Chapter 6

Making Oswald An FPCC "Leader and "Castro's Most Eminent Protégé"

There certainly are theories about the CIA. The title of Brown's fourth chapter is merely "The CIA."

After pretending he knows something about the CIA and its history Brown gets to the Oliver Stone movie, JFK. He treats it and the SDECE fake book as real. He has few source notes for this Chapter and all included in them are fake books. Where he needs a source he has none. As for example, speaking of the top level CIA dismissals after a decent interval following the Bay of Pigs disaster he says they "took the CIA by surprise." There should have been no surprise after that CIA disaster (page 64).

He says that Orést Peňa, the New Orleans Cuban I knew fairly well, was an "FBI informant." He was not. He had been for a while a source but he wound up hating the FBI. Nonetheless, with that magic of his, Brown interprets this to mean that there was a Peňa/Oswald connection. Oswald supposedly had a drunk in Peňa's Habańa Bar and Grill on Decatur Street and because Peňa was the FBI informer he wasn't, Brown says "the CIA was free to use Oswald in any capacity it saw fit" (page 64). This allegedly was because "there would be no fear of a close investigation by the FBI" (page 64). What rubbish! Peňa was not even there when Oswald supposedly was. Some "connection!"

Brown quotes Francis Gary Powers, whose U-2 flight was shot down deep inside the USSR, breaking up the scheduled Eisenhower/Khrushchev summit at Paris, as "believing" that Oswald had knowledge of the U-2 routes" (page 65).

More Brown magic: Oswald, a radar operator and no more, when in Japan, would have had knowledge of what did not exist, "U-2 routes" five or six thousand miles to the east.

The U-2s were not delivering mail on fixed "routes." They were sent to overfly where the CIA expected to find information it wanted.

With no source, again none existing, Brown says that Oswald's letters were, his emphasis written for public consumption" (page 65).

According to Brown, by some unexplained means, this means again his emphasis, "that the intelligence community was aware of his weapons collection" (page 65).

Weapons collection?

Brown is referring to Oswald correspondence when he was in Minsk and its interception. But in the USSR ownership of more than a shotgun was prohibited. And not only did Oswald sell his shotgun before returning, it hardly represents any "weapons collection." It was not until after Oswald came back here that he bought that cheap and worn-out pistol and that Italian war surplus rifle. A "weapons collection."

Without any source or , for that matter, reason Brown says Oswald was connected to the CIA through Spas Raikin, who greeted the Oswalds as a Traveler's Aid when the Oswalds docked in New York. In addition, he as "George DeMohrenshildt [sic], David Ferrie, Guy Banister and Clay Shaw" as "CIA operatives . . ." (page 66).

No-sourcing merrily away, Brown even says Oswald "printed leaflets in Banister's office" (page 67). They were printed at the Jones Printing Company. The job records are in those twenty-six volumes.

Still no-sourcing merrily away, Brown says that "Ferrie next attained prominence as a paid observer in the courtroom where Carlos Marcello's deportation hearings were decided on November 22, 1963" (page 68).

Whatever Brown refers to as Ferrie's earlier "prominence" was unknown and entirely unreported until the Clay Shaw trial of 1969. Ferrie had been dead for two years then. There was but that one "hearing." It was a trial in federal district court that ended the day of the assassination. Ferrie was not a "paid observer" in it. In fact, he was not even in the courtroom. He was in the witness room. With that, too, not being reported or getting any attention until November, 1967, when my Oswald in New Orleans appeared. Ferrie's "prominences" seem to have sprung from Brown's mind. Or imagined need.

Brown then spends another page on those fakers Morrow and Lorenz with a few others. More fakers, like Hugh McDonald, are on the next page.

There is a nice Brown touch on page 71:

At the time he was discovered by House Select Committee investigators, DeMohrenschildt [sic] killed himself with a shotgun (page 71).

"Discovered?" He was never hidden, never underground. He was fresh from a long stint in the psychiatric wars of Parkland Hospital. He was the guest of a wealthy Florida friend. Knowing the pressures the poor man had been under, Earl Goltz, then of the Dallas Morning News, as he told me himself, got in touch with all those he believed would bedevil the poor man and warned them not to because his health was that precarious.

Before the single House investigator, Gaeton Fonzi, showed up, de Mohrenschildt had spent the morning being interviewed by Epstein.

