From: Eric Paddon DOROTHY KILGALLEN AND THE JFK ASSASSINATION Among the many candidates for the "mystery death" list first popularized by Penn Jones in 1967 is Dorothy Kilgallen on November 8, 1965. The well-known gossip columnist for the New York Journal-American, and regular panelist on the popular CBS game show "What's My Line?" had died in her sleep of an apparent overdose of drugs just hours after she had appeared on the regular Sunday night broadcast of "Line." Because Kilgallen had long made a career of covering famous criminal trials (including those of Bruno Hauptmann and Dr. Sam Sheppard), and because she had attended the trial of Jack Ruby and was conducting her own skeptical investigation of the JFK assassination, rumors were immediately spread by conspiracy authors Jones and Mark Lane that her death was somehow connected to the assassination. That she had allegedly been preparing a major scoop that would blow the lid off the Warren Report, and was therefore "silenced" by the forces behind the conspiracy. Her biographer Lee Israel repeated these charges virtually unchallenged in her 1979 book (i) Kilgallen (i), and even used the supposed assassination connection as the book's primary selling point. Although not all conspiracy authors have bought into the Kilgallen story (even Ramparts magazine was quick to dismiss the idea at a time when they were promoting other conspiracy authors), there has not been an adequate rebuttal to it from Warren Commission defenders. Gerald Posner, in his dissection of the "mystery deaths" in (i) Case Closed (i), is much too dismissive in his treatment of Kilgallen. He does note that an oft-told story about Kilgallen's JFK investigation, that she had a "private interview" with Jack Ruby during his trial, is not supported by Hugh Aynesworth who also covered the trial, and who recalled her "interview" as being no more than several minutes during a recess while surrounded by other reporters. Beyond that, he offers nothing else that would satisfy those who's impressions of Kilgallen were formed by the Israel biography. To this author, the surest way of demonstrating the absurdity of the Kilgallen story, is not to focus too strongly on her long-bout with alcoholism and barbituate addiction (which was at its worst in the immediate years prior to her death and is graphically visible in the reruns of "What's My Line?", where her speech is slurry and thick on numerous programs throughout 1965) that likely caused her death. Rather, when one focuses on exactly what Kilgallen had supposedly uncovered about the assassination and who her sources were, it becomes clear that she could not possibly have been "silenced" for what she knew. The sum total of what she knew was a cacophony of erroneous assumptions and misinformation fed to her by dishonest sources, which she then proceeded to act on in a haphazard manner. After covering the Jack Ruby trial, Kilgallen first became interested in investigating the assassination when somone leaked a copy of Ruby's Warren Commission testimony to her two months before the Report was published. This leak from someone she would only describe as being "inside the Commission and a friend of long standing" caused Warren Commission counsel Lee Rankin to order the FBI to find out who was behind this indiscretion. Accordingly, the FBI spent several days in September 1964 interviewing staff members who would have had access to the transcript as well as Ruby's attorney Joseph Tonahill, all of whom denied being the source. When Kilgallen charged in her Spetember 30, 1964 column that the FBI "might have been more profitably employed in probing the facts of the case rather than how I got them", and thus implied that she had been unnecessarily harassed, there was an angry reaction from inside the Bureau. New York Officer Supervisor Jack Danahy phoned the Washington office and emphasized that in two previous interviews, Kilgallen had been well aware that the FBI investigation of the leak had been in response to a direct request from the Warren Commission and that her implication was false. Another memo from that same night, noted that days before the column appeared, Kilgallen had promised to provide the FBI with a photostat of the last page of the Ruby transcript for examiniation, but that "she had given all sorts of excuses for not furnishing [it]." Believing that Kilgallen had unjustly maligned the Bureau, the decision was made to drop the investigation of the leak altogether and initiate no further contact with Kilgallen. By this point, their impression of Kilgallen was that of a devious reporter who had furnished them with useless leads before (in December 1963, they had reluctantly decided to investigate an assertion in her column that a prominent TV star who had been friends with Ruby was worried about his connections with the man coming to light. Their interview with Kilgallen on this matter is not available, obviously because it would harm the reputation of a man who was totally innocent), and that she would evidently cause more trouble for the Bureau's