arlen and the fonz

Dueling Obituaries

by Sam Enderby

10/17/2012

Around the time of that Anti-War March on Washington (see July 5 post) in April, 1971 - the one where John Kerry gave that moving testimony to the Fulbright committee- the eminent Dr. Emil L. Fackenheim, then professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, was invited to give one of those fancily endowed lectures on the advancement of Jewish Studies at Syracuse University. A Holocaust survivor, Dr. Fackenheim had already published his 

"SAVING THE TORAH'
oil on canvas by
Jacqueline Jolles

noted book on "the religious dimension" in Hegel ( I couldn't put it down) but had yet to publish his two most famous works The Jewish Return into History and To Mend The World in which, in both, he expands on his famous dictum, if you will, not to give Hitler any posthumous victories by basically being good observant Jews and better Christians (and Moslems?) The title of his lecture was "The Human Condition After Auschwitz" and he began it with a story from the Midrash Rabbah (sometime after the return from Babylonia the rabbis and scribes thought it a good idea to start, first, an oral tradition of expounding on the meaning and laws of the Torah in a way that would be more accessible to people, a study guide of sorts that would develop its own literary expression over the next several centuries- oy, I knew I should have started with the obituary) when God was about to create Adam: It seems the angels (now just go along with this its a story afterall), at least a few of them, were not too thrilled with this idea and the conversation went as follows: "Some said Let him be created and others said Let him not be created ." Love (the Angel Love, of course, who knew?) said, "Let him be created, for he will do loving deeds." But Truth said, "Let him not be created, for he will be all falsity, he is compounded of falsehood"(Did the Angel Truth ever lie?) And Righteousness (a righteous brother) said, "Let him be created, for he will do righteous deeds." Yet Peace (Peace !) said, "Let him not be created, for he will be full of strife." What did God do? He seized hold of Truth and cast it to the ground. And the angels were stunned and asked God why did you do that (They certainly had chutzpah, I mean it was God afterall) and God said something like let Truth arise from the ground and the question of  

whether man could face the truth and be was left dangling (I keep seeing Jack Nicholson yelling that we can't handle the truth). God was going to make Man, anyway, and the hell with Peace (my interpretation).

And so they buried Arlen yesterday, Tuesday, in Pennsylvania, according to Jewish Law, one presumes, replete with Frank Sinatra's "My Way" (note to my wife: if you can remember at my funeral - if you have one - and there's a Victrola around, I'd like the rabbi or the funereal assistant to play Sidney Bechet's 1937 recording with Tommy Ladnier of "When You and I Were Young, Maggie"). Joe Biden was there for his "good friend" and so was Ed Rendell, ex-governor and now almost a likeable pundit (he is, unfortunately, a point man for the oil companies and "fracking" interests in PA but then again where did that all start ?) on those cable and news shows, who called Arlen "a positive force for Pennsylvania". Arlen's son thought him "the patron saint of lost causes", which if you're keeping the scorecard is the bailiwick of St. Jude.

Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Senator, Is Dead at 82

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: October 14, 2012, WASHINGTON — Arlen Specter, the irascible senator from Pennsylvania who was at the center of many of the Senate’s most divisive legal battles — from the Supreme Court nominations of Robert H. Bork and Clarence Thomas to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton — only to lose his seat in 2010 after quitting the Republican Party to become a Democrat, died Sunday morning at his home in Philadelphia. He was 82.         

Hard-edged and tenacious yet ever the centrist, Mr. Specter was a part of American public life for more than four decades. As an ambitious young lawyer for the Warren Commission, he took credit for originating the theory that a single bullet, fired by a lone gunman, struck both President John F. Kennedy and Gov. John B. Connally of Texas. Seconds later, Kennedy was struck by a fatal shot to the head from the same gunman, the commission found.

If he had any regrets, Mr. Specter rarely admitted them.

