Chapter 7

Brown's: Some Of That "Persuasive Evidence"

These eleven chapters that as Brown constructed his book are not a Book, bring us to his Book One (pages 123-200). They are longer than his Book One, which has nine chapters but not as long as Book Two, which has but three chapters. Although not a Book they are about a third of the text in this strange structure.

However, they provide a reliable means of evaluating Brown, his mind and his work. His judgement, too, as well as his subject-matter knowledge.

In his Book One, from his own propaganda, we know that he is to lay out his case of what he calls "Blue Death," the Title of his Book One, his case that the Dallas police provided the actual assassins. That is a serious matter and what we have learned about him, about how is mind works, his judgement and his subject-matter knowledge should be kept in mind in considering this very serious matter of his accusing the Dallas police of being the actual assassins. Indeed, in bragging about it and about his "solving" the case of it.

In what we have seen to here, he displays none of the qualities one expects of the kind of serious scholar who brags about his Ph.D. degree in history. He has not shown a thing of the benefit of training to become the FBI special agent he says he was or what we should be able to expect him to have learned on the job. There is not a thing we have seen that reflects any investigation of any kind even though he has referred to a few interviews. What he has reflected of the way his mind works tells us that he began his preconception and cares about nothing else, pursuing nothing else. That is neither scholarship nor investigating. He has a love of wise-guy, smart alecky things and indulges it. His judgement, reflected by the claimed sources alone, is poor, very poor. Astonishingly for one armed with a Ph.D. and was an FBI agent. Not only does he regard obviously fake books as solid and dependable and use them repeatedly that way, he lacks both intelligence and the subject-matter knowledge to perceive that these obviously fraudulent books are just that. Also on his subject-matter expertise we have seen and see again that he is both ignorant or dishonest and both at the same time in what he omits. And, as we have also seen, he regards, (his being that kind of claim to scholarship) what the Warren Commission published alone as at least adequate for this book, serious as are the charges he makes in it. He knew of and had and declined access to the more than a quarter of a million pages I got from the FBI by Freedom of Information Act litigation. He makes no use at all of the more than two hundred cubic feet of Warren Commission records (the extent of which he almost doubled in referring to them) that were available beginning three decades ago. Except rarely and then second-hand at best he has nothing about the simply enormous amount of other agency assassination records that began to be disclosed under the 1992 Act. It requires what we should not expect, full disclosure of all agency assassination records.

He writes, in short, in ignorance of in conscious and determined ignorance of most of the official information that is available.

Yet claims to be able to identify both the assassins and those for whom they did that dirty deed.

His is not a book that would be accepted as a thesis of a student seeking a Ph.D. degree.

He begins his Blue Death with its first chapter titled On Mechanics and Investigations (pages 123-6), a very short chapter. "Mechanics" is spook lingo for assassins. Somehow he sees what he quotes from Winston Churchill as appropriate for his book and for this chapter:

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

There is nothing in this chapter to which this added flaunting of meaningless learning applies. It certainly does not apply to "mechanics."

The second word in what is here quoted is "posited." It does not mean proved. The Oxford dictionary meaning of posit is, "to present or assume as fact." It does not mean that what is posited is fact. It means the opposite, that it is not proven and is assumed only.

That is his sole basis for charging the Dallas police as the actual assassins, his assumption of it!!

Having posited that an interwoven, multi-faceted conspiracy with overlapping goals of self-preservation had come to the conclusion that President Kennedy's term should be shortened, it is now our challenge to consider the "mechanics" (a polite euphemism for "assassins") chosen for the operation and the methods necessary to contain the investigation within the first few hours until the dust settled and the world could be convinced of Oswald's -- and nobody else's--guilt.

The word "assassin" is derived from the Arabic word "hashshasin," literally "eaters of hashish," and specifically an order of Middle Eastern Muslim fanatics active from 1090 to 1272 whose goal was to kill Crusaders. (Believers in "Camelot," take note.) Since those times, "assassin" has come to mean a paid killer willing to murder someone of political importance (page 123).

He assumed that the assassination of President Kennedy was a conspiracy but only a subject-matter ignoramus need assume it. Whether or not there was a conspiracy is a matter of fact, not assumption. The facts in this case rather than the official misrepresentation of that fact prove there was a conspiracy. Of the many facts that do prove this offered assumption one should suffice: the shooting attributed to Oswald was beyond the capability of the country's best professional shooters. Therefore, no one man was an assassin and there was a conspiracy. That official proof has been available since my first book of 1965, Whitewash. More evidence is brought together on this in Never Again!

When Brown has not proven that there had been a conspiracy he cannot honestly say that it was a "multifaceted" and had "overlapping"was goals. Without knowing the facts he has no legitimate basis for conjecturing who the assassins were. But that is what he does.

He assumes also that the investigation was "contained" with in the first few hours but presents no evidence that it was. Knowing nothing about any of this he says he will go into it anyway.

In plain English, he is going to make it up. Which he does.

Flaunting a little of his book learning again he explains the origin of the word assassin but does not tell his readers why those ancient Arabic assassins ate hashish. Was it to make them happy because killing was a happy occasion?

If there is any reason for him to interject "(Believers in Camelot take note.)" he does not indicate what he means by it. Or which of the imagined Camelots he means.

It is not true that all assassins are paid. Here he mentions three assassinations of the current century and not one of those was a paid assassin. Elsewhere he names other assassination victims. He does not mention Robert Kennedy.

Once again there is more but this should be enough.

After a page of idle conjecturing, none of it having any basis in fact, without even an argument to support it he concludes that "the forces behind the assassination were going to have to originate within America's borders" (page 124).