image if they kept paying attention to her too much. And so, more than a year before her death, the FBI dropped all further interest in Kilgallen. There is no evidence to indicate that they took seriously any of the things she would write in September 1964 that became the cornerstone for her "investigation" into the Kennedy Assassination. That "investigation" began in late August 1964 when she travelled to Dallas and obtained the transcript of the Police Department radio logs for the day of the assassination, and used them as the basis for an August 23, piece in the Journal-American. The story was written to play-up what she considered to be a "startling revelation" that as soon as the shots had been fired, Chief Jesse Curry had issued an order to "get a man on top of the overpass and see what happened up there." But Kilgallen noted that "twenty four hour after the assassination, however, Chief Curry assured reporters that the sound of the shots told him at once they had come from the Texas School Book Depository and that 'right away' he radioed an order to surround and search the building." Biographer Israel chooses to treat this "revelation" with the importance one would treat the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, and notes that the Warren Commission never mentioned the nature of Chief Curry's initial order at 12:30. But what was the real value of this "revelation" to the actual case? In substantive terms, absolutely nothing. The only thing it did prove was that 24 hours after the shooting, Chief Curry decided to be a blowhard and inflate his own powers of perception in what was no doubt, an effort to salvage some credibility for himself and the Dallas Police Department. What Kilgallen, and later Israel, never stopped to think about was the possibility that Chief Curry, who had been riding ahead of the president's car, was simply confused in the haste of the moment. Considering that no evidence was ever found to suggest a shot from the overpass, the worthlessness of Kilgallen's "revelation" is even more obvious. What Kilgallen did next to fuel her skepticism, bordered on the comic, even though Israel wrote about it with dead seriousness. Learning that the Dallas Police had relied on Howard Brennan's description of a gunman from his vantage point in Dealey Plaza, Kilgallen decided to conduct her own idea of a scientific reenactment, for which she enlisted the help of her alcoholic and abusive husband Richard Kollmar. The reenactment would not take place in Dallas at the actual location under the sunny, noontime conditions identical to those of November 22nd (as the Warren Commission's own reenactment was), but would instead take place at night outside Kilgallen's Manhattan apartment. "Late one night, with the lights on in the house, Richard positioned himself, broomstick in hand, leaning out of one of their fifth-floor corner windows. Dorothy went outside to East 68th Street. Standing at the approximate distance that Brennan had been situated [Kilgallen evidently forgot that Brennan had been seated on a ledge with a better vantage point than those standing at street level], she craned up at her play-acting husband, hoping, doubtlessly, that they were unobserved by neighbors. Dorothy concluded that there was no way in the world that such a description could have been accurately determined by Brennan." In other words, Lee Israel believes we should be impressed by a conclusion drawn from a re-enactment under conditions that did not even remotely resemble those of Howard Brennan's vantage point in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, and which was also arrived at without the benefit of talking to Brennan himself. One can only marvel at how Kilgallen, who had covered enough criminal trials in her career to know better, could have made such a bold judgment based on a clear perversion of the scientific process. After this breathless description of Kilgallen's supposedly brilliant detective work, Israel claims she was eventually vindicated by the Zapruder film, because the infamous movie of the JFK assassination revealed that Brennan "was not even looking up at the time the shots were fired." This declaration though, is totally false. Brennan's testimony before the Warren Commission was that he looked up at the Depository and saw the gunman firing his final shot, which was the head shot of frame 313 of the Zapruder film. Brennan is not visible in the film at that point. He can only be seen from frames 134 to 212 (nearly six seconds before the head shot), which is a point encompassing the first shot, and when by his own testimony he was not looking up at the Depository. Just how valuable Israel's scholarly attentiveness is, becomes clear when she admits that she herself did not view the Zapruder film to make this assertion. Rather, she simply took the word of one man who had seen the film and made his assertion about Brennan that she repeated verbatim. That man was Mark Lane, author of the bestselling 1966 conspiracy-book (i) Rush To Judgment (i). But as one reads on, one learns that