COMMENTS FROM STREET TALK NETWORK ABOUT THIS POST-

1. Do your own research on the information provided and then come up with your own conclusions.

2. This article contains many names and other information that can be researched.

3. Trust your gut feeling on information provided as this post may contain slanted information.

The linked PDF is a three-page selection from the November 1966 issue of Ramparts, pages 59–61. It appears in the Harold Weisberg Archive because it discusses Weisberg’s book Whitewash and other early criticisms of the Warren Commission.

The piece is presented as a joint review by Jacob Brackman and Faye Levine of five purported books:

1. Inquest — Edward Jay Epstein

2. Whitewash — Harold Weisberg

3. Rush to Judgment — Mark Lane

4. Time of Assassins — Ulov G. K. Leboeuf

5. Oswald: Patsy Without Portfolio — Leopold Zaftig

The essential fact readers need to know is this:

The first three books are real. The last two—and much of the evidence attributed to them—were invented as satire.

Time of Assassins, Ulov G. K. Leboeuf, Oswald: Patsy Without Portfolio, Leopold Zaftig, Officer Toasty, Artemis Heverford, Selma Fingle, Merriweather Really, and the “Tupferman silicone test” were fictional creations.

The PDF is therefore not a genuine investigative report identifying additional Oswalds or proving that Kennedy was shot from inside the limousine. It is an elaborate parody of JFK-assassination literature, written convincingly enough that some contemporary readers reportedly mistook it for a real review.

The original pages can also be consulted through the Internet Archive’s Weisberg collection, while an indexed transcription identifies it as appearing in Ramparts, November 1966, pages 59–61. The Unz Review reproduces the article.

1. The opening: criticism of the Warren Commission debate

The review begins with a serious observation about the public response to President Kennedy’s assassination. The authors suggest that Americans were no longer asking only:

• Who killed
  Kennedy?
• What exactly
  happened?
• Which
  interpretation should the public believe?

They argue that ordinary citizens lacked the investigative resources needed to determine the truth independently. Consequently, the public had to choose among official reports, books, journalism, political explanations and psychological interpretations of Lee Harvey Oswald.

The opening establishes the central conflict between:

• The Warren
  Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone.
• Critics who
  believed the Commission had failed to investigate important evidence.
• More speculative
  writers who attempted to identify a larger conspiracy.

Although the passage becomes satirical, this opening reflects a real historical development. By 1966, public confidence in the Warren Commission was declining, and Epstein, Weisberg and Lane were among the authors driving renewed discussion.

2. Treatment of the three real books

Edward Jay Epstein’s Inquest

Epstein’s 1966 book grew from research conducted while he was a graduate student at Cornell University. Rather than attempting to name Kennedy’s killers, Epstein examined how the Warren Commission operated.

His principal concerns included:

• The Commission’s
  internal procedures.
• Its dependence
  upon the FBI.
• The pressure to
  complete the investigation quickly.
• The development of
  the lone-assassin conclusion.
• Differences
  between the Commission’s internal deliberations and the confident language
  of its final report.

The Ramparts reviewers dismiss Inquest as a narrowly legal and procedural examination. Their description is deliberately impatient, but it correctly recognizes that Epstein concentrated on the Commission’s methods rather than offering a complete alternative solution to the assassination.

Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash

Weisberg’s Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report was one of the earliest book-length attacks on the Commission’s conclusions. Because commercial publishers initially rejected it, Weisberg published it himself.

Weisberg argued that the Commission:

• Selected evidence
  supporting Oswald’s guilt.
• Failed to
  reconcile conflicting witness testimony.
• Relied too heavily
  on the FBI.
• Minimized or
  ignored evidence inconsistent with a lone gunman.
• Presented
  conclusions more definite than the underlying record justified.
• Failed to conduct
  the kind of adversarial investigation that would have tested its
  assumptions.

