Laying Old Ghosts to Rest
Preface Part One Part Two
Part Two: The Pitzer Meme
(or, Now It Can Be Told: The Truth About De-evolution*)
by Kent Heiner, January 2015
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Without Smoking Gun, 2004. |
LCDR William Bruce Pitzer was a World War II veteran, a talented and dedicated Naval officer, and by all accounts a fine man, the kind I would like to have met. But it was none of those things that made him a martyr figure of sorts to many students of the Kennedy assassination. No, he gained that status by forcing improperly-sized live ammunition into the barrel of a revolver in which he normally kept blank rounds, placing the gun to his temple, and pulling the trigger. Once all the facts are examined, it would take a fertile imagination indeed to suppose otherwise. Tragic, but true. As I review the notes I made from conversations with Pitzer's youngest son, I feel a renewed sadness not only for his family's loss but for the world that Bill Pitzer made a better place by having lived in it. I also am saddened to be reminded that due to having collaborated with Col. Marvin (See Part One) in my investigation of Pitzer's death, doors were closed to me and I was denied some opportunities to learn more about Pitzer's life; thus I also lost the opportunity to include a richer biography and more fitting memorial in my book.
The conclusion of suicide was not an easy one for me to reach. For ten years, I refused to publicly offer or personally reach any conclusion at all on whether Pitzer was murdered or had committed suicide, to the disappointment both of readers and of radio listeners.
In Part One of this series, I reviewed many of my experiences researching Pitzer's death, and how I have come to see certain aspects of that experience in a far less troubling light. Part One dealt with Col. Marvin in particular; in Part Two, I will now write more generally of the Pitzer case as a whole, discussing both the facts of Pitzer's death and the mythology surrounding it. Among the facts are these: Pitzer was right-handed, consistent with the entry wound on the right side of his head and the small exit wound opposite. A .38 caliber revolver was found on the floor next to his corpse, which lay face-down on the floor of the studio adjoining his office at the National Naval Medical Center.
One of the most haunting suspicions I had carried this past ten years is the possibility that well-known JFK researcher David Lifton may have unknowingly precipitated - or somehow hastened - the murder of LCDR Pitzer. Feel free to laugh, but follow me on this: In Best Evidence, Lifton records October 22, 1966 as the landmark day he discovered mention of "surgery of the head area" in the FBI report on JFK's autopsy, leading Lifton to his hypothesis that the president's body had been tampered with prior to the autopsy. This discovery was in a historical context of growing public criticism of the Warren Report. Chapter 9 of Best Evidence is titled "October 24th, 1966," the day Lifton informed Wesley Liebeler of his findings, who in turn called Arlen Specter. By the end of the day, word had passed to several former Warren Commission personnel. Specter in particular was reported to have been greatly agitated by the news. Bill Pitzer, who reportedly had been in possession of visual proof of Lifton's theory, was found dead by gunshot wound a mere five days later, on October 29th. The 29th also happened to be the day that the Kennedy family finally agreed to release their autopsy photos and x-rays, after months of pressure from Congress and the Justice Department. Three days later, Lifton writes that he placed a call to Dr. Humes, who had performed JFK's autopsy. Humes had worked with Pitzer, and unknown to Lifton, had probably just returned from Pitzer's funeral when he took Lifton's call. No fewer than two days after (if I recall correctly) having taken photos of Bill Pitzer's corpse in the Bethesda morgue, John Stringer went to the National Archives to review photos released by the Kennedys which he had ostensibly exposed during the president's autopsy in that same morgue three Novembers previously. Though he would many years later, he made no objections at that time to the mismatch between what these prints depicted and what others present at the autopsy recalled. Creepy, is it not? When I first put all these dates together, it shook me.