Mark Lane, who's twisted deceptions in (i) Rush To Judgment (i) have been ably documented elsewhere, was not simply a source for Lee Israel. As it turns out, nearly all of Dorothy Kilgallen's "leads" on the JFK assassination that supposedly had her on the verge of "breaking open the case" at the time of her death, originated entirely with Mark Lane and no one else. Ecstatic by the results of her "investigation", Kilgallen had contacted Lane at his Citizens Committee Inquiry office to tell him her desire to "break the case." From that point forward, Kilgallen was entirely in Mark Lane's hands as far as assassination information went. Because of the controversy surrounding the unauthorized leak of Jack Ruby's WC testimony, Kilgallen had developed the suspicion that she was being watched by the intelligence community, and given Lane's determination to prove somehow that the assassination had been planned by American intelligence agencies, he wasn't about to do anything to discourage that suspicion. Whenever they contacted each other to discuss the assassination, they resorted to tricks reminiscent of bad spy movies. At Kilgallen's suggestion they would use separate telephone booths and use codenames for each other, while on another occasion they "exchanged information under a lamppost." At this particular point in time, late 1964, Mark Lane was in desperate need of an audience. His efforts at "representing" Lee Harvey Oswald before the Warren Commission had gone badly for him, with Chief Justice Warren and all those who had heard his dishonest attempts to impeach Tippit murder-eyewitness Helen Markham, essentially dismissing him as a kook. Believing that he was being blackballed from getting his "information" out into the mainstream media, the chance to use a popular mainstream columnist like Kilgallen could only have been manna from heaven for Lane. And with Kilgallen already convinced of a conspiracy based on her shoddy research, she proceeded to accept uncritically everything Mark Lane and his staff gave to her. September 1964 saw Kilgallen use her nationally syndicated "Voice Of Broadway" column several times to promote Lane's "evidence." It was Kilgallen, who on September 3, gave the first account of the story Lane had told the Warren Commission about the alleged "meeting" at the Carousel Club between Jack Ruby, J.D. Tippit, and Bernard Weissmann (the author of the anti-Kennedy ad that had upset Ruby on the day of the assassination), and to her it seemed interesting that Jack Ruby had never flat-out denied that such a meeting had occurred when he'd been asked about it by the Warren Commission. Kilgallen also siezed on a bizarre trivality in which the purloined Ruby testimony indicated that a mysterious "oil man" had also been linked to the meeting with Tippit and Weissman, but that Lane had never mentioned such an oil man in his WC testimony, and that therefore the original story of a Carousel Club meeting had to have been confirmed by at least one other, unknown source. It was a case of looking at a tree in what was a non-existent forest. Had Kilgallen waited only another month for the entire Warren Report to be released, she would have found that the story was completely absurd. Ruby had not known J.D. Tippit, but rather G.M. Tippit of the special services bureau. Weisssman, a 26 year old carpet salesman who had only been in Dallas for three weeks, had never been to the Carousel Club, and as it turned out, witnesses who had claimed they thought they had seen Weissman in the club at one time (Larry Crafard and Karen Carlin), both admitted to the FBI in their original statements that they were probably thinking of another person entirely. Kilgallen already knew what the Warren Commission didn't, the original source of the story, who was Fort Worth reporter Thayer Waldo. It is also reasonable that she knew who had furnished the story to Waldo. When the full details of that came out in 1966 with the publication of (i) Rush To Judgment (i), it was up to another reporter, Charles Roberts of Newsweek, to ask the salient questions that had managed to escape Kilgallen's attention in the year prior to her death. "Waldo's informant in turn, was a customer of Ruby's who dated a stripper and who 'understandably did not wish his visits to the Carousel to attract attention because he was a married man and his girlfriend had become pregnant.' Thus, Lane asks us to believe that he and Waldo knew of a witness to a meeting that might literally have involved thenational security, but refused to name that witness to a Presidential fact-finding commission. In so doing, I submit he is either admitting the story was a hoax and he knew it, or he is asking us to believe that he places the family security of a Carousel customer over the security of his country. I am inclined to accept the former." The fact that Kilgallen did not see fit to contact Bernard Weissman or the family of Officer J.D. Tippit before running Lane's story goes unmentioned by Lee Israel. The next Kilgallen exclusive from Lane was another story he would eagerly