Free Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi

have used against him.
    I can assure the conspiracy theorists who have very effectively savaged Posner in their books that they’re going to have a much, much more difficult time with me. As a trial lawyer in front of a jury and an author of true-crime books, credibility has always meant everything to me. My only master and my only mistress are the facts and objectivity. I have no others. The theorists may not agree with my conclusions, but in this work on the assassination I intend to set forth all of their main arguments, and the way they, not I, want them to be set forth, before I seek to demonstrate their invalidity. I will not knowingly omit or distort anything. However, with literally millions of pages of documents on this case, there are undoubtedly references in some of them that conspiracy theorists feel are supportive of a particular point of theirs, but that I simply never came across.
    Some may say it is petty, perhaps even improper, to criticize others in writing a book about the case. I don’t agree. The Kennedy assassination is a historical event. And when anyone purporting to write the history of the event fabricates, distorts, or misleads about the facts of the case, it is not only advisable but incumbent upon those who subsequently write about the event to point out these lies and distortions. If they do not, the lies themselves will harden in the future into “facts” and millions will be misled. This is precisely what has already happened in this case. After all, if future writers don’t correct the errors and distortions of their predecessors, then who will? If they don’t have the responsibility to do this, then who does? Therefore, if those who follow me find that in writing this book I myself have taken liberties with the truth, I would expect them to bring this to the attention of their readers.
    Another defect I shall studiously avoid in this book—one that characterizes so many authors of books on the assassination—is to falsely suggest to the reader that what he or she is reading is new information that the author has mined from his research. For instance, the reader of Case Closed can only come, from the context , to one conclusion about the section on Failure Analysis Associates’ computer reconstruction of the shooting in Dealey Plaza, and the section debunking all the supposedly mysterious deaths of people associated with the assassination: that the author, Posner, worked with Failure Analysis on its reconstruction and/or commissioned Failure Analysis’s work, and that the author, in his research, had discovered that there were no mysterious deaths associated with the assassination. But Failure Analysis, a leading engineering and scientific consulting firm with offices worldwide, was commissioned to do its work not by Posner, but by the American Bar Association for a mock trial on the assassination the association conducted in San Francisco at its annual convention in 1992. * Roger McCarthy, president and CEO of Failure Analysis Associates who testified as an expert witness at the trial in San Francisco, told me that Posner “didn’t have anything to do” with their project, and they weren’t even aware he was in the process of writing a book at the time. What particularly troubled McCarthy was that “Posner only presented in his book the prosecution side of our presentation in San Francisco, completely omitting what we presented for the defense, which was important enough to help bring about a hung jury.” 80
    Similarly, way back in 1977, sixteen years before the publication of Case Closed , the HSCA thoroughly investigated the entire “mysterious deaths” allegation and wrote of its extensive research and findings discrediting the allegation in volume 4, pages 454–467, of the HSCA’s report to Congress. Yet Posner does not tell his readers this in his book. Show me one reader out of a hundred who read Case Closed who didn’t think that the author was sowing new ground in