Chapter 8

Stones From Glass Houses.

Brown knows so little about "The Case Against Oswald" the title of his Chapter Six of Book One, this he spends only a few lines more than three pages on it (pages 163-166). Quite obviously, he could not begin to report the case that was alleged against Oswald in that brief writing. Most of what little he goes into is trivial and then is other than the established fact. Some of it is pretty sick, like this:

Three cartridges were found near the sniper's window, and although one had a dent that would have prevented it from containing a bullet, that was no problem: That was a blank, fired to focus attention on the gun made obvious in the sixth floor window while other, less conspicuous guns did their dirty work.

"Three cartridges" were not found there. A cartridge is a live round. What was found was three empty cartridge shells. Two had the marking of having been placed in the breech of that rifle before and the third held the markings of a different rifle.

I brought the presence of that dent to light in Whitewash and in it noted that a bullet so dented could not be placed in the rifle to be shot from it. Then when I was able to get a duplicate of that Oswald rifle and went to the local police range with it, a local expert, on learning what I was trying to duplicate and could not, showed me how to do it by doing it for me. All it takes is excessive, greatly excessive force, in ejecting the empty casing with the bolt action. That excessive force throws the ejected casing not away but against the follower, as that part of the rifle is called, and the impact on the ejected casings dent them.

That shell was not a blank. It was manufactured for that rifle. With that dent in it, it could not have been placed in the breach to be fired. But then except in the childish imaginations of the Browns of assassination mythology, there was no need for any blank or any need to focus attention away from other weapons. Contrary to what Brown says, that rifle was never reported being seen in that sixth floor window and there was no credible report of any rifle being seen fired from that window.

After all of this Brown refers to it as a "hypothesis" and says of that it "goes a long way to explaining why so many witnesses believed their first impression was hearing firecrackers" (page 163).

That is not any hypothesis and it is not the informed opinion of a former FBI agent but it is childish poppycock.

Brown says correctly but rather both incompletely and inaccurately that "the bag that supposedly contained the disassembled rifle did not have any gun oil on it; for evidentiary purposes, it was not photographed on the sixth floor of the TSBD . . ." (page 163).

Brown does not give the history of that bag as the Commission invented it out of nothing. In it Oswald allegedly carried the allegedly disassembled rifle from the Paine garage in Irving to the home of Wesley Buell Frazier's sister, Linnie Mae Randall. She saw him carrying a bag by its crumpled top. It could not have been that bag. It looked like a grocery bag. As I go into all of that in considerable detail in Whitewash, I do not repeat it here. Frazier then saw this bag and he also insisted that it could not have been the alleged bag that allegedly held that disassembled rifle on the back seat of his car. Both insisted that the bag, as Oswald carried it, could not possibly have held the length of the disassembled rifle. Frazier testified that he saw Oswald walking to the Depository building with that package cupped in a hand and going into Oswald's armpit. Now quite aside from the impossibility of that bag having held that disassembled rifle, there is not an Oswald fingerprint on it anywhere where he was seen to have held it. And, that alleged bag was photographed where it was allegedly found on the sixth floor. That photo is the published evidence. But it has no crumbled area from how was as Oswald was seen carrying it and it showed no marks from bouncing around in Frazier's old jalopy. It shows no such markings of any kind. Moreover, the creases where it had been folded are entirely undisturbed. Those creases are sharp and clear as they would not have been from the official story.

After more of his endless wisecracking about Oswald as a marksman, Brown writes:

What is important here is to note a few inconsistencies that bring the Dallas authorities closer to being the cause of the crime than its solution (page 144).

In the baby stuff Brown makes up in an effort in support of this, none is of any significance. One is that "no Texas officer of jurisdiction accompanied the evidence [apparently to the FBI's lab but Brown does not say that] and with Oswald's passing, Texas never got a great deal of its evidence back" (page 164).

It was not necessary for any Texas officer to carry any of that evidence to the lab. Any FBI agent could, to the satisfaction of any court, have done that and could have testified to doing it.

Once Oswald was dead and Texas had no intention of charging anyone else, what was wrong with Texas letting Washington, which did have an active investigation, retain possession of whatever evidence it wanted?

Continuing his infantilism about the evidence Brown says:

Evidence was faked. The clearest indication we have is that the photo of the Walker residence with a car in front with no license plate" (page 165).

That picture, which the Warren Commission published, is without question of the backyard not the "front," of the Walker property. It is not the license plate that is missing. The version of that picture the Commission used, Commission Exhibit 5 (16H5), and the Commission is not the Dallas police, had the area of the license plate torn out of that print. Other prints have the license plate in them.

My, what a case "against" Oswald Brown builds or what little he says to disprove the case against him!

Next he says, "Photographic evidence just disappeared." Hugh Betzner, noted earlier, had his film taken and got a thank-you (page 165).

If the sheriffs, not Dallas police, thanked Betzner, that was nice of them. But they also returned his pictures and years after their return he gave me copies to a friend of mine who gave one I still have.