Truth is a rare commodity indeed.

the "Commission"- or How not to investigate a murder

So rare in fact that it is a wonder whether anyone can recognize it at all and if they did or if someone was able to pick it out of a lineup would it matter? And yet can you name a more human and worthwhile pursuit? For most of Amercia's politicians its a sucker's game. Fackenheim wasn't talking about Amercian's lying politicos (much) but something even more horrible of course and something that with the sure passage of time will render the confrontation with it even more opaque. Of course he was addressing a mostly Jewish audience at a time of great tumult (when is it not a great tumult?) especially in the lives of Soviet Jews then who were for the first time in a long time affirming their Jewish identity as a group against what was still a ruthless system of oppression. Fackenheim wondered :

" Is heroism in evidence among ourselves, the comfortable, mostly middle-class Jews of North Amercia? In order to perceive any trace of it, we must break through the false but all-pervasive categories of a world which does not know of Auschwitz and does not wish to know of it."  

About a month before Arlen died, the New York Times reported that a man named Gaeton Fonzi died in Florida on Aug. 31. Mr. Fonzi also had a connection with Pennsylvania as had Arlen; he was born in Philadelphia and, like Arlen, attended the University of Pennsylvania. He was described as "relentless" in his position as staff investigator on the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the latter 1970's. Relentless was also the word used to describe Arlen in his various roles as  staff investigator ( he, too), prosecutor, senator. But in Arlen's case it wasn't in pursuit of truth  or justice that he brought his relentlessness to bear but rather their opposite. Mr. Fonzi's committee issued a final report that stated for everyone to hear that the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963 was probably the work of a CONSPIRACY. Arlen's committee, the famous WARREN COMMISSION, concluded in its final report that Oswald acted alone in killing the president. Mr. Fonzi was more dismayed at the way the committee he worked with just folded up its chairs and files and left the building after issuing such a pronouncement which totally refuted the official government report that Arlen so relentlessly worked on as a staffer on the Warren Commission 15 or so years before. There was no follow-up in either case.

Arlen who was brought into the Warren Commission by Gerald Ford which is in itself -at least to me- an oddity, worked relentlessly to make sure that whatever eyewitness testimony he deposed for the commission measured up to the conclusion that the Commission had already decided (through these past 48 (!) years it has been often conjectured whether the commission was part of a CONSPIRACY  to cover-up the murder or part of a sort of inner conspiracy to lie for the sake of the Amercian government and people who it was felt couldn't "handle the truth"- either way, a CONSPIRACY.). And just as he "distinguished" himself during his questioning or rather hectoring of Anita Hill almost 27 years later, Arlen was fashioning a nice reputation as a ladies' man with the closest eyewitness to the assassination (other than Mrs. Kennedy), Jean Hill.

Excuse this minor interruption:

(Judge Thomas: (replying to Orrin Hatch after the senator referred to Long Dong Silver for the twentieth time) "I would have preferred an assassin's bullet to this kind of living hell that they have put me and my family through."

Senator Hatch: (A few minutes later after referring to such "liberal" icons as Earl Warren, Felix Frankfurter, and William Rehnquist) "So, you would still like to serve on the Supreme Court?"

Judge Thomas: "I would rather die than withdraw from the process.")

You really should read the whole questioning of Prof. Hill by Arlen. Such a passionate advocate he was for truth.    

Jean Hill (red dress)
Zapruder film still

You can see Jean Hill in the Zapruder film (that some claim was neatly doctored by the FBI prior to public view). she is standing next to her friend, Mary Moorman, who was taking polaroid pictures near the curb opposite the grassy knoll when the President's car was passing by and the two women appear (Jean Hill is wearing a red coat) in the frames of the film just before the fatal and horrendous "head shot".

He won his first election to the Senate in 1980 and, as he recounted in his 2000 autobiography, “Passion for Truth,” immediately began courting Senator Strom Thurmond, the deeply conservative South Carolina Republican who was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, seeking a seat on the panel. ( I lost this attribution but take note of "deeply conservative"- it really should have read unrepentant racist)

