Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission's Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald is a 1966 book by American defense attorney Mark Lane. He examines the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy—and the murders of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit and accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald—and takes issue with the investigatory methods and conclusions of the Warren Commission.
Lane's book, along with Inquest by Edward Jay Epstein and The Oswald Affair by Léo Sauvage, was part of the initial wave of mass market hardcovers to challenge the Warren Commission's findings.Prior to Rush to Judgment, there had been a few self-published and small press books, by Harold Weisberg, Joachim Joesten, Sylvan Fox, Penn Jones Jr., Thomas G. Buchanan, etc., which questioned the Warren Commission's "lone gunman" theory. Rush to Judgment was a fixture on best seller lists for two years, first in hardcover, then in paperback. According to Alex Raksin, the book's success "opened the floodgate" for JFK assassination conspiracy theories.
Background The genesis of Rush to Judgment began soon after JFK's assassination on November 22, 1963. Within weeks, Lane wrote a letter to Chief Justice Earl Warren, requesting that the Warren Commission give consideration to appointing a defense counsel to advocate for Lee Harvey Oswald's rights. In the letter, Lane enclosed a 10,000 word "brief", which he also submitted for publication. The only newspaper that would publish the brief was a small New York-based left-wing weekly, the National Guardian, where it appeared on December 19, 1963, with the article title, "Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer's Brief". Lane organized the article as a set of rebuttals against fifteen assertions by Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade regarding the JFK assassination and the murder of Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit. The remainder of the article was a defense of Oswald who deserved, in Lane's estimation, "the presumption of innocence".
By January 1964, Lane was serving as unpaid legal counsel for Oswald's mother Marguerite. After reading the National Guardian article, she asked him to represent her deceased son before the Warren Commission. The next month, Lane started conducting his own witness interviews. He was also speaking publicly about the assassination. In a series of lectures, many of them in New York City, he would talk for 2–3 hours about what he viewed as anomalies in the government's assassination narrative, i.e., that Oswald was the lone gunman. When the Warren Report was published in September 1964, Lane was already expanding his article into a book.: Lane traces his decision to write the book to a conversation he had with Oscar Collier, a literary agent, not long after a televised debate between Marguerite Oswald and Melvin Belli. The debate occurred on The New Les Crane Show on August 5, 1964. He wrote most of Rush to Judgment while living in Europe. He had a complete draft by early February 1965. He returned to the U.S. and initiated a lengthy, frustrating search for a publisher:
After being turned down by over a dozen U.S. publishers, including Grove Press, Simon & Schuster, Random House, and W. W. Norton, he "decided to try for a publisher in England." He sent the manuscript to James Michie, editorial director of The Bodley Head, a British publishing house. Michie asked Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford, to evaluate the manuscript. Trevor-Roper strongly recommended it, advising "it would be a classic when published." Lane signed a contract with Bodley Head in 1966, with an advance payment of £2,000. He later noted sardonically: "And so it came to pass that this American story about the death of an American president found its first publisher in a foreign country." Trevor-Roper would go on to write the book's Introduction. He is thanked by Lane in the Acknowledgments, along with Bertrand Russell In June 1964, Bertrand Russell raised public awareness about Lane's work by establishing a "Who Killed Kennedy committee" in England "for the purpose of making known the material he [Lane] has uncovered and his further findings." and Arnold Toynbee, for being "kind enough to read the manuscript and make suggestions". Shortly after securing a British publisher, Lane found an American publisher in Holt, Rinehart and Winston, which brought out the book in August 1966.
Years later, Lane recalled his process for choosing a suitable title for his work: Some of Lane's advisers, such as Raymond Marcus and Deirdre Griswold of the Citizens Committee of Inquiry (CCI), argued that "Rush to Judgment" was a poor title choice because it would not be obvious to book buyers that the subject matter was the JFK assassination (they proposed instead, "The Assassination: Rush to Judgment"). Nonetheless, the book retained its original title, while adding the subtitle, "A Critique of the Warren Commission's Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald".
