-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Editor's note: The following essay was published in Gold Coast magazine in
2008. It was reprinted in The Philadelphia Magazine Story - Making Publishing
History (Fort Lauderdale, FL: Sweeney, McCormick and Sons, Inc., 2013), pages
40 through 47, reproduced below with permission.
September 2013: A newly released reprinting is now available of: The Last
Investigation, by Gaeton Fonzi (Author) with Marie Fonzi (Preface), Skyhorse
Publishing, 496 pages.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chapter 6
The Odyssey Of An Investigation
In charting the history of Philadelphia magazine's growth from obscurity to
national recognition in less than ten years, the names D. Herbert Lipson and
Alan Halpern are linked. Halpern, the editor sometimes described as a
genius, is more aptly recalled as a gifted editor who understood his market
and his times. Lipson, the publisher, had a vision of what the magazine
could become and the sense to give Halpern largely a free hand, and to
support him in running stories that took considerable courage and exposed
him to legal risk.
At the time, however, another name eclipsed them both in the minds of many
among the growing and influential audience of Philadelphia magazine readers.
Beginning in the early 1960s, Gaeton Fonzi startled the city month after
month. He steadily built readership with a series of investigative stories,
colorful profiles and lifestyle pieces that, as a body of work, have few
comparisons in the history of magazine journalism. He and Greg Walter
exposed the corrupt Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Harry Karafin. His
two-part series on Walter Annenberg eventually became a book [Annenberg; A
Biography Of Power, NY: Weybright and Talley, 1970] and some credited it
with embarrassing the powerful publisher to the extent that he sold the
paper and left Philadelphia.
Less well-remembered, however, is a 1966 article which defined Fonzi's
reputation for the rest of his long career. Much of that reputation rests in
southern climes, after he moved to Florida in the early 1970s. He did
noteworthy work for Gold Coast and Miami magazines, at the time owned by the
same company. He was for several years editor of the latter. The work which
proved most enduring came to Fonzi because of his location in Florida;
however, it actually began at Philadelphia. It led to a book now regarded as
must reading for anyone who takes seriously the murder of an American
president. "The Last Investigation" originally appeared in two long magazine
articles in Gold Coast magazine in Fort Lauderdale and The Washingtonian
magazine. It evolved in book form in 1993, and in 2008 was re-published in
an updated version. Let Fonzi take over from here, from an article he wrote
for Gold Coast in 2008:
The Last Investigation
By Gaeton Fonzi
The title of my book, "The Last Investigation," was meant to convey an
element of cynicism and more than a touch of irony. It referred to the
just-completed inquiry into JFK's murder by the U.S. House Select Committee
on Assassinations. I worked for the Committee for almost two years as a
staff investigator, and later as an investigative team leader. Prior, I had
been an investigator on the staff of U.S. Sen. Richard Schweiker, who headed
a JFK assassination subcommittee of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence.
How "The Last Investigation" got published in South Florida, in Gold Coast
magazine, and how I became an official investigator for the U.S. Government,
parallels the evolvement of interest in the Kennedy assassination by two
magazine journalists out of Philadelphia: myself and Bernard McCormick, my
former Gold Coast partner and now editor and publisher.
Being in Philadelphia was the key because it was home of two individuals of
pivotal importance in the history of Kennedy assassination research. Arlen
Specter and Vince Salandria. Specter, at this writing running for his fifth
term as U.S. senator, then a young and ambitious assistant district
attorney, became a junior counsel on the Warren Commission and is credited
with authoring the now fabled "single bullet theory" -- the contention
critical to the Commission's conclusion that a lone gunman killed JFK. Vince
Salandria was a little-known school board lawyer who developed an intense
suspicion about the workings of the Warren Commission long before it issued
its report. He didn't like the secret meetings or the rumors it leaked about
designating "a lone nut" named Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin who
reportedly killed to gain attention, yet kept insisting he was innocent and
"a patsy."
McCormick and I were working for Philadelphia magazine at the time and heard
about a wild-eyed young lawyer giving talks to civic groups and writing
pieces in local legal journals contending that the Single Bullet Theory was
hogwash and that the Warren Commission Report was basically a fraud the U.S.
government was fostering on the American people. We thought Salandria was
likely some kind of lone nut.
