Presumed Guilty

If Howard Roffman is right, and his careful documentation argues that he is, Lee Harvey Oswald could not have been the assassin of President John F. Kennedy. He could not have been the gunman in the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building, as shown by his close analysis of both the circumstantial evidence and the ballistics of the case. The implications are serious indeed, and the Introduction deals with them extensively, besides assessing the contributions of other critics. The documentation here presented, extracted from the once-secret working papers of the Warren Commission, demonstrates conclusively that the Commission prejudges Oswald guilty and made use of only circumstantial evidence to bolster its assumption, while suppressing information that tended to undermine it. Roffman in this book states the charge explicitly: "When the Commissioners decided in advance that the wrong man was the lone assassin, whatever their intentions, they protected the real assassins. Through their staff, they misinformed the American public and falsified history."