ASSASSINATION: ANY NUMBER CAN PLAY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000400490013-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 22, 1998
• Sequence Number: 13
• Publication Date: November 7, 1966
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

T Lr7S~.+ L
ASSASSiNATiON:
3 Any Num,"'%ai Can Play
STUDY THE PAST, says tile 111SCriptioll
chiseled in stone outside the National
Archives on Washington's Pennsylvania
Avenue, and rarely have so many ama-
teur scholars followed the command into
the dusty reliquary of U.S. history. The
well-beaten path leads upstairs to the
East Search. Room, where, almost any
day, a visitor can find one or two instant
historians poring over some of the 300
cubic feet of evidence generated by the
assassination. The name of the game is:
who killed John F. Kennedy? And the
answer, for the people disposed to play
it, is 1.116y tile Ifl lpie Verdict the W,trmrf
-commission; rendered: Lee Harvey Os-
wald, acting alone.
Three years after the fact, the will to
doubt that verdict is stronger and more
intractable ? than ever. Dissent has be-
RMase : CIA-RDP75-00149R000400490013-4
Epstein's . "Inquest," a made-over mas-
ter's thesis attacking the Warren com-
mission's methods, topped 20,000 and
t . I,s ulre magazine
gave Epstein eight pages in its Decem-
ber issue to analyze no fewer than 35
extant theories contradicting the com-'
mission's. A New York television sta-
tion scheduled a three-hour November
postmortem starring Lane and other
critics of the commission. The foreign
press splashed the c:c,ubters' accounts,
often with we-told-you-so glee. And
even London's sober Sunday Times ven-
tured that the Warren report "appears
a vulnerable document."
erwise obscure owner-editor of the tin
(circula(ion: 765) Midlothian, Texas
Mirror, found a flossier forum i
California's Ramp: , is magazine for th
most Byzantine tale to date. By Jones'
lievers--a subculture of assassination or another by the assassination had me
buffs who obsessively probe the massive "mysterious' deaths"-a catchall term tha
record, swap their findings and publish includes a karate cliop, a slit throat, tw
new and ever' more elaborate conspiracy heart attacks, two auto accidents an
theories. And they have created a grow-' the demise by "acute barbiturate an
ing market: a recent Louis Harris poll alcohol intoxication" of Hearst columnis
showed that three-fifths of the American Dorothy Kilgallen. Introducing Jones
public doubts the assassination was the Ramparts playfully paralleled his theory
work of one man-nearly double the with that of the death "curse" o
level of two years ago (Nuws,.vF those who opened King Tut's tomb
Oct. 10). But the magazine gave him twenty
It is a game any number can play, and pages and a widely reported Wash
it was still proliferating last week: ' ington press conference, at which Jones
^ Hard-cover sales of "Rush to Joni"- confidently boosted the count to seven
"
Those people
ment," lawyer Mark Lane's defense br;ef teen and announced:
for Oswald, passed 90,000 and kept the have been pretty systematically elimi-
book second of The New, York Time.,. nated.?" (Snorted "Inquest's" Epstein:
"This is the way a child thinks-every
the official verdict against the critiques.
He sent them first to the 26 volumes
of published testimony and exhibits,
planned . to dispatch them next to the
Archives as soon as the commission's
hundreds of filing boxes of working pa-
pers are declassified in the next 60
days.* Re hopes, too, that the much-
debated autopsy photos and X-rays of
the dead President will be made avail-
able; he shares the prevalent belief
that "somebody in the Kennedy family"
has them. Liebclcr remains convinced
that the Warren commission was right,
a There were the first signs of a back-
lash against the doubters. At ,U,, j 4,
. }rte pr.AfcsSO~ We e}a.ej Lie elcr
-a commission staff alumnus who o ten
played devil's advocate during the in-
quiry-put 23 students to work weighing
"The PIII, the Secret Service and tho'CIA have
already released what material they felt they could
to the Archives under standard restrictions covering
'such considerations as national security, the iden-
tities of agents and iniormants and the protection
of innocent persons. The Archives staff is using the
same guidelines in siftin th i
g
but ' he feels the widespread doubts
demand a down-the-middle review.
And- still the search goes on. The 30-
foot rows of gray cardboard boxes in
nate the doubters. "There is nothing
new or startling there," an ex-commission
'staffer insists. But still the trickle con-
tinues; one or two requests a day for
data on a single subject is the Archives'
equivalent to a run on a bank.. And that,
in a society that has never quite closed
its books on the assassination of Abraham
Lincoln, was hardly surprising. "This,"
a' Warren commission lawyer forecasts.
dolefully, "will go on for a century or.
.more."
CQYRGHT
o cmnmtss on s memos
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