Mark Lane, Early Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy Theorist, Dies at 89

[Octafish]

63. Truly a great American. Some of his accomplishments...

Last edited Sun May 15, 2016, 12:32 PM - Edit history (2)

At Duquesne, he remarked that after appearing on William Buckley's "Firing Line," a PBS show, US broadcasters never allowed him to be interviewed in a broadcast reaching more than one US city at a time. He said that it was when the CBC broadcast an interview from Toronto that reached all of Canada that people in US towns near the border were able to hear him talk about the assassination of President Kennedy.

Biography of Mark Lane

by Ken Rahn

Mark Lane is one of the best-known researchers of the JFK assassination. He is also one of the most outspoken and controversial. He is a New York defense lawyer with strong leftist leanings and a strong social conscience, having involved himself in many causes over the years, such as the unjust exclusion of Negroes and Puerto Ricans from the juries in New York, the effects of widespread pretrial publicity upon the rights of the defendants, and the mistreatment of mentally retarded children in a New York State school. In 1959, helped found the Reform Democratic Movement within the New York Democrat Party. In 1960, he was elected to the New York Legislature, where he served for one term with the support of Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, who was a Presidential Candidate at the time. In the legislature, he worked to abolish capital punishment, exposed a scandal in the construction of fallout shelters, and worked with New York Mary Robert Wagner on its housing problem. Perhaps one of the reasons he has been so interested in the assassination is that he managed JFK’s 1960 presidential campaign in the New York City area.

After the JFK assassination, Lane founded the Citizens’ Committee of Inquiry in New York City, where he spoke virtually daily on the assassination (before the Warren Report had been issued). He discussed the assassination widely in Europe because he felt that practically the only way to inform the American people about the assassination was to speak about it over there. Those efforts brought him into contact with Bertrand Russell and his then aide, Ralph Schoenman. Lane’s influence on Russell led the latter to publish his famous (or infamous?) “16 Questions On The Assassination” in the U.S. in September 1964.

He volunteered to defend Lee Harvey Oswald before the Warren Commission, but they refused him. He was then retained in 1964 by Marguerite Oswald to defend her son's interests, and was the only witness to request an open hearing. These events made him persona non grata with the Commission. Later he worked with Jim Garrison in New Orleans on Clay Shaw case, which was featured in Oliver Stone’s famous movie JFK.

Lane has written widely on the assassination. His first book on the subject was Rush to Judgment, which appeared in the U.S. in August 1966, in Great Britain in September 1966 (in hardcover), and then in 1967 as the Paperback Penguin Edition in Britain. He then wrote A Citizen’s Dissent in 1968. He has two screenplays dealing with the assassination, Executive Action and Plausible Denial, the first of which became a movie. He has produced two documentary films on the assassination, Rush to Judgment and Two Men In Dallas. He has also written one play, The Trial Of James Earl Ray.

Mark Lane has also been active in trying to understand the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination. He was James Earl Ray’s lawyer, then later wrote (with Dick Gregory) a book on that assassination, entitled Murder in Memphis).

Lane was also a lawyer for Jim Jones’s “People’s Temple” in Guyana. Regarding that relationship, Michael Benson noted in Who’s Who In The JFK Assassination that “Lane’s role in the uncovering of a JFK conspiracy is made more intriguing by the fact that Lane was a lawyer for Jim Jones’s People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, and managed to escape the bizarre community just before the massacre. According to researcher John Judge (Critique, Spring/Summer 1986), Jonestown was not a religious community at all, but rather a part of the CIA mind-control program known as MK/ULTRA”. Whew!

More recently, Lane has been a lawyer for the far-right Liberty Lobby, headed by Willis Carto. In 1985, he successfully defended that group’s publication The Spotlight. That case led to his writing the 1991 book Plausible Denial, which claims that the CIA killed Kennedy.

SNIP...

We feature here Lane's article "Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer's Brief." that appeared in the National Guardian of 19 December 1963, or just four weeks after the assassination. As far as I can find, this is the first American reaction of a critical nature. It was an enormously influential article, and set the stage for Lane's years of intense activity regarding the case. Lane tells how the article came to be in the first chapter of his 1968 book A Citizen's Dissent: Mark Lane Replies. It seems that The New York Times had published on November 26th the text of Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade's press conference of the 24th, shortly after Oswald's death had been announced, in which Wade presented fifteen assertions concerning the sole guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald. Lane began to study the charges and compare them with what was then known about the case, and found many contradictions. He rapidly produced a ten-thousand-word article (the equivalent of twenty single-spaced pages) and started to shop it around. In his words, he offered it "gratis, to almost every periodical in the United States," including The Nation, Fact, The Reporter, Look, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, The New Republic, and The Progressive. Eventually James Aronson agreed to publish it in the leftist National Guardian, where it occupied five tabloid-size pages. Lane states that so many additional press runs were needed to keep the newsstands supplied that the Guardian reprinted it as a special pamphlet. Other publishers reacted in mixed ways. The New York Times published a long story on Lane's points, but to the best of Lane's knowledge no other paper in the country touched it. Lanes notes that the Guardian later reported that "Abroad the reaction was quite different. In Rome the Lane brief was scheduled to be printed in full in Paese Sera, the largest in the evening field, and in Liberation in Paris. Oggi, an Italian magazine with a circulation of one million, sought permission to reprint. The Japanese press and news agencies also were on top of the story. Several Mexican papers picked it up, too."

CONTINUED...

http://www.kenrahn.com/JFK/The_critics/Lane/Lanebio.html

He came to speak in Detroit in 1993. I was unable to attend, but heard him interviewed on the radio. Caller after caller -- filtered by the station, of course -- all came on to criticize and slam him for daring to say CIA was involved. He asked the host if there was anybody in Detroit who'd read his books?