For its part, the Warren Commission, which had decided to conduct its own investigation, ended up doing very little. The HSCA said the Commission “quizzed” Hudkins. But it didn’t. The citation the HSCA gives for its assertion that the Warren Commission quizzed Hudkins is an interview of Hudkins by the Secret Service on December 17, 1963, almost a month and a half before the Warren Commission’s executive session on January 27 in which the Commission concluded it had to conduct its own investigation into the matter. Hudkins told Secret Service agent Lane Bertram that Allen Sweatt of the Dallas sheriff’s office had told him that it was his opinion Oswald was an FBI informant.133 (See the FBI conspiracy section for a fuller discussion.) Also, on the evening of January 24, Secret Service inspector Thomas Kelley told Warren Commission general counsel F. Lee Rankin that Hudkins was “not very reliable” based on previous unfounded reports that he had furnished to the Secret Service.134 However, the only affirmative things that the Warren Commission is known to have done on its own to get to the bottom of the Oswald informant issue was to conduct an independent review of FBI files, which uncovered no evidence that Oswald was an informant,135 and to have the Internal Revenue Service do an audit on Oswald’s income on the assumption that if the FBI had been paying Oswald money the IRS might discover unaccounted-for income.136 No unaccountable income was found.137
In late January, the Warren Commission staff met with FBI and Secret Service experts and viewed for the first time what was to become the single most critical piece of physical evidence in the whole investigation: the twenty-five seconds of 8-millimeter color film shot by a Dealey Plaza spectator to the motorcade, Abraham Zapruder. There was no audio on the film, so it was impossible to time the shots exactly, but it seemed, after a cursory examination, that two of the shots may have come too close together to have been fired by Oswald’s bolt-action rifle, the one found in the Texas School Book Depository Building. These initial doubts were based largely on the apparent reactions of President Kennedy and Governor Connally as seen in the film. (See Zapruder film section later in the text.)
The hearings formally opened on February 3, 1964, at 10:35 a.m. with the testimony, through two interpreters, of Marina Oswald. Rankin himself handled the interrogation and began by asking Lee Oswald’s widow if she wanted to correct anything she had told FBI agents in the many interviews they had had with her to date. She did.
“Yes, I would like to correct some things because not everything was true,” she told the Commission. “It is not just that it wasn’t true, but not quite exact.”
She couldn’t at that point recall any specific instances, “but perhaps in the course of your questioning if it comes up I will say so.”138
The veracity of Marina Oswald was viewed as imperative by the Commission since she was in a unique position to shed light, directly or indirectly, on her husband’s motivations and guilt, she being the only witness to most of Oswald’s life from the time she met him in Minsk to the night before the assassination. As such, the Commission was heavily dependent on her testimony.
According to author Edward Jay Epstein, the Warren Commission staff counsel did not believe Marina was a credible witness. He said senior assistant counsel William Coleman wanted her subjected to a more rigorous examination and had prepared a “trappy deposition” for her, and threatened to resign when Rankin said that the Commission members had decided they believed her and saw no need to question her further.139 But when I spoke to Coleman, he said, “You know, this was many years ago, but I can tell you without any hesitation that I never at any time threatened to resign from the Commission. That’s just not true. As to the first matter, I don’t recall at all that I was dissatisfied with Marina Oswald’s testimony and had prepared a trappy deposition for her. The reason it makes no sense is that my assigned area was the possibility of a foreign conspiracy, and Marina’s testimony didn’t really go to that issue. Furthermore, I had tremendous respect for those who questioned Marina, like Rankin and Warren, and I can’t even imagine thrusting myself into the matter with a so-called ‘trappy deposition’ for her. Where did Epstein get this? Certainly not from me.”* When I asked Coleman whether the majority of the Commission members and staff thought Marina was lying, he replied, “No, not at all. The strong consensus, and I was a part of that consensus, was that she was telling the truth. But after her first four days of testimony, there were several assistant counsels who wanted to ask further questions of Marina, not because they felt she was lying but because there were areas that hadn’t been gone into or needed further clarification or amplification.”140
