There he’d be -- brilliant and earnest and sort of awkward -- on the Today Show and Face the Nation and CNN and maybe, even, the Daily Show. Still sharp and bow-tied at 85, with his off-kilter little smile and distinctive voice and odd tic in his eye, he’d in his lawyer-like way cite fact after fact to prove that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone on that awful day 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
David Belin was sure about a lot of things -- that children were to be nourished, that friends were forever, that education was everything, that music soothed the soul, that women had equal rights -- but he was most sure of this: That there was no conspiracy to kill the President. Period. Absolutely. For certain.
And if anyone knew the facts, it was David.
David Belin -- my lawyer, my business partner, my friend -- was in 1964 appointed assistant counsel for the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon Johnson established to investigate the shooting of Kennedy. David’s assignment was specific: Determine if the president was killed by a single gunman; determine whether there was a conspiracy to assassinate. He interviewed everyone, went over every detail, looked into every background and concluded Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. And that was the finding of the commission. That job finished, in 1975 he was appointed executive director of The Rockefeller Commission, which investigated CIA doings in the United States -- including any CIA knowledge of the assassination.
So David Belin knew more about the death of John F. Kennedy than any other person except Lee Harvey Oswald. And Oswald was dead.
He certainly knew more than Oliver Stone. David was infuriated by Stone’s “JFK,” the 1991 movie that implied the killing was part of a conspiracy. The mention of Stone would make his blood boil and send him into a monologue about truth. He said there were at least 100 mistakes in the movie, errors of omission and commission, and he chronicled them all. In testimony in 1996 to the U.S. Assassination Records Review Board, he called the movie “the greatest electronic cover-up fraud ever perpetrated on America’s movie screens.” He called it “a hoax, a smear and pure fiction that rivals...Nazi propaganda films.”
You knew where he stood.
David wrote two books about the assassination -- “November 22, 1963: You Are the Jury” and “Final Disclosure: The Full Truth About the Assassination” -- and he asked me to read the manuscripts. The detail was mind-numbing, but always backed up by records and documents and witnesses. Anyone who plowed through the books would be convinced -- but it took a lot of plowing to get through them.
When he wasn’t dealing with the conspiracy-theory crowd, David was involved in everything in Des Moines. It was hard to find a place to sit in his large office at the law firm, where he padded around in his stocking feet. The couch, the chairs, the floor, his desk all were piled high with book chapters, legal briefs, files on the wealthy families he represented, correspondence, clippings on this and that, notes on ideas and politics and all the many things he wanted to talk about, often all at once. But ask him for something, and he could go to the right pile, dig down a couple of feet, and produce the paper. His office was a mess, but his mind was tidy.
But he would drop everything to lecture or argue or debate about the assassination. (After one of his books came out, he was on the Today Show and was interviewed by Bryant Gumbel. Gumbel welcomed him, and David responded. “May I call you Byron?” he said. “I guess so,” the usually unflappable Gumbel responded after a flummoxed pause. Laughing, Gumbel later told me, “What was I going to do? Take up half the time by explaining to him that my name is Bryant and then having him apologize?”)
David Belin died on Jan 17, 1999, at age 70. He had been at the Mayo Clinic for his annual physical, and in the middle of the night he fell in his hotel room and hit his head. He was in a coma for 12 days.
I immediately drove to Rochester with Gary Gerlach, the third partner in our company that owned the Ames (Iowa) Tribune and some other publications. David lay in his bed, hooked up to monitors and tubes, deep in that coma. Some were optimistic that he would awake, would recover, would live to argue another day.
“May I see him alone?” I asked a nurse.
She let me.
I walked in. I took his hand and held it firmly in both of mine. I leaned over to whisper in his ear. “David,” I said, “I think there was a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy.”
He didn’t rise up and smite me. He didn’t squeeze my hand. He didn’t blink.
I walked out knowing that he would not awake.
1 comment:
Great piece. One of the best arguments I heard from David B growing up which made an impression on me regarding that there was never a conspiracy was the following.
He pointed out that Robt Kennedy was US Atty General from 1961-1964. If there was any thought that there was a conspiracy involved in the killing of Jack one would think his own brother who held the highest legal position in the land at the time would have gone forward on some sort of investigation of same. Never ever did though did he. That alone made me realize Oswald acted alone.
Andrew- Gils youngest son
Post a Comment