Betzner did get his pictures back. Naturally, Brown has no source note on this. It is a fabrication.

But none of this has a thing to do with the Dallas police. It was the sheriff who had those pictures. He made prints of them. The chief criminal deputy, Alan Sweatt, told me he had a set of duplicates of them in his desk.

The real problem with pictures that Brown is too uninformed to begin to understand is that the FBI shunned them because they gave it added problems to explain away what the pictures show.

Aside from his usual ignorance about those "inconsistencies" quoted above, Brown did use them to allege that "the Dallas authorities [were] closer to being the cause of that crime than its solution."

Do not look for even a childish effort to support this serious accusation anywhere in this brief chapter. It's absence cannot be attributed to the brevity of the chapter. It is not stated because there is not a word that Brown can write to support his above-quoted accusation.

He makes it and that is enough for him. And apparently, for his publisher.

There is virtually nothing worth paying any attention to in Brown's Chapter Seven, Justice Denied (pages 167-79).

I've not earlier commented on his facility of passing of the work of others as his own but on the first page of this sorry mess he uses what is uniquely from the book of Dr. Charles Crenshaw, ghosted for him by others. Conspiracy of Silence, "calls would subsequently be put through from the White House to Parkland Hospital to request surgeons to get a death bed confession from Oswald." There is no source note on this but the source is Crenshaw and Crenshaw alone (page 167).

Trying to make a case against Jack Ruby and depending on the ever-undependable Crossfire by Jim Marrs, speaking of Ruby, Brown says "that same year [1941] a "Jack Rubenstein" provided inside information on the Chicago crime network to an eager freshman Congressman Richard Nixon, who did his best to keep his informant's name confidential. From there Ruby turned his former pursuits . . .." (page 171).

That was, as the readily available records leave without doubt, an entirely different "Jack Rubenstein" who was not from Chicago, where Jack Ruby then lived.

Brown moderates this a trifle on the next page where he says that there may have been a connection years later when Ruby did not pass his probation as an FBI informer in Dallas. Brown there argues that "This combined with Ruby's possible involvement with Congressman Nixon, suggests that Ruby was not the total loner . . ." (page 172).

It was not possible that this Jack Ruby had any connection with Nixon and his Un- American Activities Committee.

There seems to be nothing too crazy, too impossible for Brown to take, lift, from his stable of the most undependable sources. Like:

Author Jim Marrs has suggested that Ruby's subsequent cancer might have been police induced, as Ruby could have been taken to Parkland for an annual physical and left in an X-ray room with the machinery on. (Brown's emphasis.)

So the police in Dallas operate the hospital X-ray room and machines!

Brown cites no medical authority for the possibility of any of this.

But when he has fakes, is flakey and frauds for his major sources, why expect any legitimate ones from Brown?

His ignorance of fact, his contempt for it, is visible here also.

The Dallas judge on the Ruby case, who enjoyed none of the respected attributes of good judges, did agree to competing psychiatric examinations of Jack Ruby. The judge preferred the one presenter by the prosecution. He ignored the defense report. It was sent to J. Lee Rankin for the Commission under the date May 29, 1964, along with the prosecution's, by Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade. The defense expert was Louis Jolyon West, head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center. His report concludes that Ruby urgently needed "immediate psychiatric hospitalization, study and treatment. Close observation. Suicidal precautions." He held that Ruby was "psychotic" and reported that Ruby had tried to kill himself by running and "striking his head against the wall." He had been caught trying to steal enough cloth from his clothing to fashion a noose with which to hang himself. Under "Diagnostic Impression" he has a long list of serious problems. They assure that nobody who knew him would trust Ruby with anything, including knowing of their interests, if any, in killing Oswald. He also found Ruby to be "insane."

The Commission did not publish this but when Brown has Jim Marrs as an authority what need has he for a competent, professional psychiatric report. Or for what Jack's brother Earl said, that Ruby suffered from acute neurosis from the age of ten.

It happens that I spent much of the day Ruby was buried with his Chicago lawyer, the eminent and respected Elmer Gertz and his wife. We were to film a TV show to be aired two days later. The Gertzes went from the cemetery to the studios of WBBM-TV. Gertz had no doubt at all about the cause of Ruby's death being natural and he did not believe the cancer had been induced. We had plenty of time to talk because technical problems delayed the filming of the show.

But still again, can a Gertz be compared with a Marrs when a Brown has a need for the cause he is phonying up?

Says Who? is the title of Brown's Chapter Eight (pages 180-95), He found it appropriate to begin quoting Herman Goering, "Shoot first and inquire afterward, and if you make mistakes I will protect you" (page180). Brown sets the tone with his first sentence. In it he says that there was "valid testimony that there were police in abundance in the railroad yards and elsewhere on November 22, and clearly not in postures that would put them in protective scenarios." For all that alleged abundance of "testimony" he has not a single source note because there is no such testimony. The actual testimony and supporting evidence is that there were only two policemen on the triple overpass and not another one anywhere near them. Even in what Brown writes there is no confirmation of this. There is no point in consulting his source notes because he has not a single one for this chapter and the next one;.