The overwhelming consensus in the conspiracy community is that Marina Oswald was not a truthful witness. This perception started mostly because of a very ill-advised statement by one of the Commission’s most distinguished assistant counsels, Norman Redlich, who said in a February 28, 1964, memorandum to General Counsel Rankin, “We cannot ignore, however, that Marina Oswald has repeatedly lied to the [Secret] Service, the FBI, and this Commission on matters which are of vital concern to the people of this country and the world.”141 These loose and incorrect words have been seized upon by Warren Commission critics to rebut Marina’s devastating testimony against Oswald. The Warren Commission staff, as indicated, consisted of very bright lawyers who graduated from the nation’s finest law schools. Most of them, however, did not have trial lawyer backgrounds* and, hence, were unaware how extremely common it is for even truthful witnesses to give inconsistent, contradictory, and incorrect testimony. And witnesses, of course, flat-out lie all the time on the witness stand. The late Francis L. Wellman, a distinguished member of the New York Bar, once observed, “Scarcely a trial is conducted in which perjury does not appear in more or less flagrant form.” In fact, perjury is so common that instead of being surprised by it, seasoned prosecutors expect it.
Redlich was a very bright and highly respected professor at New York University School of Law at the time he was appointed to the Warren Commission staff, but he had never been inside a courtroom, at least as a trial lawyer,† and therefore didn’t have any framework of reference for the inconsistencies in some of Marina’s testimony; hence, he erroneously concluded she had “repeatedly lied.” Yet it should be noted that Redlich made his observation about Marina near the start of the Commission’s investigation in February of 1964, and even Redlich would later conclude that “based upon everything that I knew,” by “the time we were finished with our investigation, I would find her a credible witness.”142
I am very familiar with Marina’s testimony, and I can say that based on the known record, she was every bit as consistent and truthful in her testimony as ninety-eight or ninety-nine out of a hundred witnesses during a trial. In fact, in view of her circumstances, she was surprisingly consistent and truthful. Here’s someone who, in 1964, testified for more than six days before the Warren Commission, her testimony in the Commission volumes consuming 215 pages. The pages are small print, so this translates to at least 500 pages of typical courtroom transcript. In addition, she was interviewed in depth, over and over again (an unbelievable forty-six times before her Warren Commission testimony) by the FBI and Secret Service. In 1978, she gave an additional 201 pages of testimony to the HSCA, and was interviewed in great depth by HSCA investigators. When you couple this prodigious, virtually unprecedented amount of interviews and testimony with the fact that at the time of her Warren Commission testimony she was but twenty-two years old, had a natural and instinctive desire to protect her husband as much as she reasonably could, was highly insecure living as an expatriate in a foreign country whose popular president had been murdered by her late husband,* and was operating under the substantial handicap of not speaking or understanding English and had to communicate through an interpreter (Chief Justice Warren describing her testimony as “laborious because of the interpreter”), it’s absolutely remarkable she did as well as she did.143 With typical witnesses at a trial giving just one-tenth of the vast amount of testimony Marina gave, I can
guarantee you I normally would find many, many more examples of inconsistencies and discrepancies in their testimony than were present in Marina’s.
