cuchulainn
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from the Chicago Sun-Times
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-rifle16.html
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-rifle16.html
The rifle that killed JFK
November 16, 2003
BY ANDREW HERRMANN Staff Reporter
This time of year, around the anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Chicago sporting goods magnate Milton P. Klein would grow moody. For he could not help but be reminded of his awful place in history as the man who sold Lee Harvey Oswald the rifle used to kill JFK.
Guilt? No one knows for sure. For years, Klein, who died in 1997 at the age of 87, did not talk openly about Oswald's mail order purchase from Klein's Sporting Goods with anyone, family or friends.
Milt's two sons, Tom, a 62-year-old Ohio college professor, and John, a 58-year-old Southern California screenwriter and director, believe his silence was a way to shelter them.
"He didn't want us to get stuck on it. He took it on himself. It was not a pleasant thing, and he didn't want us to bear that problem,'' John said.
It was Milt's problem. Milt Klein believed in the rule of the hunter -- you eat what you shoot -- and his connection with Kennedy was a fact. "He had to eat that fact every day,'' his son said.
John suspects the November sadness may also have come from Milt's realization that he was forever tied to one of America's darkest days, the 40th anniversary of which is being observed this week in television specials, new books and public forums.
"He knew where he stood in the murder of JFK,'' John said, but no one wants "to be reduced to a fact in history.''
Milt Klein's only public comment was a flatly written statement to reporters detailing Oswald's mail order purchase of an Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano rifle -- a $21.45 buy Oswald made under an assumed name. In his written statement, Klein said he had cooperated fully with authorities and noted that rifles like the one sent to Oswald could be bought "in thousands of stores and from hundreds of mail order companies all over the United States.''
It was only a few years before his death that Milt began to open up a bit to his family, prompted by his son's efforts to co-write a movie script.
The script was sold but never made into a movie. John says the studio pushed to make it a "big drama'' about the assassination, but he turned out a "small story'' about an old man's relationship with his family.
A couple of Thanksgivings ago, various family members sat around a table and read the script aloud.
"It was cathartic,'' remembers Milt's grandson Daniel.
An ad, a money order, a gun
Today, someone buying a rifle from a dealer in another state needs to have it delivered to a licensed gun dealer, who will check identification and is responsible for ensuring all legal requirements are met.
In 1963, though, one could simply fill out a coupon in a magazine. And that's what Oswald did on March 12, about 81/2 months before he shot Kennedy in Dallas.
Oswald saw an ad placed by Klein's Sporting Goods in an issue of American Rifleman magazine, a publication of the National Rifle Association. It offered an "Italian Carbine,'' described as "slight use'' surplus from the Italian army.
Klein, who sold guns at his handful of Chicago area retail stores as well as in gun magazines, had purchased the weapon from New York importer Crescent Firearms.
Oswald clipped the coupon and signed it A. Hidell -- a variation on Fidel Castro, his wife would say. He gave a Dallas post office box as the return address and used a U.S. postal money order.
When Oswald's wife, Marina, saw the gun, she asked her husband why he bought it.
For hunting, Oswald replied.
In a now-famous photo snapped by Marina, Oswald can be seen posing in the backyard of his rented home in Dallas holding a pistol, two newspapers and a rifle -- the rifle investigators said Oswald bought from Klein's.
Conspiracy theories abound about the rifle.
Some say this type of weapon is notoriously unwieldy and underpowered. Italians reportedly called it "the humanitarian rifle'' because it was thought to be so inaccurate.
But the Warren Commission, the body charged with investigating Kennedy's murder, believed FBI firearms experts who said it was as reliable as a U.S. Army M-14, and with its scope, deadly reliable. Oswald's fingerprints were found on it, as were fibers from his clothes.
Just before midnight on the day Kennedy was shot, FBI agents arrived at the Klein offices at 4540 W. Madison, having traced the gun's serial number.
