It Was 50 Years Ago Today: ‘Rush to Judgment’ by Mark Lane
January 3, 1967
Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald by Mark Lane
#1 on the New York Times Best Seller list (Non-Fiction), November 13, 1966 – January 7, 1967
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in while traveling via motorcade on Dealey Plaza, Dallas, on November 22, 1963. Later that day, Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit was gunned down while on duty. Two days later, the apparent assassin of both men, Lee Harvey Oswald, was killed by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby while Oswald was being transported from city jail to county jail.
Ten months afterward, the Warren Commission, established by newly-inaugurated president Lyndon B. Johnson and headed up by Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, issued a report concluding that both Oswald and Ruby acted alone.
Even before the Warren Report was released, however, challenges began cropping up to the official version of events. One of the first of these naysayers was lawyer Mark Lane, a former New York State Assemblyman and Freedom Rider hired by Marguerite Oswald to represent her deceased son at the Warren Commission hearings.
Only four weeks after Kennedy’s assassination, Lane published the article “A Lawyer’s Brief: Is Oswald Innocent?” in the alt-weekly National Guardian. While the Warren Commission never formally recognized Lane as Oswald’s legal defense, he did testify before them, summarizing interviews he had conducted with witnesses of all three murders and presenting theories that ran counter to the narrative the commission was pursuing.
The Warren Report ultimately disregarded much of Lane’s testimony, apart from a few indirect dismissals in its “Speculations and Rumors” appendix. Lane, not willing to be ignored, published the book Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald in August 1966.
While there had been other books criticizing the Warren Commission published in the two years since the release of its report, Rush to Judgment had the benefit of being the first mass-market hardcover — not self-published or issued by a vanity press, but widely available, with a mark of legitimacy.
The American public’s hunger for more information on the mysterious death of its beloved 35th president made Rush to Judgment an instant bestseller, topping the New York Times‘s Non-Fiction list for two months coinciding, with the third anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination.
In Rush to Judgment, Lane painstakingly details evidence and eyewitness testimony that contradict the Warren Commission’s findings. He also points out unasked questions and potentially fruitful areas that the commission failed to explore that could have yielded different conclusions.
He charges that, rather than providing an honest inquiry into the circumstances of Kennedy’s death, the commission began with the conclusion that Oswald had killed the president and acted alone, then ignored any evidence that didn’t fit this preconceived notion.
Lane’s intellectual approach — he writes with the depth of a legal defense but with the clarity of an appeal to a jury — gives Rush to Judgment a plausibility that many other Kennedy conspiracy theorists lack.
While Lane sometimes gets bogged down in minutiae and makes far-fetched leaps in the later, more conspiracy-focused chapters, he also raises some reasonable questions about the Warren Commission’s methodology and conflicting evidence. Even if the reader doesn’t buy many or all of Lane’s arguments, it’s still possible admire his thoroughness and willingness to challenge a flawed report.
Rush to Judgment may have been the first major work confronting the official narrative of the Kennedy assassination, but it was far from the last. Lane himself published three more books on the topic before his 2016 death, ultimately accusing the CIA of masterminding the assassination. Thousands more books have been published in the half-century since, both pro- and anti- the Warren Report, as well as articles, movies, television programs, and other media.
Fifty years on, there seems to be no ebbing of interest in one of the 20th century’s highest-profile and most mysterious deaths, nor is there a shortage in the number of theories concocted to explain the events of Dallas, November 1963. Mark Lane and Rush to Judgment can be blamed — or thanked, depending on your viewpoint — for opening the floodgates.
Header: John F. Kennedy with Mark Lane, c. 1960
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