Return to Main Page
Review by Richard Bartholomew
In the academic year 1976-77, my first year at The University of Texas at Austin, I lived in a small off-campus dormitory with, among others, Berke Breathed. I was an art major. He did not study art, but was a photographer for the school newspaper. Donning an apron on Wednesday nights, Breathed also served chicken wings in the dorm's dining room.
Breathed, creator of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Bloom County comic strip, became one of the most famous cartoonists in the country. I became a lesser-known editorial cartoonist.
Are Breathed and Bartholomew in cahoots? No. We barely knew each other then. And we do not know each other now. If he had not become famous, I would have forgotten about him long ago, just as he has forgotten about me.
Connections do not a conspiration make. However, more than anything else, conspiracy investigation is about connections.
In Bruce Campbell Adamson's eight-volume, self-published work-in-progress, Oswald's Closest Friend: The George de Mohrenschildt Story, and its companion volume, The JFK Assassination Timeline Chart, you will find absolutely no proof that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy. That is arguably a major omission. It is arguable because the conspiracy that killed Kennedy has long been sufficiently proved by the weakness of the well-known direct evidence, plus the strength of several lesser-known "smoking guns."
Adamson represents a newer class of citizen-investigators of Kennedy's murder who have gone beyond minute debunking of multiple, conflicting single-bullet theories. They are instead attempting to identify and name conspirators. For many of the newer students, the final straw inspiring their search for truth was Gerald Posner's book of big lies, Case Closed. Adamson is one of a slightly earlier generation of investigators who was inspired to begin his study after seeing Oliver Stone's film, JFK. There are now over three decades of such personal breaking points that started serious students on their quests for Camelot.
Adamson's nearly 10,000-page study cannot be adequately reviewed in a short review. But in brief, and on balance, Adamson's work is more good than bad. He has done a wide-ranging study of a pivotal suspect in the conspiracy -- one who had never before been this widely studied.
For those who are not students of the JFK assassination, and who have not rented Oliver Stone's movie lately, George de Mohrenschildt was the distinguished, gray-haired, educated, upper-class, anti-Bolshevic, Russian-exile, international spy who became a CIA agent, a Texas oilman and, by the time he was in his late fifties, a very close friend of 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald in 1962 and 1963.
As Adamson duly notes, despite this cosmopolitan man's seemingly bizarre friendship with the future accused assassin of a U.S. president, "De Mohrenschildt did not become [known as] a central figure in the JFK assassination conspiracy until 1976 when he began telling the press that wealthy Texas oilmen, including H.L. Hunt, were behind the assassination." The next year, de Mohrenschildt died when he blew a hole in his own head with a shotgun after receiving shock treatments, and just before Congressional investigators could interrogate him.
The unlikely friendship between de Mohrenschildt and Oswald brought Oswald within a degree or two of separation (far less than six) of powerful anti-Kennedy men like, among many others, former CIA director and future Warren Commissioner Allen Dulles; Vice President (soon-to-be president) Lyndon Baines Johnson; future vice president Nelson A. Rockefeller; Texas oilman, future CIA director and future president George Bush; and media giants Henry Luce and William S. Paley. Of those, only Bush is still alive, and he is not talking.
The most unfortunate downside of Adamson's research is that while his study is wide, it is shallow, illiterate and graphically amateurish to the point of tastelessness. In one of many examples, Adamson repeatedly notes that Abraham Zapruder, the man who filmed the famous home movie of the assassination, had known and worked at a clothing factory with de Mohrenschildt's wife, Jeanne Le Gon, ten years before the assassination. This fact, initially reported by Adamson in his first volume, is hardly supported in end note 35: "Santa Fe Public Library, newspaper article, Nov. 3, 1968; personal interview with Ballen at La Fonda." While probably true, such unschooled citations force readers to take Adamson's word as "proof."
While Adamson only implies it in his books, he has stated with more conviction in his e-mail broadcasts and more private e-mail that the former association of Mrs. de Mohrenschildt and Mr. Zapruder, combined with the fact that Zapruder did not "duck and cover" during six seconds of gunfire while operating his camera, proves that Zapruder knowingly and willingly filmed the murder as part of a CIA assassination plot. That is, of course, a non sequitur.
I questioned Adamson about this, naively expecting harder evidence for such an extraordinary claim. Rather than support the claim, he multiplied the non sequitur by accusing me of unfairly defending Zapruder in a conflict of interest because I am related by marriage to Zapruder's former business partner. He further multiplied it by citing, after falsely claiming for a month that it was secret, his long-published claims about Zapruder's interest in the Dallas Council on World Affairs and the Crusade For Free Europe.
Nonetheless, uncovering the fullest truth of Kennedy's assassination requires that somebody start somewhere and publish the result. Uneducated amateurs cannot be easily dismissed in a vacuum of educated professionals. This first extensive study of Oswald's closest friend is an admirable, though defective, start by Bruce Campbell Adamson.
Return to Main Page
* * *