Reclaiming History
Page 69
On September 6, two days after receiving the galley proofs of the chapter on the identity of the assassin, Liebeler, the Warren Commission’s in-house devil’s advocate, submitted a twenty-six-page critique of the chapter, forcing publication of the report to be held up again while the chapter was revised.184
In later years, Arlen Specter would note, “It is hard to specify the people or Commissioners who were pushing for a prompt conclusion, but it was an unmistakable aspect of the atmosphere of the commission’s work.”185 On the other hand, Specter said that in the last analysis “the Commission used ample time in finishing its investigation and coming to its conclusion. The Commission was flexible in its timetable. It started out with the thought that the investigation could be in the three-to-six-month range. When the investigation required more time, more time was taken.”186 Howard Willens thought the time to complete the report was “sufficient,” although he could not deny “that the work could have gone on for another month or two or six.”187
However anxious the country was to know what had happened and whether any conspiracy was involved, Rankin did not think there was any undue pressure. “There was no indication at any time,” he told the HSCA in the late 1970s, “that we should try to get it out for any such [political] purpose and not adequately make a report or investigate whatever sources we were able to find.” Commissioner John McCloy summed up the final month’s work when he told HSCA investigators, “We had no rush to judgment. We came to a judgment,” adding that by the time of the report, “We had already arrived at [our] conclusions.”188
Although there is no evidence of a rush to judgment, the media at the time was full of speculation (speculation that has persisted through the years) that LBJ had exerted pressure on the Warren Commission to come out with its findings before the presidential election in November of 1964. LBJ, worked up about this charge, telephoned his press secretary, George Reedy, to complain to him about Reedy’s profession when it went beyond speculation into fabricated conversations. He tells Reedy what Reedy already knows, that “reliable newspapers” are “quoting me” as pushing for an early report, that these false reports were “not very complimentary to your profession…Allen and Scott [two reporters] say Johnson is ‘strongly urging’ the report of the Warren Commission be made before the Democratic [convention].” LBJ lectures Reedy, “[I] haven’t seen either one of ’em. Haven’t talked to any of their stringers. And [it] never entered my mind. And [Earl] Warren’s gonna get it out whenever he wants to. That’s pure makeup.”189
The Warren Commission’s final report was submitted to President Johnson on September 24, 1964, and four days later the Warren Report, as it came to be called, was presented to the press and public. After an exhaustive ten-month effort, the Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, fired the shots that killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository Building; that Oswald also killed Dallas police patrolman J. D. Tippit and attempted to shoot another Dallas police officer while resisting arrest at the Texas Theater; that Jack Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald; that Ruby and Oswald did not know each other; and that “no evidence” could be found that either Oswald or Ruby “was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy.”190*
The Commission could not make any definitive determination of Oswald’s motive but cited his deep-rooted resentment of all authority, his inability to enter into meaningful relationships with people, his urge to find a place in history and his despair at times over his failures, his capacity for violence as evidenced by his attempt to kill General Edwin Walker, and his avowed commitment to Marxism and Communism as factors that contributed to his character and might have influenced his decision to assassinate the president.191
The Warren Report was greeted by many, particularly the establishment press, with praise and a great sigh of relief. Time magazine said the report was “amazing in its detail” and “utterly convincing in its major conclusions.”192 The New York Times said it was a “comprehensive and convincing account of the circumstances of President Kennedy’s assassination” and that “readers of the full report will find no basis for questioning the commission’s conclusion that President Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone.”193 The Times went on to publish nearly the entire Warren Report in a forty-eight-page supplement to its September 28, 1964, edition. But the report was greeted by others with profound suspicion and hostility. The truly paranoid immediately decided that Chief Justice Earl Warren, the commissioners, and the staff had to be in on a “conspiracy” to withhold the “truth” of the assassination from the American people.
There was hardly a junior counsel on the staff who did not harbor—and vent—his own criticisms of some of the Commission’s decisions and procedures, some of them quite pungent. David Belin complained that the work of the Commission staff was hampered here and there by political considerations and errors of judgment by the commissioners, including the chief justice. He cited mistakes ranging from overzealous marking of evidence as “top secret” to the lack of direct access to parts of the record he and other assistant counsels considered vital, particularly the autopsy photographs and X-rays of President Kennedy’s body. He complained of inaccurate reports from all of the investigating agencies, including the FBI, the Secret Service, and the police forces in Dallas. Belin and his fellow investigators were bedeviled by the myriad contradictions, anomalies, and false leads that peppered the record, even though, as practicing lawyers, they were all too conscious of the fact that real evidence—as opposed to a concocted case—is rarely free of contradictions, and the very depth and range of their investigation multiplied them geometrically. Nevertheless, Belin, who in the days following the assassination felt it probable that there was a conspiracy,194 came to believe, in the course of his work, that Oswald alone killed both the president and Officer Tippit, and that there was no conspiracy.