My own correspondence with Lifton started on a poor footing and was slow to improve. Our first introduction took place in December 2001 after I sent him a copy of my weekly newsletter, in which I was picking at loose ends in the 9/11 investigation. Lifton responded in his classic manner: "This is real junk. What is the source of your 'data'??" After I began working on my book on the Pitzer case, I contacted him again. This time, we got into a minor argument about the consistency and credibility of Dennis David's testimony (see below) concerning Pitzer. Lifton seemed to have forgotten that Pitzer was the main focus of the 1975 article which brought Dennis to Lifton's attention. He implied that Dennis had changed his story, having been somehow unduly influenced by fellow author and nemesis Harrison Livingstone, who for years had been the Pitzer story's chief evangelist (again, see below). I was astonished to realize that in Best Evidence (1980), Lifton had covered every aspect of Dennis David's comments in the 1975 article except Bill Pitzer. This omission was apparently not lost on one of Pitzer's family members, who called Lifton in 2000. According to Lifton, the caller "apparently wanted to interest me in the subject; and it seemed to me, from that phone call, that he had an animus towards me because [Pitzer's] name was not in my book."
As I review the emails between Lifton and me, I see that between all his denunciations of various and sundry persons - ranging from the well-deserved to the ill-considered - some wisdom was to be found. Saying that I was "dealing with people who are pushing an exaggerated and ever changing story," he observed: "Any normal journalist would understand where the truth lies in this situation, but you keep digging, as if there's some great secret being hidden." "I am in the business of evidence, not urban legend," he wrote to me. An "urban legend" might less pejoratively be called a "meme." The term has come to common usage in the context of internet cat pictures and the like, but it also represents a certain intellectual approach to understanding where ideas come from and how they spread. LCDR Pitzer's death is a fact. The idea that he was murdered to safeguard the cover-up of the true nature of JFK's murder is - regardless of its truth or falsity - a meme.
Wikipedia defines a meme as "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures." As Pitzer's story has spread over the years, its details have indeed undergone a kind of selective replication and mutation. Many, if not most, versions of the story reveal a clear heritage in the elements that they do or do not include. These elements, which one might call "memetic markers," are analogous to the genetic markers passed in DNA, as I will demonstrate.
At one time, I wondered whether Lifton had been too quick to dismiss Dennis David's Pitzer account because at some level he recognized the significance of the date of Pitzer's demise and didn't want to bear the burden of that responsibility. I cannot imagine that during his search for Dennis David - who in the 1975 article had been quoted only anonymously - Lifton did not determine the date of Pitzer's death and read his obituary in a Washington newspaper. Still, despite the perverse pleasure I might have found in doing so, I was careful in my book not to overemphasize the coincidence of Lifton's October discovery with Pitzer's death. The far simpler explanation of Lifton's choice is that he is naturally and generally skeptical. By the time he located Dennis, he may have already ruled out Pitzer's presence at JFK's autopsy based on his absence from the FBI's list of people in attendance. An alternate - and weak, but not mutually exclusive - explanation is that David's story, though it would have supported the testimony of Lifton's other witnesses regarding the original nature and locations of Kennedy's head wounds, could have caused problems for Lifton's theory that the wounds had already been altered by the time JFK's body arrived at Bethesda and was presented to Doctors Humes and Boswell. Indeed, we may justifiably infer from his discussion of Dennis David's 1988 interview (below) that Lifton at one point saw the Pitzer story as a threat to the credibility of his most key witness and of his own work. This line of thought may be developed further in a third part of this series, discussing how Lifton produced an equally robust (and also problematic) meme completely distinct from, but having definite common origin with, the Pitzer meme, its half-sibling.
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Washington Post, November 2 1966 |
The context of the story
If we are to analyze the Pitzer story as a meme, we should first recognize its precedents in a more general tradition. Penn Jones Jr. was the owner of the Midlothian, TX Mirror and the originator of what came to be known in the JFK research community as the "mysterious death list." He is best known for the self-published, four-volume series, Forgive My Grief. While reviewing news stories contemporary with Pitzer's death, one of the interesting items I found was a mention of Jones's "death list" in a Washington Post article published three days before the tragedy. Due to the publication of several books on the Kennedy assassination, 1966 was a year of growing criticism of the Warren Report, comparable perhaps to the reaction to Oliver Stone's "JFK" 25 years later. The article reported the list numbering "at least ten." Gerald Posner writes that by 1967 the list would grow to eighteen. Pitzer himself would not be included until 1976, when the number of persons on list would be reported as "more than fifty." The "mysterious death" meme was picked up by others, and the population of their later lists would exceed one hundred. Many of the deaths on the list were indeed connected to the assassination, but, as we shall see, at least one of them came to be included due to a misunderstanding.
