Chicago Tribune, Sunday, September Nonfiction Who didn't kill JFK? Gerald Posner shines the cold light of sanity on the host of conspirac■

Case Closed: by the time he was 17. Lee Harvey Oswald and His stormy childhood led to the Assassination of JFK his fixation with a sort of infan- By Gerald Posner tile leftism, which manifested Random House, 607 pages, $25 itself in lifelong interest in com- Reviewed by Jeffrey Toobin munism and the Soviet Union. A staff writer at the New Yorker and Notwithstanding these inclina- author of "Opening Arguments: A Young Lawyer's First Case—United States v. tions, he joined the Marines, but Oliver North" (one of the many myths that Posner explodes) never gained access to any great national se- ndertaking a serious in- crets in the Corps. The truth is vestigation of President more mundane. He was simply John F. Kennedy's as- a washout. sassination is a little After his military service, U like conducting a sober Oswald embarked on the most study of unidentified flying ob- bizarre chapter of his life, the jets. There is nothing inherently one that became the fount for frivolous about either subject. many of the conspiracy theo- But both fields have been domi- ries. He defected to Russia. It nated for so long by crackpots was, in part, a political act. But and nut cases that a sort of mostly it seems to have been a guilt by association attaches to rather poignant attempt to get each new arrival. Don't we all, attention. on hearing that an otherwise re- For a while Oswald was a spectable :author like Gerald modest celebrity in Minsk—the Posner has taken on the death American Defector!—but the According to "Case Closed," the Warren Commission was right Lee of JFK (and the life of "JFK"),• novelty quickly wore off, and he wonder if the fellow has lost his became just another Soviet Harvey Oswald (above) was the lone assassin of President Kennedy. marbles? • trying to get along on lousy cited of Oswald's alleged co- second shot a "magic bullet," He hasn't. Unlike many of the food in a too-small apartment. After about three years in Rus- conspirators—had no reason to which survived in an impossi- 2,000 other books that have been want Walker dead. If Oswald bly pristine state after injuring written about the Kennedy as- sia, he came home. The Soviets—even the KGB—never had any co-conspirators inthe two men? No—the bullet per- sassintion, Posner's "Case Kennedy assassination, they formed as intended, and subse- Closed" is a resolutely sane had any use for him and were happy to see him go. Oswald certainly would not have want- quent tests on cadavers showed piece of work. More impor- ed him to take the risk of first that other bullets sustained ap- tantly, "Case Closed" is utterly and his Russian wife, Marina, settled near Dallas in 1962. He trying to kill Walker. The epi- proximately the same degree of convincing in its thesis, which sode is strong circumstantial damage. seems, in light of all that has continued to drift, quietly des- evidence that Oswald was sim- transpired over the past 30 perate. ply a lone crazyman with' a What of the famous grassy years, almost revolutionary. His Posner spends a great deal of powerful rifle. knoll? Was Kennedy shot from thesis is this: Lee Harvey time on one event the conspira- the front as well as from be- Oswald killed Kennedy by cy theorists tend to ignore. On The heart of "Case; Closed" is hind? No—there were 178 wit- himself. There was no conspira- April 10, 1963, using the same a reconstruction of the events of nesses to the shooting, and not cy. Fundamentally, the Warren mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano November 22, 1963. Posner rides one saw a gunman on the knoll. Commission was right. ; rifle that he would fire at JFK, all of the conspiracy theorists' Several saw Oswald fire. Ken- Oswald attempted to assassinate favorite hobbyhorses straight nedy's and Connally's wounds The bulk of "Case Closed" is a right-wing retired general out of town. are consistent with shots from devoted to Oswald's pathetic life named Edwin Walker, who was Did Oswald have time to fire the rear. story. His father died two prominent in Dallas politics. all three shots? Yes—the first If Kennedy was shot from the months before he was born. His By some fluke, Oswald's shot one missed, the second hit both mother was erratic and possibly rear, why does the Zapruder only grazed the general's hair. Kennedy and John Connally film show his head snapping insane. Oswald had moved 21 The CIA, the KGB and the and the third blew off the top of times (and attended 11 schools) back in that direction? Two rea- Mafia—the most commonly the President's head. Was that sons—because the bullet de-

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stroyed JFK's cortex and caused a neuromuscular spasm that jol- ted his head backward and be- cause of the "jet effect," the same phenomenon in physics that causes a rocket to go forward when its jet fuel is ejec- ted backward. In detailed (and often amusing) footnotes, Posner exposes the factual er- rors, fantasies and frauds that the conspiracy theorists have relied on to explain the events of that day. Posner concludes with a short history of the Warren Commis- sion—and the backlash against it. The tragedy of the Commis- sion, as Posner sees it, is that its deliberations were rushed, secretive and incomplete. Worse, the FBI and CIA never owned up to all they knew about Oswald and events relat- ing to the assassination. Those omissions were criti- cal—not because they would have changed the Commission's conclusions but because the dis- sembling encouraged the con- spiracy theorists' flights of fancy. As it turned out, the Warren Commission was perfec- tion itself compared with the "investigations" that followed it In particular, Posner's account of Jim Garrison—the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans district attorney whom Oliver Stone made the hero of his film "JFK"—is by turns horrifying and hilarious. I started "Case Closed" as a skeptic—and slightly put off by the presumpttlous title. To my I mind historical truth is always a slippery thing. The chances of knowing for sure what hap- pened in any event—much less one as murky as the Kennedy assassination—seem remote. But this fascinating and impor- tant book won me over. Case closed, indeed.