Wings Press

• Bestsellers / Recent Prize Winners
• New Releases
• Whitebird Chapbook Series
• Complete Index
• Back List Guide
• Limited & Signed Editions
• Authors Index

• Home
• Wholesale Information
• Company Background
• About Bryce Milligan
• Contact Information
• Premio Poesia Tejana Award
• Join Our Mail List
• Submission Information

Critical Praise for Praise from a Future Generation:

• It was a privilege to read John Kelin's Praise from a Future Generation — a learning experience even for those of us who have read widely in the field. We need to know our own heritage. Kelin makes that legacy much more accessible with this excellent book, which will itself receive praise from a future generation.

  — James W. Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable (for6thcoming) and Lightning East to West: Jesus, Gandhi, and the Nuclear Age

• Praise From a Future Generation fills a void in the literature on President Kennedy's assassination. It is the first book-length study of the beginnings of the critical movement that eventually brought down the Warren Commission. Kelin shows us how a small band of average Americans, through relentless dedication, perseverance, and a tireless pursuit of truth, permanently altered the consciousness of a nation.

  — James DiEugenio, author of Destiny Betrayed; co-editor, The Assassinations

Reviews

• Publishers WeeklyAugust 30, 2007

  For more than 40 years, a small band of self-anointed investigators have made a cottage industry out of critiquing the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of JFK and postulating elaborate theories associated with that tragedy. Kelin – one of the second generation of critics and the founder of the JFK assassination Web magazine Fair Play – pays homage to the first generation who, unlike "craven" mainstream historians, he says, "refused to buckle under the most subversive lies ever told the American people." Kelin explores in detail the work of a parade of investigators, including prosecutor Jim Garrison (immortalized in Oliver Stone's controversial film JFK); Rush to Judgment author Mark Lane; smalltown newspaper editor Penn Jones Jr. (who made a specialty of investigating the "strangeæ deaths of assassination witnesses over the course of several decades), and ... Whitewash author Harold Weisberg.... If Vincent Bugliosi thought his mammoth Reclaiming History would put an end to this debate, Kelin is determined to prove him wrong. (Oct.)

• Praise From A Future Generation: A Summary by Robert Bonazzi

  John Kelin does not espouse any particular conspiracy theories nor does he make any summary pronouncements. Rather, he tracks the early critics as they raised crucial questions about the government's "rush to judgment" in naming Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin – on the very day of Kennedy's death – while blindly disavowing any possibility of other riflemen or any evidence of a conspiracy. Kelin presents the unfolding evidence that came to light during the 1960s, as it was gathered, for the most part, by ordinary concerned citizens.

  Unanswered Questions

  Part I introduces the first-generation of critics of The Warren Report. They were neither all leftist crackpots nor all political supporters of John F. Kennedy. These concerned U.S. citizens and European journalists were in search of the truth about the 1963 assassination of an American President and the shocking execution – on television – of his accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Nearly 45 years later, there are no firm answers to most of the questions. Yet subsequent generations believe overwhelmingly that there was a carefully-organized conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy and his alleged assassin, and a massive government cover-up of the facts in what has been called "the crime of the century."

  The Warren Report

  Part II goes beyond the initial shock among the first critics and addresses why, given their varied but uniformly skeptical natures, they were all drawn to investigate what they saw as a government cover-up of the actual crime. The alleged cover-up was codified by the publication of The Warren Report and its 26 volumes of testimony. Early on, two questions drove the critics to investigate: How could an inept gunman accomplish such a precise feat of marksmanship, and how could a single bullet do so much damage and remain virtually unscathed? Several early critics made a compelling case for the "innocence" of Oswald. They demonstrated that Oswald had no skill as a marksman, as the Warren Report itself maintained. They scrutinized the improbability of the report's "single-bullet theory," which proposed that a single bullet passed through the President, wounded Governor Connally, and was then discovered in pristine condition lying on a hospital stretcher.

  The early critics found that Connally's assertion made much more sense. The governor claimed that he had been wounded by a separate, later shot. This certainly seemed to be confirmed by a close examination of the film evidence. Connally's assertion was echoed both by his wife and by Jacqueline Kennedy, yet the commission discounted the governor and his wife, and excised Mrs.Kennedy's testimony entirely.

  The early critics pursued both leads and hard evidence that the commission ignored, such as the photographs taken at the autopsy of President Kennedy.

