JFK conspiracy buff settles libel suit with Dallas Morning News p.23

By: Mark Fitzgerald Newspaper will allow author to rebut
statements made in a review of his book sp.

A SURGEON WHO helped treat the mortally wounded John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald and later became an assassination conspiracy theorist has settled his libel suit against the Dallas Morning News.
Dr. Charles Crenshaw had sought $35 million from the News, the American Medical Association (AMA) and a Des Moines lawyer in a suit claiming he was defamed by three separate articles about his 1992 book, JFK: Conspiracy of Silence.
In the settlement, the News will pay no money, but will publish a rebuttal article by Crenshaw and co-author J. Gary Shaw.
"It was a settlement in name only in the sense that we offered them a chance to rebut the review right from the start. We feel absolutely vindicated," said Michael McCarthy, lawyer for the News.
Washington Times writer Hugh Aynesworth reported in late January that Crenshaw and Shaw, who joined in the suit, had also settled with the AMA ? and that the physicians' group would pay $200,000 while also publishing a rebuttal to its own article attacking the book.
Efforts to reach Dallas lawyer Charles "Chip" Babcock, who represented the AMA in the case, were not successful.
The third co-defendant, Des Moines lawyer David Belin, has been severed from the suit and will continue to fight the allegations, the Washington Times reported.
Belin was counsel to the Warren Commission, which investigated the 1963 murder of then-President Kennedy and concluded Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.
In his book, Dr. Crenshaw cast doubt on that conclusion, claiming to have seen wounds on Kennedy that indicated the president was shot from the front. Any shots fired by Oswald would have hit Kennedy from the rear.
Dr. Crenshaw concluded that Kennedy's autopsy photographs were faked, and he alleged that President Lyndon Johnson had phoned the emergency room where doctors were trying to resuscitate Oswald to demand "a deathbed confession from the accused assassin."
In a book review published by the Morning News, June 28, 1992, freelance writer Lawrence Southerland wrote that the authors of the book were "peddling lies."
Similarly, George Lundberg, editor in chief of the AMA magazine, Journal of the American Medical Association, picked the book apart and concluded in the May 27, 1992, issue that it was a "sad fabrication based on unsubstantiated allegations."
Warren Commission attorney Belin was sued for comments he made in a May 17, 1992, interview with the News.