There is nothing of any substance on this chapter so there is no point in wasting any time on it.

There is slight point in quoting what he quotes one of his favorite sources Jean Hill as saying she saw, that just before the first shot the President and Jackie were looking at a dog that was in the middle of the seat" (page 184). There was no such dog and the contents of the car are well known. Moreover, the Zapruder film establishes without any question at all, that at that time neither Kennedy was looking toward the center of that seat. I say this in the event those who believe in magic believe Hill and that the dog disappeared by some magic. Each was looking forward toward the side, the President to the right, his wife to her left.

Does Brown need a better reason to be high on Hill, and what she said in which he has such confidence and of which he used so much?

He is no less without question about the complete dependability of Beverly Oliver. She claims she is what was called the Babushka lady who is seen in pictures taking pictures of the motorcade but whose pictures have never surfaced. She said they were taken from her by the FBI. How totally dependable Oliver is is reflected by what unquestioning Brown publishes with the bliss of his ignorance. She was shown a collection of pictures and in them "she identified FBI agent Regis Kennedy, a case officer on the Marcello 'case' for want of a better term, as the agent who seized the film" (page 191).

In Dallas, that is. When he was in New Orleans, not Dallas.

There is no end to Brown's making a point of his permeating subject matter ignorance in his writing what he knows nothing about, citing no sources for it, and when he is making it up, rehashes what he has heard others say or has read in their assassination trash. At the end of this chapter, where he is talking about deletion by the Commission of two paragraphs of Jackie Kennedy's testimony about the President's wounds, Brown says "the text of her statement has been made public through Freedom of Information Act litigation" (page 195).

All of her "statement," which was her testimony, was published by the Commission save for those two paragraphs. Paul Hoch and I did not have to have to take any Freedom of Information Act case to court to get those few words disclosed. The Archives probably decided that if they forced a lawsuit that would only attract attention to it, so they just gave us copies.

"Says who" may be appropriate for this chapter but only as Brown did not intend. The appropriateness of his quoting Goering I do not understand, either.

However, Brown did find it appropriate: he used it.

The same is true of his title for Chapter Nine: Vulnerabilities (pages 196-200), not quite three full pages of text.

Impressed as he is by what he regards as his own brilliance and by the knowledge he believes he has that enables him to write book after book on the subject he is unable to perceive that he is not nearly as brilliant as he believes he is and that what he regards as his subject-matter knowledge is quite limited in reality and is dominated by the liking he has for the assassination mythologies, fakes and frauds that have nothing to do with reality or with fact of the assassination. He appears to be staking his claim in that area with what is original in it, accusing the Dallas police of being the actual assassins.

Thus Brown cannot see that this chapter title, "Vulnerabilities," applies so well to him and to this book of his.

He is confident that he knows when he does not, as in knowing that artificial light is not needed for the indoor use of a video camera.

Thus he can see what others he regards as his intellectual inferiors cannot see. He sees that "John Kennedy had four vulnerabilities" two of which were the "deterioration of his marriage" and that "political scandals were about to destroy his Vice President" (pages 196-7).

That is the Vice-President who after he became President was re-elected overwhelmingly.

"J. Edgar Hoover," Browns writes, a surprise visitor to the Greater Dallas area the evening before Kennedy's murder, had one vulnerability in addition to his sexual orientation: If Kennedy had returned to Washington aboard Air Force One alive Hoover would be receiving a gold watch and a handshake upon his retirement within 1.6 years" (page 197).

Whatever Hoover's "sexual orientation" may or may not have been, as we saw earlier it was not and never has been any problem in holding his office and it never manifested itself in what he had his FBI investigate. The Tony Summer belief that the mob had on Hoover what could ruin him is amply disproved by the fact that first, there was no reduction in investigations and prosecutions of the Mafia and in fact they were intensified; and second by the fact that the Mafia made no effort to use in its defense what Summers thinks and said it had while it was being more intensely investigated, prosecuted, and its dons going to jail.

With his usual practice of giving no sources for his brilliance, they being entirely internal, Brown provides no explanation for saying that had Kennedy not been killed in Dallas he would have fired Hoover in "1.6 years." That would have been six months after Kennedy's re-election. Why if Kennedy had decided to fire Hoover he need have waited past his re-election, which as a year ahead, or past his being sworn in the second time, which was much less than six months after his re-election, Brown does nor explain (page 197).

Nor does he explain why he says that Hoover's visit was "a surprise" when he was there by invitation and prearrangement. Hoover was not a captive of his Washington office and it was well-known that he traveled often without publicity.

