Mark Lane (author) facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Mark Lane
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Mark Lane in Ann Arbor, 1967
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| Member of the New York State Assembly from New York County's 10th District |
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| In office 1 January 1961 – 31 December 1962 |
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| Preceded by | Martin J. Kelly, Jr. |
| Succeeded by | Carlos M. Rios |
| Personal details | |
| Born | February 24, 1927 The Bronx, New York, U.S. |
| Died | May 10, 2016 (aged 89) Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Other political affiliations |
Freedom and Peace (1968) |
| Known for | Conspiracy theorist on the Assassination of John F. Kennedy |
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Notable work
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Rush to Judgment Plausible Denial Executive Action |
Mark Lane (February 24, 1927 – May 10, 2016) was an American attorney, New York state legislator, civil rights activist, and Vietnam war-crimes investigator. Lane is best known as a leading researcher, author, and conspiracy theorist on the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy. From his 1966 number-one bestselling critique of the Warren Commission, Rush to Judgment, to Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK, published in 2011, Lane wrote at least four major works on the JFK assassination and no fewer than ten books overall.
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Early career
Mark Lane was born in The Bronx, New York, the son of Harry Arnold and Elizabeth Levin (Levin was changed to Lane in the 1920s), and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He served in United States Army after World War II from 1945 to 1946 and was stationed in Austria. After attending Long Island University, he received a Bachelor of Laws from Brooklyn Law School in 1951. As a law student, Lane was the administrative assistant to the National Lawyers Guild and orchestrated a fund-raising event at Town Hall in New York City that featured American folk singer Pete Seeger.
Following his admission to the New York bar in 1951, Lane established a practice with Seymour Ostrow in East Harlem. Although Lane acquired a reputation as "a defender of the poor and oppressed," Ostrow later asserted that Lane was "motivated more by his ambition and quest for publicity than any dedication to a cause or concern for the interest of his clients." The partnership dissolved in the late 1950s.
In 1959, Lane helped found the Reform Democrat movement within the New York Democratic Party. He was elected with the support of Eleanor Roosevelt and presidential candidate John F. Kennedy to the New York Legislature in 1960. During his own campaign, he also managed the New York City area's campaign for Kennedy's 1960 presidential bid. He was a member of the New York State Assembly (New York County's 10th District, encompassing East Harlem and Yorkville, where Lane resided) in 1961 and 1962. In the legislature, Lane spent considerable time working to abolish capital punishment. Lane promised to serve for only one term, and then manage the campaign for his replacement—which he did.
In June 1961, during the civil rights movement, Lane was the only sitting legislator to be arrested for opposing segregation as a Freedom Rider. In 1962, he ran for Congress in the Democratic primary and lost. In the 1968 presidential election, Lane appeared on the ballot as a third party vice-presidential candidate, running on the Freedom and Peace Party ticket (an offshoot of the Peace and Freedom Party) with Dick Gregory.
Kennedy assassination
Warren Commission
After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Lane wrote a letter to Chief Justice Earl Warren on December 17, 1963 requesting that the Warren Commission give consideration to appointing defense counsel to advocate for Lee Harvey Oswald's rights, and enclosed a 10,000 word "brief" that he had submitted for publication. Published less than four weeks after the assassination, Lane's article in the December 19 issue of National Guardian, "Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer’s Brief", attempted to rebut various assertions made by Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade regarding the assassination and to offer a defense of Oswald. Oswald's mother, Marguerite Oswald, reached out to Lane after reading the article.
In December, Lane travelled to Dallas to question Oswald's family, and three days later suggested to Marguerite Oswald that she sue the city of Dallas for the death of her son. Lane said: "It would be an attempt to give Lee Oswald in death what he could not obtain life—a fair trial." Marguerite Oswald announced on January 14 that she had hired Lane to represent her son before the Warren Commission. After Lane notified the commission that he had been retained by Marguerite Oswald to represent her deceased son, the Commission's general counsel J. Lee Rankin replied: "The Commission does not believe that it would be useful or desirable to permit an attorney representing Lee Harvey Oswald to have access to the investigative materials within the possession of the Commission or to participate in any hearings to be conducted by the Commission." Although Warren reversed that position with a statement released on February 25 that said Walter E. Craig, president of the American Bar Association, had been appointed by the Commission to represent the interests of Oswald, Lane remarked that he still considered himself to be Oswald's counsel.
Lane testified before the Warren Commission on March 4, 1964 and again on July 2, 1964. In his March 4 testimony, Lane testified that he had contacted witness Helen Markham some time within the five days preceding his appearance before the Commission and that she had described Tippit's killer to him as "short, a little on the heavy side, and his hair was somewhat bushy". He added, "I think it is fair to state that an accurate description of Oswald would be average height, quite slender with thin and receding hair."
At the beginning of April, Marguerite Oswald asked Lane for a copy of his report, asked him to stop any organized effort on behalf of her son through his Citizens Committee of Inquiry, and terminated his representation.
During the July 2 hearing, exchanges between Lane and Warren were often heated. After Lane reiterated his request to appear before the Commission as Oswald's counsel, Warren reminded him that the Commission had already denied his request to act as counsel, explaining that Marina Oswald was Lee Harvey Oswald's legal representative and that she was already represented by counsel. In addressing the assertion that Markham's description of Tippit's killer was not consistent with the appearance of Oswald, the Warren Commission stated that they had reviewed the telephone transcript in which she was alleged to have made it. The Commission wrote: "A review of the complete transcript has satisfied the Commission that Mrs. Markham strongly reaffirmed her positive identification of Oswald and denied having described the killer as short, stocky and having bushy hair." As a result of this, Lane was called to reappear before the Warren Commission in July 1964. Warren told Lane that the commission had "every reason to doubt the truthfulness" of some of his testimony due to the appearance of his misrepresentation of what Markham told him.
