Dear Gerry, B/31/96 . When Dennis told me that you found the subject "overwhelming" I suggestdd

wneat he seems to believe was a simple approach that eliminates Of it least reduces this, handling the institutions separately. To the degree that is possible.

leslerday Jerry told me of his- conversation. with Dennis Thursday night, in what he had .earned, of publisher preference for short books. That is in

general true but not always and 11.:.t wit'l all publishers. I have no reason to be-lieve it is true Of university presses, for example. It may be. I do not ow.

However, I believe as a book is conceiOand as it is written it sheald be RA- ten as the mateeilnl justifies, not condensed in advance of the writing. It

can be condenceOlin concept, of course, as I'll soon svgest, but within that concept it should be written as the material warrants. If necessary it can thenX beportened. If necessary it may still be Auable to Itave drawn together what e is eliminatTed.

It is my belief that several of the institutions can be dealt with adequately i with a fewpmall samples to justify genera]. statements. One of these is the House

assassins committee. They can be dismissed with a few items like the Guinn testi-moay, the tabuldkenclgeWhey got from the PB1 and the breakdown compared Ath what I got earlier and was available for it free, the Ebersole, Gatixgkan es, ') Frazier, Galloway, SIfyert-OTeill stuff Dennis got and iperhaps/you can use the Dolce material here. -kf you use it with the Commission a mention of it here is enough. (Most of what liSOIL got from the FBI is irrelevant mafia stuff that Iglkey was hung up on.)

Likewise the mayor media can Le handled the same way, with print and TV separate and with OBS as representing commecial TV. Here thdre is overlap with the Guinn material, that it was totally ignored bIZ papers after they

lone:: what Guinn testified to and its meaning, that the bale iidence had been taepered with ar0/ destroyed.

Likewise with the courta. 'i'sook publishers, too. This approach lets you devote most time and space to ::here it should be,

to the Ocumission and to the FBI. With both you will have to decide in advance what you will not go into but that will leave more than enough Mover you decide. Hovever, I would not omit what you believe should be included merely for the shorter booK. Instead write it to roak.e any such cutting easier.

Jerry had borrowed the 133 /ogres of the CIA hexico's summary of its assassi-nation communitations with headquarters for copying. There is a Staples about 10 minutes from here, closer to Hood, where he had it clone. Cost a little more than six dollars 0 50 or less a page. That rate is Ath what can be fed aU4oejtically.

So let one of us know if you'd like that file and we can get it copied that way. That is faster than having the college do any of that copying.

When i told Jerry, when he told me he was reading and liking parts of the incomplete ms. of Case Oeen, originally Hoax, that he hart the full thing to the degree it was retyped, 782 pages of it, he found that in the box in which I think 1 have it to him. do no'..; know if yeu'd like that, or if till will. I'll ask him. I am certain that in it I followed more of the evidence than exists in the shorter printout the shortening of 4ich is a mystery to me. I raise the question not only to e.earn if one of you would like it but also to be able to take advantage of any reduced rate for greater volume, if Jerry's belief is correct. likEnixszne s2 I'll/enclose the Lardner story on the Guinn testimony. 1 have the full pub- lished USOA testimony if you need that. Or want it.

If you want to explore the Russell archived' score that may be worthihile. may be possible to get some of that done for you by a student, perhaps a law student. A member of the law faculty, Donald 1'. qlkes, at Athens, has been in touch with meA has written everal articles about the Russell position for the local p„-pers. 1?or them he did little or no research of his own but what he had was adequate and he needed no more.

I have soee of what Selby got. I'm sure he'll let yoe have nore if he has more that you can usg, is a' 1)3301 Overbrook &Pad Lane, Bowie, WD 20715. (y.

If you do not ha' u should get it. Using a child you can get 100 pages of it, about wl it io]ii free. That leaves either of you free for asango4N- AWrig for yourself. You CR have real fun with the table of contents andethe iddex alone!

It it a diatribe aaainst "scald that barely mentions the came and does not mentithn all the known shooting or all the wounds-even the cause of death! If you cannot find what ea"aughton of the Defen5 e °ept, said of this and what the 10111 then did in my files ask the archive e for it. 6e alone had any questiond and they went after him in return. I think he was geneeat counsel. Check my subject file on this and on what .uoover did to the Dallas police after blackjacking Jesse Curry to retract the truth he told-broke off all relations with them. Even training.

