Gerald Posner
Gerald Leo Posner is an American investigative journalist and author of thirteen books, including Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, which explores the John F. Kennedy assassination, and Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. A plagiarism scandal involving articles that Posner wrote for The Daily Beast and his book Miami Babylon arose in 2010.
Early life and education
Posner was born in San Francisco, California, the only child of Jerry and Gloria Posner. His father was Jewish and his mother Catholic, and both were native San Franciscans. His father was a labor union official.Posner was raised Catholic. He was educated at St. Ignatius College Preparatory and graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley in 1975. In 1978, he earned his J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where he served as the associate executive editor for the university's Law Review.
At age 23, he joined the law firm, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, as one of the youngest attorneys ever hired by the firm. In 1980, he went into private practice with a partner. In 1981, he represented Deborah Ann Fountain, Miss New York State, against the Miss America pageant after Fountain was disqualified for padding her bra. He left the law in 1986, when his first book, about Nazi Josef Mengele's life on the run, was published by McGraw Hill.
Journalism career
''Mengele: The Complete Story''
Posner's first book, co-written with British journalist John Ware, was the 1986 biography Mengele: The Complete Story. The book was the result of a five-year pro bono lawsuit that Posner brought on behalf of survivors of Josef Mengele's medical experiments at Auschwitz. Posner and Ware obtained exclusive access to 5,000 pages of Mengele's diaries and personal papers for their book. The book was critically recognized as the "definitive" biography of Mengele.Posner testified before the United States Senate in 1986 about how Mengele used an International Red Cross passport to travel safely from Europe to Argentina in 1949. He also testified about the discovery made by himself and Ware that Mengele had twice been captured by U.S. Army troops in 1945, but released both times before authorities realized he was on several wanted lists.
In June 1986, Posner appeared with Mengele's only son, Rolf Mengele, on the Phil Donahue Show. Syndicated columnist, Lewis Grizzard, called the hour-long live program "an incredibly compelling piece of television journalism."
Some of the content in Mengele: The Complete Story was utilized by the United States Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations, which in, February 1985, began an in-depth investigation into Mengele's post-war activities and whereabouts. The investigation, done in conjunction with the United States Marshals Service, was launched after allegations that Mengele was at any time in the custody of or had any relationship with U.S. government institutions or personnel after World War II. In its official report to the Attorney General of the United States in 1992, In the Matter of Josef Mengele, OSI noted it was indebted to Posner for obtaining a witness statement concerning Mengele's whereabouts from October 1945 to August 1, 1948.
''Warlords of Crime''
In 1988, Posner published Warlords of Crime: Chinese Secret Societies: The New Mafia, an exposé of Triads and international heroin syndicates. Posner, and his wife, Trisha, traveled to Hong Kong, the Golden Triangle, the Netherlands, San Francisco, London and New York to conduct in-person research with drug traffickers. Clarence Petersen, reviewing the book for the Chicago Tribune, commented, "Posner... is persuasive for the facts he gathered, all the more so because his narrative is largely the story of how he got the story, what he was told by the criminals and by law enforcement agents here and abroad and, most persuasive of all, what he saw with his own eyes. He does not dramatize; he doesn't have to. The chilling story he unearthed speaks for itself." Former New York detective and best-selling novelist, Dorothy Uhnak, wrote in The New York Times that "Warlords of Crime is powerful, frightening and, unfortunately, nonfiction."Touchstone Pictures purchased the film rights to Warlords of Crime.
