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

Harold Weisberg    Unpublished Manuscript    Excerpt 1:

On a picture in which he is not identifiable taken during the shooting, Groden has this caption:

"A person who some later thought was Lee Harvey Oswald watched the assassination from the Depository’s front entrance (see pages 30 and 186). This man stayed in the doorway after the shooting and was eventually pressed into service running the Depository elevator for the police while they searched the building."

The man not here identified Groden later suggests was Billy Nolan Lovelady. Groden was well aware of my publication of this matter Whitewash II and of what I had done to develop evidence based on which people could make their own minds up. That

included a year of effort with the Wide World Pictures component of the Associated Press. 

After a year it finally located and sold me the rights to the well known photograph taken by its photographer, Ike Altgens. The use I made of it in Whitewash II was the first full publication of it

anywhere. All the versions used by the Commission were cropped in various ways. Groden makes full and uncredited use of this work done for me by a professional photo lab as his own

work not only on these two pages but also on page 185. But his using the picture or as I did and he duplicates later, an enlargement of that part of it, he denies his reader the information that to

his knowledge I did bring to light in Whitewash II, particularly on its last page and the facing inside back cover.

Consistent with his intent to argue a preconception rather than to report is what Groden omits, although he did that work for me. Also consistent is what he misrepresents in what he took from Tony Summers’ book and presents as his own work, the story that Carolyn Arnold saw Oswald in the second floor lunchroom when neither she nor Oswald could have been there.

Photo editors, as I reported in Whitewash II, immediately wondered if the man seen in the Altgens picture seeming to be standing against the west end of the building’s front

stairs was Oswald. Groden does not get into his version of this until page 196. He hides this matter until then despite the earlier use of these pictures.

Consistent in his intent he does use a picture here in which that man, whether Oswald or Lovelady, is not visible and thus it means nothing to the reader. Saying that this unnamed man was “pressed into service running the” elevator for the police is to argue without so saying that he was Lovelady and could not have been Oswald. (It was quite some time before Lovelady could have operated that elevator.)

If the Altgens’ picture holds proof that Oswald was on the outside of the building during the assassination that is the most total destruction of the entire case of Oswald as the assassin.

This then is an important question. I give this more time and attention for this reason and because it also addresses Groden’s honsety in what he uses and how he uses it. He once again

uses this as his own work when it is not.

As we have seen, Carolyn Arnold told the FBI that she had seen Oswald “standing in the hallway between the front door and the double doors leading to the warehouse at about 12:25 p.m., November 22, 1963”. (Photographic Whitewash, pages 210

- 11).

Robert MacNeil, then a reporter with NBC News, said that Oswald directed him to a phone also on the first floor. Groden distorts and misrepresents this on page 49. Groden does admit that MacNeil said it was Oswald who had directed him to that phone but as Groden rearranges what is known he gives the impression that was later than it was.

There were others who also placed Oswald on the first floor when that would have made it impossible for him to have been on the sixth floor firing away. One of these others was Pierce Allman. Allman then was program director of WFAA-TV. The Secret Service had a special interest in this because during Oswald’s interrogation on the day of the assassination he told the police that when he was at the front door, “two men one with a crew cut....identified themselves as Secret Service Agents and asked for the location of a telephone”.

With Allman was his coworker, Terrence Ford, who was the program director of the companion radio station. And as the Secret Service report on this states, Allman had his hair

crew cut. He also had press credentials that could have been mistaken for those of the Secret Service. 

In any event, in the report made by its agent, Roger C. Warner from its file CO - 2 -34,030, the Commission’s file No. 354, the Secret Service concluded that Allman “is believed to be the man Oswald saw on the first floor immediately after the assassination”.