High Treason – Robert J. Groden & Harrison Edward Livingstone, 1989 ★

Who Shot John

Many books posit the idea of a high-level conspiracy in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, books with titles like Six Seconds In Dallas, Best Evidence, and Crossfire. High Treason is different in a way signaled by its title.

What you get here is not a reasoned argument about the facts of the assassination, as it is assumed no reasonable person could take in what authors Robert J. Groden and Harrison Edward Livingstone put out and see anything other than a conspiracy at work. For them, it’s a matter of identifying murderers and reasons for their crime, which morphs into an explanation of what they call “the Secret Team,” ST for short, and their hidden hand in episodes like the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the attempted assassination of presidential candidate George Wallace, and the Watergate burglary, to name a few.

I expected a test when I picked up this book, given my beliefs going in that the killer was this Lee Harvey Oswald guy. But since I took the time to read and review an anti-conspiracy book, Gerald Posner’s Case Closed, I wanted to challenge myself. Early on it became clear I had chosen the wrong book.

High Treason employs a shifting narrative, wide gaps between assertions and supporting facts, and an author’s (authors’?) tone which strains to land feeble points. A lot of strange territory is covered, for me and I assume for many who believe there was a conspiracy, too.

Take that famous Dallas landmark that centers every conspiracy theory I know of: The Grassy Knoll. Many argue the real killer shot his fatal bullet from that location. Not so High Treason:

There are strong reasons to believe that snipers were facing the car, located in a manhole at the northwest juncture of the triple overpass and the stockade fence, and in a manhole at the southwest corner of the overpass – both looking down on the car from each side as it approached – and another sniper in the second floor of the Dal-Tex Building behind the limousine, near the building where Oswald was supposed to be.

Elsewhere, though, Groden and Livingstone do bring up the Grassy Knoll as a possible location, noting footage showing shadows in the foreground as the limousine carrying the stricken president speeds away; as well as a claim that a man identifying himself as Secret Service ordered people away from the Knoll.

So Knoll or no Knoll? No clear answer here.

This seems to be the authors’ intent. Much of High Treason centers on investigations, both that conducted by the Warren Commission in 1964 and especially another concluded in 1979 by the House Select Committee on Assassinations [HSCA]. At one point, High Treason tells the story of a photography expert named Jack White whose HSCA testimony was disputed when he reported evidence of forgery in photos of Oswald holding a rifle.

White was challenged by one committee staffer who asked him if he knew what the word “photogrammetry” means. Being a photography expert, one would expect he would, but White said he didn’t. This was used to impugn his knowledge, a tactic High Treason presents as evidence of the committee’s narrow-mindedness.

The book goes on to approvingly quote White’s concluding comment: “I am just an ordinary person who has observed a lot of things and I am really here to present questions rather than answers.”

This to me sums up the approach taken in High Treason. It’s an exercise in hole-poking, not tying up loose ends.

Much can be argued regarding the case against Oswald. Take the state of the first round that according to the Warren Commission struck President Kennedy and limo companion John Connelly, a. k. a “The Magic Bullet.” High Treason notes its “pristine” condition considering the supposition it passed through two men, and left ample metallic residue in Connally besides. Soon after came the killshot on the President, fragments of which were found in the limo:

If the above shot passed through both men and came out in nearly perfect condition, another bullet, supposedly fired from the same gun, would have to have entered the President’s head and behaved as though it was a frangible bullet; that is, it broke up or exploded upon entry into the skull. That is extremely unlikely.

I’m no ballistics expert, but they do have a point here.

According to the Warren Commission, Lee Harvey Oswald posed for this snapshot by his wife, Marina, before venturing off to kill right-wing agitator Edwin Walker in April 1963. Groden and Livingstone claim ample evidence of forgery in this and other photos. Image from gettyimages.com.

There is also ample if conflicting testimony from doctors who operated on Kennedy at Parkland Hospital regarding the nature of his injuries. Lay aside that the autopsy itself was badly handled, whether because of human error, excess deference to the Kennedy family’s sensitivities, or deliberate cover-up. At least one doctor, Robert McClelland, has been consistent that the head wound he observed in the operating room could only have come from in front of the President. High Treason quotes him at length:

“…I noted that the right posterior portion of the skull had been extremely blasted. It had been shattered, apparently, by the force of the shot so that the parietal bone was protruded up through the scalp and seemed to be fractured along its right posterior half, as well as some of the occipital bone being fractured in its lateral half, and this sprung open the bones that I mentioned in such a way that you could actually look down into the skull cavity itself and see that probably a third or so, at least, of the brain tissue, posterior cerebral tissue and some of the cerebellar tissue, had been blasted out.”

Here High Treason strikes solid ground, yet tangles itself quickly. Four other key doctors on the scene at Parkland are quoted as initially uncertain but come down eventually for the official story; the authors dismiss this by suggesting they were misled by false reporting in newspapers revisiting the case in the early 1980s.

