Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Even if the evidence up to January 11, 1964, the date of the subject memorandum, had not pointed only to Oswald, and even if there was no reference to a possible conspiracy in the tentative outline, the best way to judge the work of the Warren Commission on this point is not by what the Commission wrote or said, but by what it did. (One of my favorite sayings is “Your conduct speaks so loudly I can’t hear a word you are saying.”) And we will see that the Commission’s conduct throughout the investigation clearly shows that its members only had one objective, to discover the truth of what happened.

  In addition to the aforementioned long chapter on conspiracy, many sections of the Warren Report deal with the conspiracy issue. For instance, in the thirty-one-page appendix XII to the report, the Commission responds to 126 speculations and rumors, some dealing expressly with the allegation of conspiracy, most dealing in one way or the other with the allegation. Appendix XIV deals with Oswald’s finances in great detail, showing he was not in possession of money from an unknown source. And certainly the long biography of Jack Ruby and an analysis of the polygraph test he took,56 in many places expressly, and in virtually all places at least implicitly, address themselves to the conspiracy issue.

  It has to be noted that after the FBI became the chief investigative agency of the Warren Commission, no fair and sensible person could ever accuse the bureau of conducting a superficial investigation. It was exceedingly thorough. As Tom Bethell, who was in charge of the research for New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation and prosecution of Clay Shaw for the assassination of President Kennedy, has written, “Garrison’s investigators were quietly impressed by the speed and thoroughness of the FBI’s inquiry…It turned out that the FBI, far from having done a poor job, had very thoroughly interviewed anyone and everyone with the most tangential relationship to the assassination.”57

  Just two examples, among so many, of the FBI investigating the issue of conspiracy, examples that no book pushing the conspiracy theory would ever dream of mentioning. The enigmatic fellow with a checkered history who sat next to Oswald on the bus that transported Oswald to Mexico in September 1963, an extremely peripheral figure, was the subject of an investigation into his identity and background that remarkably generated ninety-nine pages in an FBI report.58 Also, the FBI obtained not only all records of toll calls made by Jack Ruby, but also those of his three brothers and four sisters, and twelve other persons known to have been in close contact with Ruby between September 26 (when it was reported in the newspapers for the first time that Kennedy would be in Dallas on November 22) and November 22, 1963.59 This had nothing directly to do with Oswald killing Kennedy, and everything to do with a possible conspiracy.

  The Warren Commission critics who do not believe that the Commission covered up the assassination allege instead that the Commission conducted a very superficial, incompetent investigation of the assassination. But in my opinion, the Warren Commission’s investigation has to be considered the most comprehensive investigation of a crime in history. Even leading Warren Commission critic Harold Weisberg acknowledges that the Commission “checked into almost every breath [Oswald] drew.”60 Very few people are more critical than I. And I expect incompetence wherever I turn, always pleasantly surprised to find its absence. Competence, of course, is all relative, and I find the Warren Commission operated at an appreciably higher level of competence than any investigative body I know of. It is my firm belief that anyone who feels the Warren Commission did not do a good job investigating the murder of Kennedy has never been a part of a murder investigation.

  Of one thing I am certain. The Commission’s conclusions have held up remarkably well against all assaults on their validity. This is true not only of its basic conclusions, but also of its finer points. For example, with all the technological advances in photographic enhancement to which the Zapruder film of the assassination has been exposed, the very latest interpretation by most of the experts on precisely when the first of two shots hit the president (the only one in controversy, the second shot being the visible head shot)—somewhere between frames 210 and 225—just happens to coincide with what the Warren Commission concluded61 way back in 1964.

  With respect to the depth of the Warren Commission inquiry, there are hundreds of thousands of pages of investigative reports and documents on its investigation that are in addition to the twenty-seven published volumes of the Commission. These volumes consist of the 888-page, single-volume Warren Report; 8,082 pages of testimony in small print in volumes 1 through 15; and 9,833 pages of documents and exhibits in volumes 16 through 26. They all add up to 18,803 pages and close to 10.4 million words, almost all of which consist of substance, not fluff, as Warren Commission critics would want the public to believe.* The commission or its staff took direct testimony, affidavits, or statements from 552 witnesses,† more than ten times, for instance, the number of witnesses called before the Joint Congressional Committee that investigated, in 1945–1946, the attack on Pearl Harbor. The FBI alone (there were also companion investigations of the assassination by other agencies) conducted an unprecedented 25,000 interviews as the investigative arm of the Warren Commission, and submitted 2,300 separate reports. Eighty additional FBI agents were ordered into the Dallas area alone, and a great many more agents around the country worked on various parts of the case. A total of 3,154 items of evidence were introduced before the Commission in its investigation of the assassination.

