Mark Lane's brash and brusque demeanor can be off putting, even to his fellow JFK conspiracy theorists, but no other researcher's criticisms of the Warren Report run as deep or as far back in time as his. Lane was criticizing the Warren Report's conclusions even before the official report was released. As a defense attorney, he was appalled by the lack of due process in Oswald's arrest and interrogation (with no lawyer present), the rush to judgment that declared his guilt and the absence of any defense attorney to speak in Oswald's defense before the Warren Commission that he wrote a Defense Brief for Oswald, which was published in the National Guardian on December 19, 1963 (and is included in the appendices of this book). His book Rush to Judgment, published in 1966, will always be a pioneering and landmark book on the JFK assassination. That being said, I was most interested in reading Plausible Denial.

Lane's main focus has always been on the CIA's possible involvement in the assassination. No one can now deny the CIA's complicity in a cover-up of information regarding Oswald and the facts of the case, but proving the involvement of The Company in the actual assassination is much more difficult. It's not as if Lane ever had the chance to question some of his prime suspects in a court of law -- not until 1985, that is, when he agreed to represent the Liberty Lobby in a retrial for charges of libel brought against it by E. Howard Hunt. Back in 1976, the Liberty Lobby published an article by ex-CIA agent Victor Marchetti in The Spotlight that placed Hunt in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and indicated he had some role in the JFK assassination. Hunt sued for libel and won the initial court case, but an appeals court threw out that decision, setting the stage for a retrial in Miami in 1985. Despite the anti-Semitic reputation of Liberty Lobby, Lane (a Jew) took the case, relishing the chance to get Hunt and top CIA officials on the witness stand. It is a fact that Lane won the case. In the process, he also claims that he convinced the jury that Hunt was involved in a conspiracy to murder President Kennedy.

The lion's share of this book is devoted to Lane's preparations for the trial, the depositions he took of leading CIA suspects and the events of the trial itself. Frankly, though, Lane convinced me of nothing more than the fact that Hunt has changed the details concerning his whereabouts on November 22, 1963, on more than one occasion. I can place little faith in Hunt's testimony, but Lane really offered no proof that definitely placed Hunt in Dallas on the fateful day. It was interesting to hear testimony from the likes of Richard Helms and James Jesus Angleton of the CIA, but I took little in the way of substance from what I read.

Additional research about this book has lowered my opinion of its contents -- and of Lane himself -- considerably. The information that Lane conveniently ignored in this case is quite telling. Lane's main witness tying Hunt to Dallas was Marita Lorenz, who claimed to be a CIA operative and an ex-mistress of Fidel Castro -- yet this woman claimed (in the deposition taken by Lane himself) to have spent considerable time training with Oswald for the Bay of Pigs invasion during the time that Oswald was in the Soviet Union. Thus, Marita Lorenz really has no credibility. Lane also quotes the foreperson of the jury as saying he had proved to her that Hunt was complicit in the JFK assassination -- but he mentions nothing of the several other jurors who disagreed and said that the only reason they ruled in favor of Liberty Lobby was because Hunt failed to prove any malice in the printing of the Marchetti article (which was, after all, the very basis of the lawsuit).

Given the fact that the evidence Lane produced in Plausible Denial failed to convince me of his argument that Hunt and others in the CIA killed Kennedy (and I say this as a person who believes the CIA was complicit in the assassination in some capacity), I was prepared to give this book an average review. Additional knowledge of the evidence Lane chose to hide from the jury and his readers (even though that is pretty much what lawyers do on a regular basis) lowers my opinion of my book even further. I really do not think there is much information contained in Plausible Denial that JFK assassination researchers can benefit from.