The Wall Street Journal noticed me not long ago. My book was one of five described in a Journal overview of new titles that "help untangle the mysterious popularity of conspiracy theories."

The only bad publicity, they say, is no publicity, and I suppose there is some truth to that. There was an unmistakable jump in sales right after the WSJ item appeared. But the article, written by Max Holland, was decidedly unflattering and misleading, implying that my nonfiction narrative deliberately ignored important information and inadvertently revealed that the people I was writing about were desperate liberals who could not accept the truth.

The truth, the article says, is that President Kennedy was shot by an avowed Marxist, all on his lonesome, because he hated America and because he was nuts.

So the book, my first, deals with the JFK assassination. When I began working it, my thought was, "We need another book about this like we need another lawyer." But I was confident my approach was different, that it was worth the effort.

It is the saga of the earliest critics of the Warren Report – a dozen or so self-selected critics, mostly ordinary citizens, who analyzed the government data on the assassination and found it severely flawed. It is because of them that phrases like "the grassy knoll" and "the magic bullet" became part of American pop lexicon. Over a period of about five years I interviewed those critics still alive, was permitted to see their voluminous correspondence from the 1960s, and accessed a variety of public and private archives. The result is a 500-something page narrative entitled Praise from a Future Generation, published last fall by Wings Press.

I wrote it without the benefit of a publishing contract and funded most of the research myself. If nothing else, it is an honest effort, and a work I stand by. But I learned long ago that in spite of the passage of many years, the Kennedy assassination remains a hot-button topic, and anyone who dares breathe the word "conspiracy" is a potential target for those still willing to defend the proposition that the deed was committed by a lone nut.

Thus Mr. Holland's opus. "This work deserves to be read," he wrote of my book, "but not for the purpose the author intended." Zing. He continued with the unsupported and perhaps libelous allegation that one of the people I wrote about was "secretly subsidized by the KGB." During the course of my research I saw an awful lot of paper on the critic in question (all from the National Archives). What emerged from these documents, plain as day, was that in 1964 the FBI was monitoring him closely – not for any connection to the KGB, which was never mentioned, but for his work in bringing out the truth about the assassination.

Mr. Holland has long written in defense of the Warren Report. Writing in The Nation a few years ago, he acknowledged the Report to be "imperfect,” but continued that “its fundamental findings have never been seriously impeached." Is that so? Tell that to surviving members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. In its final report, published nearly thirty years ago, this committee concluded that "President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy." True, they copped out by further stating they were "unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy." But their verdict is diametrically opposed to the Warren Report's no conspiracy conclusion. I'd call that seriously impeached.

I drafted a terse letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal and sent it along. Max Holland's article, I said, was a misrepresentation. So far they haven’t published it and I don’t suppose they shall. Answering one's critics in this manner can be a fool's errand, and perhaps my letter was a waste of time. Perhaps I am being too thin-skinned. Take the publicity for what it is, genuflect toward the monolith, and move on.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120190643729936587.html

http://home.comcast.net/~johnkelin/praise.html