Errol Morris: The Thinking Man’s Detective

Errol Morris’s provocative documentaries Fog of War and Mr. Death hold out the promise that his new foray into the Kennedy assassination questions may bear fruit. However, we have joined researcher and writer Russ Baker recently in our criticisms of the six-minute interview Morris filmed for the New York Times with Josiah “Tink” Thompson, author of the groundbreaking book Six Seconds in Dallas, who clearly still knows Oswald could not have killed Kennedy. Thompson’s dismissal of the significance of the “Umbrella Man” in Dealey Plaza and the strange behavior of his associate and himself after the shooting, and the exhaustive work of Robert Cutler on the evidence may not bode well for the outcome of his proposed investigation into the subject. We hope he will interview other researchers into the case who have continued to dig the ground that early critics like Thompson broke open.

Errol Morris: The Thinking Man’s Detective
The documentary filmmaker has become America’s most surprising and provocative public intellectual
By Ron Rosenbaum
Smithsonian magazine, March 2012

[EXCERPTS]

My favorite private-eye trick is the one I learned about from Errol Morris.

You probably know Morris as an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker. Roger Ebert called his first film, Gates of Heaven, one of “the ten greatest films ever made.” With The Thin Blue Line, Morris dramatically freed an innocent man imprisoned on a murder rap. In The Fog of War he extracted a confession from Robert McNamara, getting the tightly buttoned-up technocrat to admit “[we] were behaving as war criminals” for planning the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, which burned to death 100,000 civilians in a single night…

I wanted to tell you about his private-eye trick, which he learned from a hard-bitten partner.

It wasn’t a blackjack-brass knuckles-type thing. “It went like this,” Morris explained. “He’d knock on a door, sometimes of someone not even connected to the case they were investigating. He’d flip open his wallet, show his badge and say, ‘I guess we don’t have to tell you why we’re here.’

“And more often than not the guy starts bawling like an infant, ‘How did you find out?’” And then disgorges some shameful criminal secret no one would ever have known about otherwise.

I have a feeling about why Morris likes this. There’s the obvious lesson—everybody’s got something to hide—and then there’s the subtle finesse of the question: “I guess we don’t have to tell you…” No water-boarding needed, just an opening for the primal force of conscience, the telltale heart’s internal monologue. It’s one of those mysteries of human nature that private eyes know and Morris has made his métier…

This is one of Morris’ greatest strengths, what Keats called “negative capability”: the ability to hold conflicting perspectives in the mind without “irritable” reaching after certainty. (So many conspiracy theorists just can’t bear the irritation of living with uncertainty.)

Any entanglement with the Jeffrey MacDonald case is risky, if you ask me, but Morris is not afraid of risk. As if to prove it, Morris tells me he’s considering plunging into the most dangerous labyrinth of them all—the Kennedy assassination. Abandon all hope ye who enter there.

Last November 22, the New York Times posted a six-minute mini-documentary Morris carved out of a six-hour interview with Josiah “Tink” Thompson, the author of Six Seconds in Dallas.

Another remarkable coincidence: Thompson was my philosophy professor at Yale, a specialist in the works of Soren Kierkegaard, the gloomy Danish proto-existentialist best known for the “leap of faith” notion—the idea that to believe in God one must abandon the scaffolding of reason for the realm of the irrational, even the absurd. The Lonely Labyrinth, Thompson’s book on Kierke­gaard, is still widely admired.

At the same time he was leading students through the labyrinth of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Thompson worked as a consultant for Life magazine on the JFK case and wrote his influential book on the ballistics evidence in Kennedy’s assassination—an attempt to prove through pure reason (and science) that the Warren Commission was wrong. That Oswald could not have fired the number of shots attributed to him in six seconds from his antiquated Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Which meant there had to have been at least one more gun­man. (Others have since claimed to have disproved Thomp­son’s contention.)

More coincidences: Thompson eventually quit his promising academic career to become—yes—a private detective working with David Fechheimer, a legendary investigator who had also employed…Errol Morris.

After reading a story I’d written that discussed Thompson’s arguments, Morris called him and arranged an interview. “He drove from Northern California to Florida, where I filmed him,” recalls Morris. “I wondered why [he drove] because we offered to fly him in. So I’m interviewing him. He gets up. He walks off. He comes back. And he has a Mannlicher-Carcano, just like the one Oswald used.”

“That’s why he didn’t fly?”

“Exactly. He wanted to demonstrate for me the enormous difficulty of firing those shots in rapid succession.”

My feeling is that the real JFK mystery is what was going on inside Oswald’s head, not inside the chambers of the Mannlicher-Carcano. Why was he doing it? What was his motive? Were others involved, even if they didn’t fire a shot?

But if anyone can solve it…

I have a fantasy that someday Errol Morris is going to show up at the door of some old guy no one has connected to the Kennedy assassination before and say, “I guess we don’t have to tell you why we’re here.”