The reviewers call Whitewash a “literary-pedantic analysis” of the Commission’s “red herrings.” That is not a neutral summary. It is a cutting characterization of Weisberg’s dense, evidence-by-evidence approach.

Nevertheless, the wording acknowledges the actual nature of Weisberg’s work: he concentrated principally on deficiencies in the government’s investigation, not on definitively identifying a different assassin.

Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment

Lane’s Rush to Judgment became the most commercially successful early critique of the Warren Commission.

Lane emphasized matters such as:

• Witnesses who
  believed shots came from the grassy knoll.
• Questions
  surrounding Officer J. D. Tippit’s murder.
• Problems in the
  identification of Oswald.
• The treatment of
  witnesses by the FBI and Commission.
• Jack Ruby’s
  background and associations.
• Medical and
  ballistic inconsistencies.
• The failure to
  provide Oswald with a trial at which the government’s evidence could be
  challenged.

The review criticizes Lane for arguing forcefully against the official case without naming the people who supposedly organized the assassination.

This becomes the bridge to the fictional Leboeuf: the reviewers pretend that, unlike cautious authors such as Epstein, Weisberg and Lane, Leboeuf is bold enough to explain everything.

3. The fictional Time of Assassins

The centerpiece of the PDF is a supposed four-volume investigation titled Time of Assassins, attributed to “Ulov G. K. Leboeuf.”

The reviewers claim that Leboeuf:

• Read all 26 Warren
  Commission volumes 13 times.
• Examined
  unpublished drafts of other assassination books.
• Accompanied FBI agents
  during visits to Jack Ruby’s nightclub.
• Examined tax
  records and telephone directories.
• Obtained business
  ledgers from stores associated with Oswald.
• Collected hundreds
  of exhibits.
• Discovered a much
  larger and more complicated conspiracy.

None of this occurred because Leboeuf and the books did not exist.

The name itself contains a clue: “Ulov” sounds like “you love,” while “Leboeuf” is French for “the beef.” The inflated biography—Franco-Russian parentage, an “Austrian University” education and residence in Levittown—is deliberately absurd.

The four enormous volumes and their low combined price are additional signs of parody.

Purpose of the invented author

Leboeuf represents the fictional “perfect conspiracy researcher”—someone who never admits that the surviving evidence may be incomplete. Instead, he connects every coincidence, discrepancy, name, photograph, receipt and political event into a single enormous plot.

The joke is that the reviewers praise him for precisely the qualities that should make readers distrust him:

• Unlimited
  confidence.
• Excessive
  accumulation of detail.
• Reliance upon
  intuition.
• Identification of
  patterns that cannot be independently verified.
• Presentation of
  speculation in the style of scholarship.
• Use of elaborate
  citations to create an appearance of authority.

4. Aldous Huxley and the “psychedelic purge”

The review claims that Leboeuf suspected writer Aldous Huxley—who died on November 22, 1963—was poisoned by a female FBI agent disguised as a servant.

Huxley really did die on the day Kennedy was assassinated, as did author C. S. Lewis. But the alleged FBI poisoning and “psychedelic purge” were inventions.

This section parodies the tendency to treat simultaneous or nearby events as evidence of a common cause. The fact that two events happened on the same day does not establish that they were connected.

5. The 1965 blackout, George Hamilton and Ben Bella

Leboeuf supposedly connects:

• The major
  Northeast blackout.
• A secret laser
  test ordered by Lyndon Johnson.
• Actor George
  Hamilton’s military status.
• Algerian leader
  Ahmed Ben Bella.
• The Kennedy
  assassination.

The connections are intentionally nonsensical. The reviewers describe them in scholarly language to show how an impressive tone can make an unsupported theory appear plausible.

The blackout was real, but the alleged Johnson laser test and the connection to Kennedy were fictional.

6. The Polaroid-camera theory

Another invented section claims that the same Polaroid camera photographed:

• Kennedy at
  Parkland Hospital.
• Adlai Stevenson
  near the time of his death.
• Malcolm X at the
  Audubon Ballroom.

