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Rush to Judgment
Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission's Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald is a 1966 book by American defense attorney Mark Lane. He examines the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy—and the murders of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit and accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald—and takes issue with the investigatory methods and conclusions of the Warren Commission.
Lane's book, along with Inquest by Edward Jay Epstein and The Oswald Affair by Léo Sauvage, was part of the initial wave of mass market hardcovers to challenge the Warren Commission's findings. Rush to Judgment was a fixture on best seller lists for two years, first in hardcover, then in paperback. According to Alex Raksin, the book's success "opened the floodgate" for JFK assassination conspiracy theories.
The genesis of Rush to Judgment began soon after JFK's assassination on November 22, 1963. Within weeks, Lane wrote a letter to Chief Justice Earl Warren, requesting that the Warren Commission give consideration to appointing a defense counsel to advocate for Lee Harvey Oswald's rights. In the letter, Lane enclosed a 10,000 word "brief", which he also submitted for publication. The only newspaper that would publish the brief was a small New York-based left-wing weekly, the National Guardian, where it appeared on December 19, 1963, with the article title, "Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer's Brief". Lane organized the article as a set of rebuttals against fifteen assertions by Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade regarding the JFK assassination and the murder of Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit. The remainder of the article was a defense of Oswald who deserved, in Lane's estimation, "the presumption of innocence".
By January 1964, Lane was serving as unpaid legal counsel for Oswald's mother Marguerite. After reading the National Guardian article, she asked him to represent her deceased son before the Warren Commission. The next month, Lane started conducting his own witness interviews. He was also speaking publicly about the assassination. In a series of lectures, many of them in New York City, he would talk for 2–3 hours about what he viewed as anomalies in the government's assassination narrative, i.e., that Oswald was the lone gunman. When the Warren Report was published in September 1964, Lane was already expanding his article into a book. He wrote most of Rush to Judgment while living in Europe. He had a complete draft by early February 1965. He returned to the U.S. and initiated a lengthy, frustrating search for a publisher:
These were the bitter and difficult months. I had but one copy of the manuscript, some of it typed, portions handwritten, and I was possessed of neither the time nor the funds to have other copies made. Each publisher required from one to three weeks to make a decision. A month might well be spent awaiting two rejections. It was necessary during this period to stand by so that I might be available to the publisher then considering the work should questions arise. There were many hopeful moments when it seemed that the document would at last be accepted. But each of these was followed by substantially longer periods of dejection.
After being turned down by over a dozen U.S. publishers, including Grove Press, Simon & Schuster, Random House, and W. W. Norton, he "decided to try for a publisher in England." He sent the manuscript to James Michie, editorial director of The Bodley Head, a British publishing house. Michie asked Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford, to evaluate the manuscript. Trevor-Roper strongly recommended it, advising "it would be a classic when published." Lane signed a contract with Bodley Head in 1966, with an advance payment of £2,000. He later noted sardonically: "And so it came to pass that this American story about the death of an American president found its first publisher in a foreign country." Trevor-Roper would go on to write the book's Introduction. He is thanked by Lane in the Acknowledgments, along with Bertrand Russell and Arnold Toynbee, for being "kind enough to read the manuscript and make suggestions". Shortly after securing a British publisher, Lane found an American publisher in Holt, Rinehart and Winston, which brought out the book in August 1966.
Years later, Lane recalled his process for choosing a suitable title for his work:
When I wrote the book...I was looking for a title that would have some historic resonance. I came upon the phrase I needed in a speech by Lord Chancellor Thomas Erskine, back when he was defending James Hadfield around 1800. Hadfield was charged, appropriately enough for my purposes, with the attempted assassination of George III. Erskine spoke these words in defense of Hadfield: "An attack upon the king is considered to be parricide against the state, and the jury and the witnesses, and even the judges, are the children. It is fit, on that account, that there should be a solemn pause before we rush to judgement."