He did not have to be "discovered." But then maybe that seems a bit more exciting to Brown. Or maybe he knew nothing and was improvising on what he had heard.

With make-believe knowledge of how spooks work as a means of checking on Nosenko and with a little more such nonsense we are at the end of the chapter supposedly on CIA conspiracies to kill the President and without a single such conspiracy coming from Brown.

Brown's Chapter Five, "The FBI," is also short (pages 75-81). The long and short is that this comes from the same dubious to fake sources, has nothing new in it and does not allege any FBI plot to kill Kennedy. No theory, thus in Brown's concept it is under "Theories" in his chapter on them.

Even shorter (pages 82-88) is Brown's Chapter Six, titled The Right and Other Wings.

This chapter begins by saying that Texas oil moguls were distressed over Kennedy's alleged plan that Brown neither knows nor explains what he says would cost Texans some of the money they saved on taxes. Oil interests had a special depletion allowance that Kennedy believed was unfair compared to other sources of fuel that was consumed, like coal. Knowing nothing and not bothering to learn, Brown refers instead to "the 'Kennedy Act' of 1962 and subsequent legislation that closed a few minor oil loopholes" (page 83).

There was no such "Act."

Thus the Texas motive for assassination.

He has Madeleine Brown saying of the pillow-talking vice-president what Brown says confirms that the assassination was by oil interests (page 84).

Unable to keep anything straight and giving no source for it Brown asks, "And what of James Powell, Army intelligence agent, taking films of the assassination, and then gaining access to the TSBD during the search?" (page 85).

Pretty good for Brown. The name was James Powell and he was of Army Intelligence.

But he was not in Dealey Plaza or watching the motorcade elsewhere at the time of the assassination. He was at lunch nearby. He did not take films, movie or any other kind of the assassination and he did not "gain access to" the building during the search. Powell took a single still photo as he ran to the Plaza from lunch, rushed into the building immediately and was confined in it after the search began (page 85).

"What of" need not delay us for it means nothing. But in that same "what of" paragraph Brown asks what of "Postal Inspector (and FBI informant) Harry Holmes being part of the Dallas questioning of officers?"

If anyone can explain this, and I doubt he can, it could be only Brown. But again the causes wonder about whether he ever really was an FBI agent because just because Holmes spoke to the FBI that does not make him an "informant." Everyone who was ever an FBI agent should know the only actual FBI "informants" the FBI has it represents with symbols and they are referred to inside the FBI as "symbol informants." A source is a source and the FBI did not refer to sources as "informants" (page 84).

We've dealt with the story that Loran Hall was offered $50,000 to kill Kennedy.

From this Brown proceeds to say that Morrow says the Ferrie was the "brains behind the assassination" and that William Reily of the coffee company for which Oswald worked briefly "allowed him leisure time to visit Adrian Alba and God knows who else . . ." (page 86). That is a rather original way of saying Reily fired Oswald for it!

There is more but this is crazy enough for now.

Part of the unusual Brown "analysis" that is not what is usually meant by the word is that "in the seeds of a new America" Kennedy was planting there was one "that would tax the mighty oil barons" (page 87).

There was no Kennedy plan to tax those oil barons. He hoped to eliminate one of their tax exemptions.

If there is any FBI assassination story, any theory of the FBI being involved in the assassination. Brown did not put it down on paper.

Organized Crime is his seventh chapter. That rich subject was not an inspiration because it is just as empty of any real content and because Brown's writing of it is of undiminished dishonesty. He begins it with a quotation he attributes to Carlos Marcello and on that page begins basing his writing about it on what is not true.

"Three can keep a secret if two are dead" is what he refers to as a philosophical construct attributed to Carlos Marcello. On this, the would-be wise guy in Brown is not restrained, he has a footnote:

If one assumes that the "Marcello safety factor" is a constant - that is, that 300 can keep a secret if 299 are dead - the safety factor can be expressed algebraically as S=T(T- 1), although confirmation would be impossible (page 88).

The wonder is he did not realize this would provide a means of wiping organized crime out - merely let secrets get around.

What he attributes to Marcello comes from the dubious sources.

The suspicion that organized crime was the moving factor behind the Kennedy assassination has been well chronicled by authors G. Robert Blakey and Richard Billings (based on House Select Committee findings) as well as by David Scheim and John Davis. The Kennedy brothers having been put into office with the understanding that Joe Kennedy would temper their anti-crime concerns, did not live up to the billing . . . the Kennedy brothers prosecuted their campaign donors with a vengeance (page 89).