When I first read Redlich’s remark, I asked myself what was he referring to specifically? Such a question apparently also entered the mind of HSCA counsel Kenneth Klein, and when he asked Redlich, the latter answered, “Now, I have tried to recollect any specific matter that I may have had in my mind, and I have to say that I do not recall anything specific. It may have been, and one would have to go back into the investigatory report, it may have been that at first she may not have told the truth in connection with the attempted killing of General Walker. I am really just surmising she may have been asked if Oswald ever engaged in violence, and she may have at first said, ‘No,’ and then [she] brought out the fact about the General Walker shooting.”144 Although Redlich is unclear in his memory, what is very clear is that the first time Marina was asked, under oath, about the attempted murder of General Walker, she readily acknowledged her husband’s attempt to kill Walker.145†
The following represent the type of inconsistencies in Marina Oswald’s statements and testimony, as set forth by the HSCA: “Marina Oswald was subsequently questioned by the FBI about the [backyard] photos. She said they were taken at the Oswald home on Neely Street in Dallas, in the backyard. But Marina gave two different versions of when the pictures were taken. She first told the FBI it was in late February or in early March 1963…Nevertheless, in an FBI interview made after her initial appearance before the Warren Commission she said that the first time she ever saw the rifle was toward the end of March. She recalled taking the photos seven to ten days thereafter, in late March or early April. [Boy, that’s serious stuff. But I don’t remember what tie I wore yesterday, and am sometimes off by more than an entire year in trying to recollect the date of an event.] Other evidence available to the Warren Commission supported her later version.” And: “Marina Oswald, in addition to giving two different versions of when the backyard pictures were taken, gave different versions of the number of pictures taken. At first she testified that she took one picture. She later testified that she took two pictures.”146 (Wow. Again, this is serious stuff.)
The late Sylvia Meagher, who usually had absolutely no trouble with the hundreds upon hundreds of deliberate, flat-out lies told by her colleagues in the conspiracy theory community in their books, had no tolerance or understanding at all for someone like Marina, who, as indicated, answered literally thousands of questions by the authorities on and off the witness stand and didn’t even speak English. Meagher, nitpicking over minutia, did her best to gather up all the examples she could muster of the contradictions in Marina’s testimony, but failed miserably, only citing a small handful—all, I believe, while Marina was not under oath.147
The very few times Marina was caught in a lie were when she understandably was trying to protect her husband shortly after the assassination. An example is her lie (not under oath) to the FBI, which she subsequently admitted to the Warren Commission, that she had no knowledge that Oswald had taken a trip to Mexico,148 probably thinking this would somehow be incriminating to him in view of his having instructed her not to tell anyone.149 (She told the Warren Commission that she did “not like [the FBI] too much. I didn’t want to be too sincere with them.”)150 But when someone does the opposite and incriminates a loved one (as Marina’s testimony before the Warren Commission did concerning the night before, and the morning of, the assassination), there’s hardly any reason to disbelieve what that person says. In fact, it could be said that if someone’s lies are almost always in favor of another individual, this only increases the former’s credibility when he or she says something damaging about that person.
Rather belatedly, on February 25, 1964, the Commission, wanting to ensure the fairness of its inquiry to the alleged assassin and his family, requested Walter E. Craig, president of the American Bar Association, to participate in the hearings and investigation and advise the Commission whether the proceedings “conformed to the basic principles of American justice.” In effect, he was to look after Oswald’s interests and was even authorized to question witnesses if he desired. Marina Oswald agreed with the arrangement. Craig accepted the appointment but he (and two associates of his who attended the hearings whenever he was absent) was virtually a nonexistent presence at the hearings, asking very few questions (and those innocuous and non-adversarial) of very few witnesses. In no way could they be considered conventional cross-examination. He could have performed the function of a responsible devil’s advocate, asking key Warren Commission witnesses questions that a competent defense attorney would have, but he failed abysmally in this effort and, through no fault of the Warren Commission, turned out to be mere window dressing for the expressed goal of helping to guarantee that a deceased accused be treated fairly and objectively.151