Brown has vulnerabilities for Tippit that are in no way unusual and for Oswald, too. Of the many he make up for Oswald, including his alleged "posturing to be considered a dye-in-the- wool "Red" in the Marines," Brown says that "led to a nickel-dime black op assignment in the Soviet Union." But, "his weak black op involvement in the events in Dealey Plaza was to have changed all that . . ." (page 197).

"Black Op," nice touch that. Not that he explains what it means or what he intends it to mean.

He also says at this point that Oswald's "Marines career had been a failure." He does not explain what he means by a failure but the fact is that of all the men in his outfit, as we soon come to, Oswald was one of five entrusted with greater responsibilities - five men in that entire outfit.

Brown does not ignore the vulnerabilities" of "the myriad of faceless persons and companies who depended upon bellicosity and saber-rattling" (page 198) nor does he forget "The Dallas police, who like most southern big-city departments a generation ago had its own vulnerabilities" (page 198). The latter seems to be what Brown regards as usual,"minor shakedowns and unlawful perks." There would, he says, have had a field day" if investigated by a "blue-ribbon commission" (page 198).

Lyndon Johnson's "vulnerability," as Brown explains it was that "to save his political life" he could do that only by "providing" a war to those operators and entrepreneurs who stalked the corridors of power" and by "appointing a federally controlled investigating body to ratify the lone- nut theory," this and more "at a price of being a hostage to the monied interests in Texas" (page 198).

Ruby's, as Brown explains it, was a different kind of "vulnerability." He would, had he not died of cancer, "have been a free man and somewhat of a celebrity before the end of 1967." When he died in 1967, Ruby was awaiting a new trial his lawyers had won for him not on the evidence but on procedural matters. The fact remained that Ruby was photographed shooting Oswald with dozens of witnesses, and how he could have been acquitted of that when it is probable that no single juror had not seen it on TV does not intrude upon Brown's brilliance. But then the Ruby "vulnerability" that alive "he posed a serious vulnerability to those with other, different vulnerabilities whom he had assisted in the events of 1963." So, he "could not be allowed to be loose to speak his mind. As events transpired, he wasn't and he didn't" (page 199).

As Brown ticks off these "vulnerabilities" and gets to the Dallas police he forgets his book is based upon that alleged "Blue Death," the alleged fact that the police provided the assassins, for he says of it only that "the suggested involvement" does appear to be a bit less than "Blue Death" being the assassins, without which Brown has no book.

And thus his Book One ends wiping his book out.

His Book Two is titled Red Patsy (pages 202-59). Its first chapter is Life Be Not Proud (page 203-8). He begins it with a quotation from Melanson's Spy Saga, that Oswald was a "disgruntled loner and leftist, a Russian spy, a pro-Castroite pawn of the Castro government, a low-level Mafia pawn, and a U.S. intelligence agent" (page 203).

All of them, the Russian, the Cuban and our government and the Mafia certainly were appreciative because their "spy", "pawn" and "agent" never got a penny from any of them.

Lee and his family lived a hand-to-mouth existence in which, when they lived on unemployment, they lived as well as when he worked and got paid for his work. When he died he had fifteen dollars to his name, and no estate worth mentioning. How stingy the Russian, Cuban and United States governments were! The Mafia, too! How they treated Oswald was certainly not helpful in further recruiting.

What he did or could have done for our government neither Melanson nor Brown bother to report. It must have been a remarkable secret life he led in Minsk because there the KGB bugged his apartment, recording even what he and his wife said and did in bed. When he went shopping, the KGB tailed him and filed detailed reports on that. It intercepted and opened his mail. Although it began with the suspicions he could be an American "agent-in-place" or a "sleeper agent," despite its diligence it never got a basis for even a suspicion of it from all its close cover of almost his every moment (Post Mortem, pages 627-9).

With Melanson and Brown as with others we see the value of a Ph.D. degree when they write and speak about the assassination of President Kennedy. Earlier we saw the great value of that degree as reflected by Stephen Ambrose. There are other such illustrations.

"Life" in this chapter title refers to the magazine. Its handling of the story and of the Zapruder film. The exclusive right to which it bought have been criticized by others and with more dependability and depth than Brown.

Somehow in this Brown found it appropriate that:

Despite valiant efforts by Dr. Malcolm Perry, who had attended the President on Friday, and who believed he had come very close to saving Oswald, the patient was pronounced dead at 1:07 p.m. (Page 204). (Brown has no source for this.)

If he had had a source, it could not have been Perry's Warren Commission testimony, in which he said that Oswald was irreversibly dead when the bullet severed the abdominal artery.

As Brown flails away at Life with a mixture of rehashes and what he imagines he refers to its publication of still pictures from the Zapruder film that "were clear," pasty stills that appear in Volume XVIII of the Warren Commission exhibits" and this also is true. Next he asks, nothing omitted in quotation, "Did the Commission work from a good print of the film, or the kind of poor, bootleg copy that was circulating in the 1970? That issue is as yet unresolved" (page 207).