Where a footnote or a source is essential there is nothing but Brown's word in support of any of this.

If the belief with which Blakey took over the job of running that committee has been only "chronicled" and not "well chronicled" he would have had no trouble getting the committee to conclude as he began wanting it to conclude. That it did not is ample reason to regard Brown's version as untrue.

The Davis and Scheim books are not on the assassination. They are hung up on the mafia, their books are mafia books, and they have little about the assassination; not a thing that is credible.

In his The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster, Davis vented his spleen on just about all his relatives, all Kennedys and most Bouviers and made himself important, or tries to. When his Mafia Kingfish, was printed I learned that his viciousness extends to all who disagrees with him. Including, if not especially those to whom, by normal standards, he is indebted.

He took much of my time in long distance phone conversations and in letters and in other ways I'll get to but he was much too important to take the time to go over the records I had gotten by those Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. For one who considers himself as one who under another system would be of nobility, the honest work of honest writers is demeaning. But I could not, and had I been able to, would not have done that work for him. Finally I suggested that I might be able to get a student at local Hood College to do his researching and copying for him. He agreed and she spent just about all her free time for a school year searching those FBI records and making copies for him.

When his checks bounced he blamed that on his bank.

I have no idea what she copied for him. I knew only what she and he asked me about, and he asking took more time which I neither asked nor was offered anything. This extended over pretty much all of her senior year.

In the course of her copying she managed to send him both my only copies and the copies she made for him of a few records of my personal correspondence. They happened to reflect the opposite of what he wanted to say and would up saying because it was an indispensable as well as an overt lie in his concept that became his book.

Carlos Marcello never manifested the slightest interest in what the FBI records about him say from anything I know or have heard. If he had had any such interest all he needs have done is file or get his lawyer to file a request for those records under the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act and for ten cents a page he'd have gotten them.

Picture of the man who Davis holds responsible for the assassination not giving a damn about the records on him the government had when he could get them for what for him was a very small part of one year of his tomato crop if not by money obtained by other means!

All these self-created experts on the JFK assassination at their very best are from the flat- world society. They need know nothing about the established fact of the crime. That would mean only difficulties for them working around it. All they need is to them brilliant thoughts with which they began and what they do is seek what does not exist, conformation of it.

Because of all the rumors, and they did not begin with either Scheim or Davis, about the belief that the assassination was a mafia job and particularly because David Ferrie was involved in the Marcello defense in the Department of Justice case against him in New Orleans, I wrote and asked his immigration lawyer, the late Jack Wasserman, a few questions. And even Wasserman did not ask me for any copies of any of those FBI records on Marcello.

Brown, it will be remembered, had referred to Ferrie as "a paid observer in the courthouse" (page 68). Earlier Brown wrote that he "had connections to organized crime through his contacts with Marcello" (page 67). Brown, at that point, does refer to my writing about Ferrie. His source note makes no mention of what I'd written that he refers to (page 403). That was Oswald in New Orleans and not only did Brown have it, he had to have read it to be able to say what he does that comes from it only of all my books. In it I include a report of the FBI SA Regis Kennedy. In it he states that he and Ferrie were in the witness room together. Ferrie was a potential witness and Brown did not pick that up when he read Oswald in New Orleans. Or, as is clear throughout his book, he prefers saying something else for own reasons.

I also reported in that book that Ferrie worked for the lawyer G. Wray Gill and I knew Gill was one of Marcello's lawyers. In reply to my questions Wasserman wrote me that Gill had recommended hiring Ferrie to do the investigating and that he had approved it. Ferrie worked for Marcello's lawyers, not for Marcello.

But that apparently was not what Brown wanted known so he made up a different role for Ferrie, with not even a reasonable basis to suspect that it could have been true, of "paid" observer in the courtroom in which the defendant and all his lawyers present were observers. They needed no amateurs for that role.

What Brown makes up is ridiculous.

For all his effort Davis was not able to come up with anything at all to indicate that Marcello gave a damn about the FBI's records on him. That simply was not reasonable in the book Davis made up. Davis' own research proved wrong . But Davis, like all those who wrote what they palm off as assassination books without knowledge of or even seeking knowledge of the basic and established facts, knows he is right no matter how wrong he is. And anyone who does not agree with him or says what disproves him or even does what he does not like being done he defames in his book whose reader is a captive audience and that under circumstances that prevents the truth being done known along with the defamation.

