John Fazio Interviewed

[John Fazio]

(04-30-2020 09:37 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  https://baltimorepostexaminer.com/was-jo...2020/04/29

Roger:

Many thanks for bringing this article to our attention. Permit to say two things:

1. First of all, I would like to publicly express my deepest sorrow upon the passing of Laurie. Truly, she was the captain of this ship. She was knowledgeable, brilliant, insightful and reliable. She could always be counted on to bring us back to common sense when we strayed from it. She will be greatly missed. We are now, as it were, adrift without a captain. But let us carry on as best we can.
2. The author of the article, in my judgment, gave a pretty good summation of my book, except for his use of the word "patsy". We need to distinguish between a patsy and a conspirator. A patsy, properly defined, is someone who is taken advantage of and manipulated to accomplish a foul deed. I'm not even sure Oswald used the word correctly inasmuch as he had just said, seconds before, that "I don't know what this is all about", i.e. I am innocent. If he's innocent, then he has not been taken advantage of and he is not being manipulated, because he didn't do anything wrong. Booth, by contrast, was a knowing and willing agent of the Confederate Secret Service. He was knowingly and willingly being primed to carry out multiple assassinations and he was at all times aware of it. He was nobody's patsy; he was a committed agent assigned to do a deed and he fully intended to do it. With luck, he succeeded in accomplishing his specific assignment, but with his co-conspirators, it was a case of "whatever could go wrong, did go wrong". Let me say, too, that the writer's reference to a kidnapping scheme that evolved into an assassination scheme is, as you have heard me say many times before, simply erroneous. He is not to be faulted for this, however, because it is the conventional wisdom that, over a period of 155 years, has acquired a life of its own, in the same way that conclusions that Herold accompanied Powell to the Seward home and Atzerodt went into the bar at the Kirkwood to bolster his courage have acquired lives of their own even though there isn't a scrap of evidence to support either conclusion. Please read, or re-read, Chapter 12 of my book, which I believe, and I will add that many others do too, blows the kidnapping theory out of the water. See specifically pp. 129-137, wherein I set forth 26 reasons for concluding that Booth never intended to kidnap anyone, that it was all a ruse to conceal his more sinister purpose and goal.

John