the Governor's left thigh and on doing that came to rest; lurked there awaiting the parting of the curtains for it to emerge, unassisted, then somehow get underneath the mattress on the gurney on which the governor had been taken to the emergency room from the limousine, and then to have selected the very moment a doctor had to use the nearby men's room for its dramatic appearance.

This is part of what Brown found expedient not to include in his "solution" which in his own words requires still a different history or, as we see, mythology.

One long paragraph of what he writes plus the first sentence of the next one suffices for our present purposes:

The House committee also revised earlier dogma about the wound that apparently was inflicted on the president from behind, stating its findings indicated there was a slight upward trajectory to the "back wound." This simple finding was as much of a milestone as the committee's willingness to accept the acoustic evidence of the shots. First, it posited the wound for what it was: a back wound, not the nonsensical "neck wound" that was a forced prerequisite for the Warren Commission. Second, it reflected the reality of the wound. I have seen and heard much controversy about the president's back wound, as speakers point to the holes in the president's garments, then cite Secret Service agent Clint Hill's testimony about "a wound six inches down from the neckline" (an accurate description), and conclude with the autopsy deduction that the bullet went in at an angle of forty-five degrees. If you look at the garments and ask where a bullet would go that entered those holes on a six-foot individual of average build and then went down and to the left at forty-five degrees, you are forced to conclude that the president died from that shot, as it would have pierced his heart. It did not, as we know. It entered where shown on the garments, which were not seriously bunched, but rather fit comfortably on a man with a raised shoulder configuration -- almost hunched, as suggested in the photograph where president Kennedy was mobbed as he emerged from a swim. It then traversed slightly upward, nicking the spinal column, and possibly emerging from his throat. It then either hit the windshield, the chrome, or flew out over the chrome and could have been the bullet that Sheriff Decker saw hit the pavement behind Curry's cruiser. The bullet did not, as the Warren Commission wants us to believe, enter just below the hairline, go down at an angle of eleven degrees, and then make several roller-coaster turns to and through the governor.

With respect to angles, we have been scammed (page 37).

For all but the first four lines of this Brown has but a single source citation, that 46 at the end of that paragraph. It reads:

46	For Clint Hill, see CE 1024, 18H 744-5; for the Warren Commission's artistic rendering , see DE 385, 16H 977; the heart theory is the author's ; Try it with a sport coat and the measured specs! (page 37).

Beginning with Clint Hill in this note, his testimony is not in Volume 18 nor is his testimony any exhibit. His testimony is in Volume 2 of those twenty-six, beginning on page 132.

It is not merely that Hill referred to where the damage was in the Presidents's clothing. He was called into the autopsy room by Kellerman, who was in charge of that detail, to be the Secret Service official observer and to confirm where Kellerman and Greer and already located that wound on the President's back for the official record. Naturally Brown makes no reference to the fact that Hill did not locate the wound on the President's back by his clothing only. He makes no reference to the official nature of the role of Hill then was filling or the confirmation of it by Greer and Kellerman. This and more like it, all official evidence, was drawn together and published by me in my first book in 1965, the book that Brown has and includes in his bibliography. What I refer to above is set forth along with its official sources, on page 185).

Brown refers to only two pages of Hill's statement that Brown says is his testimony when it was not. The part Brown cites refers to the location of the holes on the clothing. But as Whitewash noted on page 185, Hill's statement is more than two pages long. It appears on pages 740-5. It is six pages long, not the two of Brown's version. And in it Hill is quite on observing and locating that wound, quoting from Whitewash, which I repeat Brown has:

Kellerman called Secret Service Agent Hill into the autopsy room to make formal observation of the President's wounds. This also is not quoted in the Report, but it is in his statement ( 18H 470-5). Hill declared, " I observed a wound about six inches down from the neckline on the back just to the right of the spinal column," precisely what the suppressed autopsy notes show.

Odd, isn't it, that Brown also makes no reference to those autopsy notes; his preferences for sport jackets being what it is, also with those specs! and his exclamation point.