Jack Wasserman was one of the country's top immigration lawyers. That is the reason Marcello, who could afford it, reached all the way to Washington for him. Wasserman got Marcello acquitted. So, with Wasserman safely dead and unable to sue, in his book before what is quoted below Davis referred to him as the mafia's "top lawyer." Davis had me to get even with, Davis being Davis, because I did not agree with him. Leading into what is quoted verbatim he first asks the question, what was Marcello's reaction to all those FBI reports that also were used by the House assassins committee? He would hardly say that Marcello had no interest in them. This is what Davis then wrote:

There is solid evidence that he was quite disturbed, for in the summer of 1979, when those findings were finally published by the government printing office, he apparently assigned the matter to his most trusted attorney, the brilliant Jack Wasserman, for investigation. Wasserman immediately set about obtaining the available files on the Kennedy assassination, which included the extensive files on David Ferrie and some documents, but not all, on the allegations of Eugene De Laparra and SV T-1, as well as the Edward Becker story of Marcello's threat to kill Kennedy.

These files, amounting to well over 220,000 pages of documents, had been obtained through a lengthy and costly Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought against the Justice Department by Harold Weisberg, noted Kennedy assassination researcher and author of several books relating to the assassination. They were the files the Assassinations Committee should have had at the beginning of its investigation but did not receive until too late. Now they were being put at the disposal of Carlos Marcello's attorney.

From correspondence between Wasserman and Weisberg that I have examined, it appears that throughout the summer and fall of 1979 Jack Wasserman foraged in Weisberg's files in an attempt to retrieve every FBI document that could relate to the possibility of his client's having been involved in the assassination.

Because of this frantic response of Marcello's principal attorney to the House Committee on Assassinations' findings, we can safely assume that those findings were a matter of deep concern to Carlos Marcello.

Did Carlos expect there would be an investigation of his possible complicity in the assassination by the Justice Department -- an investigation which might have led to the convening of a grand jury and the returning of an eventual indictment for conspiracy to murder the President of the United States? (pages 414-5).

This quotation and the extent to which Brown uses and depends on Davis tells us much about Brown as well as Davis. Whether as scholar, as former FBI agent, as a writer with any self- respect and principle and about the dependence that can be placed on anything he writes and says. Brown did know me. He did read this in Davis' book. But he did not speak to me about and he gave no thought to what it means if not true. Nor, of course, did he give any thought to how he would be abusing the trust an and dependence on a writer who would say such things if they are not true.

As not a single word of it is.

That "solid evidence" that Marcello was quite disturbed and thus assigned his lawyer to investigate immediately and get all those FBI records is a lie made up out of nothing at all.

Although Wasserman would have been welcome, as all are to go over all those records I got, he never asked and I did not offer it. It never happened.

When Davis writes that the correspondence he has examined - and the crumbum did not say that I'd make all of that available to him - show that Wasserman "Through out the summer and all of 1979" was here, left alone foraging" in my files, that is not only a contemptible lie, when he referred to Wasserman as the top Mafia lawyer, which he was not, that is also an intended defamation.

Not only was Wasserman never here, not only did we never lay eyes on each other, in the very slight contact we had he never asked me for a piece of paper and he never asked to have someone go over those files, as Davis himself did.

And I add he learned that there is nothing in them like Davis made up. If there had been they would certainly have been in his Marcello book.

In full swing in his lying and defamation Davis then says of what never happened that Wasserman's response was "frantic." This means that to Davis nothing at all, what did not happen, is for his corrupt and dishonest purposes a "frantic" response."

It is precisely because the two letters I wrote Wasserman and the one he wrote me say no such thing and could not be more different than Davis says that my only copies also found their way to him. And my! The time and effort it took to try and get them back. Poor man, he was, when he replied at all, and that was not until after I wrote his publisher on learning there was to be a paperback reprint, always too busy.

In the end, after many months, he did return one. He still has the other.

That makes a thief of him in addition to being an utterly unconscionable liar.

It is based on his own contrived and unspeakable lie and on it only that Davis could say what is in itself a big lie, "we can safely assume that those findings were a matter of deep concern to Carlos Marcello."

And that is the only thing in that big book that says Marcello cared a bit about any government records on him, especially as an assassin.