But when McCormick and I met Salandria, a small fellow, soft-spoken and
intensely earnest, we were stunned that he could support his sensational
assertions with the Warren Commission's own evidence. Salandria gave me a
copy of the Commission's thick report, as well as its 26 volumes of
accompanying evidence. McCormick and I, interrupting our regular summer
assignment of evaluating the latest flock of classless beach birds at
Wildwood by the Sea, studied the report. It quickly became apparent that
Salandria's claims might be valid. There were blatant contradictions between
the Commission's conclusions and the evidence in key areas. Not gray or
minor differences, but stark black and white discrepancies.
I couldn't believe the prestigious members of the Warren Commission would
permit so many obvious misrepresentations of facts. Why hadn't the national
news media jumped on this story? I didn't realize then that even the big
media boys had screwed up, lured and then trapped into a defensive position
on the JFK murder that would last for years and still exists to this day.
The Commission had cleverly withheld release of its 26 volumes of evidence
until more than two months after the release of its report. A lengthy The
New York Times editorial, for instance, lavishly endorsed the Report's
conclusions without having available any supporting or contradicting
evidence.
At any rate, at the time I thought Arlen Specter would clear it all up for
me. A number of reporters had interviewed Specter when he had returned from
Washington and had asked him about the report. Specter, a former Yale Law
Debating Team captain, exuded confidence and authority in claiming that the
Warren Commission did the most thorough investigation in the history of
mankind. He exuberantly defended the report's lone gunman conclusion and the
"single bullet theory." Yet from their questions it was obvious that few
reporters, if any, had even read the 888-page Commission Report and likely
not one had even touched the 26 volumes of evidence. I would be the first
journalist to confront Specter with the details.
[The Warren Commission, The Truth, and Arlen Specter]
The 1966 article was based on the first interview with Arlen
Specter by someone prepared to ask important questions about
the conflicts in the "single bullet theory" which Specter
developed to support the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was
the lone assassin of President Kennedy. At the time, few
people had read the complete Warren Commission Report. One of
them was Philadelphia attorney Vincent Salandria, who had
briefed Gaeton Fonzi in detail before his meeting with Specter.
Fonzi wrote several more articles on the JFK murder. One who
read them was Pennsylvania Sen. Richard Schweiker. Some years
later he hired Fonzi as an investigator when the JFK
assassination inquiry was revived by a Congressional committee.
I had known and admired Specter as a young assistant DA, had even worked
with him on a story about his courageous battle with the corrupt local
Teamsters union. He was not only exceptionally articulate, but always
forthright and candid. But that day in Philadelphia and in the days of
follow-up interviews, I found another Arlen Specter. He hemmed and hawed and
mumbled in his attempt to explain critical points, he was evasive and
anything but forthright, often stammeringly frustrated in his inability to
provide rationale explanations.
I remember asking Specter one very critical question about the bullet holes
in the back of Kennedy's jacket and shirt. The "single bullet theory" hinged
on, among other factors, the bullet emerging from Kennedy's throat and
tumbling on to do all the damage to Governor John Connally's chest, wrist
and thigh. And yet here, I showed Specter, is a photo from the volumes of
evidence revealing that Kennedy's jacket and shirt had bullet holes at least
six inches down his back and well below where the bullet emerged from his
throat. If Oswald was supposedly firing from behind and above the President,
wouldn't the entrance wound, I asked Specter, be above the exit wound?
Specter sputtered and backed, danced around a few impossible possibilities,
finally got up from his desk and went behind me to use me as a model to
indicate that maybe Kennedy's jacket might have hunched up. He raised my arm
high to pull up my jacket. "See," he said, "he was waving." Yes, but not
that much, I said, showing him another photo from the volumes of evidence.
Besides, I asked, what about his form-fitting custom shirt? "Same thing,"
said Specter. And then realizing that was an inadequate explanation, he sat
down at his desk, shook his head and softly said, "I don't remember."
Didn't remember a defining issue about a critical piece of evidence in the
most important murder case in recent American history? I came away from my
two long sessions with Arlen Specter numb with disbelief. He had not eased
my concerns about the Warren Commission Report, he had magnified them.
Philadelphia titled the article "The Warren Commission, The Truth and Arlen
Specter." It garnered the attention of what began as a small core of
ordinary citizens who, like Salandria, had been paying attention and were
concerned that their government was not being truthful. (Yes, young folk,
there was a time when that was a difficult reality to embrace.) As they
began probing deeper into the Warren Report's evidence, these independent
researchers began spreading the word, holding forums, giving speeches and
publishing their findings in whatever publication that would print them,
however esoteric and obscure. Vince Salandria found a home for a few of his
historically important articles in the unlikely Computers and Automation
magazine.