  As author Relman Morin observed, “Never in history was a crime probed as intensely, and never in history was the inquiry itself subjected to such intense scrutiny.”62 Speaking later, as the district attorney of Philadelphia, former Warren Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter said that “I have never seen the resources devoted to the determination of the truth as were the resources of the United States of America devoted in this case…There has been no equal of this kind of inquiry, anywhere.”63‡ A “monumental work” and “an outstanding achievement,” Lord Devlin, former justice of England’s High Court, Kings Bench Division, averred.64 As Newsweek’s White House correspondent Charles Roberts put it back in 1967, the Warren Commission “interrogated strip-teasers and senators, street urchins and psychiatrists…It explored more theories, tracked down more leads, and listened to more rambling witnesses, expert and illiterate, than any body of its kind in history.”65 Paul L. Freese, in the New York University Law Review, wrote, “The Commission is without rival in its display of investigative energy. It gathered a prodigious amount of evidence.”66 And yet, as conspiracy author Walt Brown accurately points out, “The Warren Commission…became the most vilified fact-finding body ever assembled in the United States of America.”67

  But very little of the vilification is warranted. Although the Warren Commission appears to have fudged on some small points here and there—unfortunately, not uncommon for law enforcement—overall it did a very thorough and exemplary investigative job. Apart from the commissioners’ natural inclination to conduct themselves honorably, one reason why the Warren Commission (as opposed to the individual authors, investigators, and conspiracy theorists who followed) was fair and objective is that it was essentially forced to be so. The Commission and its lawyers and investigators consisted of a considerable number of people, many of whom were very familiar with the case, and hence, even if a member of this group was duplicitous and dishonorable enough to want to deceive the American public, he would have known he simply couldn’t do this because his colleagues would be in a position to question immediately the fabrication or distortion he wrote, or the important fact he curiously omitted.

  What follows is a typical example of what I’m referring to, a September 14, 1964 (ten days before the Warren Report was published), memorandum from Warren Commission assistant counsel Wesley Liebeler to fellow assistant counsel Howard Willens regarding, Liebeler writes, the galley proofs of “that portion of chapter VI [of the prospective Warren Report] dealing with conspiracy beginning with ‘Investigation of Other Activiti
es.’” These are but a few excerpts from many more points in the memorandum: “We have not conducted sufficient investigation to state that there is no evidence that FPCC [Fair Play for Cuba Committee] and ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] were aware that they were authorized to receive mail at P. O. Box 6225, or that mail was ever addressed to them there.” “We cannot say that all of Oswald’s transactions in connection with firearms were undertaken under an assumed name, only his known transactions.” “The last sentence in that paragraph [first full paragraph on page 259] is not supported by the TV films we got from CBS. It should be deleted.” “Whiteworth and Hunter do not now say Oswald drove down the street, and only Mrs. Whiteworth said so before.” “I know of no evidence that Ryder and Greener talked on the 24th.” “The paragraph about the psychiatrist is quite unfair. It states that Odio ‘came forward’ with her story, whereas she did not come forward at all and was quite reluctant to get involved at all.” “Why do we fail to mention the Cuban or Mexican that one of the Western Union employees said was with the man Hambian thought was Oswald?”68 And so on. Liebeler wrote a similar memorandum on September 6, 1964, with respect to perceived inaccuracies and overstatements in chapter IV (“The Assassin”) of the pending report.69 Such was the methodology used by the members of the Warren Commission and its staff in their effort to arrive at the truth in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Yes, as in virtually all involved criminal cases (and here there were three separate and distinct murders to deal with—the murders of JFK, Officer J. D. Tippit, and Lee Harvey Oswald), there were unresolved questions and areas of speculation, but as Liebeler testified before the HSCA on November 8, 1977,

  As to the basic facts of the assassination relating to questions of the President’s wounds, source of the shots and identity of the assassin, the physical evidence alone shows without doubt that Oswald was the assassin and that he fired from the sixth floor of the school book depository. The Commission pursued to the extent that it could all plausible leads suggesting the involvement of persons other than Oswald and it could not establish any facts that would seriously suggest the existence of a conspiracy to assassinate the President.

  The staff was highly motivated and competent with no inclination or motive not to pursue the issues to the truth. The work of the staff of the Commission was not perfect. [But] when compared to the criticisms that have been made of our work or compared to the product of other human institutions, and not to some ideal of perfection, we might ask ourselves, or you might ask yourselves whether you would have been likely to have done better at the time, and when thought of in that way and when compared to those standards I think the Commission’s work will pass muster very well.

  As I have said, I have never doubted the nature of the conclusions of the report and I do not doubt them now. In spite of what has happened since the publication of the report I think that eventually it will stand the test of time.70