The history of the story
Pitzer's death on October 29, 1966 was announced very briefly in the Washington Post on the 31st of that month, and at greater length on November 2nd, relating mostly details of his life and explaining only that his demise came "unexpectedly." It set a precedent of factuality that has too seldom been followed in subsequent publications concerning the incident. The Washington Evening Star also reported much of the same information as the Post on November 2, adding only the polite fiction that Pitzer had died "after a brief illness." An autopsy was performed, and inquiries were made without public attention; The medical examiner and Naval Investigative Service both concluded that the death had been a suicide, and the FBI found no indications to the contrary.
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News-Sun, May 1, 1975 (article continues here). |
There wasn't much in contemporary reporting to give this story "staying power." Military suicides are not uncommon, and like all suicides, not a matter happily dwelt on. These stories were sterile, destined to die out, memetic dead ends. But, as we shall see, once a certain mutation arose, its survival was nearly guaranteed. Indeed, it replicated itself far too readily, not unlike a tumor.
This mutation first saw print in the Waukegan, IL News-Sun on May 1, 1975, based on information from Dennis David, Pitzer's friend from the Naval Hospital. In "Another link in JFK death?" reporter Art Peterson mentions a "mysterious death syndrome" that followed in the wake of the Kennedy assassination and speculates that Pitzer may be counted among the "more than 50 persons connected with the incident who have died under mysterious or unusual circumstances." David was quoted as saying Pitzer "was shot with a 45-caliber pistol and was found with the gun in his right hand . . . But he was left-handed." This was incorrect on more than one point. When asked about it much later, David admitted not knowing where he got the idea that the weapon was .45 caliber. The idea that Pitzer was left-handed appears to have arisen from the fact that David and Pitzer played bridge together, and David recalls having teased Pitzer about having dealt cards left-handed. Peterson then reports that Pitzer "had filmed in detail the Kennedy autopsy," presumably based on David's recollection of having seen such a film in Pitzer's possession. Though his words have been grossly misrepresented on this point, neither Dennis David nor any other credible person has claimed to have seen Pitzer at the autopsy, with camera or otherwise. Jerrol Custer, an x-ray technician, is the only person to have made this assertion, and his recollection was both inconsistent and full of inaccuracies. "I've always believed he was murdered," David said in 1975. "They said he was depressed, but he was close to retirement and had just received an offer to work for a network television station at $45,000 a year."
It is difficult to know whether to attribute some of the inaccuracies in this article to either Peterson, David, or the channels through which David was informed of Pitzer's death, but given the overall consistency and character of David's later recorded statements, both public and private, on numerous occasions over a span of several years, I am not inclined to dismiss any of that later testimony based only on what was reported second-hand in 1975. Whatever its precise origins, the Pitzer meme was now "in the wild" and quickly found its way back into print. Mere months after the Peterson article, in a January 1976 edition of his 1969 book Forgive My Grief, Vol III, Penn Jones relayed the inaccurate information from the News-Sun and apparently added more of his own, declaring that "Lt." Pitzer called his experience of debriefings after JFK's autopsy "horrifying" and that "he was visited periodically by military personnel who reminded him repeatedly - for reasons of 'national security' - never to reveal what he saw while taking pictures." Whether Jones had a source for any of this additional information or merely invented it is unclear. It is not implausible that he and Peterson may have shared notes, as Peterson's "list" was almost certainly in reference to Jones' work. It seems doubtful that Jones did any research of his own in this matter; had he even looked up Pitzer's obituaries, he would have been obliged to give his correct rank as "Lt. Cmdr."
When interviewing Dennis David for 1980's Best Evidence, David Lifton passed over Dennis' information regarding Pitzer, focusing instead on Dennis' account of the circumstances in which the - or "a" - casket arrived at the morgue for the Kennedy autopsy. In fact (as I mentioned previously), by the time I wrote to Lifton in 2002, he implied that Dennis had changed his story, having been in the meantime somehow unduly influenced by Harrison Livingstone. Lifton wrote to me:
As to any filming of Dennis David, I interviewed him in July, 1979 by telephone. What he told me then appears in my book, verbatim, exactly as he told me. The book went to press over the summer of 1980 and was published at the tail end of 1980 (Dec. 1980/Jan. 1981).
I filmed Dennis David in October 1980. There was nothing about Pitzer mentioned in that filmed interview, which basically put on camera what he told me in our July, 1979 telephone interview.
