Introduction by James DiEugenio
Gary Aguilar is a most valuable critic of the Warren Commission and its apologists. He has taken on PBS and Cold Case Nova, Gerald Posner and also Vincent Bugliosi. His reply to Bugliosi's book Reclaiming History was published in Federal Lawyer among Bugliosi's peers. The former prosecutor did not like what the good doctor said about him amid his colleagues. So he replied to Gary in no uncertain terms, a reply which we print here for the first time. And we close with Aguilar's wrap-up to the whole affair.
It is always reassuring to see that no matter how big the ballyhoo for these recurrent attempts to revive the stagnant corpse of the Warren Report, people like Aguilar have the intelligence, learning and energy to show how hollow they are behind all the hype accorded them. Facts are facts. They are ultimately immutable.
Bravo Gary!
James DiEugenio
Important Links
Aguilar’s letter to the Federal Bar News and Journal criticizing Posner.
Aguilar’s book review of Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History, as published in The Federal Lawyer.
Transcript of Bugliosi’s reply to Aguilar (originally handwritten).
Discussion by Gary Aguilar
When I published a letter in 1994 critiquing Gerald Posner’s Case Closed in the official journal of the U.S. Justice Department (The Federal Bar News and Journal, FBNJ), I couldn’t have imagined that, 23 years on, another piece I wrote for FBNJ would result in my getting an unsolicited, preposterous and threatening, letter from Vincent Bugliosi, the New York Times-heralded Warren Commission defender;[1] the man whom Max Holland has said is the “chief defender of the official story: Oswald did it.”[2] Bugliosi was apoplectic about my unflattering review of his 1,600+ page piece of pro-government propaganda, Reclaiming History. My review appeared in the FBNJ’s renamed journal, The Federal Lawyer.[3]
Bugliosi wrote, “Instead of receiving this civil letter from me, Dr. Aguilar, by all rights you should be receiving a summons and complaint in a civil lawsuit for libel by you against me that would unquestionably result in a favorable judgment for me that would force you into bankruptcy and/or have you working for me (by attachment of your salary) the rest of your professional life.” Out of the goodness of his heart, he added, “My Christmas gift to you is that I don’t intend to sue you now, and I doubt very much that I will change my mind.” His good-heartedness lasted until he passed away.
I wrote that review at the invitation of the editors of FBNJ in the wake of a letter they apparently liked that I’d published in that journal debunking some claims Gerald Posner had made in his book, Case Closed. I also charged that Posner very likely deceived the congressional committee he testified to.[4]
To digress for background, Posner told Congress that he’d spoken with JFK’s autopsy doctors, James Humes, MD and J. Thornton Boswell, MD. He said that they’d told him directly that they’d changed their minds about where the fatal bullet struck Kennedy in the head. Whereas in the original, 1963 autopsy report, and elsewhere, they claimed that it entered low, in the bottom rear of JFK’s skull (through occipital bone), Posner swore that they’d admitted to him that they changed their minds: it entered high in the back of the head (in parietal bone), the location the government then endorsed. I didn’t believe Posner for a second, and with good reason.
The surgeons had repeatedly insisted Kennedy’s skull wound was low - in sworn Congressional testimony, in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and in comments to the press. So I called both autopsists, recording the calls. As I wrote in my letter to FBNJ, “Both physicians told me that they had not changed their minds about Kennedy’s wounds at all. They stood by their statements in JAMA, which contradict Posner. Startlingly, Dr. Boswell (also) told me that he has never spoken with Posner.”
I wrote my letter in support of a critical review of Case Closed by FBNJ’s knowledgeable George Costello, JD.[5]* Posner, of course, never wrote to rebut Costello, nor even to deny his likely deception, despite the fact it was an official legal journal, and he a lawyer.
Years later, I heard from FBNJ’s editors when they asked me if I would review Bugliosi’s then-new book. My review ruptured Bugliosi’s spleen, but it occasioned hilarity among Warren skeptics. When I read Bugliosi’s threat to me to HSCA counsel Robert Tanenbaum, JD, he busted a stitch and said it was one of the silliest things he’d ever heard.
Gary L. Aguilar, MD
Addendum
* Knowledgeable skeptics have come to understand that mainstream outlets typically dispatch trustworthy and unschooled writers to inform the public about the events in Dallas. Overwhelmingly, they endorse the government’s preferred narrative. The New York Times is the case exemplar. In the Netflix documentary about investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, Cover Up, former Timesman, Columbia Journalism Review editor, and Hersh collaborator, Jeff Gerth pointed out that The Times was always chary about challenging the government.[6] The Grey Lady’s choice of reviewers for Posner’s and Bugliosi’s books proves Gerth’s out.
Take Posner’s Case Closed. The Times’ reviewer, book editor Christopher Lehman-Haupt, has never shown any expertise on Dallas. But he certainly knew that the Paper of Record had backed the Warren Commission, literally from the day in October 1964, when the Times published its own Bantam edition of the Warren Report. In an introductory essay, Times reporter Anthony Lewis falsely reassured the public, "The Commission made public all the information it had bearing on the events in Dallas, whether agreeing with its findings or not."[7] Similarly, The Times' Assistant Managing Editor, Harrison Salisbury, having read none of the 26 volumes of supporting evidence, nevertheless announced, "No material question now remains unresolved so far as the death of President Kennedy is concerned."[8][9]
(The experienced criminal investigators of the Church Committee and House Select Committee on Assassinations came to precisely the opposite conclusion. See Gary Aguilar, “Max Holland Rescues the Warren Commission and The Nation.[10])
In contrast with George Costello’s point-by-point deconstruction of Posner’s book, Lehmann-Haupt gushed that Posner’s book, “is more satisfying than any conspiracy theory because at every step its explanation is clearer and more elegant.”[11] It is clear and elegant, if one knows nothing about the assassination.
