Case closed

National Review, Dec 22, 1997 by Jacob Cohen

Mr. Cohen is a professor of American studies at Brandeis University.

MR. RUDDY gives the game away in his opening gambit. He has offered no grand conspiracy theory, he says, and sets down quotations from several respectable reviewers who dutifully repeated what he cued them to say and what he cues the reader to believe: that he offers no grand conspiracy theories. Defending O. J. Simpson, Alan Dershowitz also said that he was not claiming that there was a grand conspiracy to frame O.J. Well, that is true. He didn't and Ruddy doesn't say that, and for good reason: if they, and myriad other conspiracy theorists who also hide behind that weasel formulation, had the courage of their insinuations, the laughable absurdity and/or mendacity of their position would be revealed. Theirs is a methodology of pure attack; they accept no responsibility to state and defend the alternative version of singular reality which those attacks logically entail. The reader is left alone with his fantasies, and theirs.

As cases in point, consider the preceding letters. Mr. Ruddy says he is "rather suspicious" of the failure of the Park Police to find Foster's car keys and another set of keys in his pocket at the scene of the crime, only to discover them there, in the hospital, "a half-hour" after the body was removed, naked, from the park. (Mercifully, Ruddy here abandons the insinuation in his book that White House aide Craig Livingston brought the keys to the hospital three hours later, presumably to salvage the suicide legend.)

Mr. Ruddy is suggesting that the keys were not in Foster's pocket in the park but were inserted there for discovery a half-hour later to cover up the fact that Foster had not driven his car to the park. His killers drove the car to the park having brought him in another car, another Honda with Arkansas plates, as it happens.

Let us slow down the action. The killers suddenly realize that they had the keys to Foster's car, which they had driven separately to the park. So they go to the hospital and, undetected, slip them into Foster's pocket. They know, of course, exactly where the pants are and when they would arrive at the hospital (How? Did they ask?) and of course they had unimpaired access to the pants. No one noticed. Ruddy has elsewhere suggested that they then whispered in the ears of the Park Police that if they again searched the pockets they would find the keys, which of course the police obediently did. Indeed, they found not only the car keys but a second pair of keys, having nothing to do with the car, which apparently the killers had removed from his pocket and then returned to him, or rather to his pants in the hospital. The Park Police and hospital staff saw no one suspicious sticking keys in pockets, and the police found nothing suspicious in the whisper, apparently because they understood, from the first, within hours of the killing, that a cover-up was afoot. To me, that sounds silly.

Mr. Ruddy is at great pains to discredit the autopsy, which found none of the other wounds that he strongly insinuates were there, the signs of murder. This is not a subtle point. That external wounds as glaringly conspicuous as those he insinuates were there would simply go undetected and uncommented on by the autopsy doctor, who has performed more than 20,000 autopsies, and by his assistant, and were not heard spoken of by the four others in the room during the autopsy, and that photographs taken during the autopsy and at the murder scene would fail to show these tell-tale signs, necessitate a very grand conspiracy instructing the doctors and the four observers in the autopsy room to lie. That conspiracy would involve the fabrication of many photographs and the destruction of the real ones. By whom? Under whose orders? Mr. Ruddy lamely asks whether the many who would have had to know about this could be expected to call up the Washington Post. The answer to that is: yes. Again, to me, all this sounds silly, and sinister beyond belief.

I might add that the medical examination also reported "no wounds or bruises . . . in the neck, hands, buttocks, shoulder, back, or any portion of the body except the head," to quote from the Starr Report. If that was the case, then we must hypothesize that Foster permitted his killers to place a gun in his mouth, without any struggle, conveniently placing his hands near the muzzle in order to explain the powder burns which were found there.

Ruddy and his army of followers need to answer the powerful argument in the Starr Report that the large amount of blood deposited in the body bag in which Foster's naked body was brought to the hospital, and the absence of blood on his clothing, is proof in itself that his dead body was not transported somehow to the park, and, as I said in my review, lugged over two hundred yards and deposited there, in broad daylight, in full view of many potential eyewitnesses, and a gun, his gun, placed awkwardly in his hand to simulate suicide. It is true that Ruddy offers no grand theories. However, his readers have a right to expect him to stop hiding behind his suspicions and say what might have happened. I did that for him in my review, and that is what has occasioned this howling protest. But note: he still offers no alternative theories.