  Inconceivably, the commission never even viewed the autopsy photographs. Even more bizarre, the medical examiner at Bethesda burned his original notes. Instead the commissioners were shown diagrams of the President's wounds and imaginative trajectories of three bullets supposedly fired by Oswald within six seconds or less from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository Building behind the motorcade.

  It was the early critics, not the Commission, who revealed that doctors on the scene at Parkland Hospital in Dallas thought that Kennedy's throat marked an entrance wound and not an exit wound. This clearly implied that a shot or shots came from the grassy knoll area in front and to the right of the motorcade. The critics tracked down several photographic images which depicted activity behind the fence on the grassy knoll, which supports the many witnesses, including Dallas police officers, who thought shots had come from that direction. Some officers had even sprinted up the incline with drawn pistols while onlookers ducked and fell to the ground.

  These were some of the crucial areas of the early critics' initial investigations. Their questions were not answered – most were never even asked – by the Commission, which also failed to call key witnesses, convincing those they had called to stick to the lone assassin theory even when their testimony mitigated against that theory.

  The Garrison Investigation

  Part III of Praise from a Future Generation focuses on District Attorney Jim Garrison's 1967-1968 investigation and eventual trial in New Orleans where, Garrison maintained, the assassination plot had been hatched. After a 1965 conversation Garrison had with Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs (a member of the Warren Commission) – during which Boggs had expressed doubts about the lone assassin theory – Garrison began studying the work of the critics. He drew significantly on their research throughout his own investigation and prosecution.

  One phase of Garrison's investigation centered on Oswald's connection to the CIA's anti-Castro activities in New Orleans. This meant that the critics' analyses could be used in a criminal investigation that possessed the powers of subpoena. The critics were elated to be included as expert witnesses in the Grand Jury proceedings against Clay Shaw, whom witnesses placed with Oswald. Despite the Grand Jury's indictment of Shaw, the media attacked Garrison's methods and dismissed his case as speculation.

  However, the Garrison case eventually created a wedge among the original critics. Harold Weisberg and Raymond Marcus testified before the Grand Jury; Mark Lane and Vincent J. Salandria counseled Garrison on legal matters; Penn Jones, Jr., Maggie Field and Shirley Martin were supportive investigators. But Sylvia Meagher, who at first welcomed the case, began to doubt the integrity of the New Orleans District Attorney. Based on several subtle points, Meagher turned against Garrison and eventually ended her friendships with the other critics. Kelin examines these disputes and discusses the merits and consequences of Garrison's case against Clay Shaw.

  Even though Shaw was acquitted of conspiracy, the trial discredited the Warren Report. Also, for the first time, the Zapruder film (owned by Life magazine) was shown in its entirety to a jury and a public gallery. Kelin's chapter on the 1968 trial details the judge's attempts to subpoena the autopsy X-rays and photos from government agencies. Kelin follows the point-counterpoint process of the trial, including the legal strategies, surprise witnesses, the CIA's support of Clay Shaw, and that agency's interference with the prosecution's case.

  Oliver Stone's screenplay to the 1991 film, JFK, based on Jim Marrs' Crossfire and D.A. Jim Garrison's On the Trail of the Assassins, fictionalizes the investigation and court proceedings. Kelin's is the most comprehensive analysis available of this important legal moment in American history.

  Epilogue

  John Kelin's extensive Epilogue follows the critics' lives after the 1960s, and recounts the deaths of several from that first generation. He also covers the workings of the 1976-1977 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), "which concluded, albeit tepidly, there had in fact been a conspiracy," writes Kelin, following this with the HSCA's summary conclusion: "The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy."

  The critics came to believe that the HSCA "was a highly politicized body that in its own way was as determined as the Warren Commission had been," writes Kelin, "to conduct a less-than-full and honest investigation."

  Sylvia Meagher's final contribution was the publication of her Subject Index to the JFK Assassination Investigations in 1980. After publishing four volumes of Forgive My Grief, Penn Jones continued his work in a newsletter, The Continuing Inquiry. Jones lamented: "We lost our democracy on November 22nd and we have never regained it yet. I won't live long enough to see it return, but I hope you do."

  Ray Marcus, Vincent J. Salandria and Mark Lane continued writing about the Kennedy assassination and Stone's JFK film stimulated new interest among younger generations. In 1998 Lane and Salandria were invited to speak in Dallas under the auspices of the Washington-based non-profit Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA).