In mid-March, after Jack Ruby had been convicted of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald and sentenced to the electric chair, Joseph Ball and David Belin flew to Dallas to begin, as the FBI had been doing for a few months, their own “field investigation,” held off until now so that Commission staffers would have sufficient time to prepare for their fieldwork and to avoid potential future charges that the Commission had interfered with Ruby’s right to a fair trial.152 They set up in the offices of U.S. Attorney Barefoot Sanders in the Dallas Post Office Building, Sanders serving as their liaison to local authorities. They interviewed police officials and witnesses about various aspects of the assassination and the two killings that followed it, and arranged for some of them to testify to the Commission in Washington the following week. On March 20, Ball and Belin staged a reconstruction of Oswald’s believed movements at the time of the assassination, in which many of the eyewitnesses participated. By March 23, most of the assistant counsels were in Dallas starting their field investigations. While the staff immersed itself in the field investigation, the most important eyewitnesses to the assassination testified before the Commission in Washington during fourteen days of hearings conducted that month.153
Inevitable staff changes were made during the month of March, the kind any large organization goes through as schedules change. Francis W. H. Adams, the senior counsel for Area I, investigation of the actual assassination, was unable to participate very much because of unavoidable responsibilities at his prestigious law firm, so even more of the work of this crucial investigation fell on the shoulders of Arlen Specter. Belin later described Adams’s noninvolvement as one of the best-kept secrets inside the Commission. “He should have been asked to resign,” Belin wrote, “when it first became apparent that he was not going to undertake his responsibilities, but because of some mistaken fear that this might in some way embarrass the Commission, Mr. Adams was kept on in name only and the entire burden in Area I fell upon Arlen Specter. Fortunately for the Commission, Arlen Specter was able to carry the entire weight of Area I on his own shoulders. Nevertheless, it is indicative of the nature of investigations by governmental commissions that the need for a second lawyer in Area I was outweighed by a political decision. The ramifications of the fact that this decision was made by the Chief Justice of the United States are indeed chilling.”154
Another senior counsel, William Coleman, was unable to devote as much time as he would have liked to the Commission, and so a young lawyer from the Justice Department, Stuart Pollak, was assigned to work with the junior counsel, David Slawson, in Area IV. With Ball and Belin otherwise occupied in Dallas, Melvin Eisenberg was given the job of examining expert witnesses (e.g., on firearms, fingerprints, etc.) at the Washington hearings. John Hart Ely, Warren’s law clerk, was appointed to help Albert Jenner and Wesley Liebeler develop Oswald’s history.155
To many of the junior counsels in the trenches, the seven commissioners often seemed out of touch with the investigation. Senior counsel Joseph Ball thought the Commission “had no idea what was happening. We did all the investigating, lined up the witnesses, solved the problems, and wrote the rep
ort.” Eisenberg saw the Commission as a corporation’s board of directors, with Rankin as president and the staff as its officers. Howard Willens commented that “the commissioners were not in touch with the investigation at all times.” But J. Lee Rankin countered that some of the younger lawyers “simply didn’t understand how a government inquiry worked” and that the collective experience and wisdom of the commissioners provided the inquiry with its direction.156 Norman Redlich, Rankin’s assistant, agreed. “I have never known a staff that thought that the group that it worked for was as well informed as the staff was, and the Warren Commission was no exception,” he told the HSCA in 1978. Contrary to other staff opinions, Redlich thought that several of the commissioners were “tremendously well informed,” citing in particular the chief justice, Gerald Ford, and Allen Dulles. He described the chief justice’s almost daily appearances at the Commission, in particular, as “heroic.”157
The investigation in Dallas continued into the first two weeks in April. Nearly one-half of all the depositions taken by the Commission staff were taken in Dallas during this period. Ball, with the help of Belin, Samuel Stern, Ely, and Alfred Goldberg (a member of the staff who was a U.S. Air Force historian), established Oswald’s movements from the time of the assassination until his arrest; Leon Hubert and Burt Griffin investigated Oswald’s death, and Liebeler and Jenner interviewed Oswald’s relatives and acquaintances in the hope of shedding light on his motive.158 Back in Washington, Redlich, Specter, Willens, Eisenberg, and others wrestled with problems emanating from the Zapruder film. Rifle tests had determined that the murder weapon could not fire two bullets in the time period that the film seemed to show both Kennedy and Connally being hit. The assistant counsels began to develop the hypothesis that came to be known as the “single-bullet theory,” the concept that the president and the governor were hit by the same bullet.159
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