Clearing the Air

THE investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination is “an American edition of a frame-up resembling the German Reichstag fire.” It serves “to shield the real culprits.” Thus spake the World Marxist Review in January 1964. In a similar vein, Joesten and Buchanan set out to show that Oswald never was a Marxist and that he did not murder the President.

Out of the original mess of conflicting and unevaluated bits of information, quite a few tall stories can be distilled without any trouble at all. Mr. Joesten is an A-student of Joseph Goebbels’ blunderbuss propaganda. He cumulates and telescopes “evidence” and demonstrates gleefully that 2 x 2 is not just 5, but conceivably might be eight. There was a “conspiracy of powerful men with a narrow circle of complicity in the middle echelon of the FBI and the Dallas police.” Mr. Henry M. Wade, District Attorney of Dallas County, is deemed to be a secret and dishonest ally of the FBI. Mr. J. Edgar Hoover’s “patriotic vestments are . . . in Samuel Johnson’s famous definition ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ ” Joesten accuses Mr. Hoover outright of being “an accessory after the fact.”

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Stefan T. Possony

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THE investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination is “an American edition of a frame-up resembling the German Reichstag fire.” It serves “to shield the real culprits.” Thus spake the World Marxist Review in January 1964. In a similar vein, Joesten and Buchanan set out to show that Oswald never was a Marxist and that he did not murder the President.

Out of the original mess of conflicting and unevaluated bits of information, quite a few tall stories can be distilled without any trouble at all. Mr. Joesten is an A-student of Joseph Goebbels’ blunderbuss propaganda. He cumulates and telescopes “evidence” and demonstrates gleefully that 2 x 2 is not just 5, but conceivably might be eight. There was a “conspiracy of powerful men with a narrow circle of complicity in the middle echelon of the FBI and the Dallas police.” Mr. Henry M. Wade, District Attorney of Dallas County, is deemed to be a secret and dishonest ally of the FBI. Mr. J. Edgar Hoover’s “patriotic vestments are . . . in Samuel Johnson’s famous definition ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ ” Joesten accuses Mr. Hoover outright of being “an accessory after the fact.”