Forum Debate on Watergate
(1)
Gaeton
Fonzi,
interviewed
on 8th October, 1994.
Q: How do
you view Posner's technique on this subject vs. your own? For example,
it does not appear from the notes in the back of his book that he
interviewed her, relying instead on her testimony to the WC, yet,
he doesn't hesitate to mention her emotional problems, her divorce
or that there isn't one piece of corroborating evidence for her
post-assassination claim that one of the men who visited her was
introduced as 'Leon Oswald'. Could he have interviewed her? Should
he have interviewed her? What makes her credible, in your opinion?
A: First
of all, let me say at the start, that I view Posner's book as a
dishonest book. Posner called me early on when he was beginning
to work on the book. He asked me about those areas of the investigation
in which I was involved. I told him briefly, gave him some specifics.
He said that they seemed very interesting and very important and
that he would have to come and talk with me in detail about it.
And I said he was welcome to do that. This was way before I even
began my book. He said that he would do that and I never heard from
him again. As far as Posner's handling of Odio, he never talked
to Odio. The testimony and what he does in his book in terms of
building up a tremendous emotional problem that she had by using
an individual, quoting an individual who Silvia Odio never met,
who happened to be a friend of her uncle's, I think. To me, was,
again, misleading and dishonest. As far as, it isn't true, as this
says, that there isn't one piece of corroborating evidence for a
post assassination claim that one of the men who visited her was
introduced as Leon Oswald. That's simply not true because her sister
was at the apartment at that time. We got corroboration from her
sister. Could he have interviewed her? I don't know, whether or
not he could have interviewed her. Should he have interviewed her?
Of course he should have interviewed her. And what makes her credible,
of course, is the fact that everything she says, we got corroboration
about. We got a corroboration in terms of the details which are
more important. And in fact, even additional corroboration has come
forward when a priest, who we couldn't locate, a friend of hers,
specifically recalled her saying, talking about the visit prior
to the assassination. On a specific evening. He pinpointed the evening
closer than she had before. So, as far as Posner goes, and his credibility
in the Odio area, I think it's dishonest.
(2)
David R. Wrone, Journal of Southern History (February 1995)
Gerald Posner
argues that the Warren Commission properly investigated the assassination
of JFK. He claims to have refuted the critics, purports to show
what actually occurred, and asserts simple factual answers to explain
complex problems that have plagued the subject for years. In the
process he condemns all who do not agree with the official conclusions
as theories driven by conjectures. At the same time his book is
so theory driven, so rife with speculation, and so frequently unable
to conform his text with the factual content in his sources that
it stands as one of the stellar instances of irresponsible publishing
on the subject.
Massive
numbers of factual errors suffuse the book, which make it a veritable
minefield. Random samples are the following: Pontchartrain is a
lake not a river. The wounded James Tague stood twenty feet east,
not under the triple underpass. There were three Philip Geracis,
not one; he confuses the second and the third. A tiny fragment,
not a bullet, entered Connally's thigh. The Army did the testing
that he refers to the FBI. None, not three, commissioners heard
at least half the hearings. The Warren Commission did not have any
investigators. Captain Donovan is John, not Charles, and a lieutenant.
The critics of the official findings are not leftists but include
conservatives such as Cardinal Cushing, William Loeb, and former
commissioner, Richard Russell. Posner often presents the opposite
of what the evidence says. In the presentation of a corrupt picture
of Oswald's background, for example, he states that, under the name
of Osborne, Oswald picked up leaflets he distributed from the Jones
Printing Company and that the "receptionist" identified
him. She in fact said that Oswald did not pick up the leaflets as
the source that Posner cites indicates.
No credible
evidence connects Oswald to the murder. All the data that Posner
presents to do so is either shorn of context, corrupted, the opposite
of what the sources actually say, or nonsourced. For example, 100
percent of the witness testimony and physical evidence exclude Oswald
from carrying the rifle to work that day disguised as curtain rods.
Posner manipulates with words to concoct a case against Oswald as
with Linnie Mae Randle, who swore the package, as Oswald allegedly
carried it, was twenty-eight inches long, far too short to have
carried a rifle. He grasped its end, and it hung from his swinging
arm to almost touch the ground. Posner converts this to "tucked
under his armpit, and the other end did not quite touch the ground".
The rifle was heavily oiled, but the paper sack discovered on the
sixth floor had not a trace of oil. Posner excludes this vital fact.
To refute
criticism that the first of three shots (the magic bullet) inflicted
seven nonfatal wounds on two bodies in impossible physical and time
constraints, he invents a second magic bullet. He asserts that Oswald
fired the first bullet near frame 160 of the Zapruder film, fifty
frames earlier than officially held, and missed. The bullet hit
a twig or a branch or a tree, as he varies it, then separated into
its copper sheath and lead composite core. The core did a right
angle to fly west more than 200 feet to hit a curbstone and wound
Tague while the sheath decided to disappear. The curb in fact had
been damaged. He omits that analysis of the curb showed the bullet
came from the west, which means the bullet would have had to have
taken another sui generis turn of 135 degrees to get back west with
sufficient force to smash concrete, which he pretends was not marred.
He asserts
proof of a core hit because FBI analysis revealed "traces of
lead with a trace of antimony" in the damage. What he omits
destroys his theory. He does not explain that a bullet core has
several other metallic elements in its composition, not two, rendering
his conclusion false. He further neglects to inform the reader that
by May 1964 the damage had been covertly patched with a concrete
paste and that in August, not July, 1964, the FBI tested the scrapings
of the paste, not the damage, which gave the two metal results.
He says
the second shot transited JFK's neck and caused the nonfatal wounds
striking Connally at Zapruder film frame 224 where Connally is seen
turned to his right, allegedly lining his body up with JFK's neck,
thus sustaining the single bullet explanation. He finds proof that
a bullet hit then in Connally's lapel that was flapping in that
one frame as it passed through. But he does not conform to fact.
Wind gusting to twenty miles per hour that day ruffled clothing.
And, there is no bullet hole in the lapel but in the jacket body
beneath the right nipple area.
Posner crowns
his theory with the certainty of science by using one side of the
computer-enhanced studies by Failure Analysis Associates of Menlo
Park that his text implies he commissioned. The firm, however, lambastes
his use as a distortion of the technology that it had developed
for the American Bar Association's mock trial of Oswald where both
sides used it. Posner fails. I believe that irrefutable evidence
shows conspirators, none of them Oswald, killed JFK. A mentally
ill Jack Ruby, alone and unaided, shot Oswald. The federal inquiry
knowingly collapsed and theorized a political solution. Its corruption
spawned theorists who tout solutions rather than define the facts
that are locked in the massively muddied evidentiary base and released
only by hard work.
