Reclaiming History? or Re-framing Oswald?

Reclaiming History? Or Re-Framing Oswald?

The famed prosecutor of Charles Manson, Vincent Bugliosi, has written a book entitled Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, whose introduction states that it is intended to a "comprehensive and fair evaluation of the entire case, including all of the major conspiracy theories." Even at 1600+ pages plus 950+ more on a CD-ROM, the book is hardly comprehensive, mainly due to incessant repetition that "conspiracy theorists" are "kooky as a three-dollar bill". And fair?

As a prosecutor in the Los Angeles District Attorney's office, Vincent Bugliosi won 105 out of 106 cases, and 21 of 21 murder trials. This establishes beyond doubt that Bugliosi is a great prosecutor. Since not all persons brought before the court of justice are guilty, it might also lead a reasonable person to conclude that Bugliosi can win an argument even when he is wrong. In the JFK case, he is very wrong.

Like Gerald Posner's Case Closed before it, Bugliosi's book is a prosecutor's brief. He cherry-picks the evidence, ignores the most compelling counter-evidence, and sets up straw-man arguments to knock down. This website is devoted to presenting differing viewpoints on Bugliosi's book and the arguments he makes, in the pursuit of a truly fair evaluation of the case. Judge for yourself.

- Rex Bradford, May 20, 2007

Review of Reclaiming History

by Gary L. Aguilar, 21 Dec 2007

Ed note: This review first appeared in the Nov/Dec issue of The Federal Lawyer.

"[A]lthough there have been hundreds of books on the [JFK] assassination," Vincent Bugliosi writes in the introduction to Reclaiming History, "no book has even attempted to be a comprehensive and fair evaluation of the entire [italics in original] case, including all of the major conspiracy theories." Indeed, no book has – not even this 1612-page book, supplemented by a CD-rom containing 958 pages of endnotes – although not because it is too short.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

Vincent Bugliosi's Misnamed "Reclaiming History"

by David R. Wrone, 28 Sep 2007

In the forty four years of sustained discussion about the official findings of the federal government’s investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy no author can equal the failure Vincent Bugliosi has achieved in his misnamed Reclaiming History.

Invented facts & relations.

A characteristic of his narrative is the frequent use of hypothetical instances as a substitute for a lack of evidence or absence of documentary support for a statement. These he typically expresses with such phrases as “probably” or “must have” and similar wordage. In other words, when no or scant evidence exists to sustain a point he is writing about, he makes it up. For example, in one three page section of the end notes where he discusses the Officer J. D. Tippit murder he uses these made up substitutes for the lack of evidence thirty seven times. In the book as a whole one can only estimate the total number of inventions to be incredibly large. This is not what the civilization we are part of calls history, but is a class of fiction presented as non-fiction known as Munchausen’s work. In the appendix the thirty seven instances are set down.

Mythic reconstruction substituted for evidence.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

Besmirching History: Vincent Bugliosi Assassinates Kennedy Again

by Michael Green, 19 Sep 2007

Copyright 2007 Michael Green

The purpose of Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History is to defend the integrity of the USG National Security State by grossly distorting its nature and function, by disguising that it is the servant of factions of the ruling classes within the United States, and by pretending that the people who control it did not and could not contemplate the assassination of a democratically elected President whose recalcitrant politics fell outside their parameters. According to Bugliosi, only the lunatic can seriously entertain that Kennedy was murdered because he pursued détente with the USSR, championed nuclear disarmament, decided not to back the invasion of the Bay of Pigs with US military might, made a peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the Joint Chiefs wanted invasion and war, and decided to withdraw US troops from Vietnam rather than pursue by brute force an imperial venture in Southeast Asia. According to Bugliosi, Oswald is not just the murderer of Kennedy, he is the only one involved, and he is nothing but “a first class ‘nut.’” (945) Thus, Kennedy’s murder is deprived of any political significance whatsoever, assassinating him yet again.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org

Bugliosi, Bowles and the Open Mike

(c) Chris Scally

The final report of the United States' House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (the HSCA) was published on July 29, 1979. This second official investigation into the Kennedy assassination found that President Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy", although Lee Harvey Oswald did fire three of the four shots, and he fired the shot that actually killed the President. The HSCA's report stated that "scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired" at the President&emdash;Oswald from the Texas School Book Depository building above and behind the President, and a second, unidentified gunman from the grassy knoll in front and to the right of the motorcade.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

An Ass of You and of Me

or, Buyer Beware: Initial impressions, but not really a review, of Reclaiming History
by John Kelin

One must assume that Vincent Bugliosi is honest, and that his new book on the JFK assassination is likewise honest. Reclaiming History is Bugliosi’s long awaited entry into the war of words over what really happened to John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

This is a massive book, so massive that the publisher, W.W. Norton, elected to put all of its end notes and other source notes onto an accompanying CD-ROM. At more than 1,600 pages, Reclaiming History gives the appearance of a comprehensive and minutely detailed study of the crime that shook the world four decades ago. Bugliosi says he devoted twenty years to his book. I’m devoting about twenty minutes to writing this essay.

