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NYT
March 4, 2002
Harold Weisberg, 88, Critic of Inquiry in Kennedy Death, Dies
By STUART LAVIETES
Associated Press, 1994
Harold Weisberg
Harold Weisberg, an implacable critic of the government's investigation of
the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, died on Feb. 21 at his home
in Frederick, Md.
He was 88.
A former journalist, investigator for the Senate Committee on Civil
Liberties and analyst for the Office of Strategic Services in World War II,
Mr. Weisberg had retired to be a Maryland chicken farmer and writer by the
time of the shooting in Dallas in 1963.
Incensed by the government's investigation into the assassination, he
published a response at his own expense, the bluntly titled "Whitewash"
(1965). In it, he argued that careful analysis of the evidence presented in
the Warren Commission's report undermined the single-bullet theory and, with
it, the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone.
Mr. Weisberg followed this book, which was republished by Dell in 1966, with
"Whitewash II." That book presents a close examination the Zapruder film and
questions the time sequence accepted by the Warren Commission.
He wrote four more sequels, each devoted to evidence in the commission
report and to government documents that he uncovered using the Freedom of
Information Act. Over the years, he collected more than 250,000 government
papers on the assassination, all of which he stored at his home in Maryland.
Unlike many other critics of the investigation, Mr. Weisberg cannot
accurately be called conspiracy theorist, because he did not speculate about
who might have been involved in the assassination.
Jim Garrison, a New Orleans district attorney, was inspired by "Whitewash"
to search for and prosecute conspiracy suspects. But in a 1992 opinion
article in The Washington Post, prompted by "JFK," the Oliver Stone film
about Mr. Garrison, Mr. Weisberg wrote that "the proliferating conspiracy
theories mislead and confuse as much or more than the faulted official
conclusions." In a letter to The Post, Mr. Weisberg called the movie a
"monumental piece of disinformation."
Mr. Weisberg was also a critic of the government's handling of the
investigation into the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
in 1968. Hired as an investigator for James Earl Ray, he came to believe
that his client had not fired the bullet that killed Dr. King. In his
subsequent book, "Frame-Up" (Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1971), Mr. Weisberg
maintained that although Mr. Ray was a member of a racist group, he was
merely a decoy and had been pressured into a confession, which he later
recanted.
Mr. Weisberg had his own critics and accusers. In a review of "Whitewash" in
The New York Times Book Review, Fred Graham, then the Supreme Court
correspondent for The Times, wrote that it was "difficult to believe that
any institution could be as inept, careless, wrong or venal" as Mr. Weisberg
implied.
Mr. Weisberg, who was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Wilmington, Del.,
is survived by his wife, Lillian Stone Weisberg, and two sisters.
Mr. Weisberg saw some of his beliefs vindicated in the final report of the
House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979, which concluded that
President Kennedy's death was probably the result of a conspiracy. The
report criticized the Warren Commission for failing to "investigate
adequately the possibility of a conspiracy," placing a large part of the
blame on the refusal of "the C.I.A. and F.B.I. to provide it with all
relevant evidence and information."
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