Again following more conjectures in support of which he does not even claim there is any evidence to support them he intones:

One group and only one group fits the profile perfectly, a rogue handful of Dallas police officers, with one or two key people near, at, or above the chain of command (sic) (page 124).

He does not say but possibly those "key people" were to protect the assassins.

Those only "near" the "chain of command" could do that?

This is just story-book stuff, and a cheap story-book at that. But he has nothing else, there being nothing else to have:

As suggested in "Theories," the plausible denial syndrome was probably greatly aided by the presence somewhere in Dallas of a well armed CIA/Cuban assault team composed either of genuine exile fanatics, or the Hunt-Sturgis-Hemming-Lorenz decoy caravan, as well as mob torpedoes, and even a right-wing/white supremacist team, but they were never considered active. Dealey Plaza was the kill zone all along, and elements of the Dallas police, hardly friendly to Kennedy, had the weapons, skills, and ability to blend into the scenery and come and go casually; and the rest of the department, loyal Americans and honest cops in varying degrees, could hardly begin an investigation of themselves. They had Oswald in their subversive file and they were not surprised when he became the suspect as soon as the shots were fired" (page 214).

In the first sentence he can say no more of what he wrote earlier than that it "suggests" and he follows that with "probably" and with no other reason than baseless conjecture he has that "well armed CIA/Cuban assault team" and they are "somewhere in Dallas."

What were they trying to assault?

Does he know what an assault team is and does?

Or is it more he thinks it is professional spook talk and gives a nice touch to what he makes us, the people reading it will like it and believe he knows what he is talking about?

An "assault team" is not for an assassination and what is known of this assassination eliminates the possibility of there of there having been one. There was neither any use or need for one.

He even repeats that Lorenz fabrication that was so impossible. If he were not so determined a subject-matter ignoramus he would have spotted that to begin with.

There was no such "caravan" and if this dope had the slightest idea of how intelligence agencies work he would know that anyone employed by them, in this fakery E. Howard Hunt, would have been almost anywhere else in the world but not in Dallas.

If his childishness is not enough, he has, in addition to than non-existing "assault team" and that "caravan," also entirely imagined and baseless, a team of "mob torpedoes" and even another, a "right-wing/white supremacist team." Only they killed each other off. Who or what were they going to "torpedo" and why?

No, all these were there to do that job but somehow didn't and that left it for him added imagining assassins. Those imagined "elements" of the Dallas police.

Who in his description are hardly unique.

They are "Hardly friendly to Kennedy," and they "had weapons" to kill. Not true in almost any city?

Only "the rest of the department, loyal Americans and honest cops in vary degrees, could hardly begin an investigation of themselves."

Once Brown says something there is no more to be said. So it does not have to be asked why they could not "begin an investigation of themselves," which all police departments have to do from time to time. "Honest cops" and "loyal Americans" would not do all they could a) because it was the President who was killed on their watch in their city; b) because the disgrace of not solving the crime would be permanent; c) because they might get caught covering up and at the least d) because of the great harm to that department and to that city.

In addition to which there was always the possibility that the truth would get out anyway and then where would they all be? Would they then continue to be regarded as "honest cops" and as "loyal Americans?"

Brown say it because his cockamamie notion and his expected fame from it requires it and that is that.

When Brown says it, it does not have to make sense. Anything that his made-up story needs is real as soon as he makes it up.

Like besides, these Dallas cops "had Oswald in their subversive file and they were not surprised when he became the suspect as soon as the shots were fired."

No source for this, for any part of it, naturally.

Perhaps we can assume they had a "subversive file." But there is neither evidence nor reason to believe that Oswald was in on it or that there was any reason why he should have been. He had not taken out an ad in the papers to let all, including the police, know that he had been to the USSR and had returned.

Then there would have had to be a special kind of "subversive file," one that held anti-Communists to be subversive. Oswald was anti-Communist, and vigorously, despite the official representations of his politics. Which if Brown were not wedded to all the nuttiness and had been a decent scholar, he would have known from the previous citation of what he claims expertise in, those twenty-six volumes.

We can skip over what also has no source, that the police "were not surprised when he became the suspect as soon as the shots were fired" because it is obvious not only that he was not," then a suspect but also because he then could not have been. He also was not the first arrested as a suspect.

Brown next promises what he says this section of his book will do:

will show the Dallas police controlled the motorcade route, the manpower allotments, the crime scenes, the "evidence," the media, the interrogation of the one serious suspect, the release of all other suspects, the custody and safety of the prisoner, the prisoner's immediate family, and all phases of the preliminary investigation (pages 124-5).

What is material in this, or can be, will require more of his magic and no-sourcing or ignoring information that was available or both because the Dallas police did not control "the motorcade route." That was decided by the "Secret Service and what if he were not so ignorant Brown could have used better, it was the traditional route in the city and to Dealey Plaza. It did not have to be "controlled." It was automatic.

What Brown will not go into is that those were other suspects, but there being nothing on any of theme, they were released because there was no reason to keep them. Then:

When elements of the Dallas police were chosen, it was a selection whose wisdom time has sanctified; for while the world watched in horror at the repeated flaming ineptitude of the Dallas cops during that tragic weekend, little did anyone know that they had succeeded in every responsibility they had been given. And their success has survived until now (page 125).

Brown does not say it but he means chosen for the assassination. He does not say who chose them or on what basis or how many others that made conspirators of.

There was no "flaming ineptitude" that weekend other than not making it impossible for Ruby to kill Oswald by the accident over which the police had no control.

The well-known truth is that if Ruby had been a conspirator he would not have been able to kill Oswald because Oswald was to have been moved more than an hour earlier and the delay was not within the control of the police.

