Gerald Posner - The Posner Files: Case Closed and Killing the Dream

The Posner Files

Case Closed and Killing the Dream

Gerald Posner

CONTENTS

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Case Closed Copyright 1993, 2003 by Gerald L. Posner

Killing the Dream Copyright 1998 by Gerald L. Posner

Cover design by Mauricio Daz

ISBN: 978-1-5040-5618-2

This edition published in 2018 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

180 Maiden Lane

New York, NY 10038

www.openroadmedia.com

Gerald Posner (b. 1954) is a renowned investigative journalist. Born in San Francisco, California, he attended the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to a career in law. Posner earned international acclaim with Case Closed (1993), an exhaustive account of the Kennedy assassination that debunked many conspiracy theories. Case Closed was a finalist for the Pulitzer for history. Posner has written about topics as varied as Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele, 9/11, Ross Perot, and the history of Motown Records. His most recent book is Miami Babylon (2009), a history of glitz, drugs, and organized crime in Miami Beach. He lives in Miami with his wife, author Trisha Posner.

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Case Closed

Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK

TO

BOB LOOMIS, MY EDITOR,

WHO NURTURED THIS PROJECT FROM ITS INCEPTION,

AND TO

TRISHA, MY WIFE, MY PARTNER, MY LIFE

Authors Note

The response to the hardcover publication of this book surprised both me and my publisher, Random House. We were initially worried that the book might be lost in the publicity surrounding the publication of other books espousing convoluted theories. But we had underestimated the extent to which, after thirty years of virtually unchallenged conspiracy conjecture, the conclusion that Oswald acted alone in assassinating JFK had evolved, ironically, into the most controversial position. While the medias response was overwhelmingly positive, the reaction from the conspiracy community was the oppositenot simply negative, but often vitriolic. There was little effort to study my overall evidence and conclusions with anything that approached an open mind. Indeed, there was a concerted counterattack to discredit both the book and its author.

There were panel discussions at conspiracy conventions in Boston and Dallas and special publications focused solely on contesting the book. A conspiracy-based research center in Washington, D.C., issued a media alert about Case Closed. The release consisted of five pages alleging the book was misleading and flawed, but the alert misstated my arguments and distorted the evidence in the case. Harold Weisberg, one of the deans of the conspiracy press, found his first publisher (he had previously self-published six conspiracy books) to bring out a book titled Case Open, a broadside attack attempting to diminish the impact of my work.

Other conspiracy buffs launched personal attacks. It was, as one journalist commented, as if overnight I had become the Salmon Rushdie of the assassination world. I was accused of treason by a buff who ran a Dallas research center, and my wife and I were subjected to several months of harassing telephone calls and letters. At an authors luncheon, pickets protested that I was a dupe of the CIA. Faxes and letters to the media also charged I was a CIA agent, or that the CIA had written my book, or that I was part of a conscious effort to deceive the public and hide the truth. (Some critics even expanded the accusations to my first book about Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, contending that I whitewashed the Mengele investigation, when actually that book was the first to detail Mengeles entire life on the run, including his time in U.S. captivity and the Israeli and German bungling of his capture.) Television and radio producers were harassed by callers attempting to have my appearances cancelled. Some reviewers who wrote favorably about the book received intimidating calls or letters. My publisher was subjected to the same treatment, and even my editor, Bob Loomis, was publicly accused of being a CIA agent.

Although I had expected that individuals who had invested their adult lives into investigating JFK conspiracies might react angrily to a book that exposed the fallacies in their arguments, the vehemence of these personal attacks surprised me. I had mistakenly expected a debate on the issues. It took little time to discover, however, the extent to which many people who believe in a JFK conspiracy do so with almost a religious fervor and are not dissuaded by the facts.

Case Closed was probably subjected to greater scrutiny by more critics than any other book published in recent years. Several emendations in this book are the result of what some charged as fraudulent omissions in my discussion of various aspects of the case. Because Case Closed attempted to deal with all the major issues in the assassination, plus countless arguments raised by conspiracy critics in the three decades following the Warren Commission, many of these, especially those addressed in footnotes, were condensed. To fit all of my research into a single, manageable volume, I did not have the luxury of presenting and explaining each nuance of every issue, but instead focused only on primary arguments. For instance, in a few pages I addressed the theory that JFKs corpse was stolen from Air Force One and medically altered, although the author of that theory took over seven hundred pages to present it. Obviously, not every point raised in his book could be dealt with in