Read the full essay.

A Crime Scene Between Two Hard Covers

by Milicent Cranor

If you ever want to witness a crime with your own eyes, you need only look at certain pages of the official record on the murder of John F. Kennedy. The crime is perjury. But unless you know a great deal about the case, you may not recognize it. There is, however, another crime scene you can visit that is easier to evaluate. Here, the crime is fraud, six pounds of it: “Reclaiming History,” by Vincent Bugliosi. 

This book is infested with fraud from cover to cover, but you might never know it unless you were to compare (a) the actual record with (b) what Bugliosi says is on record. You would also need to know (a) what else is on record that is relevant and significant, and (b) whether Bugliosi included this information.

This essay contains only a few samples of Bugliosi’s highly selective, and sometimes outright false reporting on the medical-ballistics in this case.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

Bugliosi Fails the Paraffin Test

by Pat Speer

On Page 964 of Reclaiming History, as part of his list of evidence proving Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy, Vincent Bugliosi states:

"Dallas Police performed a paraffin test on Oswald's hands at the time of his interrogation to determine if he had recently fired a revolver, and the results were positive, indicating the presence of nitrates from gunpowder residue on his hands."

This statement is incredibly deceptive.  By including this statement in his list, Bugliosi is clearly suggesting that this evidence is indicative of Oswald's guilt, even though he readily admits 800 pages earlier that "the paraffin test is not conclusive...mere handling of a weapon may leave nitrates of the skin, even without firing it." (p. 164)  Even worse, when one looks at the results of another test, performed on the paraffin casts of Oswald's cheek, one can only conclude they suggest that Oswald did not fire the shots that killed Kennedy.  You see, while the tests of Oswald's hands were positive, the tests for Oswald's cheek were negative.  This suggests that he did not fire a rifle on November 22, 1963.

Read the full essay.

Rewriting History: Bugliosi Parses the Testimony

by Don Thomas

When Jesse Curry retired as police chief of Dallas, Texas, he wrote a book called "JFK Assassination File." In a 1969 interview for the Dallas Morning News around the time of publication, Curry stated,

''We don't have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did.
''Nobody's yet been able to put him in that building with a gun in his hand."

Curry’s statement is as true now as it was then, a problem which would not be obvious to a reader of Warren Commission apologist Vincent Bugliosi’s new book “Reclaiming History.”  According to Bugliosi there is...

'“a mountain of evidence conclusively proving that Oswald shot Kennedy,” (p. 832)

and he invokes this assertion whenever he needs an excuse to dismiss evidence to the contrary. The fact is the totality of the evidence that Oswald shot Kennedy amounts to little more than the proverbial molehill. The eyewitness testimony, for what it was worth, indicated that someone other than Oswald did the shooting. In this regard, one of the more shameful aspects of the Warren Commission investigation was its handling of the African-American witnesses.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

Reply From a Conspiracy Believer

by Gaeton Fonzi

Vincent Bugliosi must be exhausted.  He not only churned out more than 1600 pages of tautologically strained contentions to support his book’s  pretentious title, ''Reclaiming History'', he must be weary from wrestling with the multitude of distortions and twisted conclusions he was forced to make to support his primary assertion.

His primary assertion?  Swallow that mouthful of  Dr. Pepper before you read this:  “...it has been established beyond all doubt that Oswald killed Kennedy.”

Fearful of endowing his abhorrent duplicity with any hint of legitimacy, I hesitate to take the time and effort to respond to all the ungrounded contentions he makes about my role as a federal investigator in the case and about certain areas of evidence with which I was involved.  There are, however,  two very significant segments of the investigation that Bugliosi, with clever  distortion and selected omission of facts, defiles truth and history.  And having cited as a source my own book, ''The Last Investigation'', he had to be well  aware of its documented adherence to the historical facts.  (Former U.S. Senator Richard Schweiker graciously provided a jacket  blurb citing the book for exactly that : “A rarity among Kennedy assassination books, [it] does not indulge in sensational or bizarre conspiracy theories.”)

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

Letter to New York Times Book Review

This letter appeared in the June 17 edition of the New York Times.