. . .
Somewhere around 1988 or 1989, Harrison Livingstone got involved in this affair and started to promote the theory that Pitzer's death was connected with the JFK assassination. He would call up various witnesses who I had interviewed and attempt to get them to change or amend their accounts about any number of things, but the Pitzer business was part of his agenda. Again, this was all in 1988 and thereafter.
Do you subscribe to the idea that its an author's responsibility to change his book to accommodate a witness who changes his story a decade after the book appears? Changes which apparently occurred after being lobbied by an assassination "researcher" who, incidentally, would call me up and leave death threats on my telephone answering machine? And send me similar letters in writing? [Livingstone wrote comparable accusations regarding Lifton in his emails to this author.]
This is the kind of territory into which you are heading. Do you think that's credible?
I first heard the William Pitzer story coming from Dennis David directly when he was being interviewed by KRON-TV around November 1988. That film shoot was not conducted by me, but I was present. The two experienced news people who were conducting the filming - producer Stanhope Gould and Sylvia Chase - were quite put off by Dennis David's change of story. It appeared to them so completely non-credible that they wanted to drop him from their documentary as a witness. However, out of respect for his prior interview with me (in 1979) and the prior filmed interview (in 1980) they did in fact use him in their show.
. . . the first I ever heard of Dennis David "viewing" "movies" of the autopsy was when he said so in front of me and Stanhope Gould in the fall of 1988, when he was interviewed (as I recall) by Sylvia Chase for KRON-TV.
Also, as I recall (and quite vividly) he said he viewed them and "edited" them with Pitzer, at his residence. Again, if that Dennis David interview footage is ever located, I defer to whatever he said. Suffice it to say that whatever Dennis David said on the subject, I had never heard it - or at least, heard it stated quite that way - until 1988, and Stanhope Gould was quite unprepared for it too, because it seemed completely bizarre and off the wall. As I mentioned before, it was so bizarre that it essentially destroyed Dennis David's credibility, and extreme efforts on my part were necessary that everything he said was not thrown out along with his allegations about Pitzer.
After further discussion and a review of the 1975 article, Lifton did agree that Pitzer's film of the autopsy had been mentioned at that time, but he also maintained that the first he ever heard Dennis speaking of having viewed such a film was in 1988, as quoted above; this may be true, but Dennis David thinks otherwise, and his memory seems to be more reliable than Lifton's. Dennis' email to me in 2003 said:
In '79, when David and his film crew sat in my living room, I told David of my experiences of the 22 Nov 63. This included my feelings on Bill Pitzer. . . .the story of Pitzer he was not able to corroborate, for obvious reasons, and [therefore] he did not pursue it. Which, I think, was the legitimate thing to do. In 1998 [sic - he means 1988] sitting in my back yard under a maple tree, I told Sylvia Chase and her crew essentially what I had told David in 1979. That: 1) I had seen portions of a 16mm film in Bill's office, and helped edit a portion of the film. 2) I had also looked at photos, some B&W and some colored. 3) I told them from the film and pictures, both Bill and I drew the same conclusion that the killing shot was a frontal entry wound. 4) They ask[ed] me if Bill was in the autopsy room, and if he had taken the film and pictures. I told them I did not know if he took the film or pictures of the autopsy. I did day that "considering Bill's job at Bethesda, it would be logical to assume that he had, however I do not recall seeing him that night."
It is unfortunate that it would not be for several years after meeting Lifton that Dennis David's recollections regarding Pitzer would be captured on tape from his own mouth. Though all the chief elements were reported, only the barest outline for Dennis David's later comments was given in the 1975 article; if his later testimony can be suspected of having been colored by anyone's influence, it would be Lifton, not Livingstone, who would seem the most likely source, intentionally or otherwise. Lifton bestowed minor fame on Dennis David in a book promoting a hypothesis which has direct connection to the later details of the Pitzer story. Thus an opportunity was lost when Lifton failed to interrogate Dennis at length on this subject before Dennis had a chance to read Best Evidence; as he stated on "Best Evidence: The Research Video," the purpose of filming his witnesses three months prior to the release of his book "was to get the key witnesses on camera before they themselves realized the full implication of information they possessed." Whatever Lifton's mistakes may have been, getting carried away with the Pitzer story was not among them.
