The Mystery Makers

John Hanbury Angus Sparrow, a congenital skeptic and distinguished Oxford don whose obiter dicta have em braced such disparate subjects as the Profumo Affair, Lady Chatterley and the plagiarisms of a 17th century Polish poet, last week published his scholar's evaluation of the Warren Commission Report and its critics. A Latinist, an attorney by training and, for the last 15 years, warden of All Souls College--one of the most eminent posts in British academe--wartime Guardsman Sparrow, 61, concluded empirically that the Warren Report on the assassination must stand and that the "demonologists" who so often attack it have, without exception, forfeited serious intellectual consideration.

Sparrow's trenchant verdict on the assassination and the countless conspiracy theories that it engendered was rendered in an 18,000-word article in the London Times Literary Supplement. "While the assassination itself has till now remained the focus of attention," he wrote, "future historians are likely to be more interested in its aftermath.

As time goes by, it will become increasingly evident that the real mystery concerns not the doings of the protagonists in Dallas during the fatal week, but the subsequent performance of the mystery makers themselves and the success of their campaign. One is tempted to ask the very question that they themselves raise about the murders in Dallas: are they to be explained as the result of some complex antecedent combination, or were they the work of obsessed, unbalanced men, each acting independently?"

Sparrow does not believe so, but to his mind, the errors in the critics' reasoning are obvious. He observed that "they put forward good points and bad alike, mingle discredited assertions with valid evidence, and make up for weak links in their hypotheses by asseveration and abuse of the Dallas police, the FBI and the commission."

Oswald Alone. Specifically, Sparrow zeroes in on the elaborate theoretical situations the critics have constructed to bolster their contention that the assassination was a consummately scripted plot. One such thesis is that a sniper--not necessarily Lee Harvey Oswald--fired at the President from the Texas School Book Depository at the very moment that one or several other assassins fired from the grassy knoll overlooking the highway.

"While it may seem an extraordinary feat for Oswald to have hit his target in two out of three rapid-fire shots," argues Sparrow, it is more difficult yet "to believe that two men more than 100 yards apart and unable to see or communicate with each other, could have synchronized their fire so perfectly. And it is hardest of all to imagine that conspirators would have allowed the success of their plan to depend on such a feat of synchronization."

Sparrow also scoffs at the idea that a gunman could have fired from an exposed position and "got clean away in full view of the public." It was Oswald alone, he concludes, who killed the President. As for the demonologists, Sparrow marks them thus: ^ Joachim Joesten (Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy): "Mr. Joesten's story (that there were two conspiracies, one to kill the President, the other to kill Governor John B. Connally of Texas) is extravagant and incredible, his book a compound of bad English, bad temper and bad taste."

> Mark Lane (Rush to Judgment) and Harold Weisberg (Whitewash): These advocates adopted "a method of controversy that does not expose them to direct refutation: they offer no connected account of what they think occurred, Mr. Weisberg contenting himself with a ceaseless small-fire of rhetorical questions, Mr. Lane with a steady barrage of innuendo."

> Edward Epstein (Inquest): "Short, clear, extremely well-argued. But his book shows how a clever man can un wittingly allow parti pris to vitiate the building up and presentation of a case, so that a chain of reasoning leads to a conclusion that is in fact ill-founded.

In short, Mr. Epstein has proved about himself what he sought to prove about the commission."

>District Attorney Jim Garrison: "Now what about the 'Jolly Green Giant' of New Orleans? He is a quickwitted, forceful, ambitious man, with an engagingly frank and easy manner, but seriously lacking in judgment."

"How is it then," wonders Sparrow, "that people have fallen for the demonologists? The story proves, and has proved twice over, the truth of the old adage^-populus vult decipi: the public is very ready to be deceived." One reason, of course, is that "misrepresentation is too often like the Hydra. Cut off one of its heads and a score of others take its place."

In consequence, Warden Sparrow believes the U.S. will long be besmirched by a "stain deeper than the crime itself: that left by the appetite that could swallow scurrilities like MacBird! (for which Mr. Robert Lowell claims 'a kind of genius'), by the gullibility of the American public, and by the recklessness with which that gullibility has been exploited, under a law that allows almost unlimited calumny of public officials, at whatever cost to the reputation of the innocent."

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