This sort of free-form second-guessing of witnesses who disagree with their conclusions happens often and pocks High Treason’s credibility. This approach extends to fellow conspiracy theorists. David Lifton’s Best Evidence argues that Kennedy’s body was tampered with to hide evidence of a second gunman. This conflicts with High Treason’s own hypothesis, reported as fact, that three (or more, they never quite say) gunmen were at Dealey Plaza.

What to do? Rather than fuss over messy ambiguity, they go after Lifton:

In addition to the theory which it propounded, the book [Best Evidence] gave the erroneous impression that there was a flap of scalp on the President’s head which covered up the large hole in the back. This book promptly became a best-seller for five months. The flap of scalp story convinced some of the doctors co-author Livingstone and The Baltimore Sun had interviewed to change their feelings about the picture, as will be explained below…There never was any evidence for the existence of such a flap on the back of the head.

The tendentious tone of High Treason becomes more shrill the more it goes on: Logic-begging arguments, long peripheral tangents, unsourced accusations of strong-arm tactics, and oodles of guilt-by-association.

Did you know that the brother of Dallas’s mayor was once in charge of operations at the CIA? That Allen Dulles, a Warren Commission member, was fired from the CIA by Kennedy? That Richard Nixon was in Dallas the morning of Kennedy’s murder?

You will when you read High Treason; its authors keep repeating these and other leading points, ominously and with an almost liturgical devotion, yet never connecting them to anything substantive.

So much time is spent quoting L. Fletcher Prouty – the supposed government insider who made such an impression two years later as the fictionalized character “X” in the Oliver Stone movie JFK – that it seems he wrote as much of High Treason as Groden and Livingstone. His long accounts of CIA skullduggery in elevating military involvement in Vietnam beyond what he describes as the “advisory” level Kennedy allowed get ridiculous early and often. For Prouty, Kennedy was America’s last president, before the military-industrial complex swept in and destroyed our democracy for keeps.

Not that Groden and Livingstone need help making silly claims. Howlers fly up at you from every page. J. Edgar Hoover was involved in the conspiracy, since the FBI knows all, but was assassinated by “a poison of the thyon-phosphate genre,” whatever that is. At the moment Kennedy was assassinated, someone tapped out a V-for-victory in Morse Code audible on police radio, as a sort of military-industrial fist pump I guess. Kennedy’s head wound was not tampered with, but it was cleverly disguised by the fact two gunmen hit his cranium at the same time from opposite sides, the sort of thing that makes a magic bullet seem mundane.

One of many strange and trivial tangents High Treason goes in is that a right-wing agitator named Joseph Milteer not only discussed the assassination before it occurred, but was photographed in the crowd watching the murder go down. Image from https://www.magasinetparagraf.se/nyheter/44630-kennedy-11-dubbel/. 

Too much paranoia, too; laying out dark suspicions of nearly everyone’s motives, then abruptly breaking off rather than solidifying these insinuations. One Florida senator, George Smathers, sold Nixon a house and also introduced Ted Kennedy to Mary Jo Kopechne; Groden and Livingstone suggest Smathers “may have” set up brother Jack “for the triple cross,” not bothering to explain exactly how.

Groden worked with the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which the book describes as a whitewash since their findings did not go far enough. Too many Republicans took part, not to mention people with CIA backgrounds who could not be trusted. Much time is spent on the authors’ clashes with anyone who challenged their version of the truth:

Everything changed in April, 1977. The Committee got a new Chairman, Louis Stokes, and hired a new Chief Counsel, a professor of law, G. Robert Blakey, from that bastion of the Establishment, Cornell University. He was a veteran of the Organized Crime and Racketeering section of the Department of Justice. There was some hope that he would do the job right, but he intended to find no conspiracy.

This is a revealing quote as it shows the authors assuming intimate knowledge of another’s intent, something they do frequently if usually less blatantly. It’s also demonstrably wrong here since Blakey, despite his Cornell background, did eventually decide there was a conspiracy, just not one Groden and Livingstone favor. Blakey blames the Mafia.

“The Mob could not have covered up the crime,” Groden and Livingstone write. “Only government agencies had people capable of planning and covering up such a murder.”

I see it that way, too. There are too many pieces in a large-scale assassination conspiracy for organized crime to manage alone. The question Groden and Livingstone don’t address competently is how the government could have pulled it off. Just look at how Watergate turned out.

No doubt other conspiracy books make a better case than High Treason. I know it can be done because I’ve seen JFK, which has glaring logic holes but a compelling narrative and a clear and convincing point-of-view, two things High Treason desperately needs. What you get here feels more like a shell game, with the writers pushing findings to fit preconceived conclusions. The result neither engages nor convinces.