["The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: A Model of Explanation,"
Issue 20, December 1971, pp. 32-40; "The Promotion of Domestic Discord,"
Issue 21, January 1972, pp. 37-39, 47.]
I did several follow-up articles and each one developed more information
that made the Warren Commission appear to be a scandalous cover-up of the
crime of the century. More than a decade later, then U.S. Sen. Richard
Schweiker (R-Pa) began to listen to the slowly rising grumble of the Warren
Commission critics. As a member of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, Schweiker was shocked to learn that CIA Director Allen Dulles
had withheld from the Warren Commission crucial revelations about the CIA's
plots to kill Fidel Castro. He decided to do some initial research into the
JFK case on his own. Tracing Lee Harvey Oswald's activities, he concluded
that "the fingerprints of intelligence" were all over them. Schweiker got
Intelligence Committee Chairman Frank Church's permission to form a
subcommittee to review the Kennedy case.
I had never met Schweiker but he remembered my story about Arlen Specter in
Philadelphia magazine. He also learned I had moved to South Florida and
that's what interested him. His subcommittee had been assigned a few
investigators from the committee's operations, but Schweiker was getting
concerned that, guided by CIA-provided documents, they were focusing too
narrowly on pro-Castro elements as possible suspects in Kennedy's murder.
And Schweiker felt that the involvement of anti-Castro Cubans was just as or
even more likely. To probe that possibility he needed a man on the street in
Little Havana. One day his top assistant called and asked if I could "check
out a few things" in Miami for the Senator. It would only take a couple of
weeks, he said.
We were still at it more than a year later when Schweiker was forced to shut
down his subcommittee because its parent Select Intelligence Committee was
expiring. But by that time we had gotten lucky and stumbled upon a secret
door. Cracked open a bit, the door revealed a world the government had long
denied existed -- an operative link between the most militant anti-Castro
groups and the Central Intelligence Agency. Every one of these groups
despised President Kennedy, blaming him for the failure of the Bay of Pigs
invasion and considered him "a coward and traitor" for making a deal with
Khrushchev to end the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, we discovered, the most
deadly terrorist actions of the most militant of these groups, was directed
by a CIA agent and that agent was linked directly to Lee Harvey Oswald.
Prior to being forced to wrap up his subcommittee's investigation, Sen.
Schweiker presented the Intelligence Committee the evidence and the key
informant we had developed in Miami. The committee reviewed the evidence,
questioned the informant, classified the information and declared it had
neither time nor funds to continue pursuing the new revelations. To
Schweiker's disappointment, the most significant evidence developed in his
subcommittee investigation never made it into the Committee's final report.
[Richard Schweiker to Gaeton Fonzi]
A letter that changed history. U.S. Senator Richard Schweiker
from Pennsylvania hired Gaeton Fonzi based on articles Fonzi had
written for Philadelphia magazine. Schweiker was convinced
Lee Harvey Oswald had U.S. intelligence connections. Fonzi
confirmed his suspicions.
Over the years, and with continuing revelations coming forth from citizen
researchers, the public had begun to accept the fact that the Warren
Commission had not performed a valid investigation, had instead distorted
and covered up evidence and had lied to the American people. Was Lee Harvey
Oswald the lone assassin or was there a conspiracy? The public was confused,
but beginning to lean sharply toward the latter. The citizen researchers
turned their increasing public support into a measure of political clout.
Finally, in 1976, Congress was pushed to establish a House Select Committee
to "conduct a full and complete investigation" of the circumstances
surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy. Shortly afterwards, I
was asked to join the committee's staff by its first chief counsel, Richard
Sprague, another former Philadelphia prosecutor with a reputation as tough,
uncompromising and scrupulously honest. Finally, I thought, there was going
to be a complete and valid investigation.
By the end of my tenure and the life of the House Select Committee on
Assassinations, I was more disillusioned than ever and convinced that, when
its report was issued, the American people were once again going to be
deceived. The Committee's claim that it had fulfilled its mandate to
"conduct a full and complete investigation" was going to be a lie. I wrote
"The Last Investigation" that appeared in Gold Coast magazine to explain
what really happened inside the committee, to reveal the distorted
priorities, the manipulations and political machinations that derailed any
legitimate effort to disclose the truth about the Kennedy assassination.