  At the COPA conference, Salandria said that "For one half of my seventy years, from almost the very date of the assassination, I have been convinced that the killing of President Kennedy was a patent Cold War killing – the bloody work of the U.S. military-intelligence system and its supporting civilian power elite." The day after this speech, November 22, 1998, was the 35th anniversary of the JFK assassination. Mark Lane spoke at a ceremony on the grassy knoll site in Dallas, and his words close John Kelin's powerful historical work, Praise From A Future Generation.

  Who Were the First-Generation Critics?

  Among the critical researchers whose little-known heroic stories are included in Praise from a Future Generation are:

  • • Mark Lane, the attorney who questioned Oswald's lack of representation before the Warren Commission, twice bested Melvin Belli (Jack Ruby's defense lawyer) in debates, and authored three books: Rush to Judgment, A Citizen's Dissent, and Plausible Denial. Lane's Rush to Judgment, while not the first book about the assassination, became an international best seller that greatly advanced the critics' case.
  • • Penn Jones, Jr., who investigated the strange deaths of witnesses (in Ramparts) and published four volumes of Forgive My Grief.
  • • Raymond Marcus, who examined images of the grassy knoll gunman and disproved, to the satisfaction of many, the "Magic Bullet Theory" in The Bastard Bullet.
  • • Sylvia Meagher, who indexed the Warren Report and wrote the most comprehensive critique of it in Accessories After the Fact. Her final publication was Subject Index to the JFK Assassination Investigations.
  • • Vincent J. Salandria, author of the first published articles critical of the government's actions and explanations. These were eventually gathered in False Mystery: Essays on the Assassination of President Kennedy.
  • • Harold Weisberg, whose Whitewash series dissected the Warren Report, wrote about a second-Oswald scenario in Oswald in New Orleans, and was a key witness and researcher in D.A. Jim Garrison's case.
    
    • Other writers and significant researchers discussed include Harold Feldman, Shirley Martin and Maggie Field, all compelling characters whose lives were deeply altered by the social and political events of the 1960s. Martin had befriended Marguerite Oswald and arranged for Lane, Salandria and Harold Feldman to meet the mother of the accused assassin.
  • • Kelin also discusses the European journalists who published early books: Léo Sauvage, Thomas Buchanan and Joachim Joesten.

  Praise From A Future Generation also tracks a parallel history of the Civil Rights Movement, since some of these same citizens were involved in the struggle for social justice before challenging the government concerning the cover-up of President Kennedy's death. Attorneys Lane and Salandria defended minorities and peace advocates pro bono and journalist Jones worked with John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me. All these critics came under FBI surveillance and felt the intimidation of federal officialdom; at first their work was dismissed by government and the media.

  The central characters in Praise formed an unofficial network, sharing each others' ideas and lending different abilities to emphasize their varied but connected investigations. All had purchased multiple sets of the 26 volumes of testimony, agreeing that these materials tended to disprove the Commission's theories about the assassination. But the critics did not agree on everything – and one of the fascinating aspects of this story is the detailed correspondences among the critics, which Kelin has so expertly assembled from their archives and presented in a clear, objective and logical manner.

  A Personal Note

  I first met newspaperman Penn Jones, one of the important first-generation critics, through my mentor, John Howard Griffin, who wrote the preface to Jones' first volume of Forgive My Grief. I worked as a stringer with Penn during Jim Garrison's investigation and wrote about Jones for The Texas Observer. As the publisher/editor of Latitudes Press, I published a special issue of Latitudes magazine with articles by six of the critics in 1967, as well as the 1977 book, Citizen's Arrest: The Dissent of Penn Jones, Jr., in the Assassination of JFK, by H.C. Nash, author of the introduction to Praise From A Future Generation.

  Both Nash and I had read early drafts of Kelin's text, and were impressed by his diligent research into an ethical-political discourse in which we had been secondary participants. While we had known only Penn Jones, Kelin interviewed almost all of the original critics and was permitted access to their archives – most previously unseen by any other assassination researcher. I have been consistently impressed by John Kelin's ethical conscience, honest and painstaking research, and his courageous independence. This fascinating and largely unknown chapter of American history is now available to all readers thanks to Kelin and to his plucky publisher, Bryce Milligan of Wings Press.

  Robert Bonazzi is the author of Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me and founder of Latitudes Press (1966-2000).