But then Brown also manages not to mention the official Navy Hospital locating of that wound on its autopsy Descriptive Sheet that I first reproduced in facsimile in that first book of 1965 on page 197, the book I repeat Brown had, and then in 1975, also in what Brown has and is in his bibliography, Post Mortem, on page 310. The difference is not in the chart. The one the Commission used and I first reprinted is a copy. It had the original hidden. It was found only by accident, where it would never be looked for, in what was sent to the Government Printing Office to be printed. It was not printed anywhere until I rescued it from its official oblivion. There is this on the hidden original in the book Brown has - the handwritten observation of the President's own physician who was in the autopsy room and did observe the body and its wounds. Admiral George Burkley wrote in the lower left-hand corner of the original of that Autopsy Descriptive Sheet: "Verified GG Burkley."

Before returning to Brown's quoted text, the would-be Milton Berle in him burst free again in his source note, where he refers to exhibit 386 (which I also published in facsimile in Whitewash along with an accurate account of its origin: it was not "the Commission's artistic rendering." It was prepared by the medical artist at the Navy hospital for the doctors to use in their testimony (Whitewash, pages 185 and 196).

Brown did not have much searching to do except to avoid what he wanted to avoid.

In what is quoted from Brown's text he says he agrees with the House assassins that the back wound was of entrance and with a "slightly upward (his emphasis) trajectory." Brown does not bother his reader with what to him are insignificant details, like how a shot fired at a man sitting upright from six stories up in the air, a matter of more than sixty feet in the air, managed to then go upward rather than down in the body.

Brown refers to this as a "milestone" because, in Brown's own words:

it posited the wound for what it was: a back wound not the nonsensical neck wound that was a forced prerequisite for the Warren Commission.

In this it was not by any means at all inconvenient for Brown's writing and his development of his bum rap on the Dallas police for him to avoid taking any reference to the available, official and published evidence relating to that neck wound Brown describes as "nonsensical."

It has to have gone through the President's body without striking bone but it did strike bone, which is not very "nonsensical." (Post Mortem, pages 587 and 592).

It also has to have left the body though the shirt collar and tie now but neither has any bullet hole in it from in the FBI's own pictures (Post Mortem, pages 597-8). So there is still new magic required for that bullet not to have left holes in the cloth and more, not to have left metallic traces on the front of the shirt. But the FBI's spectrographic examination of front, back and tie proved, there were metallic traces on the back of the shirt but not on the front or the tie.

The actual FBI lab picture, which it did not burden the Commission with - and the Commission did not bother the FBI about - says the "FBI Laboratory" in rather size. Brown being a former FBI agent we need not suppose that it is this picture or the evidence in it that he refers to as "nonsensical."

It happens that there was but a single doctor in all the world who saw the President and that "nonsensical" wound before the President's clothing was removed during the emergency procedures. Perhaps Brown is prejudiced against him because Dr. Charles Carrico is not mentioned in Brown's book, not once (page 426).

It happens also that Warren Commissioner and former chief spook of the CIA, Allen Dulles, also a successful lawyer, did not get the pitch when Arlen Specter, the Commission assistant counsel in charge of that part of it's work, questioned Carrico and did not ask him where that neck wound was. So, Dulles made the mistake of asking Carrico and Carrico was quite specific. As Dulles repeated Carrico's testimony back to him because Carrico had depended on his pointing with his hand, "you put your hand right above where your tie is." Carrico's reply was "yes, sir." (Post Mortem, page 357, citing 3 H 361-2).

Brown has Post Mortem and the Commission's Volume 3. How if he had used Post Mortem a little more or consulted its name and subject index he would have found that I had interviewed Carrico and that he added detail while confirming all he had been asked when he testified (Post Mortem, pages 375-6). He confirmed that the bullet wound in the front of the President's neck, Brown's "nonsensical" one, was above the shirt collar. He also demonstrated with his own tie how the nurses under his direction in the emergency room went through the normal procedure of cutting the tie off to save precious time. Carrico made a cut gesture upward and downward and this can be seen clearly in the official picture I published in Never Again! (pages 246-7).

The nurses were Diana Bowron and Margaret H. Henchcliff .

So the mystery of the shirt collar and tie not having any bullet hole is solved, but that does not make it what I think Brown means by "nonsensical" because in the story he tells the bullet that was allegedly going in his account at "a slight upward trajectory," his emphasis, would have had to have been going much more upward when those were not bullet holes allegedly in the collar and tie and it was in fact higher up on the president's body.

This also does not seem to be very "nonsensical."

