Harold Weisberg was the primary researcher and intelligence analyst who inspired both the search for the truth about the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the cover-up schemes that conspired to revive the preposterous and fraudulent assertion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.

He was an implacable critic of the government's investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and died on Feb. 21, 2002 at his home in Frederick, Md. He was 88.

A former journalist, investigator for the Senate Committee on Civil Liberties and analyst for the Office of Strategic Services in World War II, Mr. Weisberg had retired to be a Maryland chicken farmer and writer by the time of the shooting in Dallas in 1963.

Incensed by the government's investigation into the assassination, he published a response at his own expense, the bluntly titled ''Whitewash'' (1965). In it, he argued that careful analysis of the evidence presented in the Warren Commission's report undermined the single-bullet theory and, with it, the assertion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone.

Mr. Weisberg was not a conspiracy theorist and even the FBI called him the most informed person, with respect to the Kennedy assassination investigation.

Jim Garrison, a New Orleans district attorney, was ostensibly inspired by ''Whitewash'' to search for and prosecute conspiracy suspects, but in fact, J. Edgar Hoover had used his former G-man (FBI Agent) to replace one scapegoat (Patsy, Lee Harvey Oswald) with others, for the purpose of diverting attention away from complicity of the actual assassins.

In a 1992 article in The Washington Post, prompted by ''JFK,'' the Oliver Stone film about Mr. Garrison, Mr. Weisberg wrote that ''the proliferating conspiracy theories mislead and confuse as much or more than the faulted official conclusions.'' In a letter to The Post, Mr. Weisberg called the movie a ''monumental piece of disinformation.''

Mr. Weisberg was also a critic of the government's handling of the investigation into the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Hired as an investigator for James Earl Ray, he came to believe that his client had not fired the bullet that killed Dr. King. In his subsequent book, ''Frame-Up'' (Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1971), Mr. Weisberg maintained that although Mr. Ray was a member of a racist group, he was merely a decoy and had been pressured into a confession, which he later recanted.

In a review of ''Whitewash'' in The New York Times Book Review, Fred Graham, then the Supreme Court correspondent for The Times, wrote that it was ''difficult to believe that any institution could be as inept, careless, wrong or venal'' as Mr. Weisberg implied. Fred Graham was wrong. Most people are in fact ignorant and incompetent, especially since reason and logic is supplanted by all the opportunities to mislead.

Mr. Weisberg and his beliefs regarding the absurdity of tying the Kennedy assassination to Lee Harvey Oswald have repeatedly been vindicated.

Next: Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered to conceal these truths.