From thus, with even his cast iron gut unable to tolerate it as a statement, Davis wants his reader to believe as his question suggests, that Marcello was suddenly worried about being involved in an investigation there was no reason to suspect would be made of the assassination by the Department of Justice that for fifteen years had indicated no such interest and always the exact opposite interest.

If the foregoing is not enough to depict the wretchedly bad specimen of homo sapiens Davis is, and after this I can hardly refer to him as a man, there is more.

I wanted that defamation removed from the paperback reprint. Getting nothing from Davis, I wrote his publisher. Many times. He is no fool. He knows these lies Davis made are his peg for trying to hang the assassination on Marcello and without that there is no book. But because it could be actionable he agreed to remove it. However, that Caliban of a Shylock Davis still had to have his pound. He agreed if all references to me were removed.

I haven't bothered to check. I was not about to spend a penny on such a despicable filth made up to deceive the people about a great tragedy about which so many care.

There are all kinds of liars and in my eight decades I've met a few and I've heard of quite a few. Not one more as thoroughly despicable as Davis comes to mind. This one citation of his work should make that clear enough.

This is in return for having free and unsupervised access to all I had obtained at such great cost and effort over a period of many years in all those Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, in return for all the time he took and wasted for me and for all the time his researcher also did the countless days she was here.

But he, along with the obvious fakers and the equally obvious spooks like Lamarre/"Hepburn" are Brown sources and in his more modest duplicating of Davis' writing he deceives and misleads the people too.

How about Scheim and how about his honesty?

The hardback of his book falsely states that he wrote it for first publication in 1988 by Shapolsky publishers. That is a lie. It is a lie intended to better exploit the market for assassination books then beginning to heat up. The fact is that Scheim published it years earlier. It is a book on organized crime, not the assassination. The assassination is almost incidental to it.

And who wrote the introduction to it? John H. Davis.

Birds of a feather.

Scheim is about an hour by car from my home. He knows I got all those records, particularly FBI records, about the assassination of the President. And I had all of them quite long before his hardback reprint presented as an original book appeared. Yet he had no interest in a single one of these quarter of a million pages. With his book supposedly on the Kennedy assassination and with me so close, he does not include a single one of them in his sources. He refers to Ferrie quite a number of times but he had no interest in the Ferrie records I have or in my book that dealt with him more than any other.

But at least he did not, like Brown, include "Hepburn" and Morrow.

As Davis was so positive in writing about how "frantic" Marcello allegedly was, Brown is that positive in his effort to link Marcello to he assassination.

"We know," Brown writes, "that Marcello had uttered the famous oath,'Take the stone out of my shoe" (page 69). But we did not know Brown's source for three more pages. Only there does Brown tell us that Marcello allegedly said it "in the presence of FBI informant Edward Becker." Davis, like Brown, then asks "was he saying, 'have it done?' or 'Wouldn't it be nice if it happened?'" (page 92).

What Brown does not tell his reader, if he knows, is that when Becker the reported to the FBI he said nothing about any "oath" by Marcello. This, of course, is one reason why the Browns of assassination literature shun my files like the plague they are to that kind of writing.

That FBI report along with other Becker information is in a separate file that has Becker's name on it. Anyone looking at that FBI report knew immediately that Becker did not tell the FBI this, as he certainly would have if it had happened.

Brown would also have learned from my file that Becker came up with that invention of his when he was helping with a book on crime and what he could expect to get for that work was valued by what he provided.

Can anyone really believe that any top figure in organized crime would be so slack-jawed with people of whom he knew so little when he knew of all the government effort to put him away?

Not in real life

With more silliness about Jack Ruby and his alleged but non-existing "connections." Brown says are "well documented," Sourceless Brown writes what should be sourced.:

Yet it should be noted that Ruby had served as an FBI informer in 1959, raising questions about his loyalty to the mob, or the FBI foolishness in being infiltrated" (page 89).

Ruby was not part of the mob and he owed it no "loyalty."

This formulation still again raises questions about whether Brown was ever really an FBI agent. If he had been he would certainly know that one does not become an FBI informer for six months only. He should also know that is the period of probation for those the FBI is considering hiring as what Brown does not say and the FBI always does, a "symbol informant."

If Ruby was an informer on probation, which lasts six months, and then was no longer an informer, any former FBI agent should know that he did not pass his probation.

Which is to say that he was not an FBI informer.

And what kind of former FBI agent could possibly believe that when an informer passes information to an agent meeting with him he can possibly "infiltrate" the FBI?

