Treachery in Dallas

In the aftermath of Gerald Posner's Case Closed, Brown (The People v. Lee Harvey Oswald) has written what seems a rather old-fashioned Kennedy assassination book. But it has certain distinct virtues, as well as some liabilities. Brown's contention, put forward after a lengthy examination of the various theories of the assassination, is that the President was killed by a group of assassins working with the knowledge of J. Edgar Hoover and probably of Lyndon Johnson, and with the cooperation of at least part of the Dallas police force. Oswald's role, Brown argues, was as a patsy instructed to deliver a rifle to the shooter in the Texas School Book Depository and then to be fingered as the culprit. Brown maintains that the only shot fired from the sixth-floor window of the book depository was the first one, a blank round designed to concentrate attention on that spot; the President was then killed by carefully triangulated fire from the knoll, the roof of the county jail and the far end of the depository. Brown shows an encyclopedic knowledge of the people and issues involved and constructs a careful if vaguely worded hypothesis; but he too often wanders into gratuitous and sometimes frivolous asides-and spends an unconscionable amount of space giving evidence of how much time and paper the Warren Commission wasted. The case has long been closed on that, at least. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct.)