Among the many "unresolved" issues that is not one. As Brown should have known from the testimony in those same twenty-six volumes.

Life's Herbert Orth brought the original Zapruder film and showed it to the Commission in its offices. At its request Life made 35-mm slide of the frames beginning before and ending after the frames that are said to show the actual assassination. Those slide have always been available at the National Archives and they are astoundingly clear considering that the original is not much more than a quarter of an inch in width, its larger dimension. I have projected them to a width of five feet and found them still quite clear. Brown, however, seems to have a phobia for what was not published. He did go to Texas to interview Marina Oswald, for all the world as though she knew a thing about the assassination, but the much shorter trip from near New York City to Washington so he could examine those slides or look at the Commission's unpublished records he did not make.

Lyndal L. Shaneyfelt, the FBI laboratory agent who handled the photographic work, testified that he had made black-and-white prints from these slides so the Commission could print them which it did. What Brown, armed as he is with his Ph.D. and the knowledge of photography already indicated above, appears not to know is that aside from the loss of detail in conversion from color to black-and-white there were other and inevitable loses in detail when the Government Printing Office printed those black-and-white copies of those slides.

Brown wonders if the Commission did its work with "the kind of poor, bootleg copy that was circulating in the 1970's." He says "that issue is as yet to be resolved."

Perhaps to the Browns, the Melanson's and the other Ph.D.s and the fakers and frauds to whom they are devoted, but not in fact. In fact what the Commission worked with, aside from those slides, which are really remarkably clear, is a copy made from one of the original copies made from the Zapruder film in Dallas the day of the assassination, and with enlargements of the slides.

As for those bootleg copies, they began to appear in the 1960's, not in the 1970's.

And some of those "bootleg copies" of which in the 1960's I had a print were made from a print that was made from the original and is remarkably clear.

The Commission's 8-mm copy of the film is also rather clear. It was able to examine it in detail and for long periods of time at the place Brown refuses to visit, The National Archives. I was permitted to operate the projector myself and even to use my own Bolex projector, one of the best and one that could stop action without damage to the film.

When pictures are published they are distributed by what is know as a "screen" of tiny dots on the photoengraved plate. There are fine screens and there are coarser screens. The screen used varies with the paper on which the picture is to be printed. With a finer, coated paper such as Life used, the finer screen is possible and that permits greater detail and clarity. With the much cheaper paper used in government printing of hearings the coarser screen may be used.

This and the absence of color account for the lesser clarity of the copies published in the hearings. That lesser clarity Brown does exaggerate enormously.

Now when it comes to bootleg copies, the evidence in what was printed in Volume 18 is that the original source was the original Zapruder film, not any "bootleg" copy of it. It does not require a Ph.D. or the training and experience of an FBI agent for that to be known. Merely the most rudimentary knowledge of the photographic process which Brown does not have and should have to write about it, especially when making accusations. Much as he believes he knows all there is to know about anything and everything. He apparently did not learn from his experience videotaping me for the cable show for which he came, when he then insisted that artificial light is not required indoors for clarity with most films and cameras.

When motion picture is duplicated, that is done mechanically, and the means by which the film that is being copied is moved are the means by which it advances in the camera. On the left as one looks at the film a little more than twenty percent of it consists of sprocket holes cut into the film. When gears engage these sprocket holes the film is moved.

But when seen on projections, that more than twenty percent where the sprocket holes are is not seen. The same is true when the film moved through the copying process, that twenty percent plus is not copied.

If Brown made any serious examination of all those Zapruder frames published in Volume 18 he cannot not have seen that this same twenty-percent plus is included in each and every one of those frames published as Commission Exhibit 885 (Volume XVIII pages 1-85). This means that Life went to the extra trouble and expense of copying each one of those frames separately. And this is important because there is information recorded by the camera that is not seen on projection.

Brown does include my Whitewash II in his bibliography (page 424). In it I explain the foregoing and reproduced several of these frames the marginal material in which, that sprocket - hole area, disproves the basis of the Commission's conclusions.

In fact, in Whitewash, and again, as with my later uses, what I reproduced was the printed version of the film, the purpose for which I used it is more than adequately served. It, in fact, caused a scandal.

My printing of the frames from the less clear government printed copies inevitably resulted in a further lack of clarity. That is because those photoengraving dots must be eliminated by the offset-printing camera used and then they must be restored for the printing. Inevitably this does result in a further reduction in clarity. But after all the many reductions in clarity, beginning with the making of the slides from the original and then converting them to black-and-white, what I published was more than adequate.

Beside the fact that all of this is well-known and not in any sense either secret or sinister, Browns ignorance - really his refusal to believe that there is anything about which he is ignorant - led him to allege that the Commission worked from a "poor, bootleg copy" — none of which were available until after the Commission's life ended!

And if this is not enough for his endless self-condemnations, the ego in him, his sincere belief in his omniscience, led him to prate that the issue of the Commission's use of a "poor, bootleg copy" is "as yet unresolved."