After hours of digging, at around 4 a.m., they discovered a microfilm copy of the order, later determined to be in Oswald's handwriting.
Threatening crank calls to Klein's Glencoe house soon followed.
'Russian roulette'
"Being a gun dealer is like playing Russian roulette,'' John Klein said. "Sometimes, a gun is going to get in the wrong hand.''
That fact made Milt uneasy, said his son.
The family's connection to guns began with Milt's grandfather Jacob, a Chicago pawn shop operator who sold weapons. Milt continued that business and moved it toward sporting goods: Milt was an avid fisherman and accomplished amateur golfer. But Milt kept selling guns because he felt it was a connection to Jacob's legacy, and it was profitable.
"He wasn't a gung-ho NRA guy,'' John said.
"We had a great relationship with the Police Department. Cops bought their guns from him. He felt good about that.'' The sons and father would shoot skeet together on weekends.
At the same time, says John, Milt was nervous about lack of control over who bought the weapons.
Klein guns had been connected to a couple of murders covered by the newspapers, and burglars had broken into at least two of his shops and made off with handguns.
John believes Milt shared his concerns with William J. Waldman, a vice president of the company who ran much of the daily operations. And the assassination pushed those concerns into action.
At Senate hearings in Washington in 1965, Waldman testified on the company's behalf in support of restrictions on mail-order sales and a ban on imports of foreign military surplus.
Waldman said that in most cases, the company was powerless to determine the age, mental capacity or responsibility of its mail-order customers.
He acknowledged that the new law would slash Klein sales by 35 percent. His testimony was a lone voice among gun retailers and manufacturers.
In 1968, mail order sales directly between dealers and individuals were made illegal.
At about the same time, Klein sold his chain of stores and focused on publishing, including reproductions of old Sears catalogs and magazines on tennis, golf, crafts -- and guns.
'A shutting down'
Around the Kleins' Glencoe home, and later their house in Palm Springs, Calif., mere mention of "Oswald's gun'' was met with stony silence.
Milt's sons knew better than to bring it up. "It would trigger a shutting down,'' John said.
The downside is that by not talking about bad things, John thought at the time, a lot of good things never get said. And so he approached his father, gingerly, about a script.
John, who had worked with director Milos Foreman on "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," as well as on documentaries and music videos, hoped to use his research on the script to get closer to his father, to crack the stoic demeanor that Milt had always had but that had became even more rigid after the Kennedy assassination.
As expected, Milt's "first reaction was, 'That's not something to talk about,'" John said.
"But as we talked, he understood it was going to be something good. We talked about his father's pawn shop, his father, his own life,'' John said.
His brother wasn't immediately sold, either. Daniel Klein, Milt's 34-year-old grandson and John's son, remembers asking his Uncle Tom about the movie. Tom replied, "This is a shameful thing. Why would we want this out there?''
John sees that conversation another way. He acknowledges that Tom wasn't keen on the idea but says his brother ended up supporting it.
John thinks Tom was asking Daniel the question to spark a discussion.
Daniel never had the nerve to ask his grandfather questions about Oswald's rifle. Rather than a stain on the family, Daniel considers the JFK connection "a curiosity."
"When I first heard it, I said, 'Oh, that's interesting,'" Daniel said. But he knew it meant much more to the older generations. Every November, his mother told him, Milt "would get depressed.''
John's screenplay is a mix of fact -- and what he thinks, or wishes, his father would have said and done.
In one scene, the gun dealer tells his grandson, "You can't just pay attention to the laws in the books."
John explains: "In my script, if you know something is dangerous, you stop it.''
In another scene, the Milt character says, "If I didn't sell that gun, the assassination wouldn't have happened.''
In real life, Milt never said that. But, John said, "I can hear him saying it.''
In the movie, the grandson replies, in an attempt to ease the old man's pain, "Grandpa, you didn't pull that trigger."
Copyright 2003
