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

Harold Weisberg   Unpublished Manuscript   Excerpt 4

As the photo expert for that committee, Groden could take his own pictures of that shirt. In doing that he gives the entire shirt the gold tone the entire shirt does not have. It is, as the FBI said, “rust brown”. He also posed the shirt to hide the other imperfections in it that are duplicated in the Altgens picture. He was able to obscure even the large tears in what once had been a good and perhaps expensive shirt that after being well worn had been given to Oswald. (note: it was a Russian shirt, brought back from Russia by Oswald)

In all, Groden prints four different pictures of Lovelady in that shirt with the large checks. The one he made for me from the Martin film is not listed in his photo credits on page

223. Next to it he has Lovelady in a similar pose but not in color. To the right of it he has one I recognize because I was responsible for its having been taken.

When Bob Richter was working on a TV special for CBS TV in 1967 he came to see me. I told him the story of the Altgens picture and of Mrs. Lovelady’s call to me. I suggested

that Richter ask Lovelady to wear that shirt and be photographed at the same angle and from the same distance while standing in the position of that man in the doorway. 

(Note: Harold Weisberg and I think the same. He asks: Why didn't Robert Groden take Lovelady to Dealey Plaza and photograph him in the doorway the way Altgens did? Why didn't he try to duplicate the Altgens photo in respect to Doorway Man?) 

Richter did not pose Lovelady that way but he did have him stand with that doorway in the background and with

Richter’s back in the foreground.

Groden’s film credits do not include any credit for this picture (page 223). His caption makes no mention of Richter’s name. It does not appear in the book.

But as Shakespeare told us, murder will out; cheap amateur crooks can also expose themselves for what they are and for what they are up to. Richter posed Lovelady with the upper part of his shirt intentionally unbuttoned. When Groden posed him, the one picture of the four that has any credit notice, he had Lovelady leave the two buttons unbuttoned, as Richter had. The button at the collar is hidden by the flopped over collar in each of these pictures but that the shirt had the button below it is visible in both. The Richter

picture shows buttons where there were none in the shirt in the Altgens picture. And neither picture shows any of the imperfections in the shirt in the Altgens picture, The picture Groden

posed was taken with a still camera. So was Richter’s but it is slightly out of focus. In the Groden picture the freshly laundered shirt on Lovelady looks as though it was brand new.

Where the greatest dishonesty comes in is on that pair of pictures, the one taken from the over-exposed Martin film and one not in color similar to and next to it.

What is clear in both of them is that Lovelady had his shirt buttoned up to the collar! That was impossible on the shirt in the Altgens picture! It was impossible for the shirt I examined with great care at the Archives.

Despite Groden’s obvious dishonesties in the picture of that shirt he staged at the Archives, he did not put buttons where there are none on that shirt (which the archivists would have prevented if he had tried).

What Groden has done is prove that the shirt Lovelady was wearing that day could not have been the shirt the man in the Altgens pictures was wearing that day! Lovelady’s shirt was fully buttoned at the very time the shirt on the man in the doorway was not buttoned where it could not be buttoned!

To reverse the statement of Sir Thomas Lipton, famous for his teas and boats, “Dishonesty is the best policy” for those seeking the truth about the assassination of their President, the dishonesty of those who do not want the truth or lie for various reasons and to

promote themselves or to make money.

Photographic experts can argue in their interpretations of the pictures. Groden, when he sent me the print from the Martin footage, believed it was proof that the shirt Lovelady

was wearing could not have been the shirt on the man in the doorway. Later, after working for the House assassins committee, he changed his mind about that. That committee began with

the unhidden intent of confirming the official “solutions” to the JFK and the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations to the highest degree possible. That is why, after my first few contacts with it on its invitation, I had no connection with it at all. That is why I always referred to it as “the House assassins committee”. It set out to and it did assassinate the truth.

But in the course of this variant of its special kind of dishonesty, in the course of adding the dishonesties noted above to his literary thievery in his book, Groden has staged the picture that proves that shirt on the man in the doorway could not have been on Lovelady and he comes as close as it is possible to come to proving that shirt in the Altgens picture is identical with what without question is the shirt Oswald was wearing that day.

“Button, button, whose got the button?” Lovelady had the buttons and not Oswald!

With their staged picture, Groden and that assassins committee, through their dishonesties, have come as close as with any single item of evidence anyone can come to exculpating Oswald.

But as we have seen, without exhausting the official evidence on the point this one item of evidence does not stand alone.

Oswald was seen on the first floor by a number of people who reported it. He could not have been on the sixth floor at the time of the shooting because the official time reconstructions alone (Whitewash, pages 36-38) proves he could not have been. This

is not all the evidence on this but it is enough to cite at this point.

Just as the FBI and the Commission set out to prove that Oswald was the lone assassin and could not avoid the proof that he was not and could not have been, so also did the House assassins, with their dishonesty and that of their hired hand Groden, prove Oswald’s

innocence while proclaiming the exact opposite.

It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that one of these pictures is worth a thousand words but the two of them together, the one of the shirt Oswald was wearing and the other of the shirt on (staged) Lovelady in the Martin film, certainly are. They show the possible value to honest people seeking the truth from the dishonesties of people who are not honest and are not seeking the truth.

It seems from all of the evidence, both of the photographs and the witness statements, that both Oswald and Lovelady were in that doorway but not at the same place in it.