Mark Lane Options

[John Simkin]

What do members think about the research of Mark Lane? A member of the Democratic Party, he helped establish the Reform Democratic Movement in 1959. A supporter of John F. Kennedy, he managed his presidential campaign in New York.

In 1960 Lane was elected to the New York Legislature. Over the next couple of years he campaigned to abolish capital punishment and worked closely with Mary Wagner in her attempt to deal with the city's housing problem. Lane was also the only public official arrested as a Freedom Rider.

After JFK was assassinated, Lane founded the Citizens' Committee of Inquiry. He volunteered to defend Lee Harvey Oswald before the Warren Commission. This offer was rejected but he was retained by Oswald's mother, Marguerite Oswald. Lane also wrote an article explaining how he would have defended Oswald. It was rejected by all the main newspapers and magazines but eventually appeared in the left-wing National Guardian (19th December, 1963).

Lane has written several books on the assassination of JFK. This has included Rush to Judgment (1966) and A Citizen's Dissent (1968). He also wrote two screenplays on the case, Executive Action and Plausible Denial. Lane also helped Jim Garrison in his attempts to prove that Kennedy had been assassinated by a right-wing group that involved Guy Bannister, Clay Shaw and David Ferrie.

In August, 1978, Victor Marchetti published an article about the assassination of JFK in the liberty Lobby newspaper, Spotlight. In the article Marchetti argued that the House Special Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had obtained a 1966 CIA memo that revealed E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and Gerry Patrick Hemming had been involved in the plot to kill Kennedy. Marchetti's article also included a story that Marita Lorenz had provided information on this plot. Later that month Joseph Trento and Jacquie Powers wrote a similar story for the Sunday News Journal.

The HSCA did not publish this CIA memo linking its agents to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Hunt now decided to take legal action against the Liberty Lobby and in December, 1981, he was awarded $650,000 in damages. Liberty Lobby appealed to the United States Court of Appeals. It was claimed that Hunt's attorney, Ellis Rubin, had offered a clearly erroneous instruction as to the law of defamation. The three-judge panel agreed and the case was retried. This time Lane defended the Liberty Lobby against Hunt's action.

Lane eventually discovered Marchetti’s sources. The main source was William Corson. It also emerged that Marchetti had also consulted James Angleton and Alan J. Weberman before publishing the article. As a result of obtaining of getting depositions from David Atlee Phillips, Richard Helms, G. Gordon Liddy, Stansfield Turner and Marita Lorenz, plus a skillful cross-examination by Lane of E. Howard Hunt, the jury decided in January, 1995, that Marchetti had not been guilty of libel when he suggested that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated by people working for the CIA.

After interviewing Marita Lorenz Lane became convinced that Frank Sturgis and E.Howard Hunt had both been involved in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Lane outlined his theory about the CIA's role in Kennedy's murder in a 1991 book, Plausible Denial.

Lane also took a keen interest in the murder of Martin Luther King and wrote the book, Murder in Memphis (1993).