Although their objectives were the same, the select committee’s work was substantially different from that of the Warren Commission. For the most part it had to deal with evidence that was already fifteen years old. (Despite the already vast and steadily growing literature on the assassination, very little new evidence had turned up since the first investigation in 1963 and 1964.) That evidence fell naturally into three categories: forensic evidence still amenable to scientific investigation, the recollections of the events by witnesses who were still alive and available in 1978–1979, and documentation in the files of governmental agencies. In the committee’s judgment, the most reliable of these was the forensic evidence—autopsy, firearm and ballistic, handwriting, fingerprint, photographic, acoustical, and so on. The HSCA proceeded to hire highly credentialed national experts in each of the subject forensic fields, who subjected all of the scientific evidence253 to a thorough review and testing that often produced fresh insights and interpretations. “A major focus of our investigation was science,” Blakey would later recall. “We figured that the witnesses were now only repeating stories…While witness testimony was in stone, we figured the science had progressed in the years since the Warren Commission. We hoped to take advantage of that progress. That is where we put our main emphasis. It paid off.”254
Blakey knew, of course, that his committee was not set up to bring the murderers of Kennedy and King to trial and convict them; that was not the function of a congressional committee. He also realized that the trail was not just cold now. “It had been trampled into a state of confusion by amateur sleuths,” he wrote later, “witnesses had died, and the memories of those who were still around had been altered by secondhand perceptions (witnesses, too, read the conspiracy books) and dimmed by the passage of time; and evidence had been misplaced or destroyed.” He decided, given his limited resources, to concentrate “primarily on the hard data of science and technology.”255
In March 1978 the committee was refunded for the year. Blakey had asked for $3 million and was again accorded only $2.5 million, facing him with “unattractive alternatives.” The money was enough to keep the full staff on through December but only if travel were disallowed. To keep both staff and travel through December, the staff would have to be halved, which, he felt, “would effectively shut down both the Kennedy and the King investigations.” Blakey, with his Washington insider’s feel for the art of the possible, realized that if they got a break in either case before July, they could get more funding. If they didn’t, no one would care whether they shut down or not. He decided to risk it, cutting only thirty members of the staff and keeping both investigations going with those who were left.
By July 1978 the HSCA was running low on money. On July 13 Blakey met with the committee to review the funding needs. Blakey informed the committee that they had a break on the King case—they had developed evidence of a conspiracy. Spurred by the news, the committee agreed to seek a supplemental appropriation of $790,000.
Later that afternoon, Dr. James Barger, chief scientist at the acoustical firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman Inc. (BBN) of Cambridge, Massachusetts, called with electrifying news. Barger had been looking at the graphs made from a recording of the Dallas police radio transmissions of November 22, 1963, and, although the sound patterns he saw would have to be verified by comparison gunshots recorded in Dealey Plaza, there appeared to be more than three gunshots, possibly as many as five, which virtually assured a second shooter and, therefore, a conspiracy. The effect on the committee and its staff was galvanic. Barger came to Washington to brief the HSCA with a graph twenty-three feet long. Until now the staff’s painstaking reexamination of the assassination had only confirmed the conclusions of the Warren Commission. Even in those areas where the committee felt the Commission’s investigation had been careless, inept, or scant, the HSCA’s more detailed and scientific examination of the evidence had only strengthened the Commission’s conclusions. Now, a twenty-three-foot graph was about to turn the HSCA’s investigation on its head. “We were pulling on a thread from an intricate tapestry that was the Kennedy assassination, as it had been understood since 1964,” Blakey wrote. “If we pulled hard enough, it might all unravel.”256 They did pull hard enough and it did unravel but not in the sense Blakey meant and not before the HSCA seriously injured its own credibility.
Following an acoustical reconstruction in Dallas, a revised analysis of the Dallas police radio recordings, and seventeen days of carefully orchestrated and televised public hearings, the HSCA closed shop in January of 1979 and began the task of writing a final report.