It also happens that there is still another official source, the transcript of the first press conference of the Lyndon Johnson administration. It was not identified as that until Roger Feinman , New York lawyer, got a copy of the official transcript of it. But it was well known for the doctors held that press conference soon after they pronounced the President dead. All the papers of the country, if not most of those of the world, carried what first Dr. Macolm Perry and then Dr. Kemp Clark said in response to reporters' questions - three times they repeated it: the President's wound in the front of his neck was a very small wound and was from a shot fired at him from the front. I go into that in some detail in Never Again! beginning on page 195, with direct quotations from some of the papers following and then with direct quotations from the official transcript of questions and of answers.

I am not inclined to believe that Brown would regard this official transcript, dated 3:16 p.m. Central Time and issued by Wayne Hawks of the White House press office as "nonsensical" (page 197).

So, until, if and when he does, Brown explains what is so "nonsensical" about what he said so little else about, the wound in the front of the President's neck, that will remain another mystery.

There still is what Brown refers to as "the reality of" that wound. He says he has "seen and heard much controversy" about it, without mentioning what I cite above and clearly referring to the assassination nuttery of which he is a part. He says he "concludes" that "the autopsy deduction that the bullet went in at an angle of forty-five degrees is correct.

The first problem with this is that there is no such "deduction" or any other expression of it in the autopsy report or in the testimony of these doctors.

What Brown refers to is an error in the FBI agent's report on what they observed at the autopsy, which I published in facsimile in Post Mortem (on pages 531-6). Those agents believed what they reported from the unsuccessful attempt by doctors to probe the wound. (That was not "nonsensical" but it was medically ridiculous. It was the moved shoulder bone that prevented their probing past the bone.)

Based apparently, and with the looseness of Brown's writing it is not always possible to know what he is talking about, he then disagrees with that forty-five degree angle business, never making any reference to the absolute impossibility of getting the probe inside the President's body, because that bullet "would have pierced his [the President's] heart" and "it did not."

Brown then thinks he has explained away how the bullet hole could have been that far down on the President's back when apparently he says it wasn't. His explanation is made easier by his ignoring all the many pictures which disprove it. He says the President's clothes were "bunched" up. Brown's cited proof is not the pictures taken the moment of the assassination but others taken on a different occasion "where President Kennedy was mobbed as he merged from a swim."

That the President went swimming in shirt, tie, and jacket is news to me but it seems to be proof to Brown.

Dr. Brown becomes FBI Special Agent Brown to write that the bullet that he says entered the back and was going upward emerged from his throat. Brown does say "possibly." But if he does not have it leaving the body it has to be there still and the X-rays pretty much prove that to be impossible.

After leaving the front of the President's neck Brown conjectures, his wont, that the bullet "hit the windshield, the chrome, or flew over the chrome and could have been the bullet that Sheriff Decker [no source cited] saw hit the pavement behind [Chief] Curry's cruiser."

According to the FBI and the Commission, not those assorted assassination nuts from whom Brown has "seen and heard so much controversy about" all of this, both the chrome and the windshield were struck, and not next to each other but with some space between impacts. So Special Agent Brown leaves without explanation in his "solution" he is building one or both of these impacts, on the window shield itself and on the chrome trim around it.

Meanwhile, among other things, he seems to be eliminating the wounding of Governor Connally by this bullet. Oh, well he is so gifted at making evidence up and in time we'll probably come to where he makes up that some Dallas cop fired a bullet or bullets not in the official accounting.

In this he also leaves without immediate explanation that hole the Commission and the autopsy doctors said was a bullet hole, "just below the [President's] hairline."

After all of this I believed it appropriate to continue this selection from doctor/Special Agent Brown's next paragraph, its first words

With respect to angles, we have been scammed.

What he actually says about this bullet that supposedly entered the President's back and not his head is: "The bullet did not, as the Commission wants us to believe, enter just below the hairline . . ." What the Commission wants believed is represented on what he uses, its Exhibit 385, is that that particular bullet entered not at the hairline but at the base of the neck where it joins the shoulder.

It is not all that unusual for Brown to be confused and to confuse himself. Here he has two different bullets confused.

With respect to angles, only?

As with all of this book, if on were to note all the factual errors, all the stupidities, all the demonstrations of subject-matter ignorance along with the endless and baseless conjectures presented as realities and the wise-guy stuff, it would take more than a long book to document the departures from authentic scholarship and professional inquiry that is Brown's hallmark. Inevitably, Brown being Brown and not being what he thinks he is, there is also the preposterous.