Chief Justice Warren had only contempt for Lane. According to biographer Ed Cray, Warren deemed Lane "a publicity seeker who played fast and loose with the subject." Warren maintained prior to his death that the Commission had investigated all leads and left no witness unheard.
Lane's work on the assassination prompted Bertrand Russell to rally support for the formation of a Who Killed Kennedy Committee in Britain.
In 1975, Lane became the director of the Citizens Commission of Inquiry (CCI), which challenged the veracity of official accounts of the assassination.
Rush to Judgment
Lane's critique of the Warren Commission, Rush to Judgment, was published in 1966. The book became a number one best seller and spent 29 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. It was adapted into a documentary film in 1967. Rush to Judgment criticizes in detail the work and conclusions of the Warren Commission. Lane questions, among other things, the Warren Commission conclusion that three shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository and focuses on the witnesses who had recounted seeing or hearing shots coming from the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza. Lane questions whether Oswald was guilty of the murder of policeman J.D. Tippit shortly after the Kennedy murder. Lane also states that none of the Warren Commission firearm experts were able to duplicate Oswald's shooting feat.
At a news conference a few months after the release of the book, Texas Governor John Connally described Lane as "journalistic scavanger". Lane responded that Connally had showed "an abysmal ignorance to the implications of his own testimony" and was seeking to "bring back the days of McCarthyism.
According to former KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin in his 1999 book The Sword and the Shield, the KGB helped finance Lane's research on Rush to Judgment without the author's knowledge. The KGB allegedly used journalist Genrikh Borovik as a contact and provided Lane with $2000 for research and travel in 1964. Lane called the allegation "an outright lie" and wrote, "Neither the KGB nor any person or organization associated with it ever made any contribution to my work."
Other books Lane wrote on the topic
Lane later wrote A Citizen's Dissent, documenting his response to the Warren Commission's findings on the Kennedy assassination. He also wrote the first screenplay of the 1973 film Executive Action (starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan), with Donald Freed. Lane's associate, Steve Jaffe, was supervising producer and credited with supplying much of the research material for the film. Lane asserted in his 1991 book Plausible Denial that he only worked on the first draft of the screenplay which was ultimately credited to Dalton Trumbo. He noted that he collaborated with Donald Freed on it and after seeing subsequent drafts, they complained both privately to the producer and publicly at press conferences, pointing out errors in the work.
In 1991, Lane described Plausible Denial as his "last word" on the subject and told Patricia Holt of the San Francisco Chronicle: "I'll never write another sentence about the (JFK) assassination". In November 2011, Lane published a third major book on the JFK assassination titled Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK.
Liberty Lobby appeal trial
Lane represented the political advocacy group Liberty Lobby as an attorney when the group was sued over an article in The Spotlight newspaper implicating E. Howard Hunt (a convicted Watergate burglar) in the Kennedy assassination. Hunt sued for defamation and was awarded $650,000 in damages. Lane successfully had this judgment reversed on appeal.
This case became the basis for Lane's book Plausible Denial. In the book, Lane claimed that he convinced the jury that Hunt was involved in the JFK assassination, but mainstream news accounts asserted that some jurors decided the case on the issue of whether The Spotlight had acted with actual malice. Lane represented Willis Carto after Carto lost control of the Institute for Historical Review in 1993.
Random House suit
In 1995, Lane lost a defamation suit against book publisher Random House, which used the caption "Guilty of Misleading the American Public" under a photo of Lane in an advertisement for Gerald Posner's Case Closed. He sought $10 million in damages for disparagement of his integrity and the unauthorized use of his photograph. Lane was rebuked by Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, who said: "A conspiracy theory warrior outfitted with Lane's acerbic tongue and pen should not expect immunity from an occasional, constrained chastisement." A similar suit filed by Robert J. Groden against Random House was dismissed the previous year by a federal judge in New York.
Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Lane wrote Murder In Memphis with Dick Gregory (previously titled Code Name Zorro, after the CIA's code name for King) about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., in which he alleged a conspiracy and government coverup. Lane represented James Earl Ray, King's alleged assassin, before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) inquiry in 1978. The HSCA said of Lane in its report, "Many of the allegations of conspiracy that the committee investigated were first raised by Mark Lane". He wrote an audio docudrama, Trial of James Earl Ray, that was broadcast on KPFK on April 3, 1978, casting doubt on Ray's guilt Lane was Ray's lawyer for a time. He alleged that Ray was an innocent pawn in a government plot.
Later career and death
Lane is the author of the 1970 book Arcadia in which he details the effort to prove that James Joseph Richardson, a black migrant worker in Florida, had been falsely accused of killing his seven children. He was convicted of the murders through corrupt means used by the authorities involved. Richardson had been on death row for almost five years for the crimes, escaping execution by virtue of the Furman v. Georgia Supreme Court decision. Nineteen years after the book was published he received a hearing in which the charges were dropped thanks to the interventions of Lane and Miami's then- prosecutor, Janet Reno. Richardson was released from prison after 21 years, and Richardson's babysitter, though suffering from dementia, later confessed to the murders.
Lane resided in Charlottesville, Virginia. He continued to practice law and lectured on many subjects, especially the importance of the United States Constitution (mainly the Bill Of Rights and the First Amendment) and civil rights.
At the annual Law Library of Congress and American Bar Association Law Day symposium 2001, on the question, "Who are the paradigms for the lawyer as reformer in American culture?", Mark Lane was one of the twelve legal figures featured by panel moderator, Bernard Hibbitts, professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.
On May 10, 2016, Lane died of a heart attack at his home in Charlottesville at the age of 89.
