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Mark Lane (1927-2016)

Mark Lane, a man whose name figures into a lot of conspiracy tales, passed away on 10 May this year.  He left behind a wife, three daughters, four grandchildren, and a checkered legacy.

Lane undoubtedly did a lot of good deeds during his eighty-nine years.  He served in US Army Intel during WWII.  He then left the military to study and subsequently practice law.  Most of his early clients were indigent, many of them African American and Latino.  During this early phase of his career, he complained about how the press’ racial bias distorted coverage of his clients, saying “It was clear that the right to a fair trial was diminished in many instances by prejudicial pre-trial publicity.”

In 1959, Lane joined former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in the Committee for Democratic Voters, a leftist organization attempting to thwart what they saw as corruption within their own party.  The following year, he ran JFK’s presidential campaign in New York, while also working to elect future Congressman Alfred Santangelo.    The year after that, he won a seat in the New York legislature, where he served for a couple of years.  He left office after his arrest for participating in the Freedom Ride protests in the American Southeast. 

It was as a Kennedy supporter that his life and career would take an irrevocable turn on 22 November 1963.  Only weeks later, in January 1964, Lee Oswald’s mom, Marguerite, hired him to represent her late son.  Spurned by the Warren Commission, his subsequent investigation would become one of the most fundamentally important statements on the matter, convincing many serious-minded people of the probability of a conspiracy in the assassination of the President.  It began with the publication of a 10,000-word article published by the National Guardian, a progressive newspaper founded in 1948 by James Aronson, Cedric Belfrage and John McManus.* From there he published a number of books, including three of the most influential tomes on the JFK assassination.  The first was Rush to Judgment (1966); followed by Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? (1991); and Last Word: My Final Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK (2011).

A prolific writer, he churned out a number of other books on a number of other topics while keeping up his political and legal careers.  In 1968, he ran for President as a nominee of the Peace and Freedom Party.** He would later co-write the screenplay for the 1973 film Executive Action, starring Burt Lancaster and Will Geer.*** In 1974, he took on the American Indian Movement as a client, subsequently leading to his defense of leaders involved with the Wounded Knee incident. 

Yes, by many accounts, Lane did many good things during his eighty-nine years.  Yet, he undoubtedly did a lot of questionable things.  What’s worse, there’s the possibility that he might have done some horrific things.

For starters, Lane proved to be a divisive figure in the very anti-war movement he sought to promote.  His advocacy for the Citizens Commission of Inquiry (CCI) forged a rift between that group and another pacifist organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).  In a series of speaking engagements with famed actress and fellow activist Jane Fonda, Lane spent much of his vitriol lashing out against American atrocities committed in Vietnam in sensationalized, and in some cases unproven, fashion.  The CCI subsequently saw his actions as counterproductive to the movement and cut ties with him.  As former CCI member Tod Ensign said in a paper for the March 1994 edition of Viet Nam Generation: A Journal of Recent History and Contemporary Issues:
It was a mistake to think that celebrities like Jane Fonda and Mark Lane who were used to operating as free agents would submit to the discipline of a steering committee. We should have placed them, instead, on an advisory panel where their visibility and political and money contacts would have been used without having to tangle with them on broader strategic and tactical questions.
Figure 2.  Lane (far left) with Fonda (far right).



The VVAW were a bit more reluctant to distance themselves from Lane and Fonda, for their fundraising efforts were valuable.  But they too severed there relationship to Lane shortly afterward.

More problematic was Lane’s  representation of the Peoples Temple and its founder, Rev. Jim Jones.  He happened to have been on site in the Guyana Jonestown compound when the mass suicides and murders took place.  The fact that he lived to tell the tale, and the fact that he agreed to represent the cult in the first place, led Mae Brussell and subsequent researchers to question his true loyalties and intentions.  Some of his actions connecting Jonestown to the Martin Luther King assassination, and his background in Army intelligence led some to question whether or not he served as a government agent, whose job was to confound the issues in official conspiracy investigations by creating straw men, ineptly handling evidence, and assisting suspected CIA assets such as Rev. Jim Jones.

Lane would also represent the Liberty Lobby, an offshoot of the John Birch Society, in a lawsuit brought about by CIA officer E. Howard Hunt.  Former CIA Assistant Executive Officer Victor Marchetti published an August 1978 piece in the organization’s official organ, The Spotlight, wherein that he claimed Hunt took an active role in the JFK assassination.  Shortly before his death in 2007, Hunt himself confirmed this in a series of audio recordings dictated to his son, St. John.  But in 1978, Hunt denied the association, prompting him to sue The Spotlight for defamation.  Lane managed to get a federal appellate court to overturn a $650.000 judgment.  Eventually retried in 1995, a jury found that Spotlight had in fact not defamed Hunt.

The fact that Lane would champion such a rabidly right rag like The Spotlight is in some ways understandable, since he was, in principle, defending a position that he had maintained since 1964: namely that President Kennedy died as a result of a conspiracy, and that Hunt and others like him participated in it.  On the other hand, some saw his support of the Liberty Lobby to be highly problematic, and in some ways fueled speculation about whose side he was really on.

The question of Lane’s intentions and purpose will play heavily in the upcoming series, when we’ll explore his actions and their consequences in the representation of arguably his most famous living client.  Meanwhile, we can only let time sort out whether the recently departed Mr. Lane was more sinner than saint in the long run.

____________
*  Not to be confused with The Guardian (UK), originally founded in 1821 as the Manchester Guardian.   

Although Mrs. Oswald hired Lane, the Warren Commission rejected his request to represent him during their investigation.  They instead appointed American Bar Association President Walter Craig to represent Lee. 

**Filling out the ticket as the Vice-Presidential nominee was his good friend, comedian, activist, author and conspiracy researcher Dick Gregory.  Together, they wrote about the Martin Luther King assassination in a 1978 book titled Code Name Zorro.

***The other credited screenwriters: Robert Ryan and former Hollywood Ten sacrificial lamb Dalton Trumbo.


This post first appeared on The X Spot, please read the originial post: here

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Mark Lane (1927-2016)

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