Editor's Note: Kenn Thomas publishes Steamshovel Press, the conspiracy theory magazine. Four issue subscription: $23; single issue: $6, from POB 23715, St. Louis, MO 63121. An anthology of back issues, Popular Alienation (Illuminet Press, 1995), is also available.

Kevin Costner offers his dramatic interpretation of a Kennedy's aide's view of the Cuban Missile crisis in the film, Thirteen Days (2000).

Costner's previous contribution to filmic Kennedy history was in Oliver Stone's JFK (1991) as New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, a revered figure in the history of conspiracy research. It was a bit of climb from the monologue he delivered in the film Bull Durham insisting the Oswald acted alone, and Costner fans must wonder now if he might be working his way toward a role as JFK himself.

Bravo if Costner helps continue the trend of reinterpreting the Kennedy years on film. I wonder, however, how much Costner, or any of these Hollywood celebrities, know about the samizdat history that informs most of the written revisionism about JFK. Stone must know, since the chief samizdat, the Torbitt Document, was fundamental to Jim Garrison's case.

Until I put together the first published version of the Torbitt, NASA, Nazis & JFK: The Torbitt Document and the JFK Assassination (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1997), it circulated primarily in multiple-photocopied form. It remains compelling reading to students of parapolitics.

Although it conatins no photographs, i have always paired the Torbitt Document with the infamous "wink" photograph. Albert Thomas winks at Lyndon Johnson during Johnson's swearing-in as president after JFK's murder in this shot. David Lifton included it in his classic "body-switch" theory book/film, Best Evidence [1]. An author named Richard Trask reproduced negatives of the swearing-in sequence in his book, Pictures of the Pain [2]. He didn't mention that the "wink" photo is the only one missing.

The LBJ Library in Austin, Texas told me [3] that the negative was only missing one from the sequence. When I presented this to Trask, he wrote that it could "easily be interpreted as a making of contact with another as a gesture of good luck, or as a sign of empathy, or other such non-conspiracy possibility. I suspect, but cannot prove, that someone saw in this negative what they thought might be construed by others as an inappropriate gesture given the morbid nature of the circumstances surrounding the swearing-in, and an attempt was made to get rid of the negative." [4]

As I pointed out at the time, Richard Trask was not saying that there was no conspiracies. He argued that there was a kind of smaller conspiracy, that someone sympathetic to Albert Thomas tried to clean the historic record of an embarassing photograph. Any pro-conspiracy researcher of the JFK assassination could do the same without saying anything about the assassination one way or another. Certainly the opinions of those with a casual interest in the topic do not stand or fall on the Albert Thomas connection. While many people no doubt shrug their shoulders at what the "wink photo" might suggest, most people know that JFK's assassination involved a conspiracy. As recently as May 1996, even the curmudgeon newsman Walter Cronkite, paid for thirty years to hold CBS' insupportable view for non-conspiracy, allowed in his Cronkite Remembers special that Oswald "may have had an accomplice." [5]

And so it is with the Torbitt Document. The gamut of opinion about this curious piece of samizdat runs from Lobster editor Robin Ramsay's conclusion that it's "typical smart-ass CIA stuff to muddy the pool," [6] to John Judge's view that it represents a kind of Rosetta Stone to understanding the event. It's 157 pages of mixed type-script, scribbled marginalia and good but horridly formatted sourcing has circulated since its 1970 creation by William Torbitt, believed by some to be the pseudonym of a lawyer in the southwest possibly named David Copeland. The mismatched, awkward and missing references, the odd capitalizing and punctuation--all of which have been retained in this edition--makes the reader wonder how Torbitt got through his undergraduate education, let alone law school. As he explains in the afterward, the purpose of the work is to defend "honest right-wing conservatives" from being pinned with the crime of Kennedy's murder by a fascist cabal. It makes connections to such then-unknown governmental spy agencies as Defense Industrial Security Command and Division Five of the FBI; it suggests that a former prime minister of Hungary was the infamous "umbrella man" seen in the Zapruder film; it introduces to the assassination lore such personalities as Fred Crisman (spelled "Chrismon" by Torbitt) as one of the railroad tramps behind the grassy knoll. Crisman became the subject of Maury Island UFO: The Crisman Conspiracy (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1999), the prequel I wrote for The Octopus (Los Angeles: Feral House, 1997), the book on Danny Casolaro's research.

The Torbitt Document ties together indisputable parts of the Warren Commission and testimony. Every major study of the assassination cites the Torbitt Document; some support and expand upon its conclusions [7]; even studies of the files released since the establishment of the government's Assassinations Material Review Board [8]. It is clearly the pivotal document of JFK assassination research and so serves as an important backdrop to popular entertainments like Costner's movie movie career, The X-Files and so forth.

As with the "wink" photo, I have always invited readers to take it or leave it. One way or another, if they give the assassination literature more than a passing glance, they will encounter it. Copies of the original Torbitt manuscript were extant as late as 1992, when I picked it from an anonymous researcher at a symposium in Chicago. Scrubbed up and even annotated and indexed versions of the Torbitt Document were available before and since on a per-order basis.

Treading on the Torbitt web, X-Files fans and parapolitical students will discover that the "wink" photograph and the Torbitt document have another thing in common that make them oh-so-science fictiony: NASA.