The Gold Coast article and subsequently the book, documented the
frustrations and planted obstructions blocking staffers' access to key
witnesses and documents. Blocked by whom? To some extent by the Committee's
own Congressional members who, for political expediencies, had voted to form
the committee but saw no residual political gain in being involved in a
Kennedy assassination investigation. They wanted it ended as quickly as
possible. These were the committee members who forced Chief Counsel Sprague
out when he dared to confront the CIA's power. And that's why the new Chief
Counsel, Robert Blakey, a former federal prosecutor, forthrightly told
staffers at our first meeting: "We have two priorities: One is to get the
report finished on deadline and the second is to do it within our budget."
Taken aback, I asked, "What about finding the truth about the Kennedy
assassination?" Blakey's reply: "Oh, sure, we'll do that too."
We didn't do that too. Instead the committee's investigation was sabotaged
at almost every important point along the way. And, for whatever assumptions
that may come from it, the most disabling roadblocks were set up by the
Central Intelligence Agency.
Chief Counsel Bob Blakey never believed it. Blakey had previously worked in
Washington and had experience running Congressional committees. He thought
he could sweet talk the Agency into complete cooperation. He ignored the
lesson Sprague had learned when he refused to sign the CIA Secrecy Oath in
return for access to its documents. "Why should I sign an agreement with an
agency that might be a subject in my investigation? " Sprague had asked.
Almost immediately, Sprague began to feel the heat. Critical barrages were
fired at him from Capitol Hill and members of his own committee took
potshots. A budget battle was the ostensible issue and, to keep the
Committee alive, Sprague resigned. Sprague later admitted, "I had no
problems in Washington until I bucked the CIA."
Blakey believed he could handle the CIA. He sat down with its top bosses and
negotiated and renegotiated "agreements" that would eventually provide
committee researchers access to all its files. Of course, all the
Committee's staffers who wanted access to the files had to first sign the
CIA Secrecy Oath. Blakey saw no problem with that.
Blakey always returned from Langley beaming with pride at his skillful
handling of the CIA. And on the surface it appeared that Blakey was
successful. Even the Agency's liaisons, wing-tipped bureaucrats who handled
committee staff requests for documents, became unusually friendly and
smilingly cooperative. And if it were necessary to research documents at
CIA's headquarters, committee staffers were greeted with an organized
efficiency.
That attitude didn't last long. Yet Blakey continued to maintain his
faith in the CIA's professed total cooperation even in the face of his
researchers' increasing number of complaints. Despite the unprecedented pact
Blakey had made with their top-level bosses, the CIA's operative-level
staffers were claiming that more and more requested documents were "unable
to be found," or were "missing for some reason," or were "inadvertently"
destroyed in routine file purges. Still Blakey refused to be cynical.
"Maybe they're telling the truth," he said. "Would the CIA lie to me?"
And yet now, a couple of decades later, there is hard evidence that the
Agency did lie to Blakey and to Congress and the American people. And that
evidence also reveals the deceit and shocking arrogance with which the
Agency handled those who tried to penetrate its fiefdom. A defining example
that recently came to light:
When Kennedy made a deal to avert a nuclear war stemming from the Cuban
Missile Crisis, among his stipulations to Khrushchev was that, in return for
removal of the missiles, he would shut down a secret guerilla war the
anti-Castro Cubans and the CIA were waging against Castro. Kennedy had
quietly supported this secret war and the CIA was providing money and covert
advisers to dozens of the groups. Directed by the CIA's JM/ WAVE station in
South Miami, the groups conducted very successful, almost nightly missions
into Cuba, destroying both military and civilian targets, burning government
buildings, planting bombs in large department stores and committing general
acts of terrorism.
But the Missile Crisis was a cathartic awakening for Kennedy. He suddenly
realized he had helped bring the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.
His subsequent speeches reflect a more conciliatory approach in dealing with
the Soviet Union. He also planned withdrawing troops from Vietnam and, to
augment his promise to Khrushchev that the U.S. would not invade Cuba, he
ordered the CIA to completely shut down the secret military operations of
the anti-Castro Cuban groups.
There are those who believe that in issuing directives to augment his
enlightened policy, JFK was signing his own death warrant. Among some of the
CIA's own field personnel, there appeared pockets of insubordination. A few
of the anti-Castro guerilla groups initially ignored his edict against
further military operations and one even tried to sink a Russian ship in
Havana harbor. To enforce his directive, Kennedy had to call on the U.S.