Still carried away with his belief in his own omniscience and not troubling to learn the facts, he asks at the end of this short chapter, which, for Brown's reputation, it is not nearly short enough, "Why did Life pay so much money for something that gave them such little return?" (page 208).

For those of us who do not boast of having Ph.D.s there is a need to provide sources for what we write, as there is for most who write their Ph.D. theses. Thus for all but the omniscient to write as Brown does, we need to know what Life paid for the rights to the film and what returns it had on its sale of those rights.

Earlier Brown told us that Life paid Zapruder $25,000 for those rights. He then translated that, he said, into the amount of money that would have been at the time he wrote his book. According to Brown what was worth $25,000 in 1963 was worth $150,000 at the time of his alleged computations we are to assume were based on fact. In his calculations we suffered an inflation of something like six hundred percent.

But he is wrong about Life paying Zapruder only $25,000? What that comes from he does not say. It can be from a misunderstanding of Zapruder's testimony but then if Brown did no more than skim it he should know he was wrong. What Zapruder testified to was the initial payment to him. That was a $25,000 dollars and as he testified he gave that to "the Policeman's Benevolent, with the suggestion for Mrs. Tippit" (7 H 576).

But just before that he had testified that what he got from Life "involves a lot of things and it is not one price - it is a question of how are they going to use it . . ." (7 H 575).

In short, after the initial payment Zapruder continued to be paid by Life based on what uses of the film Life sold. That is not an unusual arrangement. Surely Brown knows about book royalties.

In any event, Zapruder got much more than the initial $25,000. That sum, for Life, represented the value it saw in the first and exclusive use of that film.

But beginning then and over the years it sold the right to use individual frames and the right to use the entire film. Brown has no idea how much Life got from the sale of those rights, at a rather high price. The probability is that the Zapruder deal was quite profitable to it as it was to Zapruder and later to his heirs. Life continued to hold and sell the rights until it was embarrassed by facing the prospect of having to sue over bootleg uses of the film when those violations of copyright extended to the television networks. It then reverted the rights to Zapruder's heirs and they have since been cleaning up.

All of which raises the question, should it be Life who should be not proud?

There is not much in Chapter two, Of Marines And Men and there is not much in it that should make Brown feel proud (pages 209-15). Aside from shallow rehashing of representations of Oswald's political views more often than not second-hand at best he gets back to one of his favorites of the most undependable of sources, Melanson's Spy Saga. He quotes from it, "Whatever Oswald's security clearance, his presence in the bubble enured that he would have information 'useful' to the Soviets" (page 211).

It does not appear to be strange to all these self-anointed experts that spying that the KGB did not believe that and ordered that he be required to leave the USSR within a few days when his visa expired. In fact, if they were not addicted to their concepts of their personal brilliance which enables them to avoid fact and reality, if they were not addicted to the fakery and fraud about the assassination of which, Ph.D.s or not they made themselves part, they would have known that the CIA shared this belief with the KGB. The CIA even approved publication of it by a retired official of its National Photographic Interpretation Center who was one of the original cadre of earliest specialists in that area. Dino A. Brugioni wrote and the CIA approved publication of Eyeball to Eyeball, with the subtitle The Inside Story Of The Cuban Missile Crisis (Random House, 1990, 1991). In it (pages 42-61) Brugioni details the virtually complete lack of secrecy about what our U-2s could do and were doing that was known and known very well to the Soviets. He also details the steps the Soviets were taking, before Oswald defected, that in the end led to the suspension of those CIA U-2 flights over it.

It is a nincompoop spook "specialist" who writes knowingly about what he knows nothing about.

It should be obvious that once the KGB learned, as it did from the tour guide who worked with him, what Oswald's marine knowledge and experiences were it decided not to waste any time on him. And that is not because the KGB was any less anxious than our CIA to learn all the real secrets it could learn.

Yet Melanson wrote and Brown liked and used that Oswald's "presence in the bubble" in which he was not present "ensured he would possess information 'useful' to the Soviets."

Useful as such formulations are to those who have little other than artificial excitement and factual error to add to what has already been published about the assassination, they are worse than useless because they deceive and mislead trusting readers.

If either of these subject-matter ignoramuses had paid any attention to the Commission testimony, they's have learned that the aerials were at some distance from where the radar operators worked so that targeting on the aerials would not destroy the radar installation and those working in it; and they also have learned that the last radar installation in which Oswald worked overseas was a "van," not a "bubble."

Brown also quotes Melanson as saying, "Whatever Oswald's security clearance" may have been. Neither had any reason to have any question about that because in 1967 I published the fact that Oswald held a "CRYPTO" clearance. That was in Oswald In New Orleans. Both of those geniuses have the book and neither asked me a question about it. They preferred their own concoctions and the nutty stuff they could use from the nutty books. My original source was a friend of Oswald's in the Marines who was not interviewed about Oswald by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the FBI or the Warren Commission. He was disturbed by that because they had been good friends. Later, I got official confirmation from the Navy of Oswald's CRYPTO clearance.

