Miscellanea, Errata, Et Cetera

Family and government representatives signed an arbitration agreement in October under which the family will retain ownership of the copyright in addition to receiving compensation for the 26 seconds of footage, said Chris Watney, a Justice Department spokeswoman.

The department and LMH Co., which represents the Zapruder family, each will appoint one person to the panel, she said. The two panel members then will select a third person to be chairman.

"The panel of three arbitrators will decide the amount of just compensation that LMH is owed based on evidence and arguments from both sides," Watney said. "They expect a decision by next June."

Robert Bennett, an attorney for LMH, did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

The original Zapruder film, considered a key piece of evidence in Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, has been stored at the National Archives since the 1970s. The family retained the ownership rights throughout the years, but the Assassination Records Review Board voted last year to declare the Zapruder film the permanent possession of the people of the United States.

Since then, the government and the Zapruder family have tried unsuccessfully to agree on a price. Initially, the Zapruder family requested $18.5 million. The government countered with $750,000, then raised its offer to $3 million.

"Who cares how much it costs?" asked John Newman, a former intelligence officer who now teaches history at the University of Maryland and has written a book about alleged Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

"As history, it's like the Enola Gay," Newman said, likening it to the American B-29 bomber that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II. "A whole generation of people -- their psyche -- has been affected by that film that they've seen over and over."

But Jim Lesar, president of the Assassination Archives and Research Center, which has the nation's largest private collection of Kennedy assassination documents, doesn't think American taxpayers should have to pay at all.

"It's evidence in a criminal case," he said.

Anthony Summers' Conspiracy is one of those books that was very important to me. It did not really mark a turning point in my thinking on the JFK case, but the first edition did bring together a lot of data of which I was only vaguely aware, or just plain ignorant of. So I consider an updated version of Conspiracy, bearing the new title Not In Your Lifetime, to be a welcome event.

New research has been incorporated into the book, including documents released by the Assassination Records Review Board. At least one chapter (five) has been retitled, and some of its text moved to the preceding chapter. In the photo section, several pictures that were in Conspiracy have been eliminated, while newer discoveries --- such as the Civil Air Patrol barbecue photo showing David Ferrie and Lee Oswald together --- have been added.

The longest addition addition to the book is a new chapter, "Oswald's Cuban Capers," which was actually written by historian John Newman. In the nine or so pages of this chapter, Newman writes about the post-assassination coverups of U.S. Intelligence agencies, with special attention paid to Oswald's presumed visit to Mexico City shortly before Dallas. "We can now say with confidence that the CIA has lied all along about the Mexico [surveillance] tapes, and that an Oswald imposter was at work in Mexico," he concludes.

Another update is relegated --- unfortunately, in my opinion --- to Not In Your Lifetime's end notes. This is Summers' response to assertions in Gerald Posner's Case Closed, a book that Summers says "hoodwinked" its readers. In one instance, Summers writes (on page 433, Note 82) that Posner claimed Summers paid former Guy Banister secretary Delphine Roberts for an interview in which she linked Banister to Lee Oswald. Posner further claimed that Roberts had retracted her story. "Neither assertion is accurate," Summers writes in this endnote, adding that Roberts initially gave information freely and voluntarily. She was later paid for a filmed interview --- "a common practice," Summers writes. More importantly, Summers says, Roberts stood by her story after Case Closed was published in 1993.

Summers has added several new paragraphs to the beginning of Lifetime's Preface. He calls it "outrageous" that as late as the mid-1990s, certain government agencies have not made public all their records relating to President Kennedy's assassination. They have been withheld on the grounds of national security, the notion of which prompted prompted Earl Warren's comment that all records "might not be [made public] in your lifetime" and gave Summers his new title. "What security-related secret of 1963 can possibly be justifiably withheld today?" he asks.

I am fascinated that this question was also posed in Theodore Roscoe's 1959 book The Web of Conspiracy, when he said that records relating to the Lincoln assassination were kept secret for seventy years, also on the grounds of national security. (See below.)

Anthony Sumers' book remains an outstanding introductory work to the Kennedy assassination. The new title may cause some confusion, and I think the change unwise. But for any novice, Not In Your Lifetime, nee Conspiracy, is highly recommended.

--- John Kelin

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Does Any of This Sound Familiar?

The following is excerpted from The Web of Conspiracy, by Theodore Roscoe, published by Prentice-Hall in 1959.

...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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