Easily one of the very most irrational viewpoints about the Warren Commission that has ever been taken in the assassination debate—particularly inasmuch as it emanates from otherwise completely rational people who don’t even necessarily buy into the conspiracy nonsense, just that the Warren Commission wasn’t of a mind to even try to find out if there was a conspiracy—is exemplified in the following two observations, the essence of which I have heard from a considerable number of otherwise perfectly intelligent people through the years.
Respected author and presidential historian Michael Beschloss wrote on the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination that “U.S. leaders…men like Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Robert Kennedy, Nicholas Katzenbach and others feared that an unfettered investigation of the crime would lead in dangerous directions. Nervous at the prospect of pursuing the investigation wherever it led, they instead sought to ensure that the American people’s suspicions were put to rest as soon as possible. Their motives were both self-protective and honorable. Johnson, for instance, was justifiably worried that if Americans promptly learned the depth of Oswald’s apparent connections to Moscow and Havana, they might demand that he retaliate with force that could lead to a third World War. The effect was to purchase short-term political calm at the price of thirty years of doubt.”195
And equally respected author and book editor Evan Thomas wrote, “America’s leaders feared that a hysterical public would demand revenge for the death of their President. At the very least, they worried, the small steps that Kennedy had taken toward detente would be dashed. With remarkable speed and unanimity, officials at the top levels of the U.S. government decided they must convince the country that the President’s death was the work of a lone madman, not of some vast Communist plot…The U.S. government did not try very hard to unearth the truth about the assassination of JFK.”196*
Neither Beschloss nor Thomas give any citation or source for their contention, for the simple reason that no such citation or source exists. Both Beschloss and Thomas, like
so many before and after, were merely repeating what they had heard sometime, somewhere, in their past. The long-forgotten (in their minds) source? Conspiracy theorists, of course. A few examples among a great many. Author Walt Brown, in his book Treachery in Dallas, writes what the conspiracy community had been saying for years: “The Warren Commission, hardly eager for full disclosure based on [President] Johnson’s concern that a nuclear holocaust would follow, acquiesced and enlarged on the FBI cover-up.”197 Conspiracy authors DeLloyd J. Guth and David R. Wrone write, “To allay fears and restore public confidence in law and elected officials, the executive branch [i.e., LBJ] directed that the murdered Oswald be identified as the sole killer.”198 Chief Justice Warren, per conspiracy author Carl Oglesby, was faced with a “choice between covering up a murder and sending a whole world to the brink of war.” For the Warren Commission, Oglesby said, the word conspiracy actually meant “international Communist conspiracy (i.e., Russia), such that the alternative to the lone assassin concept was axiomatically the next thing to war.”199
The part of Beschloss’s and Thomas’s statements about America’s leaders fearing that if the American people believed Russia or Cuba had Kennedy killed they might demand retaliation is undoubtedly true. You don’t need to cite any source for this since it’s just common sense and had to have entered the minds of some, if not all, of America’s leaders. As Max Frankel, reporting from the nation’s capital, wrote in the New York Times on November 24, just two days after the assassination, “Their [America’s leaders] greatest fear was that the assassination and the left-wing background of the prime suspect, Lee H. Oswald, would generate anti-Communist passions and cries for vengeance” against, obviously, the leading Communist nation in the world, Russia. But Frankel goes on to write, “No responsible official here believed that any foreign power or movement had any connection with the assassination.”200
This, however, was not true in the immediate wake of the assassination, when, without time for contemplation, the possibility of a Soviet takeover instantaneously entered the minds of many in our government, including Kennedy’s successor. LBJ would later say that immediately after the shooting, and before even being sworn in on Air Force One, “I was fearful that the Communists were trying to take us over…What raced through my mind was that if they had shot our President…who would they shoot next? And what was going on in Washington? And when would the missiles be coming?”201 CIA Director Richard Helms recalled that immediately after the assassination “we all went to battle stations over the possibility that this might be a plot—and who was pulling the strings. We were very busy sending messages all over the world to pick up anything that might indicate a conspiracy had been formed to kill the President of the United States—and what was to come next.” Pursuant to this, “CIA men were staggered to learn that they could not locate Nikita Khrushchev…Could there be a plot, perhaps by the Chinese, to murder the leaders of both superpowers? [Or] was the Soviet leader staying away from Moscow in anticipation of an American nuclear strike in revenge for a Soviet plot against the President?”202
Indeed, the possibility of a foreign conspiracy was such that at 2:15 p.m. (1:15 p.m. Dallas time) on the afternoon of the assassination, the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared “Defense Readiness Conditions” for all U.S. forces around the world.203 And “the supersecret National Security Agency and allied eavesdropping agencies went into overdrive to decipher intercepted conversations, cable traffic, and radio and telephone communications at the highest levels of the Soviet and Cuban governments…In about forty-eight hours the intercepts showed beyond a reasonable doubt that both the Soviet and Cuban governments had been as shocked as anyone by the news from Dallas.” Indeed, late Saturday, November 23, not even forty-eight hours after the shooting in Dealey Plaza, the State Department “issued a public statement declaring that there was no evidence of a conspiracy involving a foreign country.”204
So although the fear of a Communist plot entered the minds of our nation’s leaders in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, this fear was quickly dispelled.
