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3 Rush to Judgment
- University of Wisconsin Press
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3 ﱜ Rush to Judgment Genealogy of an Assassination Prologue “Oh, De, Jack Kennedy’s been shot,” said Andy Warhol on the telephone. De Antonio was sitting in Jasper Johns’s apartment, recuperating after knee surgery and not in the mood for practical jokes. He muttered something uncomplimentary into the phone and hung up. Just in case, though, he hobbled over to the radio—Johns’s apartment did not have a television—where he heard the news from Dallas. De Antonio rarely watched television, but on this occasion he asked a friend to bring over a portable so he could see the news coverage. Not many of those watching had known Kennedy as he had. During his freshman year at Harvard he had shot billiards with a young man he remembered as “handsome, charming, vapid.” He compared him unfavorably to the older brother, Joseph Kennedy, Jr., whom he knew slightly better. Nothing seemed to foreshadow his classmate’s political success, except perhaps his ability to line up sufficient quantities of beer and singers for social events.1 During the two decades of Kennedy’s political ascent, de Antonio remained skeptical. Even when Kennedy was elected president , de Antonio watched with a raised eyebrow. Unlike those who were intoxicated by the Kennedy mystique, de Antonio could only 48 Rush to Judgment 49 scoff at the desire to conceive of the Kennedy administration as a Camelot of any sort. Kennedy received faint admiration from de Antonio in one regard: he seemed more pragmatic, more flexible than a president driven by genuine ideals. Although de Antonio might find such qualities attractive in his friends or even himself, he saw idealism as a presidential liability because it led to moral certainty and intolerance of dissenting opinions such as his.2 Although he never perceived these traits in Kennedy, he saw them in the words and deeds of the investigators of the president’s death. The readiness with which the news media accepted the lone assassin theory, even in the face of potentially conflicting evidence, was a particular source of concern. De Antonio resented what he considered to be the oversimplification of the events surrounding the assassination, especially the conviction of the Dallas Police Department, the FBI, and the Warren Commission that their case against Lee Harvey Oswald was unquestionable, that an ongoing public discussion of the available evidence was super fluous. One more sign of the failure of democratic capitalism, he thought, as he observed how “the police have become a law unto themselves.”3 In the weeks after the assassination de Antonio’s doubts remained deep but unfocused, beginning to crystallize only when he attended a lecture by a lawyer named Mark Lane in January 1964. Lane was just thirty-seven, though already a well-known New York defense attorney who had represented many civil rights demonstrators. He was arrested as a freedom rider in Mississippi soon after being elected as a reform Democrat to the New York legislature in 1960. His victory was due in no small part to the support of then-presidential candidate Kennedy, who was photographed next to the beaming attorney.4 In the weeks after the death of his political benefactor, Lane followed the media coverage with a lawyer’s eye for detail. Yet he did not need a law degree to realize that much of the country was overlooking an obvious constitutional fact: the presumption of innocence for the accused until proved guilty. With the death of Oswald at the gun of club owner Jack Ruby, the nation had 50 Rush to Judgment been deprived of a trial in which to hear evidence that did not support the “lone gunman theory” or in any way mitigated the charges against Oswald.5 Nor was the media interested in providing a forum for discussing both sides of the case. With the belief that “most Americans did not even want to listen to any theories that contradicted ” the official story, the U.S. media unfailingly promoted the lone gunman theory in the months after the event.6 Yet doubters emerged at the margins of public discourse almost immediately, questioning the work of the journalists, FBI agents, and other experts charged with explaining the crime. Books and articles gradually appeared by Thomas G. Buchanan, Edward J. Epstein, Penn Jones, Jr., Sylvia Meagher, Leo Sauvage, Josiah Thompson, and Harold Weisberg, as well as Lane. Lane was one of the earliest and most vocal critics of the point of view...