Case Closed.

• Author: Bethell, Tom

The television networks have been gearing up for 30th anniversary specials, and according to Mary Ferrell, a retired legal secretary in Dallas who just may be the world's best informed person on the Kennedy assassination the new consensus is that the Warren Commission was right: Lee Harvey Oswald alone shot the president, and was himself shot for the reasons that Jack Ruby gave in 1963. And so we return, after a 30-year hegira, to the starting point.

As the title bluntly tells us, Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed, is very much in line with this consensus. He totally demolishes the acoustical evidence on which a House Select Committee (irresponsibly) decided 15 years ago that a fourth shot had been fired at Kennedy. His goal, Posner writes, was to "reexamine all the evidence on the JFK assassination." Quite a task, as there are a million pages of government documents and over 2,000 books to go through. Lots more books will be coming out this fall. Mary Ferrell tells me that in one of them her husband, Buck, is identified as having been stationed behind the picket fence on the Grassy Knoll, s 30-06 rifle in his hands; and she herself emerges as the famous but mysterious Babushka Lady, who appears in many photographs standing close to the presidential limousine, apparently filming the proceedings. (The woman has never been identified, but was certainly not Mary Ferrell.)

As it happened, I worked for the late New Orleans District Attorney, Jim Garrison, on his weird investigation of the assassination, later the basis of a mostly fictitious movie by Oliver Stone. Naturally I turned first to Posner's chapter on Garrison and found it to be a diligent and reliable summary. Contrary to what Jim Garrison (and Oliver Stone) wanted to believe, there was no basis at all for the charges against Clay Shaw, a New Orleans businessman, and several others who happened to cross Garrison's path. The entire investigation was a complete waste of everybody's time; far worse than that for Shaw, of course, whose lifetime savings were consumed by lawyers and whose reputation may have been irreparably damaged, despite his speedy acquittal by a New Orleans jury.

Garrison's investigation was based on Oswald's presence in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. Three years later, in the fall of 1966, a private investigator told Garrison that a rival private investigator and former airline pilot named David Ferrie had been involved somehow with Oswald. On the day of the assassination Ferrie had traveled with...