To the Editor:

Bryan Burrough’s laudatory review of Vincent Bugliosi’s book on the Kennedy assassination (May 20) is superficial and gratuitously insulting. “Conspiracy theorists” — blithe generalization — should according to Burroughs be “ridiculed, even shunned ... marginalized the way we’ve marginalized smokers.” Let’s see now. The following people to one degree or another suspected that President Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy, and said so either publicly or privately:

• Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon;
• Attorney General Robert Kennedy;
• John Kennedy’s widow, Jackie;
• his special adviser dealing with Cuba at the United Nations, William Attwood;
• F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover (!);
• Senators Richard Russell (a Warren Commission member), and Richard Schweiker and Gary
• Hart (both of the Senate Intelligence Committee);
• seven of the eight congressmen on the House Assassinations Committee and its chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey;
• the Kennedy associates Joe Dolan, Fred Dutton, Richard Goodwin, Pete Hamill, Frank Mankiewicz, Larry O’Brien, Kenneth O’Donnell and Walter Sheridan;
• the Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman, who rode with the president in the limousine;
• the presidential physician, Dr. George Burkley;
• Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago;
• Frank Sinatra;
• and the “60 Minutes” producer Don Hewitt.

All of the above, ala Burrough, were idiots.

Not so, of course. Most of them were close to the events and people concerned, and some had privileged access to evidence and intelligence that threw doubt on the “lone assassin” version. That doubt remains  today. Bugliosi himself this year joined us, Don DeLillo, Gerald Posner, Robert Blakey and two dozen other writers on the assassination in signing an open letter that appeared in the March 15 issue of The New York Review of Books. The letter focused on a specific unresolved lead, the discovery that a highly regarded C.I.A. officer named George Joannides was in 1963 running an anti-Castro exile group that had a series of encounters with Oswald shortly before the assassination.

This is obviously pertinent, yet the C.I.A. hid the fact from four J.F.K. investigations. Since 1998, when the agency did reluctantly disclose the merest outline of what Joannides was up to, it has energetically stonewalled a Freedom of Information suit to obtain the details of its officer’s activities. Here we are in 2007, 15 years after Congress unanimously approved the J.F.K. Assassination Records Act mandating the “immediate” release of all assassination-related records, and the C.I.A. is claiming in federal court that it has the right not to do so.

And now your reviewer, Burrough, seems to lump together all those who question the official story as marginal fools. Burrough’s close-minded stance should be unacceptable to every historian and journalist worthy of the name — especially at a time when a federal agency is striving vigorously to suppress very relevant information.

Jefferson Morley , Washington
Norman Mailer, Provincetown, Mass.
Anthony Summers, Waterford, Ireland
David Talbot, San Francisco

Bugliosi's lawering worse than Posner's

by Peter Dale Scott

I’d like to share an example of how Bugliosi’s lawyering is even worse than Posner’s. The following extract from Bugliosi (p. 980), is his only extended treatment of my book Deep Politics:

Here are just two examples representative of literally thousands of A-B-C (and D, E, and F) situations that the conspiracy theorists set forth in their books : Conspiracy author Peter Dale Scott believes that Dallas oilmen, Jack Ruby, and J. Edgar Hoover, along with many others, may have been part of a conspiracy to murder Kennedy. In support of this, he writes, "A businessman told the FBI that Ruby had once introduced him to Dallas businessman E. E. Fogelson and his wife, Greer Garson. Fogelson was a member of the 'Del Charro set'. "This was a group of Texas millionaires who frequented [Texas oilman ] Clint Murchison's resort, the Hotel Del Charro, near Murchison's racetrack, the Del Mar, in La Jolla, California . Clint Murchison and some of his associates would pay for annual racing holidays of their good friend J . Edgar Hoover."

You can judge for yourself how accurate is Bugliosi’s summary of what I actually wrote:

“The story of Ruby and Alfred McLane illustrates how Ruby’s intimacy with the world of gambling gave him an entrée to the overworld of Dallas oilmen and lawyers, men with considerable political influence. Beyond question, Ruby knew a number of such individuals. A businessman told the FBI, for example, that Ruby had once introduced him to Dallas businessman E. E. Fogelson and his wife, Greer Garson. Fogelson was a member of the 'Del Charro set.' This was a group of Texas millionaires who frequented Clint Murchison's resort, the Hotel Del Charro, near Murchison's racetrack, the Del Mar, in La Jolla, California . Clint Murchison and some of his associates would pay for annual racing holidays of their good friend J. Edgar Hoover.”
     (Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 204-05)

Just for the record, I do not believe, and never have believed for an instant, “that Dallas oilmen, Jack Ruby, and J. Edgar Hoover, along with many others, may have been part of a conspiracy to murder Kennedy.” I defy Bugliosi or anyone else to find anything in my writings that even hints at such an absurd possibility. The above quotation certainly does not.

When I debated Posner in 1993, I had the problem that Posner misquoted and distorted what I said. Bugliosi is not distorting, he is fabricating his nonsense out of nothing. There is a shorter word for that kind of activity.