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Rush to Judgment
Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission's Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald is a 1966 book by American defense attorney Mark Lane. He examines the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy—and the murders of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit and accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald—and takes issue with the investigatory methods and conclusions of the Warren Commission.
Lane's book, along with Inquest by Edward Jay Epstein and The Oswald Affair by Léo Sauvage, was part of the initial wave of mass market hardcovers to challenge the Warren Commission's findings. Rush to Judgment was a fixture on best seller lists for two years, first in hardcover, then in paperback. According to Alex Raksin, the book's success "opened the floodgate" for JFK assassination conspiracy theories.
The genesis of Rush to Judgment began soon after JFK's assassination on November 22, 1963. Within weeks, Lane wrote a letter to Chief Justice Earl Warren, requesting that the Warren Commission give consideration to appointing a defense counsel to advocate for Lee Harvey Oswald's rights. In the letter, Lane enclosed a 10,000 word "brief", which he also submitted for publication. The only newspaper that would publish the brief was a small New York-based left-wing weekly, the National Guardian, where it appeared on December 19, 1963, with the article title, "Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer's Brief". Lane organized the article as a set of rebuttals against fifteen assertions by Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade regarding the JFK assassination and the murder of Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit. The remainder of the article was a defense of Oswald who deserved, in Lane's estimation, "the presumption of innocence".
By January 1964, Lane was serving as unpaid legal counsel for Oswald's mother Marguerite. After reading the National Guardian article, she asked him to represent her deceased son before the Warren Commission. The next month, Lane started conducting his own witness interviews. He was also speaking publicly about the assassination. In a series of lectures, many of them in New York City, he would talk for 2–3 hours about what he viewed as anomalies in the government's assassination narrative, i.e., that Oswald was the lone gunman. When the Warren Report was published in September 1964, Lane was already expanding his article into a book. He wrote most of Rush to Judgment while living in Europe. He had a complete draft by early February 1965. He returned to the U.S. and initiated a lengthy, frustrating search for a publisher:
These were the bitter and difficult months. I had but one copy of the manuscript, some of it typed, portions handwritten, and I was possessed of neither the time nor the funds to have other copies made. Each publisher required from one to three weeks to make a decision. A month might well be spent awaiting two rejections. It was necessary during this period to stand by so that I might be available to the publisher then considering the work should questions arise. There were many hopeful moments when it seemed that the document would at last be accepted. But each of these was followed by substantially longer periods of dejection.
After being turned down by over a dozen U.S. publishers, including Grove Press, Simon & Schuster, Random House, and W. W. Norton, he "decided to try for a publisher in England." He sent the manuscript to James Michie, editorial director of The Bodley Head, a British publishing house. Michie asked Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford, to evaluate the manuscript. Trevor-Roper strongly recommended it, advising "it would be a classic when published." Lane signed a contract with Bodley Head in 1966, with an advance payment of £2,000. He later noted sardonically: "And so it came to pass that this American story about the death of an American president found its first publisher in a foreign country." Trevor-Roper would go on to write the book's Introduction. He is thanked by Lane in the Acknowledgments, along with Bertrand Russell and Arnold Toynbee, for being "kind enough to read the manuscript and make suggestions". Shortly after securing a British publisher, Lane found an American publisher in Holt, Rinehart and Winston, which brought out the book in August 1966.
Years later, Lane recalled his process for choosing a suitable title for his work:
When I wrote the book...I was looking for a title that would have some historic resonance. I came upon the phrase I needed in a speech by Lord Chancellor Thomas Erskine, back when he was defending James Hadfield around 1800. Hadfield was charged, appropriately enough for my purposes, with the attempted assassination of George III. Erskine spoke these words in defense of Hadfield: "An attack upon the king is considered to be parricide against the state, and the jury and the witnesses, and even the judges, are the children. It is fit, on that account, that there should be a solemn pause before we rush to judgement."