Navy and the Coast Guard to raid a few anti-Castro bases in Miami, the Keys
and the Bahamas -- bases the CIA itself had helped establish. What more
evidence could there be that Kennedy was a "traitor" and maybe, as the
leaflets being passed around Little Havana declared, a communist himself.
[Gaeton Fonzi on Biscayne Bay, 1993]
In probing this area of their investigation, the Assassinations Committee
staffers focused on a small number of anti-Castro Cuban groups that were the
most active and militant. The largest was the Student Revolutionary
Directorate, called the DRE from its Spanish acronym. What made the DRE more
significant than others was that, within hours of the assassination, rumors
and reports flew out of the DRE's branch in New Orleans that Lee Harvey
Oswald had tried to infiltrate the group. Its leaders, however, claimed they
had quickly seen through his guise and later caught him handing out
pro-Castro pamphlets to the public. That led to a street brawl which got
Oswald arrested briefly by the police and that, in turn, led to his
appearance on a local talk radio program defending his Marxist beliefs.
The Warren Commission used that DRE-generated incident to bolster its
portrait of Oswald as a pro-Castro fanatic. However, over the years
researchers burst that balloon of disinformation, producing evidence that
the pamphlets originated with a CIA front and Oswald was likely a willing
role player. By the time the Assassinations committee began probing the DRE,
emerging evidence had forced the Agency to retreat from its stance of
non-involvement with any anti-Castro Cuban group. It admitted it played an
"advisory" role with a few of the groups and, yes, the DRE among them. The
Committee researchers immediately requested all documents and records of the
agency's contacts with the DRE. They also asked the CIA to locate and
produce the DRE's control officer so that he could answer questions under
oath.
Just prior, Chief Counsel Blakey had brought some of his researchers'
complaints to the attention of the Agency's main liaison to the committee, a
usually glib lawyer named Scott Breckenridge. Now Breckenridge seemed
solicitous and suggested a "new point of contact" for the committee, an
expert the Agency would bring out of retirement to "facilitate" the
researchers' requests. His name was George Joannides.
Joannides was a tall, patrician-looking man who wore tailored suits and a
dour demeanor around the Committee's offices. It soon became apparent that
instead of facilitating document requests he was more and more dancing
around, delaying and blocking them. More, Joannides said, he could not find
any records indicating the name of the DRE's control officer or documents
revealing his operational activities with the group. Nor did he find any
records revealing Oswald's contacts with members of the DRE.
But, Joannides said, he would continue looking for the agency's DRE files as
well as any records which would help him identify and locate the agency's
control officer, the one man who would have the most information about the
DRE and its contact with Lee Harvey Oswald.
The tenure of the House Select Committee expired before the CIA ever
responded to its DRE document requests. Congressional committees come and
go, the CIA is a perpetual institution. The Agency chose to simply "wait
out" the committee's life. By law, the CIA's legal mandate is to function as
the Administration's intelligence advisory and support entity in a duly
elected democratic government. In fact, the CIA has evolved into an
independent institution, its ultimate priority survival. Refusing to comply
with dictates issued by elected representatives of the American people
reveals its disdain for the basic values of a democratic society. The
Assassinations Committee's relationship with the CIA regarding the DRE
indicates, in itself, what a renegade institution the Agency had become.
Through the lies and deceptions of Joannides, the CIA was able to control
and stifle the Committee's efforts to pursue the truth about an important --
perhaps pivotally crucial -- aspect of President Kennedy's assassination.
The CIA never informed the committee that Joannides was more than a clerkish
Agency expert in "facilitating" document requests. When Kennedy was
assassinated he was chief of Miami station JM/WAVE's "psychological warfare"
branch. He worked with the agency's legendary psych war guru, David Atlee
Phillips, who concocted many of the Oswald-as-pro-Castro misinformation
rumors planted immediately after the assassination. Phillips, who got the
CIA's equivalent of the Medal of Honor, was later promoted to Chief of the
Western Hemisphere Division, the agency's highest staff level. However, as a
young covert operative in the early '60s, he went by the name of Maurice
Bishop and planned at least two Castro assassination plots with another
militant Miami group, Alpha 66, headed by Antonio Veciana, a former bank
accountant. It was Veciana who saw "Bishop" meeting with Oswald in Dallas
weeks before Kennedy's murder.