The article calls this observation “breathtaking” and “incisive,” but it provides no logical connection between the deaths. The theory is satire aimed at arguments based on shared objects, technology or circumstances that are not inherently unusual.

7. Commission Exhibit 399—the “single-bullet” discussion

The review next turns to a real and important piece of assassination evidence: Commission Exhibit 399.

The genuine controversy

CE 399 is the nearly intact 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano bullet associated with the single-bullet theory. The Warren Commission concluded that one shot:

1. Entered Kennedy from behind.

2. Exited through the lower front of his neck.

3. Entered Governor John Connally’s back.

4. Broke one of Connally’s ribs.

5. Exited his chest.

6. Passed through his right wrist.

7. Caused a wound to his left thigh.

A hospital employee, Darrell C. Tomlinson, found a bullet on a stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital.

Important questions have historically included:

• Which stretcher
  held the bullet?
• Whether that
  stretcher had carried Connally.
• How the bullet’s
  chain of custody was documented.
• How the bullet
  retained its relatively undamaged appearance.
• Whether its
  recovered fragments and weight were consistent with the wounds.

Those are genuine historical and evidentiary questions.

The fictional Tomlinson investigation

The article turns the real Darrell Tomlinson into a mysterious recent arrival with a false identity. It claims he was actually “Artemis Heverford,” a relative of Jack Ruby.

It then connects Heverford to an FBI firearms expert called “Officer Toasty.”

This is a joke based upon a real name. Oswald had dealings with FBI Special Agent James P. Hosty Jr., and Oswald referred to Hosty in a note delivered to the FBI’s Dallas office. The satirists transform “Hosty” into “Toasty.”

The following elements are fictional:

• Tomlinson being
  Artemis Heverford.
• A clubfooted
  former wife named Mary.
• A family
  connection to Jack Ruby.
• Officer Toasty’s
  Las Vegas ammunition laboratory.
• A planted CE 399.
• Toasty’s wallet
  containing compromising political material.
• An IOU from Ronald
  Reagan.
• A credit card in
  Senator Ralph Yarborough’s name.
• A compromising
  Robert Kennedy–Marilyn Monroe photograph.
• A coded telephone
  note surrounded by suggestive doodles.

The passage demonstrates how a writer can build a seemingly persuasive conspiracy through invented biographical links.

8. The “five Oswalds”

Leboeuf allegedly accepts the idea of a second Oswald but argues that there were actually five:

• Lee Harvey Oswald.
• L. H. Oswell.
• H. L. Oswill.
• Lee R. V. Isabell.
• Oswald Harby.

Each man supposedly resembled Oswald and performed different parts of Oswald’s documented life:

• One traveled to
  Mexico City.
• One typed the
  Soviet Embassy letter.
• One purchased milk
  and cinnamon rolls.
• Several were
  expert marksmen.
• The real Oswald
  supposedly spent much of his time sleeping.

These characters are fictional.

The underlying real issue

The satire draws upon genuine disputes about apparent Oswald impersonations and conflicting descriptions of his activities. Researchers have long examined reports that someone using Oswald’s name:

• Visited a shooting
  range.
• Attempted to
  purchase an automobile.
• Appeared at
  anti-Castro or pro-Castro events.
• Contacted the
  Cuban and Soviet diplomatic offices in Mexico City.
• Was seen in
  locations where the documented Oswald may not have been present.

Some impersonation questions—particularly involving Mexico City—became subjects of later official investigations. But this PDF does not present authentic evidence of five Oswalds. It exaggerates the genuine issue into absurdity.

9. The Oswald backyard photograph

The fictional pamphlet Oswald: Patsy Without Portfolio is said to analyze the famous backyard photograph showing Oswald holding a rifle and Marxist newspapers.

The alleged author argues that the shadows are inconsistent and that:

• Oswald’s head was
  pasted onto someone else’s body.
• The telescopic
  sight was drawn onto the weapon.
• The body belonged
  to one of the Oswald doubles.