An example of this is his referring to Dick Russell's work as "scholarly" (page 39). Brown is high on Russell's being suckered by the former spook Richard Case Nagell into doing the tome he titled The Man Who Knew Too Much. (Carroll & Graf, 1972).

The story Nagell told, the essence of it, was well known. After some magazine stories he was interviewed by many. I could have interviewed him and did not, regarding it as worse than a waste of time. What first attracted attention to Nagell's claim is that because he was involved in the assassination and in order to have an alibi because he did not want to be a part of it, he robbed a bank.

Anyone who goes farther with Nagell than this a certifiable idiot.

It was hardly necessary to rob a bank for an air-tight alibi. Especially not for one who claimed to be privy to the whole conspiracy by being part of it. There are hundreds of ways of establishing where one is at a given time if one wants to be able to do that. If someone robs a bank it is to rob a bank, not to establish an alibi.

What Brown likes about this Nagell fiction as rendered by Russell is on its face absolutely silly. In addition, it ignores the fact that the whole world knew what the official "solution" to the assassination would be because Hoover leaked it as early as he could. The childishness that Brown likes so much he quoted it is:

"The USSR ordered Nagell to eliminate Oswald because they thought it might be an extreme embarrassment to them if he was caught, not because he was one of them but because of his history." This one sentence, in the midst of a lengthy, scholarly look at the Kennedy assassination, epitomizes much of the frustration of the research community, as it suggests the Soviets knew more about the event than our government has been willing to tell us for thirty years" (page 39).

It would not be more of an "extreme embarrassment" than having it come out that the Soviets knew and told the United States nothing? Let it happen?

And with, at least in this story, a blabbermouth like Nagell privy, the Soviets would not have expected it to come out?

If the Soviets wanted to get Oswald killed, they had to use a Nagell? What happened to all their "wet jobs" assassins that all our assassination nuts and too many officials have been talking about for so long?

And what was there in that alleged Oswald "history" that Brown does not mention to give the Soviets any concerns?

There is more, but this is enough except that I do add that all these many subject-matter ignoramuses are so ignorant of the official fact, rather than the official misrepresentation of the official fact, that they do not know Oswald's real "history." He was virulently anti-Soviet and anti-Russian and anti-American Communists. Enough of this is in these twenty-six volumes Brown poses as an expert on. More than enough of that I drew together at one point in the first book on the assassination, citing the official sources, in Whitewash beginning on page 121. I repeat Brown has it in his bibliography.

Brown cannot ignore the fact that a minor KGB official named Yuri Nosenko defected and told the CIA and the FBI about Oswald. Not that Brown mentions those FBI interviews and on what they report. They were not unknown. I quote from them at the end of Post Mortem, which like Whitewash on Oswald's real politics Brown has in his bibliography.

Much of this was testified to in public by the CIA officially and it was televised and broadcast from coast to coast. It is also included in those House assassins hearings Brown likes to quote verbatim. But instead of using the official source, the official CIA confession to admitted bestiality without precedent in our history, Brown, scholar that he is, on Nosenko uses Gerald Posner's faulty book, his mistitled Case Closed. Brown has ten consecutive end notes to Posner's book, (page 401). Thus it is that Brown writes a big lie to begin with, that the CIA "beat the teeth out" (page 42). It did not. It also is not true that "or government nearly drove him insane." It was the CIA only that that tried it and after three years failed miserably. Brown does not tell his readers what is in that CIA confession with the documentary proof in the committee's record, that there were those in the CIA who could not decide how to kill Nosenko. One of the means considered was flying him over the ocean and dropping him in it.

The actuality, apparently unknown if not also unwelcome to Brown is that the CIA had been treating Nosenko like a Prince until the FBI gave it copies of its interview reports in which Nosenko offered to testify to the Warren Commission. That really would have created problems for the CIA. Nosenko stated that in the KGB's record it was his job to go over as soon as Oswald was reported to be the assassin, the record is that Oswald was suspected of being a possible American agent in place or a "sleeper" agent and had been openly anti-Soviet inside the Soviet Union. The CIA also was not anxious for that "red" tinge to be wiped from Oswald.

There is none of this in Brown's school-boy's version of the Nosenko matter and he is no less the school boy in writing that "Posner was granted a direct interview with the traitorous Nosenko, and was allowed to ask 130 questions the CIA did not get around to asking . . ." On this he has no source, not even Posner, and he can have none because not only did he just make it up but from Posner's own rendition of what he asked Nosenko and was told by him it was all superficial and meaningless and held much less information that was already public. None of what Posner published from Nosenko has any meaning at all. It was all just a ploy to sell his book.