Pretending that they do when they do not, Brown has another question, "Do these factors add up to an assassination? Not for certain" is his response.

They do not all. If they existed, as they do not, they make no sense. They have no meaning or significance (page 89).

It is with silly, childish words that Brown is making up his case, not with fact or with evidence.

At the same time, Brown admits that "There are literally no national politicians whose death the mob can be blamed for prior to 1963" (page 90). Nor can it except in fiction during 1963.

But this kind of silliness does accumulate into an influence on reader minds and understanding.

Connecting the assassination to the mob is made easier if Oswald can be connected to it. On this Scheim was more cautious than Davis but Brown had still a third and equally invalid opinion. He writes:

Authors Davis and Scheim are at odds regarding Oswald's employment in the summer of 1963. John Davis sees Oswald as "a runner and collector" for a bookmaking operation run by Oswald's uncle, Dutz Murret, but David Scheim sees the Oswald-Murret connection as overstated. A contact of Murret's, Emile Bruneau, posted Oswald's bail after the New Orleans fracas of August, 1963 [the Bringuier fracas], but that may have been as much to keep Murrets out of the limelight as to bring Oswald into it (page 92).

Murret had a regular job. He did not "run" any operation. While my recollection may be flawed after all these years, I think he also ran a small book on the side with numbers. There was no need to "keep" him "out of the limelight."

But note that with all of this there is no source, not a bit of fact. The best Brown can say for those conjectures is that those authors "see" what they wrote.

Only determined subject-matter ignoramuses do not know what Bruneau did and why he did it.

The Murret's married daughter just happened to come back from Texas when Oswald phoned from the jail. She alone was home. So, she called the local ward heeler, and he put up those few dollars for Oswald.

This, too, is in the official records that are available.

Only a certifiably sick mind could see in this minor matter any "limelight" in it for Murret and, of course, no reason is given - or exists - for him to avoid the limelight other than in the sick minds that are trying to make up an assassination-Mafia connection out of nothing. It is even sicker to say that getting Oswald out of jail got him in the limelight. That he arranged for himself and it got him on TV news.

(The Murrets were a religious family. Their son was in a seminary on the gulf coast, at Battles Wharf, Alabama. They drove Oswald there for him to speak. It was a well-received anti- Communist, anti-USSR speech. (Whitewash, page 122, citing 16 H 243, Commission Exhibit 76 which, according to Brown's self-promotion, is the area of his expertise.)

It is not easy to believe that this kind of silly, unreal stuff can be made up by grown men who have any experience in the world at all. It would not be acceptable in a movie. It is all made up out of nothing. So, in his "analysis" even Brown for once admits that he did not make any case up and those he quotes also did not - which means they could not:

However, it is almost impossible to see organized crime as the senior partner or the prime mover in the assassination if we analyze [sic] the event in the light of syndicate methodology (page 94).

So we see that Brown is also an expert on organized crime and its "methodology."

His minor disagreement with his sources, Davis and Scheim, just happened to coincide with the need he is creating for himself in trying to make up this case of Texas moguls and cops doing that job.

It is worth noting that, with only two more of his assassination theories to go he has yet to come up with any real one for all his gift of invention and all his use of all those fellow inventors who preceded him.

His next chapter, eight, is titled Political Foes: Johnson and Nixon (pages 97-102), a blessedly short one. Typical of how little attention to this nonsense is justified is this quotation from our Ph.D. in history:

We eventually learned that Kennedy pledged not to invade Cuba again (a promise he seemed intent on keeping, breaking up staging areas and training bases for Cuban exiles), an the threat of war convinced both sides of "mutually assured destruction," which made the nuclear numbers game essentially irrelevant . . . (page 104).

Whatever Brown's reason for beginning this with "we eventually learned" of the solution it raises questions as to his Ph.D. in history as well as more of the many questions already raised about his career as an FBI special agent. Of course, his major could have been on Patagonia but how he could have lived through those most desperate days of the century and be ignorant of it without clear recollections of all the details is not easy to believe or expect from a history major.

There was no "eventually" to it. It was all public, while it was happening.

When Khrushchev did not get an immediate response to his first proposal, which he sent in secret, outside normal diplomatic channels, he went public with his next proposal. The news tickers were carrying it while those in government were printing it out. It was on the air before the full text had been transmitted. With that as precedent, and serious as the situation was, Kennedy also went public with his proposal that was agreed to, also publicly.

