Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

Ralph,

Great job in writing a rebuttal to John McAdams' review of Richard Belzer's book Hit List.

I too wrote a reply.

If you are interested in including my remarks on your blog, I am attaching a copy below.


All the best,

James

(Professor James Norwood) 

************************

At the time of the 50th anniversary of the death of President Kennedy, I taught a course on the assassination. Many of the students became interested in the topic of how individuals with important knowledge about the assassination died under suspicious circumstances. I read and recommended to the students the book “Hit List” by Richard Belzer and David Wayne. Therefore, I must challenge every point the author is making in the review.

In fact, the review is so brief that it is impossible for the writer to develop and support his contention that there is an “intellectual slovenliness” to the scholarship of “Hit List.” The reviewer casually uses the term “factoid” to diminish the value of the true stories of people’s lives which were changed forever because of what they knew about the JFK assassination. For example, the book provides a discussion of eyewitness Warren Reynolds, who saw the man running from the scene of the Tippit shooting. Reynolds was at first unable to identify Lee Harvey Oswald as the man he observed. Later, after Reynolds miraculously survived a gunshot to the head, his memory was refreshed, and he changed his testimony to implicate Oswald as the shooter of Tippit. That “factoid” tells us a great deal about the widespread and fully-documented intimidation of eyewitnesses that occurred for many years after the assassination.

“Hit List” is a good starting point for the students to learn how and why the truth about the death our thirty-fifth president has been suppressed for over a half century. The book serves as an introduction to the lives of such individuals as Dorothy Kilgallen, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Lee Bowers, and William Bruce Pitzer. The lurid circumstances of their deaths are less significant than the explosive first-hand information they possessed about the truth of the death of President Kennedy. In this area, Richard Belzer and David Wayne have made an important contribution in “Hit List.”