promote in later years, the question of whether a Mauser rifle had been found on the sixth floor and been switched with Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano, which Lane based solely on the initial mistaken recollections of deputy Seymour Weitzman. As was the case of Kilgallen's refusal to accept Chief Curry's initial recollection of the location of the shots as a simple mistake, so too was she unwilling to accept the fact that Weitzman, in the panic of the shooting's aftermath, had made an honest mistake as well. Since newsfilm was taken of the rifle being removed and confirms it to be a Mannlicher, this was another Kilgallen exclusive that had no substantive value. The same story highlighting the "Mauser" theory, contained another exclusive courtesy of Mark Lane, his discovery of alleged Tippit murder eyewitness Acquilla Clemmons who claimed that there had been two gunmen and that Dallas policemen had threatened her not to talk. But since Kilgallen had not consulted the Warren Report in full, she evidently did not realize that over ten witnesses had unequivocally identified Oswald as the sole killer of Tippit or saw him immediately fleeing the murder scene, and that the accounts of those ten far outweighed anything Acquilla Clemmons could have credibly claimed to see. When the Commission Report finally came out shortly after the last of her exclusives had run, Kilgallen refused to take note of any of the obvious holes in what Mark Lane had given her. In the same column that aroused the FBI's ire for her false implication that they had harassed her over the leak of the Ruby transcript, she also added this. "At any rate the whole thing smells a bit fishy. It's a mite too simple that a chap kills the President of the United States, escapes from that bother, kills a policeman, eventually is apprehended in a movie theater under circumstances that defy every law of police procedure [Kilgallen evidently did not choose to consult the testimony of Johnny Brewer], and subsequently is murdered under extraordinary circumstances." To her close friends, such as "What's My Line's?" production manager Bob Bach, she was more blunt. She considered the Warren Commission Report "laughable" and vowed that she would "break the real story and have the biggest scoop of the century." (One can only wonder with amusement what the moderator of WML?, John Charles Daly, thought of all this, since he was married to Chief Justice Warren's daughter) Determined as she said she was, a careful reading of Lee Israel's biography indicates that after she ran these "exclusives" fed to her by Mark Lane in September 1964, her active investigation of the JFK assassination virtually ceased. The rest of 1964 and 1965 was largely devoted to the writing of her book "Murder One", which was to describe all the famous trials she had covered throughout her thirty year career. Rumors were later circulated after her death that "Murder One" was to be the forum where she would reveal the allegedly shocking details of her "exclusive" interview with Jack Ruby during his trial. But even putting aside the fact that the question of her ever having an "exclusive" with Ruby has been disputed by Hugh Aynesworth, Earl Ruby and his attorney Elmer Gertz (Joseph Tonahill, who would talk at length about an "exclusive" to Lee Israel in the 1970s, told an entirely different story to the FBI in 1964 while Kilgallen was still alive, saying only that she was just one of many reporters who had requested permission for an interview), one has to wonder what could Ruby possibly have told her that would have had any meaningful impact? Considering that Ruby would live another two years in an advanced state of mental deterioration where he would tell outlandish stories of Jews being murdered in tbe basement of the Dallas Police Department, it doesn't seem likely that anything he could have told Kilgallen at one time would have changed the nature of the facts about the JFK assassination. She did remain in touch with Mark Lane on several occasions, one of which was to concur with his assertions that the LIFE magazine photos of Oswald holding the rifle had to have been faked. At this point, Lee Israel again displays the value of her scholarship by telling the reader that "photoanalysis in 1964 indicated that the real Oswald's head was superimposed on another body" and then tells the reader that such analysis was later vindicated by first quoting from Robert Sam Anson's ridiculous 1974 book (i) They've Killed The President! (i), and then telling us with fanfare that "photographic expert Robert Groden told the House Assassinations Committee in September 1978 that there was a 'paste-line through the chin' of Marina's purported portrait of an assassin." The reader is never told that Robert Groden was a lone wolf among nine photographic experts on the HSCA panel, the rest of whom unequivocally confirmed the authenticity of the backyard photographs. In light of Groden's recent performance at the O.J. Simpson civil trial, one can only wonder what Lee Israel thinks of him now. Kilgallen