What Kennedy actually did was add to Khrushchev's original proposal.

He did not "pledge" that we would not "invade Cuba again." He did not even admit that we had invaded Cuba, albeit by proxy. There was not "again" in it.

His actual pledge was that we would prevent any invasion of Cuba by anyone.

That, too was known before Khrushchev had a chance to digest and agree with it.

It was all that public after it began.

The only relevant "eventually" is that if we waited long enough we might "eventually" get something sensible and true, if only in part, from Ph.D. Brown:

Analysis: Both Cuba and the USSR, with whom Oswald had had lengthy and obvious contact, had more to lose [his emphasis] by Kennedy's removal that they stood to gain (page 105).

Neither had anything to gain by Kennedy's removal, which meant his being succeeded by hawk Johnson.

Once Oswald was back in the United States, rather than "lengthy" contacts with Cuba and USSR, he had very few and they were brief as he tried without success to get visas in Mexico City.

For this chapter Brown has one source note. For the next, Chapter ten, Cuban Exiles, he has four (pages 107-110).

Brown is correct in saying that some of the Cuban exiles could have had an interest in getting JFK killed (page 107). Getting wise with the lawyers' phrase of "motive, means and opportunity" he substitutes machismo for "opportunity." That, of course, wipes out the lawyer standard for where there is no live eyewitness or other evidence like that. In any theory, as in reality, having the opportunity is an essential.

The motive is without question for some of them but "means" they did not have and Brown makes no effort to provide it for them.

As Brown goes about not developing the real one he has, an oddity for him, a legitimate basis for theories, he refers to what he has no source for, no legitimate one existing, Oswald's alleged but non-existing "dealing with Ferrie, Banister and Shaw in New Orleans." That is Brown's anti-Castro stripe. He gives the opposite with somewhat unrestrained exaggeration:

On the other hand, we are asked to believe that Oswald was Castro's most ebullient protégé on the continent, based on his possession of five hundred leaflets [his emphasis] (page 109).

How he gets Oswald to be "Castro's most ebullient protégé," Brown does not say. The reason is obvious: Oswald wasn't. He was not any Castro protégé, leave alone "the most ebullient."

And those leaflets, with which Castro had nothing to do? The print order form, which is in the 26 volumes on which Brown wasted so much time, is for a thousand copies.

Brown made this up, too.

This nonsense continues into his "Analysis" in which he says what is not true as it relates to the assassination: ". . . there is almost a Cartesian consensus among students of the assassination that Cubans had to be involved somehow . . ." (page 110).

Brown would not be comfortable with most of the few legitimate "students of the assassination." Those with whom he has an affinity are not really students, as he is not. He is of the lunatic fringe on which most of them are.

I know most if not all the legitimate students of the assassination, as distinguished from those who make up theories and "solutions" and those who go for all the irrationality that spews up from time to time. I do not know a single one of them who, in recent years, I've heard say "that Cubans had to be involved somehow."

The nuts, the fakers and the ignoramuses do but they are not really "students of the assassination."

So, for all the many theories that there were over the years, and in the earlier years it may have been the most common theory, which was not all that reasonable based on the little known in those years, when Brown again has a live one instead of presenting the available information on it he wipes it out, again the interest and the need of the farce he is making up.

Chapter Eleven, "Preliminary Conclusions," ends this Book on theories that is not a "Book" and seems to have the purpose of not developing any of the theories that could linger in the readers' minds and encourage them not to credit his (pages 110-20). He begins this by introducing his own theory that he presents as fact and not a theory.

He clings to those he has put down (page 113) in what essentially the equivalent of what in journalism years ago known as a "think piece." His is not that, however. He includes in it his customary departure from fact, as in referring to Oswald as "a leader in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) . . ." (page 144).

Again, made up by Brown.

Rather than being a leader in it Oswald did what it opposed and told him not to do. His sole connection with the FPCC was his sending in his five dollars to become a member, which anyone could do and probably a large number of informants did do (page 114).

He repeats still again what is not true and, as usual, he has no source for it, that Hoover "announced Oswald's guilt almost immediately." At the same point he refers to the Warren Commission as the "sole investigating body," which it never was. (It did no investigating.) The FBI alone did most of the investigating for the Commission. The Commission did not have even a single investigator on its staff (page 114).

