A student of the assassination of John F. Kennedy has found that if one were to combine the various conspiracy theories surrounding that infamous crime there would be a total of 33 assassins in and around Dallas’ Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963, when the 35th president was shot and killed.
As anyone knows who has sampled the many books purporting to reveal the sinister secrets behind Kennedy’s death or has seen Oliver Stone’s conspiratorial movie “JFK,” the assassins had connections, collectively, to the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the White House, the mafia, the Dallas police, the KGB, anti-Castro Cubans, neo-Nazis and American business executives.
“And as of today, there are nine people who have confessed to being the `grassy knoll’ assassin,” says author Gerald Posner. “One guy, who’s now sitting in prison as a convicted murderer, has made a video of his confession that he’s selling in your neighborhood movie-rental store.”
No one who pays even minimal attention to the vagaries of human behavior, Posner says, should be surprised by this.
“All sorts of people came out of the woodwork to be a part of the Kennedy assassination, even though none of them had anything to do with it,” he says. “The same thing has happened with the assassination of Martin Luther King. It usually happens with every sensational crime. It’s a chance to make money or to be noticed or both. And when great leaders are killed, there’s a tendency to believe they were victims of clandestine plots by powerful people. It’s human nature.”
If some of us are prone to believe conspiracy theories, the 43-year-old Posner seems destined to probe them — or at least those that have arisen from two of this country’s most devastating political murders.
He is perhaps public enemy No. 1 to members of what might be called the JFK conspiracy industry because of his heretical 1993 best seller, “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy” (Anchor), which came to the conclusion that the Warren Commission got it right, that Oswald, acting alone, killed Kennedy.
When he began his research, Posner assumed some of the allegations about conspiracies might prove credible. After all, people do conspire to commit murder, including people in government — an example of which was the covert CIA plan to assassinate Fidel Castro, which came to light in the 1970s.
Yet in the end, he says, “the evidence (against a conspiracy) was overwhelming.”
Among a host of laudatory reviews, U.S. News and World Report wrote: “Posner . . . sweeps away decades of polemical smoke, layer by layer, and builds an unshakable case against JFK’s killer . . . Lee Harvey Oswald.”
An attorney who gave up the practice of law to write books, Posner is now getting the same kind of praise for “Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.” (Random House).
As he did in the earlier book, Posner examines all the conspiracy claims and scenarios in the King case and again finds no verifiable evidence to support any of them, which is also what the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations found in 1978.
Posner concludes that Ray, who died April 23, killed King, and although he may have hoped to garner a bounty on King’s life that he had heard about, he did not act at the direction or with the assistance of anyone else — with the possible exception of his brothers, both of whom, like him, were ex-convicts.
“One finishes this book reassured that no dark secrets remain, that no unexplained details need bedevil the national composure,” writes reviewer Richard Bernstein in The New York Times.
To be sure, not everyone is convinced of Ray’s guilt.
King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and the King children have stated publicly that they view Ray as an innocent patsy in an assassination plan engineered by agencies of the federal government, including the FBI and CIA, and have asked the Clinton administration to order another investigation of the case.
Last year, King’s son Dexter promoted media coverage of his visit to Ray in prison, where cameras showed him shaking Ray’s hand and declaring his family’s belief in his innocence.
Posner was troubled by the meeting.
“James Earl Ray had Martin Luther King’s blood on his hands,” he says. “I would have felt better if Dexter King had walked in and told Ray, `We think you’re involved in this, but we also think it’s a government plot.’ I think the Kings are wrong about the government plot, but at least they wouldn’t be exonerating Ray, which is a perversion of the truth.
“Even if you believe in a conspiracy, Ray’s at its heart. He buys the rifle that was the murder weapon, and his fingerprints are found on it, he rents a room in the rooming house from where the fatal shot was fired, and the minute after King is shot Ray has admitted that he was fleeing Memphis, by himself, driving to Atlanta overnight on back roads, disposing of all his belongings on roadsides along the way and wiping the car clean of fingerprints. This is a man who’s got guilt written all over him.”