Book summary Rush to Judgment is a detailed analysis of the 26 volumes of testimony and exhibits collected during the Warren Commission's ten-month-long investigation, and of the Warren Report—a separately published 888-page volume summarizing the Commission's findings. Given that Lane structured his book as a lawyer's point-by-point rebuttal of those combined 27 volumes, The Texas Observer called Rush to Judgment "one of the longest book reviews in history." Lane divided his analysis into four parts:
Part One: Three MurdersThis part makes up roughly half the book and focuses on the JFK murder. Lane raises numerous objections to the Commission's "Oswald-acted-alone" narrative. Among the chapter titles are "Where the Shots Came From", "The Magic Bullet", and "The Murder Weapon". Lane attempts to refute the Commission's conclusion that only three shots were fired, and they all came from the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. He cites multiple witnesses, some interviewed by the Commission and some only interviewed by Lane, who recounted seeing or hearing shots from the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza. He also claims that none of the Commission's expert marksmen were able to duplicate Oswald's shooting feat (a claim which was later disputed). Lane emphasizes that the Dallas police officers who found a rifle on the sixth floor identified it as a German Mauser bolt-action model, a discovery broadcast in a TV press conference.. In Appendix VI, Lane shows a photocopy of Dallas Constable Seymour Weitzman's sworn affidavit that he found a 7.65 caliber German Mauser rifle on the sixth floor. But the next day, after the FBI reported that Oswald owned an Italian Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, Lane says the story changed and all subsequent claims were that a Mannlicher-Carcano was found on the sixth floor.
In the latter chapters of Part One, Lane seeks to raise a reasonable doubt that Oswald murdered Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit less than 45 minutes after assassinating Kennedy. In the chapter titled "Forty-Three Minutes", Lane supplies a timeline of Oswald's post-assassination movements and whereabouts, and doubts whether he could have arrived quickly enough to the residential street where Tippit was gunned down. In the next chapter, Lane quotes an eyewitness to the Tippit murder who saw two shooters, neither of whom looked like Oswald, but she was never called to testify. Part One ends with the murder of Oswald on November 24.
Part Two: Jack RubyThis part continues the examination of Oswald's murder, with a focus on his killer, Jack Ruby. The opening chapter, "How Ruby Got Into the Basement", reminds readers that the Commission admitted "it was unable to determine how Jack Ruby entered the well-guarded basement of the Police and Courts Building" shortly before Oswald's transfer to another jail. Lane discusses Ruby's friendships within the Dallas Police Department, his alleged presence at the assassination site and at Parkland Hospital afterwards (which Ruby denied), and how seemingly reluctant the Commission was to obtain Ruby's testimony. They waited six months before calling him to testify, and the Commissioners "asked few questions, and almost every one of his disclosures was volunteered and was not in response to efforts made by the Commissioners or their staff."
Part Three: The OswaldsLane describes Oswald's Soviet defector wife Marina, and his mother Marguerite. He objects to the manner in which both women were held in "protective custody" by the U.S. Secret Service and FBI, and barred from any access to reporters. He contends that Marina's testimony was coached and/or coerced. Unlike Ruby, she was questioned extensively by the Commission, for four consecutive days, and was recalled again and again until the close of hearings in September. Lane enumerates instances where she changed her statement to further implicate her late husband.: "I believe it is fair to conclude that Marina Oswald was held incommunicado for reasons other than her security. Eventually she succumbed—she adopted the viewpoint of the [FBI] agents regarding the charges against her deceased husband." For example, on the day of the assassination, she examined the alleged murder weapon and said she could not identify it as belonging to her husband. But when she was shown the rifle again in February 1964, she said, "This is the fateful rifle of Lee Oswald." She initially proclaimed Oswald's innocence, but then later declared "that her husband was the assassin". Lane writes, "The question that occurs is—what made Marina Oswald change her mind?"
Part Four: The Commission and the LawLane attacks the Commission for lack of objectivity. He cites a passage from the Warren Report: "The Commission has functioned neither as a court presiding over an adversary proceeding nor as a prosecutor determined to prove a case, but as a factfinding agency committed to the ascertainment of the truth."Warren Commission Report, p. xiv He then writes: Lane ends Part Four by writing, "If the Commission covered itself with shame, it also reflected shame on the Federal Government.... As long as we rely for information upon men blinded by the fear of what they might see, the precedent of the Warren Commission Report will continue to imperil the life of the law and dishonor those who wrote it little more than those who praise it."
The book's back matter contains an Appendices section which provides some of the reports, affidavits, testimony excerpts, etc., that are referenced in the four previous parts.
Reception In her review in The Texas Observer, Frankie Randolph said Lane "demonstrates that a lawyer for the defense can make mincemeat of the government's case", and she added, "again and again he does what every thoughtful critic has done: he demands to know why the commission failed to so much as talk to so many witnesses and others whose testimony was of critical, pivotal importance." A review of ten early JFK assassination books, including Rush to Judgment, Inquest, The Oswald Affair, and Forgive My Grief. In the "Book Week" section of The Washington Post, Norman Mailer praised Lane's analysis and argued that the JFK assassination demanded a more radical, democratic inquiry than the one carried out by the Warren Commission: "One would propose...[a] real commission—a literary commission supported by public subscription to spend a few years on the case.... I would trust a commission headed by Edmund Wilson before I trusted another by Earl Warren. Wouldn't you?"