American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [28]
In Armstrong’s book, there’s also the matter of the two mothers. Apparently the real Oswald mother was quite an attractive tall woman, but then you’ve also got short, dumpy Marguerite. What proves to me that she was a fraud? In one interview she gave, she had Lee’s birthday wrong. I don’t know of a woman who’s ever given birth to a child that can’t remember the day.
I can’t end this chapter without a few words about the national media’s role in the cover-up.22 The very first dispatch out of Dallas on November 22, 1963, came from the Associated Press: “The shots apparently came from a grassy knoll in the area.” That was the news in most of the early reports, though it was soon replaced by the Texas School Book Depository.
Dan Rather, who was a local newsman in Dallas at the time, was the first journalist to see the 20-second-long “home movie” taken by dressmaker Abraham Zapruder. Rather then told a national TV audience that the fatal shot drove the president’s head “violently forward,” when the footage showed just the opposite! Later on, in his book The Camera Never Blinks, Rather defended his “mistake” saying it was because his watching the film had been so rushed.
But nobody could question this at the time, because Time-Life snapped up the Zapruder film for $150,000—a small fortune back then—and battled for years to keep it out of the public domain. The Life magazine publisher, C.D. Jackson, was “so upset by the head-wound sequence,” according to Richard Stolley, who was then the magazine’s L.A. bureau chief, “that he proposed the company obtain all rights to the film and withhold it from public viewing at least until emotions calmed.”
We didn’t find out until 1977, when Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame wrote a piece for Rolling Stone on “The CIA and the Media,” why we should have been upset about C.D. Jackson. Bernstein explained: “For many years, [Time-Life founder Henry] Luce’s personal emissary to the CIA was C.D. Jackson, a Time, Inc., vice president who was publisher of Life magazine from 1960 until his death in 1964. While a Time executive, Jackson coauthored a CIA-sponsored study recommending the reorganization of the American intelligence services in the early 1950s.” He also “approved specific arrangements for providing CIA employees with Time-Life cover. Some of these arrangements were made with the knowledge of Luce’s wife, Clare Boothe.” (Mrs. Luce was a member of the Committee to Free Cuba, and right after the assassination started putting out information connecting Oswald to Cuba—information she received from a group of CIA-backed Cuban exiles that she supported. The CIA still won’t release its files about that group.)
Life published a story headlined “End of Nagging Rumors: The Critical Six Seconds” (December 6, 1963), that claimed to show precisely how Oswald had succeeded in hitting his target. Supposedly based on the Zapruder film, the magazine said that the president had been turning to wave to someone in the crowd when one of Oswald’s bullets hit him in the throat. But guess what? That sequence is nowhere to be seen in the film.
From the get-go, Oswald was damned as guilty by the media. The headline in the New York Times: “Career of Suspect Has Been Bizarre.” In the New York Herald Tribune: “Left Wing Lunacy, Not Right is Suspect.” In Time magazine: “Evidence Against Oswald Described as Conclusive.”
Here’s what media critic Jerry Policoff later had to say: “Thus, the press’ curiosity was not aroused when a 7.65 caliber German Mauser mutated into a 6.5 caliber Italian Mannlicher-Carcano; or when the grassy knoll receded into oblivion; or when an entrance wound in the President’s throat became an exit wound (first for a fragment from the head wound and then for a bullet from the back wound); or when a wound six inches below the President’s shoulder became a wound at the back of the neck. The press was thereby weaving a web that would