ran one last column on the JFK assassination on September 3, 1965. It was little more than a rehash of questions surrounding the photos, and an assertion that if Marina Oswald could explain the "real story" it would undoubtedly cause a "senastion." She closed by vowing, "This story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive---and there are a lot of them." She evidently found time to investigate one lead on her own in New Orleans. Her make-up artist for "What's My Line?" recalled Kilgallen telling him in October that she had planned to go to New Orleans to meet someone who would give her "information on the case." The appendix to Israel's book indicates that the contact was either Jim Garrison or one of his associates. This would make a great deal of sense. Mark Lane, in addition to providing Kilgallen with information, would also become a prime source of assistance to Garrison once his "investigation" kicked into high gear, and it may be possible that he or one of the other conspiracy authors he associated himself with, had referred Garrison to Kilgallen. It is worth noting that the connections of Lane and his associates to Garrison is never mentioned in Israel's book. What she learned, if anything, was never written up. In the early morning hours of November 8, 1965, just four hours after doing the live broadcast of "What's My Line?" and not long after she had left her next-day's column under the door of her apartment, Dorothy Kilgallen died under circumstances that remain puzzling to this day. The official expalantion of complications from barbituates and alcohol remains dubious to some people because they felt that Kilgallen was largely over her addictions by 1965, especially since she had recently begun a happy affair with a gentleman Israel describes as "The Out-Of-Towner". The tape of the "What's My Line?" broadcast however, clearly shows her slurring her speech at various points (not "crisply perfect" as Israel falsely claims). None of this affected her game-playing abilities, which were always superior to any other member of the panel, but it is clear that she was not in the best of health that particular night. In 1978, HSCA counsel Robert Blakey asked for a review of Kilgallen's autopsy (a copy of which is in the JFK Assassination files in the National Archives), but he and his staff evidently found nothing worth pursuing since no mention of Kilgallen ever made it into the final report. Someone might be able to prove someday that there was more to Dorothy Kilgallen's death than met the eye that night. But if someone succeeds in doing that, he will still not be able to show that it could have had any remote connection with the JFK assassination. If one encompasses everything she knew at the time of her death, it is clear that she did not have a clue as to what the truth really was. Her entire investigation had consisted of shoddy detective work on her part, coupled with false and misleading information from a dishonest gentleman named Mark Lane. Had she been able to tell the world everything she knew on the night of her death, they would have been given another sneak preview of some of the stories Mark Lane would trumpet in his book (i) Rush To Judgment (i), as well as a possible preview of some of Jim Garrison's outlandish assertions that culminated in his witchhunt against Clay Shaw. In both instances, Kilgallen had been nothing more than a courier, not an investigator. Considering that no ill-fortune befell either Lane or Garrison when their respective work appeared in full bloom by 1966 and 1967, the likelihood of Kilgallen's death being assassination-related becomes even more remote. Indeed, the FBI files available to us, indicate that at no time were they ever concerned about the nature of any of her 1964 assertions about the case that were fed to her by Lane. The only thing about Dorothy Kilgallen that ever worried the FBI was the prospect of more columns unjustly maligning their image if they continued their investigation of who leaked the Ruby transcript to her. Dorothy Kilgallen was without question a bright, intelligent woman who had solid credentials as a reporter, and who was the key to much of the success of "What's My Line?". It is unfortunate that at a time when she was not up to her best standards of health and deductive reasoning, she became a willing target for the deceptions of Mark Lane and company. She would not have been the first intelligent person to fall victim to Lane's chicanery. The distinguished historian Hugh Trevor-Roper also would be suckered by Lane, when he agreed to write the introduction to (i) Rush To Judgment (i) and made assertions about the case that only repeated unchallenged what Lane had told him. So too, did Dorothy Kilgallen have a bizarre willingness to accept everything Lane had given to her without utilizing any of her usual skills of reporter's skepticism and investigative prowess. The end result caused her tragic death to be surrounded in pointless sensationalism and disinformation that ultimately did her memory a tragic disservice.