The pamphlet and author are fictional, but the controversy is real. Critics of the Warren Commission did question the backyard photographs, particularly the angles of shadows and Oswald’s posture. Oswald himself reportedly told police that the picture was a composite.

Later photographic examinations generally concluded that the pictures were internally consistent with a genuine photograph, although controversy persists among assassination researchers.

The satire works by inserting a genuine contested subject into an invented system of five Oswalds.

10. The supposed shot from inside the limousine

The most sensational section claims that a “Tupferman silicone test” proved the shot entered Kennedy less than .0002 milliseconds after being fired.

From this, Leboeuf concludes the bullet could not have traveled from either:

• The Texas School
  Book Depository.
• The grassy knoll.

It supposedly had to be fired inside or immediately beside the presidential limousine.

The test and conclusion are entirely fictional. There was no documented “Tupferman silicone test” producing this result.

The scientific language is deliberately meaningless. A seat cover could not establish the precise time between the firing of a bullet and its impact upon Kennedy’s body in the manner described.

11. “Merriweather Really” and the motorcade reaction

A purported witness named Merriweather Really claims:

• Shots sounded as
  if they came from Kennedy’s car.
• Vice President
  Johnson slapped Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood on the back and
  celebrated.
• Police and agents
  ran toward the grassy knoll as though they had rehearsed it.
• The Warren
  Commission suppressed the statement.

“Merriweather Really” is fictional, and the alleged quotation is satire.

Rufus Youngblood was real. He was the Secret Service agent assigned to Johnson and testified that he protected the vice president when the shooting began. The article reverses that protective response into a grotesque celebratory scene.

The name “Really” may also be a comic signal to the reader: is this witness “really” real? He was not.

12. What the satire was trying to accomplish

The article operated on several levels.

Mockery of overconfident conspiracy writing

It makes fun of arguments that:

• Treat every
  irregularity as proof of conspiracy.
• Convert
  coincidences into causal links.
• Depend on
  undocumented private investigations.
• Use citations and
  exhibit numbers to simulate authority.
• Introduce more
  conspirators whenever the theory encounters a contradiction.

Criticism of the Warren Commission

The satire does not simply defend the Commission. It states that the Commission stretched plausibility to accommodate its single-assassin theory. Thus, the piece simultaneously ridicules:

• The official
  investigation’s excessive certainty.
• Critics who
  constructed overly elaborate alternative theories.

Satire of the magazine itself

Warren Hinckle, a leading Ramparts editor, later described it as a fake review placed in the magazine’s major JFK issue partly so the issue would not become overwhelmingly solemn and technical.

Hinckle recalled that some journalists and readers failed to realize that Leboeuf was fictional. A later account states that orders for the nonexistent books were sent to booksellers and that hundreds of readers reportedly sent money hoping to purchase the four-volume set. Peter Richardson’s history of the episode discusses the reaction.

Hinckle later explicitly called it a “fake review of the imaginary book” and confirmed that the supposed author existed only in the pages of Ramparts. His retrospective interview is reproduced by FoundSF.

13. Reliability assessment

Overall conclusion

This PDF is historically valuable, but not because it proves a new JFK-assassination theory. Its value lies in showing the state of the assassination debate in late 1966.

It captures a moment when:

• The Warren
  Commission was facing serious public criticism.
• Epstein, Weisberg
  and Lane had brought alternative analysis into mainstream discussion.
• Ramparts was publishing
  extensive material challenging official conclusions.
• Editors were
  simultaneously worried that unsupported speculation could discredit
  legitimate criticism.
• Satire could be
  mistaken for investigative fact when presented with authoritative
  language, names, exhibits and precise-looking citations.

The central lesson is unusually modern: detail is not the same as verification. A theory can contain real people, real evidence, accurate dates and genuine controversies while its principal conclusions remain invented.