Rice couldn't believe what he had just heard. Gaping, he waited for West to smile, waited for him to say it was a joke.
West didn't smile. “I wasn't the only one involved. I can't take all the credit. Hennings was part of it. And two other men.”
Rice shook his head and repeated the litany which the American people had been taught by television, radio, and newspapers: “Lee Harvey Oswald was a psychotic, a loner, one man with one gun.”
“Oswald wasn't very stable,” West agreed. “But he wasn't even slightly psychotic. He was a sometimes CIA agent, a scapegoat. He never pulled the trigger.”
“But the Warren Commission—”
“Wanted to reassure the public, and quickly. Those men wanted to believe in Oswald. Investigators often prove what they want to prove. They're bunded by their own precepts.”
Andrew Rice quivered inside. He felt weak, faint, almost giddy. He wanted to believe West, for if one could assassinate a President and get away with it, the future of the United States was not, would never be again, in the hands of men who were in sympathy with the worldwide Communist movement. If men of great wealth, those who had the most to lose in a Communist takeover, were willing to assume this sort of indirect leadership of the country, leadership through assassination and whatever else was necessary, then democracy and capitalism were safe for an eternity! But it was too good to be true, too easy… He said, “It's difficult to believe so many people could be misled.”
“Americans are sheep,” West said. “They believe what they're told. They don't read. Most of them are interested only in sports, work, families, screwing each other's wives… In the vernacular—'They don't know from nothing.' And they don't want to know from nothing. They're happy with ignorance.” He saw that Rice wanted to believe but was having trouble accepting it. “Look, there are enough clues in the Warren Report to convince any reasonable man that Oswald was either part of a conspiracy or a scapegoat. Yet you never bothered to study the report and piece together the facts. If you accepted the commission's verdict, why shouldn't the average man accept it. You're a genius, or near it, and you never doubted.”
“What clues?” Rice asked.
Leaning forward in his chair so that they were in Something of a huddle over the footstools between them, West began to count them off: “One, the autopsy notes were burned. Do you think that's the usual procedure in a murder case?”
“I guess it isn't.”
West smiled. “Two. Oswald was given a paraffin test to see if his cheeks held nitrate deposits — which they would have had to hold if he'd recently fired a rifle. The test was negative. In any ordinary case, in any ordinary court, this would probably have cleared him of murder. Three. The first medical report from Parkland Hospital, later confirmed by autopsy, said the President was shot in the temple. The report still stands. Yet the commission decided that Oswald shot the President in the back of the neck. One bullet?”
Rice said nothing. He was sweating.
Caught up in his argument, smiling, West said, “Four. Julia Ann Mercer, resident of Dallas, observed Jack Ruby debark from a truck and climb that grassy knoll carrying what appeared to be a rifle wrapped in newspapers. Subsequent to the assassination, she tried to report Ruby to the FBI. We had men in the FBI, and she was ignored. The next day, as you know, Ruby murdered Oswald. Five. The Zapruder film shows that the fatal shot slammed the President backward and to his left. The laws of physics insist that the bullet came from in front and to the right of him. The grassy knoll. Yet we're told he was shot from behind. Six. A Dallas businessman named Warren Reynolds saw the man who shot Officer Tippit and chased him for approximately one block. He informed the FBI that the man who had shot Tippit was not Oswald. Two days later Reynolds was shot in the head by an unknown assailant. He survived. FBI men visited him in the hospital, and when he could talk again he had decided that it was Oswald who had shot Tippit. Domingo Benavides was only a few yards from Tippit when Tippit was shot. Benavides described the assailant as a man who did not even vaguely resemble Oswald. He was not asked to testify before the commission. Acquilla Clemons, another police witness, saw Tippit's killer and gave a description matching that supplied independently by Benavides. She was not called to testify before the commission. Mr. Frank Wright, whose wife called the ambulance for Tippit, was adamant that Oswald was not Tippit's killer. He was not called before the Warren Commission. A waitress, whose vantage point for the Tippit killing was not nearly so good as that of Benavides or the others, became the state's star witness. Even she could not identify Oswald, according to testimony in the commission report — yet in the summary the commission says she did positively identify Oswald.” He was still smiling. “Did you bother to read the report and locate this kind of material? There are hundreds of things like it.”
Rice licked his lips. His throat was dry. He was so excited he could barely speak. “No. I didn't look. I never looked.”
“And if you still doubt me,” West said smugly, “one more thing. Lee Harvey Oswald's Marine records, and testimony of friends he made in the Marines, show that he was an abysmal marksman barely able to pass his requirements. Yet the commission wants us to believe that he fired at a moving target, aiming through an opening in a tree's foliage, a situation that allowed him eight-tenths of a second to aim and fire. And he was using a mail-order rifle.” He laughed. “The commission asked three Master riflemen to re-create the assassination, just to show that it could be done as the commission said it had been done. The Masters used the Mannlicher-Cardano rifle Oswald had used, but only after the telescopic sight was remounted.”
Rice blinked. “Remounted?”
The sight wasn't aligned with the barrel and, therefore, whatever one saw through the telescope was not what the barrel was pointing at. We made a mistake planting the Mannlicher-Carcano. We should have made certain the gun at least could have been used for the job even if it wasn't. But it worked out well enough.”
“The Master riflemen,” Rice reminded him.
“Oh, yes. After the telescopic sight had been remounted, the three Masters tried their hands at a recreation. They were placed on a platform half as high as the sixth-floor window from which Lee Oswald supposedly fired the shot. Their target was not moving, while Oswald's target had been moving. They were allowed all the time they wanted to line up a shot— not eight-tenths of a second, as Oswald supposedly had. Their target was more than twice as large as the President's head had been. You know what? None of them could kill the target — or even come close to killing it.” He sighed and leaned back in his chair, picked up his cigar. “There was no need to make a perfect job of it. The files of evidence — which the public has been told again and again contain nothing that hasn't already been told — were sealed in the National Archives and will not be made public until the year 2039. This is for reasons of national security, we're told. And even then, even when they're told that worthless evidence must be kept secret for seventy-five years, the sheep suspect nothing.”