Reclaiming History from Vince Bugliosi

by Lisa Pease

Vincent Bugliosi, the famed prosecutor of the Manson case, has stopped putting liars in jail and started putting them in print. In his Orwellian-named book, “Reclaiming History,” Bugliosi purports to answer all the questions and shut all the doors to conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy. Long before we get to the question of why he would waste the later years of his life on such an impossible task, the first question we need to ask is this:

Is this an honest presentation?

After just minutes in its pages, I was shocked at how easily I could answer that.

Read the full essay at the Real History Blog.

Bugliosi Fails to Resuscitate the Single-Bullet Theory

by Jerry McKnight

The Warren Commission concluded that there was only one gunman involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This assertion rested on what in the JFK assassination literature is called the “single-bullet theory.” This theory, as Vincent Bugliosi rightly points out, “is a sin qua non” to the Commission’s single assassin and essential supporting contention that Texas Governor John Connally and Kennedy were hit by the same bullet. In his book, Reclaiming History, Bugliosi embraces the single-bullet theory without fear or trembling. This theory, largely the creation of Arlen Specter, asserts that one shot entered the back of the President’s neck near the right shoulder, transmitted his neck without striking bone, exiting through his shirt collar and tie, and entered Connally’s chest under his right arm pit, smashing four inches off his fifth rib before exiting under his right nipple, then smashing through his right wrist, and finally penetrating his left thigh just under the skin before it came to a stop.

Bugliosi’s assertion that the single-bullet theory is based on substantial or irrefutably convincing evidenced is so removed from reality as to defy caricature or parody.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

Epic Book Resurrects Finding That Oswald Acted Alone in Killing JFK

by Josiah Thompson

Bugliosi picks only the evidence that backs his argument

Former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi claims to be "Reclaiming History" from the riffraff of conspiracy theorists in his massive new book on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The term "conspiracy theorist" is practically married to the assassination, tossed about the way the House Un-American Activities Committee used to throw around "Communist sympathizer." One size fits all!

But according to Bugliosi, conspiracy theorists are the reason more than 75 percent of Americans don't believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the crimes. Bugliosi's intent is to expose its critics as "fraudulent" on the way to resurrecting the conclusion of that panel, which found that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

The first question to Bugliosi must be, "Who cares?"

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

Debugging Bugliosi

by Don Thomas

Vincent Bugliosi's treatment of the acoustical evidence is turgid with factual errors, many more than can be enumerated in a ten page essay, so I will cite only the most significant. Acoustical experts for the HSCA in 1978 determined that the assassination gunfire was captured on a police recording of a broadcast emanating from a motorcycle cop's radio microphone, and that the shots included one from the infamous grassy knoll. Although Bugliosi cites from the technical reports he clearly has no grasp of the technical issues. On such details as the manner in which the motorcycle microphone became stuck open, on the manner in which fragments of broadcasts cross-talked from one channel to another, and the manner in which ambient sounds are distorted by the radio circuitry, Bugliosi's account is substantially wrong. The facts and logic that support the acoustical analysis are misconstrued beyond recognition.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.

Doug Horne’s Response to the Attacks on His Work in Bugliosi’s New Book, “Reclaiming History.”

by Doug Horne

I just read Mr. Bugliosi’s rather severe criticism of my work on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board, where I served initially as a Senior Analyst on the Military Records team, and was eventually promoted to the position of Chief Analyst for Military Records. Specifically, he took issue with my conclusion in a 1998 research memo that 2 different brains were examined following President Kennedy’s death:

-President Kennedy’s brain, on Monday, November 25, 1963; and

-A second (fraudulent) brain---not that of President Kennedy---during the period between November 29-December 2, 1963.

Read the full essay.

Is Vincent Bugliosi Right that Neutron Activation Analysis Proves Oswald's Guilt?

by Gary L. Aguilar

In his book, Reclaiming History, author Vincent Bugliosi highlights the dubious, if long-held, claim that bullet evidence in the Kennedy case scientifically establishes Oswald's guilt to a high degree of certainty. The proof, he says, consists of two related elements that show that only two bullets from Oswald's rifle struck anyone in JFK's motorcade on November 22nd.

First, both the nearly whole bullet that was recovered on a stretcher at the hospital where JFK and Governor John Connally were treated, as well as both of the other large bullet fragments recovered from JFK's limousine (consisting of the copper jacket and the lead core of a single bullet) were shown to have been fired from Oswald's Mannlicher Carcano, to the exclusion of all other rifles in the world. Second, a sophisticated analytical test, neutron activation analysis (NAA), proves that all the smaller, recovered bullet fragments were separated from the larger specimens. Thus, only two bullets struck, both from Oswald's weapon.

As inescapable as the logic behind the theory may seem, and Bugliosi does an admirable job of making it seem inescapable, two recent reports in the technical/scientific literature have shot holes through it.

Read the full essay at www.maryferrell.org.