Jerry had all the executive session transcripts if you want any of them. His manual for hie classes will tall you more of whal; he has, in part.

I think you can siely indicate in what you write that the vastness of -what is available makee it impossible to include all of it\What you will write will male that apparent. `?nue you can sefely not include much and still have an imeressive work.

Perhaps it might be a good idea if you were to carry a small pocket note-

book in which yoa can record sabOects to include because when you get to it it

xttx thee- may no all come te mind-42te--

Gping back to Guid-A and hi 5 testimo ny, he stated that the specimens he testecd

were not the official specimens of the FBI's original testing or those in the

Uarren coamiseion's evidence. Let he testified about them as though there were

pure. The Commiseion ,rather coimiittee, tr.Q.ated his testimony as though he

testified to the genuine ar'icie in the eeidence when he was speciac in st tin

under oath t; at it wan no the genuine evid.mce. I do not sugaest that lid in-

clude expert witnesses as an inetItution but it is obgious that if he had been

fully honeSt what teetimonyceould have been based on Cot he teetfied to only

toward the end of it and the, when questioned. I think lawyers might argue that

dith any of the samplee tested invalid he could not reaely testify at all any-

the\ixothev• than the tnvalidity oZ the sqmplee tested.

The committee len. red tille est:mony inlif its alleged deliberarions and in

its report. The l'ost, while reeortina Idiot ha did say, also angle' / ' 2 t out of meaning

in the story and the headline on the story. Aceually, despite the eords he used,

his testimony was nee 'to a 'match" _when what he j6ted was not tin

Ale original speci-

e.

Than get to another Colonist failure. It did not get eta the FBI the 0

1 . aght of the soecimens it removed from the (arida:nee. It did not get from the FBI

/I what the w6Tigilis of what remains w thine specimens it took or even ehere those

specimens nay be, rather tat aetal aajf be. ell.that was needed for spectrographic

examination was as little as a millinaerein size, o/ postage-stamp weight. But ,

Frazier removed over so much more than that from the base of 399, as its picture sixows. We questioned him about this on deposition in 75-226.X did not weigh that

bullet °thee than when he recived it and he hadn't the dightest notion where all

tee excess core aaterial he removed ra, be. It col, and we do not know and cannot

allege it, have been the source ografecould have been substituted for the actual origonal specimens. In which event they ibviously Would seem to be of common

source! in ( WA Guinn also could not have testifie4honestly, if that was his testimony

rather than Lardner's interpretation of it,that "there uses no evidence that any

other bullet struck the presidanti h1 limousine." There not only is such evidence that he wa, not aware of, wae not given to him for him to testify about"e has I

no idea what caused JFK's nonfatal eounds. ikithing he was given is in feet rather

than in fabrication connected with his nonfatal injuries. And then thete is the

Commission evidence that there ::ere 40 "dustrlike" fragments in jFKIshead. They could not have c____ ame from that ammunition Guinn tested.

The press as an institution failed in this, as it failed in many other ways you :lay want to keep a list of bee cruse they require little more than mention.

It should not have let the matter of the substituted, the unibriginal, the phony in any way evidence go without comment or demands and 1 la-low of not a single one.

It accepted the port and the 26 uncritically, too. As it did secre t procedin9s, ntt being able to attend and cover any or to get transcripts. Cibm-- pare this, as 'I" think I mentioned to Dennis, with going to court to have the 0.j.Simpson case Aoun it live in TV. 't..11(1 that was after the press was jin the proceding from the beginning with a pool arran.,, ia-Aithat is the norm.

In a sense I am suGgesting compartmentalizing it. That way yet.y can do a col:Tar-blunt and. lq: it aside and do anyther, etc. tmtil you have pretty much of it written. :Lou' both have other thinge taking up your time and keeping you from being- on this constantly. That makes me think that doing it in chunks you

can pretty mech clean up as yon l go can be the best aproach for you.

I believe there is nethin. arcane or complicqte6/ in the legal/evidentiary

matters I mention above and - believe tha'7., fill, who has always been very helpful and very welling to be, will help you on it and anything else like it. Ditto for his Ale lietsy on medical records. he is a recoijnized expert in the field.

It will take time bnd it will not be as difficult as it now seems but it will be worthwhile.

Best,