They also did not cause the delay. This, too, is in the twenty-six volumes and if Brown missed it there, it is in my 1965 book which he has and used.

With respect to the "investigation," it is an article of faith among law enforcement officers, be they local, state, federal, or Interpol, that there is really only one way to run an investigation, and that is with thoroughness. Take every scrap of evidence, add to each of those scraps by dauntless investigation until the saturation point is reached, then begin to see where all the evidence points, and only then narrow the focus (page 125).

He follows this saying that the police did not do this and in saying that "no crime scene involved in the assassination was truly sealed."

This is a legitimate criticism, albeit exaggerated. Even if we assume multiple crime scenes, as by use of the plural he does. But he merely spouts off offering no proof. He also ignores the realities.

Nor does he say what evidence was overlooked or not even looked for. As usual this is helped by his ignorance of the official fact. In that evidence it is without reasonable question that Oswald was not at the alleged scene of the shooting at the time of the shooting. So what was there for the police to pick up there and what would - or could - "dauntless investigation" there have produced?

It is easy to make Brown's criticisms if one is not required to answer his own questions.

He himself, as we see, claims that shots were fired from other points. Evidence from outside the Texas School Book Depository could not be picked up in it.

And what evidence was there for those dastardly cops to leave after the shooting? Only the empty shells to pocket to take care of them.

His "article of faith among law enforcement officers, be they . . . federal," that they must be exhaustively thorough and "take every scrap of evidence" and "keep adding to it," nobody at all familiar with the FBI's work in this case could possibly say that with a straight face. And, as Brown has already stated, the FBI moved into the case and took it over promptly.

Brown gets carried away with himself and his criticisms and what he imagines and what he requires the reader to believe with no evidentiary support that as what he thinks is the Sherlock Holmes in him ticks it all off, and assuming all the assassins, contrary to what he says elsewhere, where in the Texas School Book Depository, he lays it on thick:

No impediments were placed in the way of potential fleeing assassins and although they [the police] knew Oswald was missing from the TSBD, no all-points bulletin was ever broadcast, even for him" [Brown's emphasis] (page 125).

This having exploded from his mind bursting with the excitement of his greatness Brown adds, nothing omitted in quotation:

None [that is, no all-points bulletin] was needed; they knew where he was at all times, and although they found him quickly enough, though it took two tries and one officer's life to put him permanently within their clutches. The search for any additional evidence, or assassins, was totally halted once it was "officially recognized" that Oswald was a suspect in the Tippit murder and was missing from the TSBD (page 125).

There is no attribution of that "officially recognized" quote. He likes it so that is enough.

He does blame the police for the Tippit killing.

But he does not say why or even suggest a reason for any "all-points bulletin" for Oswald or, as he writes, "even for him." Or why "even him."

Nor does he say that Oswald was far from the only Texas School Book Depository employee who did not return from lunch, after the assassination.

His emphasis on "even for him" has no explanation, but then when it comes from that Hercule Poirot mind of Brown's, it needs no source, no explanation.

Perhaps he believes that having said the police had Oswald in it security file is enough but then he had no source on that, either.

No-sourcing his way through most of his book other than when he has those fake books to cite, he writes as though he needs no sources on any of this. If he approached it any other way he'd not have been able to write this because not a word of it is true.

It is not true that no other suspects were arrested after he was arrested. And it is equally untrue that once Oswald was arrested "The search for any additional evidence, or the assassins, was totally halted."

The only arrest of the several that I recall was before Oswald's was that of the man who used the name Jim Braden. It is thirty pages before Brown gets to him. If the time of the arrest of the so-called tramps is the time they reached the headquarters, that was after Oswald was arrested. If not, the time can not be pinpointed. All others were later.

The most apparent disproof of Brown's claim that beginning the moment of Oswald's arrest "The search for any additional suspects . . . evidence . . . was totally halted" is that there was no search of any of his property until later and then some of that was the next day.

Needing no reason and common sense being no consideration at all, Brown does not explain or give any chance for, "the police who escorted Oswald [after his arrest] or witnessed his arrival at police headquarters, were convinced of Oswald's guilt of both murders from the outset" (page 125).

That "belief" was at the very most based on the unproven allegation that he had entered the Texas Theater without paying for the ticket although he had much more money on him than a ticket costs.

In fact, the police had much less reason to suspect Oswald than one of those other Texas School Book Depository employees who did not return, for example, Junior Jarman. Jarman had a police record, Oswald did not.

As he gets to the end of this fiction, foolish and farcical treatment of this truth and reality, Brown, forgetting what he said only the page before, says that

The evidence was given away almost immediately to the FBI (who had no jurisdiction, but were brought in quickly by the two 'accessories before and after the fact,' Hoover and Johnson) . . ." (page 126).

It is true that the FBI were in the case without jurisdiction. But it is not true that it never had jurisdiction and it is also not true the Dallas police, in the sense of what Brown writes, gave all the evidence they had away before the FBI had jurisdiction. Some of it, by far the greatest amount by volume, had not yet been gathered. Moreover, the first evidence the police gave the FBI it gave the FBI so its fabled crime laboratory could go to work on it, but that, too, was after Johnson gave the FBI jurisdiction and made a federal investigation official. The FBI then sent it lab's conclusions to Chief Curry. It is published in those twenty-six volumes.

The paraffin test casts, for example, were made after Oswald's arrest by hours and were not given to the FBI immediately then.

