Taking A Darker View

Three weeks after its release, Oliver Stone's film JFK continues to stir passions and debate, and to prompt calls for the release of secret government files on the Kennedy assassination. Last week the controversy drew a response from President Bush, who said while traveling in Australia that although he had not seen the movie, he had no reason to doubt the Warren Commission's finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in shooting Kennedy. While no new evidence has emerged, the film has focused attention on the band of mostly self-appointed experts who zealously pursue theories of a wider plot. This subculture is explored here by Ron Rosenbaum, a contributing editor of Vanity Fair and the author of Travels with Doctor Death, who has written extensively on conspiracy theories.

Some years ago, during a telephone interview, I finally succeeded in badgering Jim Garrison into naming the Name. For years Garrison had been telling people he had the whole case cold: he knew who gave the orders, who fired the shots and from where. Still, though he had talked a lot about the Big Guys behind the plot -- intelligence agencies, the military-industrial complex and the like -- he had never publicly named the name of the man he believed fired the fatal head shot from the grassy knoll.

I won't tell you that name, because Garrison didn't give me any evidence for singling out this person for historic infamy. On another day, I felt, he might have picked another name out of the hat.

Still, for one guilty moment I had the kind of thrill that assassination buffs live for: I had the Name everyone else was looking for and no one else had. Of course, it wasn't an entirely unknown name. Garrison told me the person had been questioned extensively by Warren Commission investigators, and when I looked him up in the Warren Commission testimony, I found he plays a kind of Rosencrantz-and-Guilden stern-level role in the Warren Report, that of a peripheral figure in a key place: he was a live-in manager and janitor at Jack Ruby's sleazy strip joint, the Carousel Club. There's no doubt that the commission investigators were interested in his story -- the transcript of his testimony runs more than 200 pages -- but mostly because he was a source who might shed some light on the peculiarities of Jack Ruby's character (investigators repeatedly pressed the Name on whether Ruby had any sexual interest in his beloved dog Sheba).

Though reading the testimony didn't give me much intimation of an assassination revelation, it was a revelation of another kind. In telling his life story, of how he wound up in the Carousel Club in 1963, the Name was telling a story of an American life -- of an America -- far different from the one I'd known in my suburban hometown.