  It is quite interesting to note that if, as the conspiracy theorists maintain, the Warren Commission only presented evidence in its volumes that supported its conclusions, and deliberately suppressed information that did not, why is it that the source the conspiracy theorists cite for upwards of 95 percent of their arguments is some document, affidavit, or testimony contained—for all the world to see—within the Warren Commission volumes? Some suppression. One example among a great many others. The Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists allege, of course, that the fatal shots came from the grassy knoll, not the Book Depository Building where Oswald was, and they claim further that the Warren Commission knows this but suppressed evidence pointing to this fact. Yet the Commission called and took testimony from many witnesses who said it was their belief (proved to be incorrect by the weight of all the other evidence) that the shots came from the grassy knoll. Again, some suppression. Warren Commission critic David Lifton, a committed grassy-knoll-theory devotee, speaks enthusiastically in his book, Best Evidence, of reading an article in the March 1965 issue of Minority of One in which the testimony of many of these witnesses is set forth. He refers to the article—which he says supported his position that the shots came from the knoll, not the Book Depository Building as the Warren Commission claimed—as being “something of a classic.” He then adds, perhaps unaware of the irony, that the article was “based entirely on information from the twenty-six volumes” of the Warren Commission.71 Conspiracy author Michael E. Eddowes writes, “When the Warren Report and its 26 supporting volumes of testimony and exhibits became available, my several assistants and I began to study them…The basis of my study has always been the contents of the volumes of testimony and exhibits, from which my assistants and I were able finally to assemble evidence disclosing the truth.”72 The critics of the Warren Commission should ask themselves whether publishing evidence damaging to one’s own position is the mark of an honest and honorable person or group, or the opposite.

  “It is the very thoroughness of the Warren Commission that has caused its problems,” the late Pierre Salinger noted. “It listened patiently to everyone, no matter how credible or incredible the testimony. It then appended all this testimony to its report, providing an opportunity to anyone with a typewriter and a lot of time on his hands to write a book on the subject.”73

  A tactic used by authors of virtually every single book I’ve ever read that propounds a conspiracy theory is to attack an agency as being part of a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination, but when this same agency comes up with something favorable to the author’s position, the author will cite that same agency as credible support for his argument. This tactic is neither subtle nor logical, yet that is precisely what almost all the conspiracy theorists do, seeking to pick and choose and have it both ways. Just one example among hundreds: Referring to a threatening note that Oswald delivered to the FBI office in Dallas less than two weeks before the assassination, which was subsequently destroyed, Mark Lane, the granddaddy of all conspiracy theorists, writes in the introduction to his book Rush to Judgment, “An obvious and reasonable explanation as to why [the note] was destroyed is that it contained material prejudicial to the FBI…[It] was but one of the illegal police actions to silence [Oswald]. The ultimate action was to murder him.”74

  Pretty serious allegations against the FBI, right? But then Lane, without even blushing, turns to the FBI for support whenever an FBI finding is helpful to his position. In other words, the FBI, though per Lane apparently complicit in the assassination as well as the murder of Oswald, is suddenly imbued with honor and integrity and is out there working diligently to discover the truth in the assassination. He writes later in his book, “If it is accurate, the December 9 FBI report provides proof that the [Warren] Commission explanation of the throat wound is inaccurate…Hoover would not presume to summarize the ‘medical examination of the President’s body’…unless the autopsy report had been studied carefully.” And later, to support his position that Oswald was not Kennedy’s assassin, he writes, “After the FBI had examined the rifle, a letter from Hoover reported: ‘It is noted that at the time of firing these tests, the telescopic sight [on Oswald’s rifle] could not be properly aligned with the target since the sight reached the limit of its adjustment before reaching accurate alignment.’”75

  Finally, there is another need for this book. Amid the blizzard of defective and misleading anti–Warren Commission and pro-conspiracy books, there have only been two books of prominence on the other side in the last twenty years: first, Conspiracy of One by Jim Moore in 1991, and the much more well-known Case Closed by Gerald Posner in 1993. Both books (particularly Case Closed, which was well received by the mainstream press) have been valuable contributions to JFK assassination literature, and I agree with their two principal conclusions, namely, that Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone. (I disagree 100 percent with Posner’s conclusion that organized crime may have intended to kill Kennedy, but Oswald “beat the Mafia to it.”) But what a disappointment it was to me when, after years and years of pro-conspir
acy books, these two books finally came out on the other side and I saw the authors engaging in many of the same unfortunate tactics as the Warren Commission critics.

  Just a very few examples among many to illustrate the often misleading writing of Moore and Posner. Earlene Roberts was the manager of the rooming house Oswald lived in at the time of the assassination. In his book, Moore refers to her testimony that Oswald arrived back at the rooming house shortly after the assassination, was in a big hurry, and left minutes thereafter. But Moore, who reasons well in his book, completely ignores the most potentially important part of her testimony, that she heard the honk of a car, glanced out the window, and saw, she claims, a Dallas police car in front of the rooming house just before Oswald left—information which, if true, clearly goes in the direction of a conspiracy. If you’re being fair and objective, and the issue is whether Oswald was involved with anyone in the assassination, how is it possible to omit information like this? Let’s take Sylvia Odio. Odio is the seemingly credible witness who testified before the Warren Commission that one evening in late September 1963 (less than two months before the assassination), Lee Harvey Oswald, in the company of two anti-Castro Cuban men, appeared at her door in Dallas seeking funds for the anti-Castro cause. The next day, one of the three called her and told her that Oswald said Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and that killing Kennedy would be “easy to do.” Anti-conspiracy theorists, of course, don’t want there to be any evidence that Oswald was seen in the company of unknown men before the assassination, particularly with men who may have had a motive to kill Kennedy (such as anti-Castro Cubans angry at JFK over his lack of support at the Bay of Pigs), and Moore, remarkably, writes off Odio, a very important witness, with just one sentence.76