As we have seen, the proof that Hoover and Johnson were accessories is fictional, there being no basis at all for Hoover and only uninhibited liar Madeleine Brown for Johnson , and she has no credibility at all. Nor does her story, rehashed by Brown, that Johnson told her all before the assassination and that it would be before the week was out. (Being the no-source specialist he is and addicted as fraud and fakery as he is, Brown, scholar with a Ph.D. and investigator with a claimed FBI background, did not even try to establish that it had been with physical impossibility for Madeleine Brown to take Johnson to bed that week. From what is known it was not possible and Johnson's schedule and whereabouts are a matter of public record.

There also was much evidence the FBI did not want at the beginning, and that included all that it would have to validate and all that tended to exculpate Oswald. It avoided pictures like the plague, for one example, and those paraffin casts and the Dallas police analysis of them is another. The FBI even rejected pictures of the President actually being killed on the basis they could not be used to identify Oswald. The Charles Bronson film for an example that Brown has already mentioned without saying this. (I brought that to light with FBI records obtained in my CA 78- 0322. The Dallas FBI did not even send that information to Washington.)

For those who do not know what paraffin tests are, melted paraffin is placed on, with Oswald, hands and face and allowed to harden, and then the chemical elements picked up by the paraffin are identified. These tests are not definitive for incriminating but they are for exculpating. One of the reasons they are not definitive for incriminating is that substances similar to the product of firing a weapon are fairly commonplace. Soap that Oswald might have used and the books he handled would yield what could be mistaken as positive proof. But where they are definitive is when those by-products of firing a weapon are not on those casts.

Naturally, being that former FBI agent and crime and investigative expert he is, Brown makes no mention of any of this.

The paraffin test on Oswald's hands yielded suspect traces but because he had handled materials that give that result they are not incriminating.

But the casts of his face were exculpatory!

They would have walked him had he lived to be tried.

As I also brought to light in Post Mortem, when in total secrecy the FBI had those face casts tested by nuclear analysis at Oak Ridge, those added tests added additional confirmation. While the Oswald face casts showed no such trace when other men fired that weapon at Oak Ridge, all those face casts showed the by-product of the blowback when bullets fired.

To make this pathetic as well as truly preposterous, Brown ends this short chapter - what it could have been if he had run on with this kind of self-exposure and self condemnation - saying that what will follow will "flesh out the allegations suggested [sic] above and demonstrate overwhelmingly that the assassination . . . could not have been accomplished with such amazing simplicity . . . if there had not been a serious conspiratorial presence on the ground in Dallas who did not have to concern themselves with either escape or investigation. It was nearly the perfect crime" (page 126).

Not since the Keystone Kops has this been equaled. Not even the Pink Panther could equal it.

"Allegations" and "suggestions" are not established fact and despite Brown's boast that he will "demonstrate overwhelmingly" that they are the fact and the truth, there is no way in the world to do that with fakery, fraud, lies and what is imagined and made up out of nothing.

Then there is the fact that the moment Oswald was shot the case was no longer a Dallas case other than of Ruby for killing Oswald. It was then a Washington case and all those imagined conspirators of such influence in Dallas had no such influence in Washington, with the FBI as an institution or with individual agents or with the Warren Commission which had not yet been appointed.

In saying, "It was very nearly the perfect crime," Brown displays no false modesty. He says, with this awful drivel that would shame a reasonable intelligent high school lad, he solves the case.

He is still writing a cheap novel, too, because he assumes what there is no basis to assume, that those who pulled it off hoped for anything more than lead time for the assassins to get away.

Nobody could anticipate that for his reasons Hoover wanted to wipe it out or that, after its appointment, the Warren Commission would too.

What he means by this, that "very nearly" part and he actually says elsewhere is that it was "the perfect crime" until he, Dick Daring, came along and solved it - with this puerile pap.

His next chapter in his campaign against the police, Early Suspicions (pages 127-30), is also a short one. It consists of argument and propaganda and is not worth taking any time for. Other than the first of the words with which he begins it in which still again he quotes the inappropriate to give his work the appearance of class and of scholarship. He quotes from Alexander Pope's The Dunciad, "stuff the head with such reading as was ever never read . . ."

It appears that Brown took the British poet's advice.

Chapter three of his Book One (pages 131-6) is "The Motorcade." If Brown were not hung up on these twenty-six volumes and ignorant of all else he would not at the outset have said that "Roy Kellerman . . . indicated the motorcade route was in the hands of Winston Lawson, Secret Service advance" agent for that trip. He would have cited the memorandum on it Lawson himself wrote that the Commission had and did not publish. Brown quotes Forrest Sorrels of the Dallas Secret Service as saying, with Brown adding emphasis, "that police officials agreed that the route taken was the best." Brown adds, "given the thesis being argued here, indeed it was" (page 131). But he never gets around to saying that it was the usual route for motorcades by those who want maximum exposure downtown.

Next is more argument, not fact, Brown's opinion for which he cites no source, that instead of turning onto Houston Street from Main and then onto Elm, "there was no reason why the motorcade could not continue down Main Street, and with Elm Street closed [which it was not] jump the small curb to reach Stemmons Freeway" (page 131).

No reason in the minds of dunderheads arguing the entirely unproven and unprovable and citing no legitimate source, but for the Secret Service and the President's security what Brown omits was a most persuasive reason not to do that. And it was only after the fact, in retrospect, and after Oswald was ordained the lone-nut assassin who worked in the Texas School Book Depository, that any such argument could be made.

Aside from the fact that the Texas School Book Depository offered less of a hazard than all the main buildings in downtown Dallas from the dozens of thousands of windows from which and from their rooftops of which shots could have been fired, doing what Brown suggest would have brought the entire motorcade to a virtual halt. That is a serious security concern. It would have had to go over more than his "small" one curbstone. It would have had to cross the divider between streets and that is a ninety degree turn. Then the President would have been a sitting duck and then also the possibility of damage to the vehicles or their tires was a possibility that should have caused the Secret Service the gravest doubts.