In fact the CIA grilled Nosenko vigorously, relentlessly, heartlessly and for prolonged periods of time, all recorded and transcribed. Those transcripts ran to hundreds and hundreds of pages. He was also subjected to polygraphed interrogations. It is simply incredible that Brown did not know this. What is not incredible is that he was well aware of it and that the truth did not serve his ends.

When Posner and the CIA got Nosenko to appear live (but with his face covered) on the Ted Koppel program on ABC-TV Nosenko openly ridiculed what Posner said and wrote and made a joke of Oswald's shooting, saying that when he went hunting in the USSR, he could not even hit a rabbit with a shotgun and that his friends had to give him game to take home. Nosenko made a point of that because Posner has Oswald shooting better than the world's best shots could do under vastly improved conditions.

Brown is so mixed up he can't even pull a fake straight. He says of the KGB that "at the height of the Cold War the a KGB perceived Oswald to be mentally unfit, so they allowed him to stay in the USSR" (page 42). Brown follows this with one of what he intends as another of his wisecracks, " If we were to use logic like that in our dealings, when the Watergate goings on came unraveled in 1974, Nixon would have been made President for life."

The KGB did not decide that Oswald was "mentally unfit." They decided he was unstable and that he had no information of any use to it. It in fact did not "allow him to remain in the USSR" but ordered that he be required to leave when his visa expired in a matter of a few days. It was the Soviet Red Cross, that not knowing of the KGB decision, took care of Oswald after he slashed his wrist. As Brown knew very well or he knew nothing about this and just makes it up.

Brown repeats what is absolutely irrational for him to believe or write, this time leaving no doubt about what he meant earlier, that "only thin plywood" was used when a new floor was laid on that sixth floor (page 44).

The Warren Commission's published information on which Brown presents himself as an expert is quite explicit in stating that the smooth plywood was being laid on top of the old solid floor of great strength.

Brown also uses Jim Moore and his silly Conspiracy of One as a source.

Moore, who is a Brown without a Ph.D., writes of taking the plywood floor up and allegedly finding on the floor underneath the marks made by cartoned books that were said to be that "sniper's nest." Cardboard making a mark on hard, old and dry solid flooring on which cartons of books had been stacked for decades? Those boxes only at that!

Brown says, "I did learn from Case Closed that Oswald had a tendency to smirk a bit." Then, nothing omitted in quotation, more of that childish wise-guy stuff, "Perhaps smirking should be added to the Secret Service as a protective concern" (page 45).

If as either a professional historian with a Ph.D. or as a former FBI agent Brown had checked Posner's sources, as I did, not a single one of them referred to Oswald smirking. Not one!

With relief that unfortunately does not last long we leave this chapter with Brown's crediting of the palpably false and impossible story by Rickey White, although I think it more likely that his wife was behind it, Rickey being that much of a dumdum. Brown says that Rickey's father Roscoe was "the point man in the drive [of the police] to tidy up loose-mouth witnesses . . ." (page 39).

This suits Brown just fine because he is huckstering his own police fiction, that some of them were the actual assassins. He did not check any of this rather amateurish White fiction. That is the only way, aside from abandoning any judgement and critical faculties, that impossible White story could be used.

There is much more White fabrication and not a word in it checked out. Some of it was the most ignorant and amateurish manufacture of alleged documents that on their face were ludicrous.

He claimed that the Whites and the Tippits live across the street from each other at the time of the assassination. The phone book, which appears to be too complicated a research material for the Whites as well as the Browns, proves that to be a lie.

Brown does not go into that alleged "tidying up." In the White fiction his father was to kill Oswald and Tippit. He claims that Oswald was with him when his father killed Tippit but managed to get away. Of all the many witnesses with their varying stories of the Tippit killing, all agree that he was not killed while he was inside another police car and dumped on the street. They agreed that he was killed by a man not garbed as a policeman when Tippit got out of his car with his gun still holstered.

The White plan was for a book and for Oliver Stone to buy the rights to their fabrication for the movie JFK which Stone had not yet begun to shoot when they made up that story.

It is good for the Brown bank account that when he was going around working on this book in Texas he did not encounter anyone offering to sell him The Alamo.