There was definitely something the CIA did not want publicized about Lee Harvey Oswald. The Veciana saga might contain at least a clue. However, because no conspiracy theory has been more widely written about than the JFK assassination, no conspiracy theory has come in for more strident attacks. The credibility of the attacks rests on the lack of credibility of one Lee Harvey Oswald, a personage painted as so twisted and pathetic that he is precluded from even unwitting participation in any act more complex than a temper tantrum. This profile finds its most recent description in Gerald Posner's pompous book Case Closed . To make sure that readers get his point, Posner gives his Oswald chapters such subtle titles as "He Looks Like a Maniac," "Our Papa is Out of His Mind"and "His Mood Was Bad."

When his treatise came out in 1993, marketed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of President Kennedy's death, the annoyingly smug Posner supplanted the Warren Commission as the final arbiter of JFK truth as far as major media were concerned. Two years earlier the same weekly magazines and daily newspapers displayed at least equal vigor or was it panic? in skewering the Oliver Stone-directed JFK. Stone's fascinating film spun almost 30 years of evidence, anecdote and hearsay into a Citzen Kane tableau so jarring that afterward, the Warren Commission's credibility was left in tatters. Even the most ardent lone-nut buffs had to admit that much. Thanks to the movie, Congress passed a law rescinding the ban on releasing piles upon piles of secret assassination-related documents.

Jonathan Kwitny, himself a journalist of notable repute, explained the media's attraction to Case Closed.

"All the good young reporters and public officials who mistakenly swallowed the official FBI-CIA line on the assasination 30 years ago have been waiting all this time for someone to relieve them of the self-doubt they are too smart not to have suffered under," Kwitny wrote in the Los Angeles Times; a rare negative review.