Being sublimely ignorant of the secret Service investigation, which he could get, as I did, at the National Archives in the Commission's files, Brown writes, "there is not a hint of evidence . . . that the Secret Service mapped out the eventual route or traveled" it (page 132). That Lawson memorandum on this of which Brown is so ignorant gives him the lie (page 132).

Authority on anything and everything that he is Brown next alleges what is not in any sense true, that "Dallas police officers and higher-ups, however, had to know that the security risks in the Dealey Plaza turn, as well as its potential as an ambush site" and that "a suitable patsy (already in their 'subversive file') worked" there (page 132).

Except that there are security risks everywhere and if they controlled the lives and activities of the President and would keep them prisoners in the White House, not a word of this is true and relevant. Brown does not even say which of the two turns he means by "the Dealey Plaza turn." He means the one from Houston onto Elm. That turn was on a smooth, paved street and while more than of ninety degrees the cars did not have to come to a virtual halt to make that turn. At any halt is where the danger is the greatest.

Basing his patsy line on what was neither true nor reasonably suspected, that the police had on Oswald what Brown makes up, that "subversive file," Brown refers to Oswald's presence there as "the ultimate bonus" for the police. He then tells the reader the lie that it was the Dallas police who, for this reason, bamboozled the Secret Service into that route and going through all that curb jumping for the entire motorcade each and every vehicle in it and jarring all in the motorcade (page 132).

Leaving no doubt about this, he says that "The Dallas police helped put the President in the kill zone" (page 132).

Naturally for Brown, no source on any of this and as indicated above, there is the official source that proves he made this all up and that it is not true.

Not pointing out that it was two decades after the JFK assassination and that in those two decades Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were assassinated and unsuccessful attempts were made against Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Brown says he compares the actualities in Dallas with those in Denver when the Pope went there in 1993. He also does not tell his readers that before the Pope was shot despite all the precautions taken against that happening (page 133).

Quoting motorcycle patrolman, Marrion Baker , who "had been assigned to ride alongside the President's car, Brown writes what he has to know is a lie, that "no officers would be riding alongside the presidential limousine" (page 134). It simply is not possible that anyone could do any research in those twenty-six volumes without knowing that four Dallas motorcycle policemen were in fact assigned to do just that, flank the President, two on each side and did. Moreover, for all the use and misuse Brown makes of the best-known picture AP photographer Ike Altgens took, he cannot have avoided seeing that in the middle of the assassination those four motorcycle policemen had been right next to the President.

Brown even quotes Altgens on a different matter (page 138).

Brown titles his Chapter Four Dealey Plaza (pages 137-49). He finds another quotation from Aeschylus appropriate, as I do and he does not intend, "Alas, I am struck a mortal blow." The mortal blow I see is in this is to the reader and his mind from all this endless misrepresentation of known an established fact that Brown intends to make the Dallas police guilty of his fabrication, that they were the actual assassins. There is much too much of what Brown makes up to go into all of it. These samples should be enough to reflect its character - and his. Here are a few of the more glaring.

With endless departures from officially-established fact and more of his own arguments and what he makes up in support of them, Brown finally gets to those Dealey plaza "tramps" (page 140). Sourcelessly, as usual, he says they were "removed from a train that had been stopped by signalman, Lee Bowers." To seem to validate this lie he says, giving again the impression that it was immediate, they "were then marched through Dealey Plaza." He adds to this that the photos taken do not show normal police procedures. He then quotes Fletcher Prouty as "insisting" that "these officers are fakes."

They are not and their names are public and known.

This more than a decade and a half after the FBI investigation of that matter I forced was made public in my CA 78-0322 and is in my files in which Brown had no interest and in the FBI's public reading room and five years after it was first known that the Dallas police had disclosed all their relevant records, including the names of those men (page 140).

Those three men were not in a "train" that had been stopped by Bowers. Whether Brown knew and suppressed it and or was ignorant, the fact is they were winos taken from a parked boxcar an it was not at the scene of the assassination. It was a block west of it and more than two blocks south of it, when that parked boxcar, not attached to any engine, was behind the Central Annex Post Office whose address was 217 South Houston Street. That was at least an hour after the assassination because those pictures were taken about an hour and a half after it. Rather than being "marched through Dealey Plaza," which Brown made up, the only way those winos could be taken in by the police other than hoisting them up the considerable height of a railroad platform and attracting all that attention in the Post Office, was to take them north on the tracks and then onto the grassy knoll and down from it and in front of the Texas School Book Depository and then over to the Sheriff's Office or to the police car parked on Houston Street. By that time the Plaza was loaded with photographers who were taking pictures of everything that moved, and that is the only reason those pictures were taken at all because there was no connection with either the assassination or its investigation.

Prouty has always insisted that General Lansdale was one of those three and that given his record, particularly in Viet Nam, was involved in the assassination. But after more utter insanity like Brown's about those men, the FBI went public with part of the truth. When those records were disclosed to me in that lawsuit in 1979. With the police records public, the two of these three still alive were interviewed by the media. That lead to still another mythology that also has nothing to do with the assassination. The two still alive confirmed what the disclosed police and FBI records say.