Nonetheless, almost three decades later these experts, Melanson and Brown, wonder about "Whatever Oswald's security clearance."

"Positing" that "Oswald has been recruited from the military for a Soviet penetration (with the military possibly using the otherwise unexplained death of marine Martin Schrand as a 'hook' into Oswald" Brown follows this with what he may intend to support it, saying that as he sees it there are "a couple of curious anomalies" in these records (page 212).

Not one of these alleged anomalies has a thing to do with Schrand, his death, or any alleged recruitment of Oswald by anybody.

Here we see the distinct advantage to those writing books supposedly about the assassination in complete divorcement from the official records.

Schrand was a suicide. He, like Oswald, had that high security clearance. He killed himself while he was on guard outside their radar van at Cubi Point, in the Philippines. As is required in the services, there was an investigation. All I had to do to get the results was to send the Navy less than nine dollars and I got every page of that inquest. There was no question about it, Schrand's death was a suicide.

So much for his death being "unexplained" and for it being so convenient a "hook" into Oswald.

But with Oswald getting what the Marines regarded as "red" literature openly in the mail and with his nonetheless having that exceptionally high security clearance, how really "red" could Brown's "Red Patsy" have been?

Not suffering a small mind to be hobgoblined by consistency, Brown opens his Chapter Three, To Russia, With Love (pages 216-23), after indulging in childish conjectures about what the Embassy's and Oswald's reactions would have been had he gone to Russia other than as some undefined agent:

. . . his defection, along with his secrets would help him rise above the radio manufacturer in Minsk that he was to become. The question then arises, "What secrets?" The Russians already knew about the U-2 and its successful history of overflights; they also were painfully aware that they could not shoot it down. Oswald's knowledge, while vital, had little or no practical application to them. But make no mistake about it: Oswald was questioned, and intensely, Yuri Nosenko's disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding (page 216).

It should be no surprise to the reader now that aside from not indicating any source for any of this in his text, Brown does not burden his end notes with any either. Uninhibited, the Brown free spirit soars as almost any spirit can when it is not controlled by fact. Brown does ask "What secrets?" in saying that Oswald defected, which he was quite careful not to do, "along with his secrets."

(I hope it will not be regarded as niggling when I wrote that rather than becoming a "radio manufacturer" in Minsk he was a welder in such a factory.)

Brown tells us, unfettered by Brugioni and the CIA's approval of what he published, that the Soviets were "painfully aware that they could not shoot it [a U-2] down" (page 216). This unsourced proclamation may be useful in suggesting that Oswald enabled the Soviets to shoot Francis Gary Powers' U-2 down but that was not true. Brugioni goes into considerable detail on the detection capabilities the USSR had, into the capabilities of their advanced missiles, one of which did shot Powers down, even into the details that the CIA had of the locations of these missile batteries so that the Soviets decided to do what they could. They shot a U-2 down and indicated they would shoot down any that followed it.

With Oswald having no secrets of any use to the Soviets, Brown, nonetheless, again unfettered by any sources, warned his readers:

But make no mistake about it: Oswald was questioned, and questioned intensively, Yuri Nosenko's disclaimer to the contrary notwithstanding.

A rare literary talent like Brown has no need to tell his reader by whom he is so confident Oswald was "questioned, and intensely." Thus he has no restraint in saying this, unsourced as it is.

If he had no secrets, and it is without question that he KGB not only believed that but refused to take any time even to look at him, leave alone question him, who was there to question him so"intensively."

And for what reason?

Blessed with ignorance to potentiate his lack of any source, Brown does give, within quotation marks, what Oswald could have told the Soviets so they could shoot U-2s down. Keep them under 60,000 feet. "Pure gold" to the Soviets, Brown says (page 211).

It was not only incorrect information, it was what Brugioni states the Soviets did not need to shoot U-2s down. Their missiles were effective at a higher range than Brown limits them to in his imagined advice from Oswald, within quotation marks yet.

As he writes, this can be taken, other than by those who read him with care, that in writing about Nosenko's alleged "disclaimers" he had some reason for saying what that. He did. It fit with what he wanted to say. He had no other reasons.

Nosenko was a rather low-level KGB official in Moscow when the name "Oswald" struck a chord as soon as the Soviets knew he was the accused assassin. They decided they had to recover all the information they had on him. There was little in Moscow so in a rush they got to Moscow all it had from the KGB in Minsk to which the Soviet Red Cross, not the KGB, had sent Oswald. Nosenko was the official who first read that Minsk material at the KGB's Moscow headquarters. What he told the FBI, which is what I published in 1975, is no more than what he read in those records before he had to buck them upward. Thus what he told the FBI and later the CIA was not in any sense a "disclaimer," a word Brown uses to convey the information he probably believes and wants to convey — that Nosenko lied.

