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A short item in the May 1997 Fourth Decade, "The Rear Guards" by R. F. Gallagher, took Gerald Posner to task for one of the many shortcomings of Case Closed.
The article also served to remind us of a blatantly misleading, if trivial, item in Posner's book. On page 485, in Appendix B, the "Strange Deaths" section, Posner writes:
Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans crime boss who some say carried out an assassination contract for the CIA, enjoyed his retirement until his natural death in 1993, at the age of eighty-three.
Enjoyed his retirement? We think not. In the first place, Marcello's final years were reportedly marked by the onset of Alzheimer's. Not much enjoyment there. Furthermore, he spent most of the 1980s behind bars:
...sentenced to prison on bribery and conspiracy charges in trials in the early 1980s, he was released from prison in 1989...(Source: Facts on File, Inc; Facts on File World News Digest.)
We've never tallied up the documented errors (or deliberately misleading statements) in Posner's book, but that might be a worthy, ongoing project. We invite readers to send us all known "errors" in Case Closed, which we'll compile into a single document, readily available in each issue of Fair Play. Please include, with each submission, a Case Closed page reference, and source which demonstrates that book is wrong.
"JFK PT Wear" is a site "for JFK fans" that went up in honor of what would have been JFK's 80th birthday. According to advance word that was emailed around the Net, the site's maintainer, Kerry McCarthy, "is a well known national speaker and has been consulted by all major authors researching her family. She is the grand niece of Ambassador Jos.P and Mrs. Rose F. Kennedy."
The advance also said that McCarthy "will tell what she believes to be the truth regarding Jack's death on this site," although the closest reference we could find was a comment that "they" killed JFK.
The true purpose of this site seems to be selling stuff, which is increasingly common all over the Internet. "If you loved his style -- you'll love JFK PT WEAR (TM)," says a blurb on the page. "The items available this summer are reminiscent of the clothes he wore and loved."
The URL to this site it http://www.oldcity.com/jfk.
...Historians know no more than the information made available to them, and for many years the United States War Department kept the records on Lincoln's assassination locked in files marked "secret." The War Department was in charge of the manhunt for Booth and his accomplices. It also assumed charge of the subsequent conspiracy trials. Although trial proceedings were published at the time, the Bureau of Military Justice sat on a great deal of conspiracy information, and the Army chiefs refused to release much of the data on the assassination and the pursuit of the conspirators. Not until the mid 1930's were pertinent War Department records placed in the public domain.
Accordingly, all previous accounts of the assassination were based on official Government statements and press releases angled, slanted and otherwise doctored to suit popular consumption, and on the sketchy (although voluminous) trial reports published by the official court reporters. Thus a towering edifice of so-called history was erected on sand. It made popular reading, but it lacked the exacting foundations of true historicity. How could the facts be known or assessed when the War Department withheld them from inquiring historians and even from such authorized investigators as senators and congressmen on contemporary Congressional Committees?
...The military censors had a field day with the Lincoln Murder case. From the outset [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton held that many of the facts relating to the assassination were "not in the public interest." Eventually so much of the truth was tampered with that no one could learn the truth. Thus an immense deception was imposed and a stupendous crime was covered.
Today the cover-up is conceded by at least one Government agency which tells us in its official literature that "confusion and mystery" cloak Lincoln's assassination and "we probably shall never know all the facts."
...For seventy years the War Department kept the official files on the assassination conspiracy, the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth, and the trial of Booth's accomplices under lock and key. One might assume that during the Reconstruction Era some legitimate purpose was served in this. But in decades long after the Civil War, what "national security" was protected by the military censors? As of 1890, for example, what strategic plans, operations, or weapons were safeguarded by this secrecy?
...In respect to the Lincoln murder case no modern intelligence device could be compromised. What could be compromised is the security of a myth, or the reputation of an institution, or the concealment of some figure or group who had been party to a heinous crime.
...Says the pamphlet issued by the Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C.: "Confusion and mystery still surround the shooting of Abraham Lincoln, and we probably will never know all the facts. One thing is sure...his murder was part of a larger conspiracy."
But the facts of the murder conspiracy are lost to history. Probably they will never be unearthed. All participants in the great conspiracy are now dead. The last surviving witness to Lincoln's assassination ... died in 1956. (He was five years old when his godmother took him to see the President at Ford's Theater...)
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