It is not necessary to cite and quote all the disclosed records on this but I refer to enough to establish the kind of scholar, professional investigator and writer Brown is. What I did that forced the FBI investigation was prompted by my detecting that the faking of a sketch of one part of the pictures taken of those men as an alleged assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., and I did that through the Baltimore FBI Office in whose territory I live. That record is in its 44-688 file. In Memphis it is in the 44-1987 file. It is dated May 3, 1968. It reports what I say about the faking of that sketch supposedly of the King assassin and forwarded copies with the picture I'd given the FBI to both Memphis and Dallas by registered mail. Dallas was asked to make a "thorough" investigation.

It replied, with a copy to Memphis, that Bill Bass of the Dallas police identification unit is pictured leading these three men and that accompanying him were Officers Roy Vaughn and Marvin Wise. Bass confirms what I say above how and where they were found and that they were taken to the Sheriff's Office.

Writing in the Washington Post of March 4, 1992, which was more than three years before Brown's book was published, its reporter, George Lardner, identified the two living men as John F. Gedney and Harold Doyle. His information was from a public statement made by the then head of the Dallas FBI, Oliver "Buck" Revill. Revill said the third was Gus W. Abrams and was believed to be dead.

Those are the names that appear on the Dallas police "Arrest Report on Investigative Prisoners," dated the day of the assassination. They were not immediately released, as Brown made up for his made-up indictment of the police, but four days later, at 9:45 a.m. on November 26. These police documents were obtained from Dallas Municipal Archives and Records Center and were given to me by my friend Dave Perry.

This can be taken, I believed, as a fair reflection of the dependability of anything Brown writes from his "insights" and "posits."

"General Lansdale" indeed!

Brown also refers to the arrest of "Jim Braden," whose correct name is said to be Jim Brading (on page 144). He says that Braden was one of two people taken into custody "in the Dal-Tex Building" but he fails to say when they were. That was when Braden, just before the assassination, was in it looking for a phone. He was arrested immediately after the shooting. Why Brown, sloppy as his writing and thinking are, omits this we do not know but we know that it protects his lie referred to earlier that Oswald was the first arrested and this the only suspect. Brown adds that what "might have mattered in subsequent hours [and he is talking about days, not hours] is "when David Ferrie, with whom Braden was an office neighbor in New Orleans, was taken into custody and released" (page 144). As Brown does not say, Ferrie was arrested by Jim Garrison.

Neither man had an office in the building Brown does not identify, The Pierre Marquette. Braden is not of New Orleans. He was there on a visit at a different time and Ferrie had the use of the office of the attorney for whom he from time to time worked, the previously mentioned G, Wray Gill.

It then turns out that the other man Brown says was arrested was not arrested at the Dal- Tex Building, which is across the Houston Street from the Texas School Book Depository. He was a local man who was said not to have a good excuse for being where he was, quoting Brown, "placed . . . with the other witnesses (Brown's emphasis)." In fact that is where those regarded as witnesses were taken immediately and as those twenty-six volumes reflect, statements were taken from them by sheriffs. The Commission published those statements.

Next, nothing in quoting Brown, he asks, having given emphasis to "witnesses,"

"Witnesses? Was Oswald treated as a witness?" (page 144).

Nothing omitted, Brown then says that "because of their less-than-optimum performance in the first few minutes after the assassination, is it possible that uniformed Dallas police officers were active [which is suggestive] during the assassination?" Without saying what he means by "active" but long on the suggestion he means as assassins, he adds, "There is persuasive evidence that the answer to that question is yes" (page 144).

We have seen enough of what Brown finds "persuasive" and we'll see more than enough more but there in fact is no much "evidence" so it cannot be "persuasive."

Brown then spends two pages trying to breath some life into the fake story made up by Rickey White and his wife.

With this another sample of what Brown regards as evidence, as fact, it would be no surprise, if he believed it would add to the case he is making up about the Dallas police, would say that a purple cow jumped over the green-cheese moon.

Apathy is the title of Chapter Five (page 150-62).

The only apathy is Brown's toward the official evidence he ignores. And as usual he goes for the phony. Like Jean Hill's story that at the Sheriff's Office she "was given a blank piece of paper and told to sign it." To this, to cover himself, Brown adds, "if accurate." He should have said: "if true" (page 152). But if he did not know, how could he say it and regard himself as responsible?

Of all the many witnesses who were taken there to sign statements she is the only one that — and after thirty years at that - particularly when at the time there was no way of knowing what if anything there was to cover up or misrepresent. The source note he has on this (page 408) is her ghosted book of thirty years later. Ghost writers are notorious for writing what is not true but they think will sell books.

Even when he cites the Warren Commission's twenty-six volumes, Brown is not to be trusted. When I came to what I brought to light in 1965 that he has here I recognized immediately that he was not reporting the truth and how he avoided telling the truth. He had a second hand source, a report by two FBI agents, but he ignored the primary source, Mrs. Roberts' own testimony to the Warren Commission. Because of Brown's inclusion in his essentially meaningless appendix of those witnesses (page 350-80), that he knew the truth does not depend on his memory of what he read in Whitewash on pages 54-6. Oddly, in that meaningless rearranging of his list of witnesses, where he gives their character - and to be able to do that he had to read that testimony - he has no tabulation of "evidence" (page 350).

In rehashing only a bit of what is in Whitewash about Tippit's whereabouts and what the police radio logs report Brown does reach into Sylvia Meagher's Accessories After The Fact to attribute to her the belief that the transmissions involving Tippit were "a total fabrication" (page 154). Now this is Brown who is making up a case of a police conspiracy and refers to Oswald as a "patsy," the word Oswald himself used. Where he can make a case from the official evidence he has studied so closely, this is what the scholar and former FBI agent says, without missing the opportunity he saw for being a wise guy, which he surely does love being:

Tippit was in car number 10. Mrs. Earline Roberts, in CE 2781, indicated that she believed car number 207 pulled in front of the rooming house at 1:00 p.m., but since 207 was accounted for at the time, the Warren Commission concluded that she was mistaken about the police car being there and honking its horn. (That means if you forget a phone number, the telephone was never invented) (page 154).

