Mary's Mosaic (55 page)

During the months that followed, however, Dr. Perry did alter his conclusion, finally testifying before the Warren Commission that the throat wound “could be consistent with an exit wound.”
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The relentless pressure applied to Dr. Perry amounts to another “alteration” of evidence in an attempt to prove that the shooting came from behind the motorcade—that is, from Oswald—and not from sharpshooters positioned somewhere in front of the motorcade, likely behind the fence on the grassy knoll.

Nonetheless, long before the Warren Commission proceedings began, the theory of “throat wound as entrance wound” was gaining traction, as were some other anomalies. Mary Meyer’s access to Kenny O’Donnell shortly after the events in Dallas likely provoked her suspicion as well as horror, and his perspective had to have aroused her curiosity. O’Donnell had been a
witness
to the fact that the shots were fired from in front of the limousine, not from where Oswald was alleged to have been.

Before the end of the first month after the assassination, two articles appeared in national media outlets raising considerable doubt that there had been only one shooter. The first article, by attorney Mark Lane, was entitled “Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer’s Brief;” the second, by history professor Staughton Lynd and Jack Minnis, was called “Seeds of Doubt: Some Questions about the Assassination.”
³⁶
Whether either of these articles were included among Mary’s “clippings of the JFK assassination” or not, it is quite likely that she would have come across them, as she would have been on the lookout for further validation of her growing suspicion concerning the treachery taking place in the cover-up.

Attorney Mark Lane’s article, “Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer’s Brief,” was published in the left-leaning
National Guardian
on December 19. Lane had offered his feature gratis to any number of periodicals, including the
New Republic Look
,
Life
, the
Saturday Evening Post
, and the
Progressive.
No one would touch it. The
New York Times
, unwilling to muster any journalistic courage or integrity of its own, yet not wanting to be outdone, knowing what was coming, published a story about Lane’s
National Guardian
article the very same day it appeared, suggesting they had gone to the trouble of obtaining an advance copy.
³⁷
Lane’s article immediately ignited a firestorm of controversy, and its publication would become a defining moment in his career, setting the stage for an unrelenting pursuit that ultimately took him to a showdown at the doorsteps of the CIA in 1985. So many additional press runs of Lane’s article were needed to keep newsstands supplied, the
Guardian
editors eventually reprinted it as a special pamphlet. It was inconceivable that such an article—published within a month of events in Dallas—would have escaped Mary’s attention.

The then thirty-seven-year-old Mark Lane took no prisoners with his “Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer’s Brief.” Already, the
New York Times
on November 26 had published the text of Dallas district attorney Henry Wade’s press conference, given shortly after Oswald’s murder. Wade had presented fifteen assertions concerning the sole guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald. Lane scrutinized not only Wade’s assertions, but also the contrived narrative that was emerging. He challenged the government’s narrative and exposed its many inconsistencies and half-truths. Point by point, Lane rebutted every allegation that Wade had made about Oswald’s guilt, particularly those reprinted uncritically by the
New York Times
itself. Indeed, Wade’s remarks about Oswald were nothing but distorted half-truths that would not have stood up in any court
proceeding. Charging, for example, that Oswald had murdered police officer J. D. Tippit before being arrested, Wade never reconciled the original statement of Dallas authorities that Tippit was shot in a movie theater, and their subsequent assertion that “he had been shot on a street,” only to then change it again by moving the murder to a different street.

Most notable was Lane’s forceful argument that President Kennedy’s throat wound was one of entrance, not exit:

A motion picture taken of the President just before, during and after the shooting, and demonstrated on television showed that the President was looking directly ahead when the first shot, which entered his throat, was fired. A series of still pictures taken from the motion picture and published in
Life
magazine on Nov. 29 show exactly the same situation. The
Life
pictures also reveal that the car carrying the President was well past the turn from Houston St. and a considerable distance past the [Texas School book] depository building. The
Life
estimate in an accompanying caption states that the car with the President was 75 yards past the sixth-floor window when the first shot was fired.
³⁸

Lane then reviewed five separate newspaper accounts, including the
New York Times
, that quoted the Parkland Memorial Hospital doctors who had examined Kennedy’s body—Dr. Kemp Clark, Dr. Malcolm Perry, and Dr. Robert McClelland—all of whom had described the throat wound as “an entrance wound.” In particular, Lane pointed out that Dr. McClelland, too, had been quoted as saying that he saw bullet wounds every day, “sometimes several a day. This [President Kennedy’s throat wound] did appear to be an entrance wound.”
³⁹

Finally, lambasting the media for the uncritical reporting that had convicted Oswald before any defense could be assembled and before the evidence had been properly examined, the outspoken young attorney was unequivocal about the implications of the falsehoods that were being concocted to prove Oswald’s guilt. “Let those who would deny a fair consideration of the evidence to Oswald because of a rage inspired, they say, by their devotion to the late President, ponder this thought,” Lane wrote. “If Oswald is innocent, then the assassin of President Kennedy is still at large.”
⁴⁰

Two days later, on December 21, the
New Republic
published an article entitled “Seeds of Doubt: Some Questions about the Assassination.” It was
authored by Spelman College history professor Staughton Lynd, who would move to a position at Yale in 1964, and Jack Minnis, a graduate student in political science at Tulane University and the research director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Like Mark Lane’s article, this article in the liberal
New Republic
would articulate some of the bedrock questions about the assassination that would never be satisfactorily reconciled by the Warren Report and that persist to this day. This article, too, had likely captured Mary’s attention, coming immediately on the heels of the Lane exposé. Citing
New York Times
reporter Tom Wicker’s November 23 interview of the two Dallas attending physicians, the authors arrived at the same conclusion as Mark Lane regarding President Kennedy’s throat wound: It was an entrance wound, indicating that at least one shot had been fired from in front of the motorcade. Taken together, both articles articulated issues that ruled out the possibility that Oswald, or any one person alone, could have pulled off a feat of the magnitude that had occurred that day in Dallas.