It is mostly nonsense presented as deep and mature thought. Among the silliest is Brown's statement that Oswald "would have been a prime candidate for a full agent on the make for a new and knowledgeable snitch - particularly one who seemed to be so easily manipulated" (page 117).

An agent is not a snitch, as a former agent should know. And the FBI was not going around looking for high school dropouts to become its agents.

Maybe in the stupidities Brown made up he can see Oswald being "so easily manipulated" but there is nothing in the evidence, nothing known about Oswald and his history, that can lead a rational mind to believe he could be or was "so easily manipulated" (page 117). All that is know is the exact opposite.

Pontificating as usual and as usual with no contact with reality, Brown says of the Mafia plot with the CIA asked the Mafia to enter into "it would not be good for any investigative agency to discover the alliance between the intelligence community and the mob" (page 118).

It did not hurt the mob or the spooks that the FBI knew all about that Keystone cops silliness.

He winds this rubbish up with even more that is made more possible for him because he has seen to it that he would not know the subject-matter. He begins his conclusion saying that the Commission recognized that "the nonsensical evidence," what it was getting from the FBI it knew as "nonsensical" (page 119). That is no doubt the reason most of what the Commission used is of that description, what it got from the FBI.

He then says an interwoven conspiracy was created. All that was required was for the President to sniff the cheese and "that trap was re-election" (page 119).

It is without question that nobody persuaded Kennedy to make that trip to Dallas. It is also without question that he, personally, overrode all those who tried to talk him out of that trip.

With more like this, we get to the end of the theories chapter that debunks most of the so- called theories it mentions with what is to lead into his "solution": "Who Pulled The Trigger, And Who Let It Happen?" Still again the italics are his. He is saying it was the Dallas police and that gets us to what he titled his Book One, Blue Death.

It is not easy to believe that what we have gone over is the serious writing of a serious man, a man with a Ph.D. in history and who says he was an FBI special agent. It is much easier to regard it an assassination-writing spoof. It is that. That is not what Brown intends. But then its true character never changes.

There is another possible explanation. That explanation is consistent with his dishonesty that permeates this book.

One aspect of the controversy that has from the first lent itself to definitive and specific writing from both sides of the controversy is and has been the theories as they are called about the assassination. Quite a few of these so-called theories are well known and have been well and often articulated. Whole books have been written about some of them. Yet what Brown devotes all the space to is a mishmash that lacks the specificity and definitiveness that is easily possible for any writer. If he wants to be specific and definitive. Obviously, Brown does not intend that. He therefore has a purpose in not doing it.

Moreover, he has been selective in his choice of the so-called theories he writes about and in that he has eliminated those he does not want in the readers' minds.

For example, one of the first was that JFK was assassinated in retaliation for the assassinations of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother-in-law Ngo Dinh Nhu. For this one there was a reasonable basis. Brown does not mention it.

Take his blubber about Secret Service I, II, and III. He makes no mention of the allegation of a dismissed black Chicago Secret Service agent, Abraham Bolden, that the Secret Service was involved.

When in his reporting of those so-called theories he omits these and goes into the palpable frauds likes that whole business of the Rickey White allegation, that his father was one of the assassins. An amateurish plot taken largely from a novel with all the alleged details immediately proven to be both false and manufactured. There are immediate questions about his intentions.

It appears clear that he wants the reader not to credit these theories he does write about, with the purpose of intending to build credibility for his own theory, which he omits from those he discusses, that the police were the assassins and that the oil moguls were behind it.

Rickey White's father was, at the time of the assassination, a Dallas policeman so his fraud Brown gives credibility to.

The fake French SDECE book Brown cites so often and treats as the most legitimate of sources has those same moguls as the conspirators behind the assassination.

Put simply, Brown treats the most apparent and transparent frauds and fakes as legitimate and ignores what he cannot put down, like the widely believed and more than reasonable of the first suspects, the Vietnamese seeking vengeance for the Diem and Nhu assassinations.

While Kennedy has nothing to do with those assassinations, that cannot be said of our government. The public record is absolutely clear and without reasonable question on this. With the assassins not known, there was no more legitimate suspicion than the Vietnamese seeking vengeance.

Yet Brown, and for this kind of writing his credentials cannot be invoked too often, for all his Ph.D. and claimed experience as an FBI special agent, makes no mention of it? Not even one time?

This is not writing of either an accredited scholar or a legitimate investigator. It is propaganda in support of his own theory that follows.