68
JACK LUDWIG
therefore, even
if
Lee Harvey Oswald was one of the riflemen, there
had to be at least another.
The screen flashed a cover of
Life.
Lee Harvey Oswald with the
telescopic sights on the rifle which killed John F. Kennedy-a touched–
up photo, Mark Lane said, pointing out details in the shadows on
Oswald's face and on the ground which clearly proved
Life
had used
a composite photograph.
The New York Times
was the next villain:
it published the same touched-up photo-worse, it probably did a
little dubbing on its own.
The audience was silent, sad, the girl on the ledge amoan with
appreciation of Mark Lane's brilliance and integrity. He took a brief
intermission.
Nobody left.
Outside, in the misting rain, people smoked, talked in low voices,
wondering, arguing a little among themselves. Most of
it
they had
heard before-at second or third hand. Some of what they heard was
in the
Times
supplement on the Commission report, except that Lane
now gave his side.
My law student neighbor hadn't left his seat when I returned.
"If
there's a conspiracy, wouldn't Bobby Kennedy want it known?
There is a kind of let's-sweep-it-under-the-rug side to the whole Com–
mission set-up and report, don't you think? Can
it
be that the family
knows they can't bring John Kennedy back to life, so why keep this
thing going? He makes you think, that man Lane. I'll never feel right
about this assassination, I guess."
The new villain of Lane's lecture was one he had hinted at before,
Chief Justice Earl Warren, whom he characterized as a poor lawyer
and, by extension, naturally, a less-than-competent Supreme Court
Justice. Again I had an odd feeling I was communing with both ends
of the political spectrum at one and the same moment. For wasn't this,
in an odd way, just another version of the "Impeach Earl Warren"
pitch, though Mark Lane was obviously too sophisticated to put it that
way. Warren was the cover-up chief. Lane began working him over
with little digs at his running down the stairs of the Book Depository
and timing himself; but what he ended with was something far more
insidious. That Earl Warren had wilfully blocked Mark Lane from
producing
his
witnesses,
his
evidence,
his
facts,
the
truth.
On and on, till midnight, Lane carried on his demonstration. Some
of it was valid, some debatable, some mere nonsense. But what emerged
was that simplistic view of things which must have causes for all its
effects; which must
blame
for all disasters; which cannot allow chance