Similarly, in 2007 The Times tapped another complete greenhorn, Bryan Burrough, to assess Vince Bugliosi’s magnum opus.[12] “Bugliosi spent 21 years coming to the same conclusion Gerald Posner had reached in 1993 in ‘Case Closed,’” Burrough gushed, “the same conclusion reached by the much-maligned Warren Commission: Oswald acted alone. Let me repeat: Twenty-one years. 1,612 pages. Oswald. Alone.”
There’s no small irony in Burrough’s touting Posner in his Bugliosi encomium. The Timesman apparently overlooked the part where Bugliosi endorses the view knowledgeable skeptics have long held about Posner. In the introduction to his book, Vince echoes Johathan Kwitney's astute observation that Posner "presents only the evidence that supports the case he's trying to build, framing this evidence in a way that misleads readers who aren't aware that there's more to the story."
Bugliosi then hastens to assure readers that he is no Posner: "I can assure the conspiracy theorists who have very effectively savaged Posner in their books that they're going to have a much, much more difficult time with me. As a trial lawyer in front of a jury and an author of true-crime books, credibility has always meant everything to me. My only master and my only mistress are the facts and objectivity. I have no others.”[13] As per my review, I didn’t have a particularly difficult time with Bugliosi. It was easy to show that his true mistress is the shoddy investigation that the notoriously corrupt FBI cappo J. Edgar Hoover ran for Earl Warren.[14]
Adding to the irony, Burrough was so smitten by Vince that he snarled that skeptics “should be ridiculed, even shunned. It’s time we marginalized Kennedy conspiracy theorists the way we’ve marginalized smokers; next time one of your co-workers starts in about Oswald and the C.I.A., make him stand in the rain with the other outcasts.”
As I pointed out in The Federal Lawyer, Burrough’s ignorant insult “elicited a remarkable reaction in the form of a letter to the editor published [in The Times]on June 17, 2007.[15] It was remarkable not so much for the facts it laid out, but because the Grey Lady, which has consistently backed the Warren Report, for once permitted her readers to see them.
“Washington Post journalist Jefferson Morley, one-time BBC correspondent Anthony Summers, Norman Mailer, and the aforementioned David Talbot wrote: ‘The following people to one degree or another suspected that President Kennedy was killed as a 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 advisor dealing with Cuba at the United Nations, William Attwood; FBI 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 ‘60 Minutes’ producer Don Hewitt.’[16]
“One could assemble a list of thoughtful and well-known skeptics that is several times as long as this one.”
Indeed, one could.
___________________
[1] Burrough, Bryan. Or No Conspiracy? New York Times, 5.20, 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/books/review/Burrough-t.html
[2] Max Holland: Review of Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History. History News Network. May 20, 2007. https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/blog/39118. (Scroll down to the comments section for my “comment.”)
[3] Aguilar, G. Book Review, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy By Vincent Bugliosi. The Federal Lawyer, November/December, 2007. https://www.fedbar.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/bookrev-nd2007-pdf-1.pdf
My review as published has but 20 footnotes. As written, however, there were 66, available online at Kennedys and King: https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/bugliosi-vincent-reclaiming-history-aguilar
[4] Aguilar, G. Letter, Federal Bar News and Journal, June, 1994.
[5] Costello, George. Kennedy Assassination: Case Still Open. Review of Case Closed by G. Posner. Costello’s review appeared in the March/April 1994 issue of Federal Bar News & Journal, vol. 41, no. 3. https://www.assassinationscience.com/costello.html
[6] Cover Up. Netflix documentary. https://www.netflix.com/title/82145211
[7] Anthony Lewis. On the release of the Warren Commission Report, New York Times, 9/27/64. Reproduced in: The Report of the Warren Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. New York: New York Times edition, October, 1964, p. xxxii.
- Lewis also reported this in the Times the day the Warren Report was released, Sept. 27, 1964: Anthony Lewis. “Warren Commission Finds Oswald Guilty and Says Assassin and Ruby Acted Alone.” New York Times, 9.27, 1964. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0927.html
- The Assassinations Records Review Board reported that more than 3,000 Warren Commission documents were still being withheld when the ARRB began its work, more than 30 years after Lewis’s comment.
[8] The Report of the Warren Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. New York: New York Times edition, October, 1964, p. xxix.
[9] https://archive.org/details/reportofwarrenco0000unse.
[10] Online at Kennedys and King: https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/max-holland-rescues-the-warren-commission-and-the-nation
[11] Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. Books of The Times; Kennedy Assassination Answers. New York Times, Sept. 9, 1993. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/09/09/books/books-of-the-times-kennedy-assassination-answers.html
[12] Burrough, Bryan. Or No Conspiracy? New York Times, 5.20, 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/books/review/Burrough-t.html
[13] Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History. New York: Norton, 2007. Introduction, p. xxxviii.
[14] See Aguilar, G. Warren Commission Counsels Burt Griffin and Howard Willens Attempt the Impossible: Shoring up the Tottering Credibility of Earl Warren’s Investigation, 6.23.2024. Online at Kennedys and King: https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/warren-commission-counsels-burt-griffin-and-howard-willens-attempt-the-impossible-shoring-up-the-tottering-credibility-of-earl-warren-s-investigation
[15] Letter to the editor, New York Times, June 17, 2007. Online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/books/review/Letters-t-1-1.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
[16] https://maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Review_of_Reclaiming_History.html#fn66
