Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, October 23, 1993                   TAG: 9311170251
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: B12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Michael Roberto Landmark News Service
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IS THE CASE REALLY CLOSED?

Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK''

Gerald Posner. Random House. 607 pages. $25

A powerful new book about the Kennedy assassination will compel longtime conspiracy theorists to reconsider: Maybe the Warren Commission was right after all when it concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Maybe, but the case is not, as the book's title asserts, closed.

In ``Case Closed,'' Gerald Posner presents two main arguments about the assassination. He builds a strong case for Oswald as the lone assassin, while also waging an unforgiving polemic against several well-known ``conspiracy'' authors - and especially filmmaker Oliver Stone, who dramatized the latter view on the big screen with ``JFK.''

Though it may seem the two arguments must necessarily stand or fall together, the fact remains that Posner - like all other authors on this subject - has his own shortcomings. No matter how convinced he is that Oswald acted alone, Posner has given short shrift to key aspects that still point to a conspiracy.

His treatment of Oswald's personal life is perhaps the most impressive part of the book. Relying on interviews with fresh sources, Posner gives us a picture of Oswald as a troubled man whose early years were marked by domestic chaos, violence and rebellion. He and his domineering mother, Marguerite, made so many moves that the boy attended six schools before the fourth grade. After his mother and stepfather divorced, Oswald clung to his mother and shunned the outside world.

Meanwhile, Oswald's withdrawal from society as a teen-ager was accompanied by a growing interest in Marxism and communism.

From there, Posner's narrative describes Oswald's stint in the Marines, his defection to Russia and his attempted suicide there, his stormy marriage to Marina and a growing disillusion with the Soviet system.

Relying on interviews with Russians who knew Oswald as well as information from his still-classified KGB file, Posner is able to prove convincingly that the Soviet secret police never considered using the American defector for intelligence work because he was mentally unstable.

Posner then gradually builds a case against Oswald as a mentally disturbed, single-minded Marxist ideologue who, in a desperate act to salvage his own identity and sense of purpose, fired three shots from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository building in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Relying on a private computer firm that made computer enhancements of the famous Zapruder film of the assassination, Posner argues that Oswald was the lone assassin and the only shooter in Dealey Plaza that day. According to Posner's ``new'' evidence, the first of Oswald's three shots was a miss, the second (the so-called ``magic bullet'') struck both Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally, and the third was the fatal shot that struck the back of the president's head.

Arguing against ``conspiracy'' authors who have long maintained that Oswald lacked the marksmanship or the time to fire all three shots, Posner presents testimony from several sources, including one of Oswald's Marine Corps instructors, who said that Oswald was indeed capable of ``making the shot.''

In the end, Posner's argument falls short. He assumes that because Oswald was psychologically disposed to assassination, he must have accomplished the deed on his own. But the former hardly proves the latter. Even given Posner's evidence that Oswald may have fired the shots, it is still possible - even probable - that Oswald, a quite disturbed person to be sure, had help.

Michael Roberto is a Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record copy editor who has written about the Kennedy assassination.