Moreover, the suggestion by Beschloss and Thomas that U.S. leaders actually feared being forced, by this nation’s citizens, into a retaliatory war with Russia seems wholly devoid of merit. As Frankel wrote, after reflection no “responsible” official believed that Russia or any other foreign power had any connection with the assassination. So irrespective of what the nation’s citizens believed or came to believe, obviously under no circumstances would our leaders go to war with a nation they believed was innocent. That is a verity which cannot be seriously challenged.
Most importantly, where Beschloss and Thomas (neither of whom go on to say they believe Kennedy died as a result of a conspiracy) err is in their contention that America’s leaders, fearing this demand for retaliation and possible war, decided not to vigorously pursue the truth in the assassination. I doubt that either gave too much thought to their allegation, because if they did, they would have to realize that by definition, they were accusing members of the Warren Commission and other high American public officials (whom people like Beschloss and Thomas, I would wager, respect) of being criminal accessories after the fact to murder for whatever nation they felt may have been responsible for the president’s death. They were also accusing America’s leaders, again by definition, of telling any adversary nation at the time or in the future, “We will not, of course, tolerate your murdering any American citizen—with one exception, the president of the United States. Because we don’t want to risk war with you, the president is a freebie for you.” The Warren Commission defined its role as a “fact-finding agency committed to the ascertainment of the truth.”205 But Beschloss, Thomas, and others are accusing the Warren Commission and its members of going through a ten-month charade of purporting to be interested in the truth, but really having no real interest in it, in effect engaging in a deliberate conspiracy—that all seven members of the Commission, including the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, agreed to—to suppress the truth from the American people.
This is essentially the position of Edward Jay Epstein, who changes the focus away from Russia to the politics of LBJ, who formed the Commission. “I think the members of the Warren Commission were all honest men,” Epstein generously allows. “It was their mission that was corrupt. And the mission was corrupt from the day they received it. And that was to have a report out by election time that restored stability to the country.”206 But the intelligent Mr. Epstein neglected to ask himself, why in the world would Johnson be stupid enough to appoint honest men to carry out his dishonest mission? Further, why would men who had been honest all their lives (one of whom was retired, and most in the latter part of their career) decide, at this late point in their lives, to suddenly become corrupt and carry out a corrupt mission? I wonder if Epstein (and others like him) had asked himself these two intelligent questions, how his intelligent mind would have answered them in an intelligent way.
There is an additional reason why the Beschloss-Thomas position has no merit. It would apply only, if at all, if the Warren Commission believed or suspected that Russia was behind the assassination—that is, the whole notion necessarily presupposes Russia’s guilt, or at least a belief in it.* But of all the alleged conspirators behind Oswald’s act, Russia was the very least suspected by the Warren Commission and all other sensible people. And this opinion of Russia not being involved was, as Max Frankel wrote, formed almost immediately after the assassination. So even if we assume, just for the sake of argument, that the Warren Commission, at the beginning, wanted to suppress the truth about the assassination to prevent a war with Russia (I mean, no one was pointing the finger at Sweden, Portugal, or Chile, were they?), once it became obvious very early on that Russia would never have committed such a reckless act as to kill our president, and there was absolutely no evidence of this, what conceivable reason would the Warren Commission have for thereafter continuing to suppress the truth for the ten months of its existence?
—which is exactly what Beschloss, Thomas, and others are alleging. Was the Commission also trying to suppress the truth that far more suspected bogeymen like the CIA, organized crime, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and so on, were involved? But if so, what type of war would such suppression help prevent? A civil war in this country? You know, half the country thinking it was okay for the CIA, for instance, to murder Kennedy, the other half opposed to it? The silliness is numbing.
Not only are the representative allegations of Beschloss and Thomas that the Warren Commission wasn’t interested in investigating the possibility of conspiracy irrational on its face, but as indicated, they have absolutely no evidence to support it. The evidence supports, 100 percent, these two statements made by the Warren Commission: “The Commission has investigated each rumor and allegation linking Oswald to a conspiracy which has come to its attention, regardless of source.”207 And, “Based upon the investigation…the Commission concluded that there is no credible evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. Examination of the facts of the assassination itself revealed no indication that Oswald was aided in the planning or execution of his scheme. Review of Oswald’s life and activities since 1959, although productive and illuminating the character of Lee Harvey Oswald, did not produce any meaningful evidence of a conspiracy. The Commission discovered no evidence that the Soviet Union or Cuba was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.”208