Case closed?

A historian argues he's unearthed the 'truth' behind JFK's assassination, but the evidence falls short

President Kennedy (left), Texas Governor John Connally, and Jacqueline Kennedy, minutes before the president was shot. (Dallas morning news/KERA-TV)

The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy
By David Kaiser
Harvard University, 509 pp., illustrated, $35

As a professional historian with about 40 years' experience, David Kaiser is proud of his ability to locate and interpret evidence. That experience is a major reason Harvard University Press decided to enter the John F. Kennedy assassination book merry-go-round, now in its 45th year of operation, with Kaiser as its guy.

As an investigative journalist with about 40 years' experience, I have read a couple of dozen books purporting to solve the JFK assassination with curiosity. Skepticism, too. I understand the nature of evidence - I wrote a book used in newsrooms and classrooms about it - and because of that understanding, I doubt any author can solve all the mysteries surrounding the events of Nov. 22, 1963.

Kaiser and Harvard make some large claims. The book's publicity release asserts that "the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was an appalling and grisly conspiracy." Kaiser's phrasing in the book itself is less glitzy, but also suggests similar certainty.

"Hundreds of books on the Kennedy assassination have appeared," writes Kaiser, who teaches at the Naval War College and has published a previous book with Harvard about the Vietnam War, "but this is the first one written by a professional historian who has researched the available archives. Partly because of the evidentiary excesses or deficiencies of so many other authors, I have written this book not only to show what happened but to make clear how we know it."

Kaiser explains how Kennedy assassination research got off "to an unfortunate start. Much of this early work became an exercise in trying to show that [Lee Harvey] Oswald, who was indeed guilty, did not commit the crime. On the other hand, most of those who believed that Oswald was the assassin . . . have argued vehemently, in the face of a great deal of contrary evidence, that he acted without any help or encouragement from anyone."

Kaiser says the "truth," his word, is something else. Of all his explanations, perhaps the most succinct shows up on page 378: Oswald, just 24 years old, "shot and killed President Kennedy at the behest of organized crime, and specifically of Santo Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, John Martino, and possibly Sam Giancana."

But those men are only the most prominent of Kaiser's players with reasons to want the president reined in. Kaiser's scenario "involves presidential intimates, down-and-out mercenaries dreaming of glory, mobsters and their show-business paramours, hot-headed Cuban exiles, duplicitous CIA agents, FBI bugs in Chicago restaurants, a mysterious white Russian whose vast circle of friends included Jacqueline Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, and George H. W. Bush, American surveillance of embassies in a foreign capital, extreme right-wing businessmen and activists, the moribund and persecuted Communist Party of the United States, and a dogged FBI agent who never quite caught up to Lee Harvey Oswald in the weeks before the assassination."

Kaiser lays out his case logically, unlike many other assassination authors. But, as many authors have done in the past, he has fallen in love with portions of his research, and love can blind - or at least cause distortion.

The starkest example is Kaiser's use of testimony from Silvia Odio, a woman sometimes ignored, sometimes barely mentioned, and sometimes featured prominently in other assassination books. Kaiser is so enamored of Odio's importance that he opens his book with her.

During late September or early October 1963 (the precise date matters, but neither Odio nor Kaiser can pin it down, a warning sign that Kaiser deemphasizes), Odio was packing up her Dallas apartment for a move. She was a young divorced Cuban woman with four children. Odio's parents were in a Cuban prison because of their activity against Fidel Castro; she belonged to a group hoping to overthrow Castro with assistance from the US government.

Three men paid her a visit. Two of them, calling themselves "Leopoldo" and "Angelo," claimed to be Cubans, but Odio thought them Mexican. The third man, introduced to Odio as "Leon," seemed American. After the assassination less than two months later, Odio thought Leon was perhaps actually Oswald.

The men asked Odio to identify potential Dallas-area donors to the anti-Castro cause. A day or two later, according to Odio's memory, Leopoldo called her. He allegedly said Leon might try to enter Cuba to assassinate Castro, adding that Leon had commented that anti-Castro Cubans should have shot Kennedy after the failed Bay of Pigs incursion.

Kaiser believes what he calls the Odio incident "links Oswald and his crime to an enormous network of mobsters, anti-Castro Cubans and right-wing political activists. Together with other new evidence, it allows us to name several of the key players in the conspiracy."

I can't discount the possibility that Kaiser is correct. But, given the well-documented untrustworthiness of eyewitness identification, Odio's changing accounts over the years, the lack of certainty that Kaiser is correct when he surmises that Leopoldo and Angelo were actually Loran Hall and Lawrence Howard, and the apparent leap Kaiser is making even if the Hall and Howard identities are authentic, I can't endorse the overweening significance he ascribes to the Odio incident. In the end, using it as the foundation for calling "The Road to Dallas" the truest book about the case is unpersuasive.

Still, Kaiser and Harvard have produced a worthy book. I would recommend it to anybody as one of many interesting ways to learn about the JFK assassination. Beyond that, I cannot go.

Steve Weinberg is the author of "The Reporter's Handbook: An Investigator's Guide to Documents and Techniques." His most recent book, a dual biography of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, is being published this month by Norton.