Mrs. [Earlene] Roberts was a housekeeper of the rooming house. The citation of Brown's source is to the source he indicates in the text but it is the page number in the very last of those twenty-six volumes in which it appears. (And Meagher spelled the name correctly.)

Whatever their reasons, and remember, Brown alleges a police and FBI conspiracy, those two FBI agents put it incorrectly in their report that Brown stretched all the way back into the last of the Commissions published volumes to cite. From his scholarship, the reader has no way of knowing that, as Brown knew, Mrs. Roberts had given live, sworn, first person testimony to the Commission. I had gone into that at some length and in detail in the book Brown had and used, the very first on the assassination. Here is what I had written in mid-February 1965 when those volumes did not become available until the previous November. My point here is that if in three months I had examined those volumes and had completed the manuscript by then, the scholar/demon investigator did not find and use them after thirty more years? Instead of Roberts' testimony, the best possible source, he uses the brief FBI report. I do not here quote all of what I then wrote about her testimony but I do include what I wrote about the matter of that police car. For emphasis I add that it was all written out for him - all the work was done for him - so long before he started his making-up the cases that are his reason for his book. At least the reasons he gives:

Although not at this point [referring to what I had just quoted from the Report], the Report also acknowledges Mrs. Roberts' testimony that after Oswald got home and before he left, a police car stopped in front or the house. It signaled with the horn several times and drove off. (R253).

"Investigation has not produced any evidence that there was a police vehicle in the area," the Report continues. It also pretends to account for all the vehicles with numbers similar to 106 or 107. Mrs. Roberts had made clear she paid no attention to the number and guessed it might have been one or these (6H443). Her vision is so bad - she is blind in one eye - she waived reading her deposition, a courtesy granted by the Commission (6H444).

Dallas police cars bear their numbers in relatively small and thin lettering within the word "Dallas", arranged like an arc above the word "Police" lettered horizontally. In the combination of these numbers the Commission investigated, it avoided one - 10. The first two numbers given by Mrs. Roberts were one and zero, 10. That was the number of Tippit's car.

What kind or investigation the Commission conducted on the assignment of police cars is not indicated but one thing is certain it did not include examination of the police radio logs which clearly reveal one police car was assigned to that area - No. 10, Tippit's.

In Exhibit 705 (17H401), the dispatcher asked Tippit, "You are in the Oak Cliff area, are you not?" Tippit replied, "Lancaster and 8th." The dispatcher told Tippit, "You will be at large for any emergency that comes in." Tippit acknowledged. This conversation was between the 12:54 and 12:55 p.m. time checks. Lancaster and Eighth is about nine blocks from the rooming house. The Report, for all the space it devoted to Jack Ruby did not reveal his address. In his questionnaire by the Commission, Ruby was not asked for his address. The Appendix on "Speculations and Rumors" (R662) says Oswald's room and Ruby's apartment were l.3 miles apart. One unofficial account located Ruby's apartment at Ninth and Lancaster, a block from Tippit's broadcast location.

Soon the dispatcher called Tippit again and got no response. The time is not given in Exhibit 705. The dispatcher's request for his "location" addressed to Tippit, according to another version of the log, Exhibit 1974, was about 1 p.m. It was prior to a 1:04 time check. By coincidence, this unanswered call from the dispatcher is just about the time Mrs. Roberts said the police car signaled.

At the rate the Commission said the Whaley cab drove, Tippit was about 2 minutes away from Oswald's rooming house when he reported his location. Why he should have failed to answer the call from the dispatcher, which just happened to be about the time the only police car in the area, his, was reported outside the rooming house, is, of course, a mystery.

If the Report can say or the above evidence in its possession "investigation has produced no evidence" of a police car in the area, what can be said of the investigation? In what light does it put all the investigations?

While the text has avoided the exact time Oswald left the rooming house, in a chart purporting to show Oswald's unseen movements, Exhibit 1119-A (R158), the Report fixes this time at 1:03. The only evidence, Earlene Roberts', is to the contrary. If there is anything clear from Mrs. Roberts' evidence on time, it is that at 1:03 Oswald could not yet have started walking to the Tippit murder scene. But again, the Commission needed more time than it had. The Report agrees Mrs. Roberts was the last person to see Oswald before he allegedly appeared nine-tenths of a mile away, at Tenth and Patton Streets (R165).

Undaunted, the Report reconstructs Oswald's walk without the handicap of eyewitnesses. Exhibit 1119-A shows that he walked back down Patton, retracing the walk he allegedly took when leaving the cab, to Davis Street. For reasons known only to the Commission, he turned east on Davis to Crawford, which runs diagonally to the southeast. At Tenth he turned toward the northeast. A block ahead was the scene of the coming Tippit slaying.

The Commission's chart, for all the rare telepathic powers the artist had, enabling him to commune with the dead, omitted three of the four streets crossing Beckley upon which Oswald could have turned. It does not show that Patton, the street whose corner with Tenth is closest to the scene or the killing, parallels Beckley north of Davis. If Oswald was going to a rendezvous with Tippit, he was not using the most convenient route. He did go out of his way, which at least has the merit of keeping all the Commission's route reconstructions illogical and unlikely. If he had been going to where Ruby's apartment was reported to have been, at the scene of the killing he was about six blocks away. Again, if he were going to Ruby's, he was not going by the direct route.