Jean Hill became a reluctant witness as a result of intimidation and harassment and even threats to her life - from the FBI and Secret Service !, go figure. According to Phillip Nelson, who has written extensively on the assassination, she agreed to be interviewed by Arlen in Dallas and he "aggressively tried to get her to revise her testimony to be compatible with the official version of events.. The insulting and condescending treatment she received from Arlen for not cooperating in rewriting her story left her perplexed, confused, and disgusted that no one wanted to hear her story of the truth of what happened. She maintains in her interview that Arlen's behavior was contemptible; that she was coerced and bullied and her testimony cut up, splintered, and fragmented, with much of it taken off the record." He even threatened to put her in a mental institution if she didn't cooperate. He was also intimidating - (but not as threatening?) with the attending doctors in manipulating questions that made them appear to be stating facts when they weren't. And of course there was the SINGLE BULLET THEORY that helped cinch the whole Warren Commission report in a loose ribbon. It is known to history as Warren Commission Exhibit 399-"a round-tip, copper-jacketed bullet (allegedly) fired from the rifle of Lee Harvey Oswald' that was found under strange circumstances on a gurney in the Parkland Hospital where the President and Gov. Connally were taken and that Arlen insisted was found rather on Gov. Connolly's stretcher. "In sharp prosecutorial tones," writes Michael Kurtz, professor of history and dean at Southeastern Louisiana University," (Arlen) interrogated Darrell Tomlinson (the man who found the bullet on what he insisted was another gurney-unrelated to the governor's) as if he were a hostile witness because afterall, his testimony as it stood would have raised the possibility of the bullet's having been planted thereby demonstrating the existence of a conspiracy. Arlen simply ignored Tomlinson's clear and convincing original account and badgered him into coming around to Arlen's way of thinking."  

A man and his magic bullet

The following is lifted verbatim from any number of sources along the great conspiracy highway and I apologize for losing this particular source but as soon as I relocate it I shall place attribution immediately: "Gaeton Fonzi, then a reporter for Philadelphia Magazine and later an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, questioned Specter in 1966 about the difference between the Commission’s assertion that the wound was in the “back of the neck” vs. the physical hole placement in the coat. How, Fonzi asked Specter, could a shot have entered the back and exited the neck if the shot had come from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository where Oswald was supposed to have been firing from?"

The Bunched-Up Coat Theory

The only path from the hole in the shirt to the wound would have been an upward trajectory, not the necessary downward trajectory had the shot been fired from behind and above. Fonzi was surprised, and a little unnerved, to see a man he had until then respected and admired start to hem and haw.

“I still remember Specter hesitating, stuttering, making a few false starts in attempting to answer that question,” Fonzi noted at a researchers’ conference in 1998. “Finally, he got up from his desk and came around to stand behind me. Well, he said, it was because the President was waving his arm, and then, trying to illustrate why the jacket would ride up, Specter pulled my arm high over my head – far higher than the Zapruder film showed Kennedy waving his hand.

“‘Wave your arm a few times,’ Specter said, ‘wave at the crowd.’ And then jabbing a finger at the base of my neck – not six inches below my collar, where the holes in Kennedy’s jacket and shirt were – Specter said, ‘Well, see, 

if the bullet goes in here, the jacket gets hunched up. If you take this point right here and then you strip the coat down, it comes out at a lower point.’

“‘A lower point?’ I repeated, wondering if Specter were trying to confuse me or was confused himself.

“If the entrance holes were at a lower point than the exit hole, how could Oswald have shot Kennedy from the sixth floor window of the Book Depository?

“In the end, Specter admitted they had what he described as – quote – ‘some problems with that.’”

Fonzi also asked Specter about how a bullet could go through seven wounds and two people and emerge nearly intact. As Fonzi noted in his 1966 article, the conversation went like this:

“‘The way the bullet went through the Governor’s wrist,’ explains Specter, ‘it really tumbled through his wrist.’

“Were any tests made to determine the results of a bullet tumbling through a cadaver wrist?

“’You can’t fire a bullet to make it tumble,’ says Specter.

“Wouldn’t a tumbling bullet be more likely to be deformed than one hitting at a higher velocity on its streamlined nose?

“’I think it was unusual for the bullet to come out in such perfect shape,’ Specter says, ‘but very plausible.’

“Did any of the test bullets come out in such shape?

“’No.’”

Fonzi later came  to regret his shyness in directly labeling the Warren Commission's conclusion as what he knew it to be: A deliberate lie. 

The late Gaeton Fonzi
No Congressional Accolades

Not so, Specter.