''The Bio-Assassins''
Posner's only novel is a biological warfare thriller set in the Cold War. According to Publishers Weekly, "Posner's first novel, a thriller whose development depends heavily on the author's convincing descriptions of the technology in intelligence work. The narrative works within the current conventions of its genre: principle is a mask for expedience; cynicism displaces conviction; proficiency implies virtue. But Posner, author of nonfiction works on Josef Mengele and Chinese secret societies, handles his material well. His descriptions move smartly; his characters, while somewhat two-dimensional, are convincing in their context; and his plot is constructed to satisfy demanding readers."''Hitler's Children''
Posner's 1991 book, Hitler's Children: Sons and Daughters of Leaders of the Third Reich Talk About Themselves and Their Fathers, included in-depth interviews with a dozen children of top Nazi officials. The book was also well received. Karen Stabiner wrote in her review for the Los Angeles Times, "This is a mesmerizing, blood-chilling book, a set of oral histories of the sons and daughters of 11 of Hitler's top men. It is barely possible to read more than a few pages at a time; the contrast between innocent childhood experience, and the awful understanding of that experience that came with time, is enough to make you weep."Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times questioned whether Posner's book length treatment was necessary to study the children of Nazi perpetrators. "Perhaps it would have been more enlightening had Mr. Posner studied fewer cases more intensely, or even a single case from the most intimate point of view."
''Case Closed''
In his 1993 book Case Closed, Posner contended that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Oswald's murderer, Jack Ruby, acted independently as well. Case Closed was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for History. It was also the subject of a double issue of U.S. News & World Report, and featured on programs such as ABC's 20/20, CBS Special Reports, and PBS's Frontline. The book was optioned for a television miniseries by David L. Wolper, the producer of the miniseries Roots. In his 2003 autobiography, Producer: A Memoir, Wolper cited his failure to get movies made of Case Closed and the Cuban Missile Crisis book, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, as his two major career disappointments.In 1993, Posner testified before the Legislation and National Security Subcommittee of the United States House Committee on Government Operations about the findings in Case Closed. In 1998, the Assassination Records Review Board briefly referenced this testimony in discussing two unsuccessful attempts to acquire the interview notes of two physicians, James Humes and J. Thornton Boswell, that Posner said he possessed.
Case Closed generally drew critical acclaim from the media; the Chicago Tribune, the Toronto Sun, The Sydney Morning Herald and Newsday all cited Posner's "meticulous" research in their respective reviews.
In his review for the Chicago Tribune, Jeffrey Toobin wrote, "Unlike many of the 2,000 other books that have been written about the Kennedy assassination, Posner's Case Closed is a resolutely sane piece of work. More importantly, Case Closed is utterly convincing in its thesis, which seems, in light of all that has transpired over the past 30 years, almost revolutionary. His thesis is this: Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy by himself. ... I started Case Closed as a skeptic—and slightly put off by the presumptuous title. To my mind historical truth is always a slippery thing. The chances of knowing for sure what happened in any event—much less one as murky as the Kennedy assassination—seem remote. But this fascinating and important book won me over. Case closed, indeed."
Case Closed also drew widespread criticism from academics involved in assassination research as well as from non-academic assassination researchers who contended that it contained factual inaccuracies. For example, historian David Wrone wrote that "massive numbers of factual errors suffuse the book". Vincent Bugliosi, whose own book Reclaiming History largely agrees with Posner's conclusions, accused Posner of "omissions and distortions" but also described Case Closed as "an impressive work". "He is perhaps public enemy No. 1 to members of what might be called the JFK conspiracy industry," wrote journalist Paul Galloway.
Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the assassination in 2013, Gallup released a national poll showing that while a majority of Americans still believed a conspiracy was behind JFK's death, the number of those who thought it was a lone assassin was the highest in 46 years. Although some mainstream media commentators such as The Independent said that "for Americans, JFK will never be case closed", others like The Economist cited "Case Closed" and concluded, "50 years on, face it, Oswald did it."
Historian Robert Dallek called Case Closed "authoritative," and said: "the best book on this subject is by a man named Gerald Posner, called 'Case Closed', I think he has responded very effectively to all the conspiracy theories, and there are so many of them." Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, Hector Tobar wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Case Closed was "the book that cured me of JFK conspiracies once and for all."
Case Closed continued to generate widely divergent views. Film director Oliver Stone told a JFK assassination conference in Pittsburgh that Case Closed was discredited and "there's nothing in the movie that I would go back on." Posner, on the day of the 50th anniversary, told CNN's Anderson Cooper that "the only thing he gets right in 'JFK' is the date on which Kennedy is killed."
Posner was interviewed for the 1993 documentary Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? produced by PBS's Frontline, and also for the 2022 documentary The Assassination & Mrs. Paine.