The telepathic powers of the staff did not extend to learning the alleged Oswald's alleged destination. There appears to be no reason why he should have been walking as he was in the reconstruction. The one possible destination indicated by the Report or its chart is the Texas Theater. He would have reached this by walking south on Beckley to Jefferson and turning west a short distance. That is where he was subsequently arrested. No suggestion of where Oswald was going or why he would have gone the way the Report says he did is even hinted at. He was seen by no one. He went that way because the Report says he went that way.

There is but one thing that makes sense of this reconstruction. That is an effort to make it conform to the highly suspect testimony of Helen Markham. Mrs. Markham said she saw the man she later identified as Oswald cross Patton at Tenth, going from southwest to northeast. The most direct route in conformity with Mrs. Markham's account was the one the Report used, whether or not it makes sense. By using its new technique of willing the existence of proof, by just wishing it into existence, the Report substantiates her. If anybody needed substantiation, it certainly was Mrs. Markham.

The Report allows Oswald less than 13.minutes to walk from his rooming house to Tenth and Patton. This generosity towards itself was accomplished by simply ignoring Mrs. Roberts' unquestioned testimony. As it did with its other Oswald movements, the Commission timed this one with a stopwatch on April 8, 1964. It did not bother to take sworn testimony from the staff members who did the timing. Assistant Counsel David W Belin merely declared while examining Whaley that he and others had walked by what he described as the "long way around route" (6H434). How long did it take?

Seventeen minutes and forty-five seconds! Tippit was killed five minutes before Oswald could have gotten to the scene of his murder!

It is now clear why this is the only one or the time reconstructions not quoted but "interpreted" by the Report.

So we begin our examination of the Tippit murder, with which Oswald was charged by both the police and the Commission, with the certain knowledge that he could not have been the killer. The Commission itself proved this, though unintentionally" (Whitewash, pages 55-6).

For those interested in the case Brown avoided trying to make and prefers more wisecracks than I quote above, I later published more on this impossibility, from the official evidence alone, of Oswald having been the man who killed Tippit. I do not begin to go into all of that, there is that much of it. But because of Brown's use of the Jean Hill impossibility for his purpose, where he said that she had been given a blank sheet a paper to sign in the Sheriff's Office, I use one of the affidavits from that Sheriff's Office that the Commission did publish, (24H202). It is the affidavit of Thomas F. Bowley, made in that office the day of the assassination and long after Brown said that with the Oswald arrest there was no more investigation (Post Mortem, page 493). Bowley attested that it was he who had used the radio in Tippit's car to report that had been shot, that he had looked at his watch and it was then 1:10. That was long before Oswald could have gotten there.

So here we have the scholar and that demon investigator, Brown, giving the wrong number for that police car and avoids the possibility that it had been Tippit's car that had honked outside of 1026 North Beckley.

My point in these repetitions of Brown's credentials is to make a record of and to inform the reader repeatedly that credentials have nothing to do with any finished product in writing. What counts is the use made of those credentials as well as the misuse of them.

There are innumerable instance in which I could have done this. I do it at this point and with this information to underscore phoniness of the made-up cases Brown does make up and to highlight the deliberateness of his dishonesties in that dubious endeavor.

If as either a scholar or investigator Brown did not learn the importance and, usually, the preference for primary sources he learned nothing at all. But my does he indulge in making up things instead! Witness also on his next very page:

There is nothing in the published record regarding the specifics of his [Tippit's] autopsy . . .we must allow for the very grisly possibility that Tippit was killed not by Oswald, but rather by the officer whose shirt was in Tippit's car (the 'second' officer seen by Oswald's landlady) (page 155).

Shades of Rickey White!

First I note that Brown gives no source for this. The only source is Mrs. Roberts' testimony or what I cite above from Whitewash. Or, in writing what he did about car 207, Brown knew Mrs. Roberts did not give that number and did give one that with her seriously impaired vision could have been the number of Tippit's car, and that as the time Tippit did not respond to a call from headquarters.

With his usually sloppiness and carelessness Brown does not say what he means in saying "there is nothing in the published record" about the Tippit autopsy. If he means that the Commission published none of those details, that would be correct. But there is much "in the published record" about all the "details" of the Tippit autopsy, in several of my books. This also serves to underscore the intended incompetence, inadequacy and dishonesty in Brown's limiting himself to what the Commission published. That Tippit autopsy was always freely available in the Commission's unpublished records. I first examined it then wrote about in beginning thirty years before Brown began this ego-trip of his.

His sloppiness if not also his love of a smart-alek writing is again typified in this chapter, possibly his ignorance, too, where he writes that "Ruth Paine testified that Robert Oswald, plus Marina's bodyguards Thorne and Martin, came by and collected some of Oswald's things" (page 158). Paine testified to no such thing and could not have. Thorne was then Marina's lawyer and Martin was then the manager of the motel to which the Secret Service had taken her and was also her business manager.

His uninformed opinion or whatever Brown wants to argue as he phonies up his made-up case against the Dallas police being more important to him than fact or truth, Brown ends this chapter saying of the so-called Oswald press conference which was not that at all, arranged by the police, "was just long enough to give off the 'suspect' look and be photographed for subsequent manipulations Page 162." Actually, with Oswald himself having alleged "police brutality" when he was arrested at the Texas Theater, the police wanted the media to see that the marks on him were very few.

As I said at the beginning of this Brown chapter he titles "Apathy," the only apathy is Brown's toward the official evidence. He proves it, he is ignorant of it, he misrepresents it and as we have seen, when it serves his purpose or indulges his reluctance to deal with the actualities, he even lies about it.

The apathy is his, not that of the Dallas police/

Apathy is hardly the word for it