– – –
Interviewed during a recent stopover in Chicago, Posner says what intrigued him most about the Kennedy and King cases was the absence of witnesses who saw Oswald or Ray firing the murder weapons and the ability of the killer or killers to get away from the crime scene.
“So there was a mystery in each case about who the shooter was, at least at first,” he says. “Obviously, this was different from the way it was with Sirhan Sirhan (in the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy) and John Hinckley (in his 1981 attempt on the life of President Ronald Reagan). You could see them on TV being wrestled to the ground with a gun in their hand.”
While questions about the identity of the assassins contributed to the rise of conspiracy theories in the two cases, Posner thinks the most important factor in their staying power was that there were no trials in which the evidence against Oswald and Ray was presented.
In the Kennedy case, of course, a trial was prevented when Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby, whose ties to organized crime provided more grist for the conspiracy mill.
In the King case, it was a decision by prosecutors to permit Ray to plead guilty to the King murder in return for a life sentence, which allowed him to avoid a trial and the risk of being sentenced to death.
Three days after his guilty plea in open court, Ray recanted — “like the shrewd criminal he was,” says Posner — insisting he was innocent and the unknowing pawn of a man he knew only as Raoul, an assertion he never retracted.
“The plea bargain was a mistake,” Posner says. “The Memphis prosecutors should have done what Sirhan’s prosecutors in Los Angeles did. When Sirhan’s lawyers said he wanted to plead guilty in return for a life sentence, the prosecutors said, `No way. We’re going to trial. You’ll present your case, and we’ll present ours, and all the evidence will be on the record.’ That should have also happened with Ray.
“And what people sometimes forget is that the King family had veto power over Ray’s guilty plea. Coretta King was asked if she wanted a trial, and she said no.
“So it’s interesting that when the King family recently began calling for the trial that Ray never had, they didn’t mention that 30 years ago Coretta King had decided against one.
“I know they shouldn’t be held to that decision, but if people think the wishes of the King family have been ignored, they’re mistaken.”
– – –
The person most responsible for the Kings’ public embrace of a government conspiracy, Posner believes, is William Pepper, Ray’s attorney and the author of “Orders to Kill” (Warner), published in 1995.
In it, Posner writes, Pepper implicates “the White House, the CIA, the FBI, Canadian and British intelligence, the Memphis police, military intelligence, the Green Berets, the National Guard and the mafia, among others.”
The King family’s inclination to believe Pepper’s explanation, Posner says, is understandable.
“Conspiracy theorists can be quite persuasive if you don’t investigate their claims,” he says. “Pepper has presented the Kings (with) witnesses who are trying to sell their stories to the movies for hundreds of thousands of dollars. These stories are demonstrably false. He’s sold them on the famous Raoul story, which is completely bogus. And he has given them documents that have turned out to be forgeries.
“I think the Kings are eager to believe in a government plot because they’re aware of the felonies the FBI committed against King in its secret campaign to discredit him, which is something we all know about today.
“And I agree with people who say that even if the FBI didn’t pull the trigger that day in Memphis — and they did not — the FBI nevertheless helped create an atmosphere in which a racist like Ray thought he might be able to take a shot at King for a few dollars and get away with it.”
Posner’s experience with the Kennedy and King cases, he says, has given him an appreciation for the reasons why many believe that people in government or the underworld were responsible for these crimes, despite conclusive evidence to the contrary.
“It’s not comforting to think your government would eliminate the great leaders of your country,” he says. “But at least that means there is some rational order in the universe, some rational order to our lives.
“It means that it takes great power to bring down people of great power, and the government, we believe, is ultimately powerful. To some of us, the thought that a Kennedy or a King could be killed by the kind of losers in life that Oswald and Ray were is very, very disturbing.
“It means that our world can be suddenly overturned by random acts of violence, which is what all of us fear. We want rational reasons for violence.”