Judging Specter

If Specter ever had any doubts, he’s never aired them, leading me to conclude one of two possibilities: 1) Specter truly believes that Oswald, alone, was guilty, or 2) Specter is still aiding and abetting a cover-up of the facts surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy.

"I wound up working closely with ..Joe Ball and David Belin (other Commission staffers), they would cover the assassin's identity. The team would treat it as an open question, despite Lee Harvey Oswald's arrest. We decided that the bullet in flight was our dividing point. Before the bullet left the rifle barrel, it was the responsibility of Ball and Belin. After striking the president, it was my responsibility..."-

from "LIFE AMONG THE CANNIBALS" BY Arlen (in which there is nary a mention of his meeting with Mr. Fonzi)

"I had questioned (Arlen) for hours about so many conflicting areas of evidence that I remember when I walked out of his office after the second and last session I felt a strange uneasiness, the numbness of disbelief. (Arlen) had not eased my concerns about the Warren Commission Report, he had magnified them....After those interviews with (Arlen), my belief in that Government would never be the same."-

from "THE LAST INVESTIGATION" BY Gaeton Fonzi

Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of JFK's murder. Generations of Amercians have come and gone in that time; and as passionate as some feel about the event that changed Amercia forever most seldom give it a thought, really. Most Amercians alive today weren't even born when the assassination occurred - (In trying to get a perspective for god knows whatever reason I always consider that my father's grandfather was born within the decade of Lincoln's assassination and my mother's mother's grandfather was 17 years old when Lincoln was shot.) More years have passed since JFK's murder then the years he was alive on this earth. And how has Amercia accepted the official versions of how he died without a murmuring pause; like most everything else that happens in Amercia - with a thundering silence. Nobody cared (including the Kennedy family) or were too intimidated to pursue it? I am convinced that if Kennedy had not been murdered we wouldn't have that black marble memorial with over 58,000  names of fallen Amercian soldiers on it. Amercians have a large knack of getting things behind us and moving on to the next big thing without a look back or a moment to reflect what we're doing - lets face it we have never as a country ever confronted forthrightly the Vietnam War- the why and whatfors and whathappened there.* Nor have we really again as a country confronted the violent deaths of 1968 and even before. Its like we're afraid of what we may find - Our current political campaigns are systemic of what we hold dear and it certainly not the truth. As a matter of fact the Romney republicans have done everything to encourage their candidates from uttering anything approaching a truthful phrase lest it be interpreted as weakness or giving in to liberal sentiment; there is no legitimate conversation taking place because quite frankly they can't handle the truth - and they think the rest of us can't also. The Amercian public has stood by - literally- since the assassination of JFK - and witnessed what is perhaps a coup that usurped the power of the ballot and in at least four presidential elections since then did not so much as raise one banner in protest of this assault on democracy.  

"When dreams are shattered", said Fackenheim, "men are wont to seek refuge in wishful thinking. Our age is no exception (and remember this was said over 40 years ago)...In a half-hearted version, collective make-believe is manifest in our current, self-enclosed, middle-class apotheosis of psychoanalysis (Within its sober bounds, that discipline gives limited help to disturbed individuals, and quite possibly we are all disturbed. Expanded into systematic wishful thinking, it turns a panacea for all the ills of our world.) In a radical version, collective make-believe is manifest in a self-enclosed ideologizing which would refashion all reality in its own image, while being itself out of touch with reality." 

If the entrance holes were at a lower point than the exit hole, how could Oswald have shot Kennedy from the sixth floor window of the Book Depository?

How do we break through these false yet all pervasive categories of an Amercia which really does not care to know and does not wish to find out? If Truth is cast to the ground is what is left only despair - or numbness? Or is it still possible to remember and look toward the life of a Gaeton Fonzi and (as it seems) many others who with their words and deeds admonish us to endure Truth and not give in to despair because in the end Truth does spring from the earth.

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* " Afghanistan is the war we somehow haven’t managed to notice most of the time, even while it’s going on, Vietnam was the war Americans couldn’t forget and have never been able to kick, possibly because we never managed to come to grips with just what it was and what we did there."-  Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch,  -1/17/2013 (Jonathan Schell review of Nick Turse's "Kill Anything That Moves"