Phillips had also been instrumental in helping members of the Student
Directorate regroup in Miami after they were forced to flee Havana. Once
reorganized and strengthened with zealous exiles anxious to take the fight
against Castro to its most effective level, the DRE was deemed by the Agency
to be worthy of a high degree of both advisory and monetary support. The
control agent the CIA assigned to the DRE soon began handing DRE's leaders a
monthly contribution that would reach, in current dollars, $1.5 million a
year.
More than 20 years later we finally learned the name of the CIA's control
agent assigned to the DRE. It was George Joannides. The man he said he could
not locate in CIA files was himself.
Many of the revelations about Joannides and the CIA's sabotaging the
Assassination Committee's investigation were uncovered by former Washington
Post reporter Jeff Morley, who discovered Joannides' personnel file in newly
released National Archives documents. The Post never ran his story, the
Kennedy assassination being history and the details too esoteric.
Chief Counsel Blakey, now a professor at Notre Dame Law, no longer believes
he was right in trusting the CIA. In fact, he now accuses the agency of
"obstruction of justice."
Several years ago there was a petition circulated asking that
still-classified CIA documents in the National Archives pertaining to the
assassination be released. Among those who signed was Robert Blakey. The man
who trusted the Agency had lived to rue the day.
End Of The Odyssey
We had hoped the Bronco would make it to see this book published. He made a
major contribution to it, both in editing and writing two excellent pieces
while suffering the debilitating effects of Parkinson's disease. Bronco was
Gaeton Fonzi's code name. It was coined by Frank King, our investigator,
probably with an assist from our good detective friend, Fran Lederer, more
than 40 years ago at Philadelphia magazine. Apparently it was an old
Philadelphia Irish neighborhood nickname for Italians. It is unclear whether
it was a term of derision or respect. Probably a bit of both, and in
Gaeton's case definitely the latter.
Anyway, Gaeton did not quite make it. He died August 30, 2012, several
months before this book was scheduled to appear. He did not go silently.
Major papers carried his obituary and the excellent one in the The New York
Times was picked up as far away as Europe and Australia. Walter Naedele's
obit in The Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Herb Lipson on the contribution
Gaeton made to Philadelphia magazine's explosive growth in the 1960s. The
Miami Herald emphasized Investigative pieces that originated in South
Florida. The New York Times quoted Robert Blakey, whom Gaeton had criticized
for trusting the CIA, when Blakey headed the congressional committee
reopening the inquiry into the death of President Kennedy in the late 1970s.
Blakey praised Gaeton's tenacity and admitted that he was right in claiming
the CIA impeded the investigation.
Those of us who followed Fonzi's JFK odyssey from that first meeting with
attorney Vince Salandria in Wildwood, New Jersey, in 1966, could not help
being struck by the irony of his remarkable sendoff. When Gaeton first wrote
about the Kennedy assassination in Philadelphia magazine, few people outside
of Philadelphia read it. In that time, those challenging the Warren
Commission were often characterized as publicity seeking sensationalists.
Fourteen years later, when he published magazine articles in Gold Coast in
Florida and The Washingtonian, there was a bit more interest, especially in
Washington where that magazine was sued by a CIA officer who thought he had
been libeled. The magazine won.
Even as late as 1993, when "The Last Investigation" was expanded into a
book, the response was muted. It was partly because Gerald Posner's "Case
Closed" appeared at the same time. Posner's book was incredibly shallow and
distorted; there is a suspicion it was commissioned by the CIA to offset
both Fonzi's book and Oliver Stone's film, "JFK." And yet numerous sources
praised Posner's book; it even was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Among
those dismissing Fonzi's book as confusing, while praising Posner's, was The
New York Times.
In the two decades since, much has changed. Fonzi's work has been a prime
source for other writers. [1] [2] They have validated "The Last
Investigation" with the support of recently declassified documents and
testimony of witnesses long silent in fear. Fonzi was sought out by writers
almost until his death, and in fact after it. His widow, Marie, still gets
contacts from researchers.
Paul Vitello, writing in the The New York Times which ignored him 20 years
ago, said "historians and researchers consider Mr. Fonzi's book among the
best of the roughly 600 published on the Kennedy assassination, and credit
him with raising doubts about the government's willingness to share
everything it knew."
The pendulum of time has a way of swinging in the direction of truth, even
if it takes 50 years and death to make it happen.
By Bernard McCormick
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/GaetonFonzi/LastInvestigation.html (hypertext)
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/GaetonFoniz/LastInvestigation.txt (text only)
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/GaetonFoniz/LastInvestigation.pdf (print ready)