I learned all this not from watching Destiny Betrayed itself (life’s too short for that), but rather from reading Oliver Stone’s Film-Flam: The Demagogue of Dealey Plaza, a newly published book authored by Quillette contributor (and one-time self-confessed JFK “conspiracy freak”) Fred Litwin. By one of those happy journalistic coincidences, a review copy of Litwin’s new release was waiting for me when I got home from New Orleans, its chapter titles corresponding to Litwin’s point-by-point rebuttals of Destiny Betrayed. These include “Was Lee Harvey Oswald a Fake Defector?”, “Did the CIA Lobby to Have Allen Dulles Put on the Warren Commission?”, and “Did the Conspirators Substitute JFK’s Brain?” (A disturbing number of JFK conspiracy theories involve the weight, shape, and ultimate fate of the President’s skull contents.)
This isn’t the place for a proper review of Litwin’s book because I didn’t read all of it. Rather, I skipped straight to the chapters touching on New Orleans, which (among other things) make short work of the Goldberg-intoned claim, contained in the fourth episode of Destiny Betrayed, that Guy Banister “gave Oswald his own office at 544 Camp Street. Oswald now began to use the office to print up and stamp pro-Castro literature.” As Litwin explains at great length, there is no evidence that Oswald ever had an office at 544 Camp Street (or at the adjoining Lafayette Street address for that matter). He also demonstrates that the Hands off Cuba! leaflets shown in both the original JFK and Destiny Betrayed, stamped “544 Camp Street,” are fake: The actual leaflets that Oswald handed out in New Orleans were stamped with either his own home address or post office box.