As I was later to learn, and as anyone with any knowledge of intelligence matters and what can and cannot be risked by a defector would have known, all that Nosenko said about Oswald was later confirmed.

In the course of Brown's vaporizing about what could have been of use to the Soviets, again uninhibited by any source, Brown says the U-2 could fly at ninety thousand feet" (page 217). But he adds that if Oswald had told the Soviets that, "It would not have helped him." Then:

An examination of the events subsequent to his arrival may tell us a great deal about which side of the fence "Comrade Oswald" was sitting on (page 217).

What knowledge Brown had or could have had about those "events" does not burden his writing. Nor does any reason for writing that Oswald was sitting on the fence.

The only "events" Brown mentions are interviews by two United States reporters. What they wrote and later said that Oswald said had nothing to do with any "fence" or any fence sitting. Oswald expressed concern for the plight of American blacks. Brown says this is difficult to "reconcile" with Oswald's "later relationships with Guy Banister," that "relationship" being another myth.

Brown says that Oswald told the embassy he "would offer secrets" to the Soviets. My recollection of those reports and that testimony is that he did not use the word "secrets."

Remembering that Oswald later said he had been interviewed by the MVD, which the FBI records do confirm, Brown comments:

Oswald may have known the Russian language and its complicated Cyrillic alphabet but there is a world of difference between 'MVD' and the KGB (page 218).

If there is any meaning in this it is not apparent. It was customary for those going to the USSR to be interviewed by the MVD. There is no reason for any not addicted to what they and others imagine and prefer to fact to not believe that the KGB had no interest in Oswald and did not take the time to speak to him other than through the Intourist guide from whom it got all it wanted to know. But, because of this addiction, Brown knows better than fact. He begins this by saying Nosenko "suddenly decided to defect to America after the President's assassination" (page 218). It was hardly "suddenly" when it was in February and the assassination was in November. It was hardly for another reason Brown does not mention. Nosenko had told the CIA in Switzerland when he was there in 1962 of his intent to defect.

Because of what he is soon to say Brown found it necessary to improve, from his point of view, what the CIA Director, John McCone said in a brief affidavit (CE 870, 17 H 866). Brown quotes McCone as attesting the CIA had never heard of Oswald. McCone said no such thing. He attested that Oswald was "not an agent, employee or informant for it;" that "the agency never contacted him, or received or solicited any reports or information from him, or communicated with him directly or indirectly, in any other manner; . . . never furnished him funds or money, or compensated him, directly or indirectly, in any fashion; and Lee Harvey Oswald was never associated or connected directly or indirectly, in any way whatsoever with the Agency."

It is this that Brown cites as saying that McCone swore "that the CIA had never heard of Oswald." And that is about the one thing McCone did not say.

Brown then says of both the USSR and the CIA denials, interpreting what Nosenko said as the Soviet's denial, which it wasn't:

Both denials beg the issue: both countries by the very nature of their respective intelligence apparatuses, had to know about Oswald. What they are telling us is that they did not want to know about Oswald," (Brown's emphasis, page 218).

Whatever that means or can mean or Brown intends it to be taken as meaning.

It really means nothing at all.

For him to deliberately misrepresent what McCone did attest to, and as we see with this direct, verbatim quotation of his cited source, has to have been to hide the fact that he lied intending to lie.

There is more of this bending and stretching of established fact and truth as Brown struggles to make a case out of nothing in this chapter but rather than waste more time on that I quote what he says at its end, no-sourcing it because he does not want to acknowledge his use of the only source — me:

There are still unanswered questions about Oswald's strange and somewhat luxurious layover in Amsterdam, especially since his profile was negative and his finances worse (page 222).

The only source for this is the Commission's January 27, 1964 Executive Session transcript I got by suing for it under the Freedom of Information Act. When I obtained it I wrote Whitewash IV and in it printed that long transcript in facsimile (pages 36-121). On page 111 Rankin stated that when the Oswald's were in Holland and were to take their ship at Rotterdam, they, for about two days, "got a place to live, some little apartment . . ." in Amsterdam.

How they got that little apartment in Amsterdam for those few days is unexplained but for that matter, there is no mention of this in any of those twenty-six volumes. It is a not un reasonable suspicion that the CIA could have arranged it. It also is not unreasonable to believe that it was arranged otherwise, as by or through the embassy.

Those "somewhat luxurious" conditions of that layover is another of Brown's endless improvements, for his purpose improvements, in fact and in truth.

While it is true throughout his books, these three things coming together by themselves raise substantial questions about Brown's honesty.

He lied in quoting McCone as saying what he neither said nor suggested.

He lied in saying that the Oswalds had "luxurious" accommodations in Amsterdam.

And for all his professional no-sourcing he was not honest in using what appears in one book only as his own work. He does that in not giving any source for his Amsterdam exaggeration.

Perhaps in acquiring that Ph.D. of which he is so proud Brown did not learn the simple truths of life, like about people living in glass houses and throwing stones.