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Forgive My Grief, Vol. III, January 1976 edition. |
Forgive My Grief disappeared into obscurity, but Jones' sensationalized Pitzer story reached much wider audiences with the 1989 work (and 1990 mass-market paperback) High Treason by Harrison Livingstone and Robert Groden, which devoted an entire chapter to "Strange Deaths." Livingstone, according to an article found on his web site in 2002, had learned of the Pitzer death by reading Jones' book; in an email to me, Livingstone stated that Jones showed him the News-Sun article in person during a visit. High Treason corrected the record on the matter of Pitzer's rank at the time of his death, as well as his dominant hand, which, according to his widow, was the right. Effort was made to gain new information on the case rather than merely recounting what had already been said; Pitzer's family was contacted. "The authors believe that Pitzer was murdered . .. as a warning to other witnesses in the hospital. His family was told that his death was a suicide, and no one in his family believes it. The government refuses to give up a copy of the autopsy report or any investigation of his death, if there was one." But in the absence of an autopsy report and photos, more misinformation enters the record: "The government refuses to give up a copy of the autopsy report or any investigation of his death, if there was one. . . . His widow said that his left hand was so mangled that they could not remove the wedding ring to give to her, but he was right-handed." Further revelations are offered without documentation (if memory serves, credit for this must go chiefly to Livingstone as primary writer): "All reports indicate it was murder." Reference is made to "several reports that [Pitzer] was not only there but filmed the autopsy" in response to Dr. Boswell's denial that this was the case. If the same fiction is handed down and repeated, does that become "several reports?" One might wonder whether at this point the Pitzer family was telling Livingstone their purely personal insights or whether their opinions had already been influenced by what had circulated in the media.
The book engages in purest speculation:
Cmdr. Pitzer may have actually been murdered elsewhere and brought into Bethesda where he was found dead to make it far more difficult for the Maryland authorities to investigate his murder, even though they have jurisdiction over crimes committed on Federal property and military bases within Maryland. The fact that Pitzer's autopsy report has never been released to his widow and family indicates that another murder has been covered up.
Dennis David is mentioned twice in High Treason, first as "a medical corpsman present at [JFK's] autopsy" and then as "a witness at the autopsy." He is quoted without reference to any other source, and thus the impression is given that the authors had interviewed or otherwise made contact with him. This appears not to have been the case. When all the references to David in High Treason are compared with prior sources, it becomes clear that they all have origin in Peterson's 1975 article and Jones' 1976 book, except for Dennis David's name, which must have come from Best Evidence. Rather than having contacted David, Livingstone (as a resident of Baltimore) must have found it more practical to contact the Pitzer family. As seen above, the authors twice misreported David's presence at the hospital and morgue anteroom as him having been "at the autopsy." This error becomes more grievous when placed directly alongside David's assumption that Pitzer had filmed the autopsy. High Treason makes this highly regrettable statement:
Dennis David, a medical corpsman at the autopsy, was a friend of Lt. Cmdr. Bruce [sic] Pitzer, who he said "filmed in detail the Kennedy autopsy" [directly quoted from Peterson's 1975 article].
It would take a careful reader not to infer from the foregoing that Dennis David told Groden and/or Livingstone that he had seen Bill Pitzer film the autopsy. Vincent Bugliosi, author of 2007's Reclaiming History, demonstrated quite clearly that he was not a careful reader; or, perhaps that he saw only what he was looking for. Bugliosi made precisely this incorrect inference and then, in his brief treatment of the Pitzer case, raked Dennis David over the coals for it:
After indicating to David Lifton in 1979 that he was not present at the autopsy, and telling Harrison Livingstone in 1988 that he was, in 1997 he went back to his original story and conceded to ARRB investigators that he was not present at the autopsy . . . It's clear that David is incapable of telling the same story twice on this matter.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Bugliosi's cynical, arrogant, and misinformed caricature of David is a straw man of his own construction which he appears to have enjoyed tearing apart. David Lifton (as quoted above) also seems to have had the impression that Livingstone had been in contact with Dennis David by 1988, but any such contact is in no way evident in Livingstone's 1989 book with Groden.
In the 1992 sequel High Treason 2, Livingstone devotes at least three more pages to the Pitzer death.