Throughout his life, Mark Lane would valiantly continue to lead a crusade to obtain the truth about President Kennedy’s assassination. Immediately after Dallas, he founded the Citizens’ Committee of Inquiry. Speaking almost daily to the fact that there had been a conspiracy that was now being covered up, Lane even volunteered to defend the deceased Lee Harvey Oswald in front of the Warren Commission; however, the offer was rejected. Oswald’s mother, Marguerite Oswald, would retain Lane to defend her son’s reputation anyway. Lane’s books would eventually become international bestsellers—after Mary had been murdered. She would not live to finally witness attorney Mark Lane (
Hunt v. Liberty Lobby
) expose E. Howard Hunt on the witness stand in January 1985 for the pathological liar he was: Hunt
had
, in fact, been in Dallas on the day of the assassination, acting as one of the paymasters for the conspiracy. Leslie Armstrong, the jury’s forewoman, would state to the media in attendance immediately following the trial’s conclusion: “The evidence was clear. The CIA had killed President Kennedy, Hunt had been part of it, and that evidence so painstakingly presented, should now be examined by the relevant institutions of the United States government so that those responsible for the assassination might be brought to justice.”
⁴¹

In Washington, the
Post
, as well as the rest of the national media, avoided the story about the jury’s verdict—a case in which the unanimous jury, on the basis of the evidence presented during the trial, had found the CIA’s role in the president’s assassination to be conclusive.

O
n December 22, an unusually newsworthy editorial appeared in the
Washington Post
, followed by a somewhat ominous event. President Harry Truman was the author of the editorial, “U.S. Should Hold CIA to Intelligence,” published in the morning edition of the
Post
, one month, to the day, after the assassination. Mary Meyer, who had a delivered-daily subscription to the
Post
, would have to have seen the Truman editorial that morning. It contained an eerie warning, even a kind of coded message for the most discerning. “There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel we need to correct it,” concluded Truman at the end of his editorial. Suggesting something sinister, the former president regretted what he had given birth to in 1947:

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

That Truman was making such a statement exactly one month to the day after Dallas was astounding in and of itself. His warning was ominous. “But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered,” wrote the former president. “I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.” Like the slain president, who had intended to neuter the operational arm of the CIA after his reelection in 1964, President Truman had come to a similar conclusion about the Agency—and with good reason.
⁴²

According to veteran researcher and author Ray Marcus, the editorial appeared only in the first edition of the
Post
that morning. It was omitted from all subsequent editions that day. Who would have the decision to limit its publication? Moreover, the editorial was never picked up by any other media outlet, nor discussed by any other journalist, columnist, or broadcast commentator. It simply evaporated from the public landscape.

“I can’t read it any other way but [as] a warning by him [President Truman] that the CIA was involved in the [JFK] assassination,” said Marcus. “If that wasn’t what he meant, then I can’t imagine he would have written and/or released it then for fear of having it read that way.”
⁴³
Was Truman trying to alert the nation to the CIA’s involvement? Marcus came into possession of a
draft of the editorial from the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum that was dated December 11, 1963. “To me, this further strengthens the already high probability that in warning of the Agency’s excesses he had the assassination in mind.”
⁴⁴
Marcus reiterated that same position in an interview for this book.
⁴⁵

Unknown to Mary, however, or anyone else at the time, was the fact that Allen Dulles, the former CIA director defrocked by President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs failure, undertook a personal covert operation of his own after the short-lived Truman editorial appeared. At the very first executive session of the Warren Commission on December 5, 1964, Allen Dulles had wasted no time, not only in establishing himself as the so-called intelligence expert, but also in immediately attempting to control and narrow the parameters of the entire inquiry. At that meeting, according to author Peter Dale Scott, the disgraced spymaster took it upon himself to give each member of the commission a copy of a book that argued that all American assassinations, unlike European ones, were the work of solitary, deranged, and disaffected gunmen, thereby using his influence to immediately discourage any real investigation into the possibility of conspiracy.
⁴⁶

Whatever the ordinary reader’s interpretation of Truman’s
Washington Post
editorial, Allen Dulles would clearly have understood the former president’s implicit message. Again, according to Ray Marcus and based on his research of documents at the Truman Library, Dulles traveled to President Truman’s home in Independence, Missouri, on April 17, 1964, using as a pretext for his visit a scheduled talk he was to give in Kansas City, Missouri, that evening. His real mission, however, was almost certainly to document that his meeting with Truman took place that day so that he could then fabricate a story that Truman had come to disavow his December 22 editorial in the
Washington Post.
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