On March 29, 1979, a substantially divided HSCA, with three out of the twelve members filing written dissents (later followed by a fourth member’s dissent)* released its final report concluding, with nearly a total reliance on the acoustical evidence, that President Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” (The HSCA’s acoustical evidence has been totally discredited. See later text.) Although the committee confirmed that Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots from the Book Depository, striking Kennedy twice and Governor Connally once, it also claimed to have “established a high probability” that a second gunman fired from the infamous grassy knoll, but that this second shooter apparently missed the limousine and its occupants. The report added, “The committee was unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.”257 Indeed, the HSCA expressly exonerated every group (organized crime, CIA, FBI, KGB, anti-Castro Cuban exile groups, etc.) suspected by conspiracy theorists throughout the years of complicity in the assassination.
Although the final report concluded that it was unable to identify the “extent of the conspiracy” it had found, or name the alleged second gunman, it did hint at two possibilities. The committee carefully pointed out that “as groups,” neither anti-Castro Cuban exiles nor organized crime were involved, but added that “the available evidence does not preclude the possibility [how could it?] that individual members [of these two groups] may have been involved.”258*
At a press conference, Blakey took things a step further than the committee report stated or even implied. “I am now firmly of the opinion that the Mob did it,” he told reporters. “It is a historical truth.” Then, he quickly added, “This Committee report does not say the Mob did it. I said it. I think the Mob did it.”259† But Blakey’s assertion, and the committee’s allegation, that there was a conspiracy behind the president’s murder, like most of the myths surrounding the assassination, will unravel before you on the pages of the conspiracy section of this book.
HSCA staff investigator Gaeton Fonzi, a well-known antagonist of Blakey, charged in his book on the HSCA’s investigation that Blakey not only was predisposed to the mob theory from the beginning, but pushed it on his staff throughout the investigation. He quotes Jim McDonald, an attorney in charge of the Organized Crime Unit on Blakey’s staff, as telling him that most of the members of the organized-crime team never bought Blakey’s mob theory, which he said Blakey had formulated many months before the HSCA issued its final report. “The team never made the link. But at our meetings it was obvious that Blakey wanted that. He wanted to make the link more than anything else.”260
Some pieces of circumstantial evidence support Fonzi’s and McDonald’s position. Blakey chose as his number-one assistant (deputy chief counsel) an organized crime–fighting colleague of his, Gary Cornwell, who as a Justice Department prosecutor had served as the chief of the Organized Crime Strike Force in Kansas City, and for his editorial director a former editor at Life magazine who had written a series of articles for Life on organized crime, Richard Billings. Indeed, although the HSCA thoroughly investigated nearly every major alleged conspiratorial group, among the twelve volumes published by the HSCA, their 1,160-page volume on organized crime261 dwarfs all others.
But Andy Purdy, the University of Virginia law student who was on the ground floor of the HSCA’s existence, and served as a deputy counsel throughout, does not agree with th
e charges by Fonzi or with the inference drawn from the size of the massive HSCA Report on organized crime. “Blakey did not push organized crime on the staff. Yes, much more was written on organized crime, but not necessarily more of an investigation was conducted. Pre-acoustics, the investigative effort into each alleged conspiratorial group was proportionate to the complexity and promising nature of the issue presented, with no discernible tilt towards organized crime. Post-acoustics, yes, there was an increased emphasis on organized crime by Blakey to come up with evidence supportive of the acoustics finding of a fourth bullet and therefore a conspiracy. But the main reason for this emphasis was that the work on the other groups had already been completed whereas the work on organized crime had not.”262
Blakey himself says that Fonzi’s charges are “unequivocally not true. In fact, when I first started out as chief counsel, I believed that organized crime was not involved. That the mob just didn’t kill public figures. But as the evidence started to develop, I came to the conclusion that Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante were behind the assassination. But I at no time pushed my staff in that direction.” When I told Blakey I still did not believe the mob went after public figures and asked him what caused him to change his position and conclude the mob decided to break with its long-standing tradition and kill a public official, “the biggest one of all,” his only answer was that “the evidence” had convinced him the mob killed Kennedy. Among that evidence, he would later write me, was “Jack Ruby’s organized crime–related background in Chicago and Dallas” (discussed in depth in the conspiracy section of this book), his belief that Ruby had “stalked Oswald” following the assassination, and FBI surveillance tapes showing the mob’s hatred for the president and his brother, including the desire of some individual members of the mob to kill Kennedy.263
Because of the disparity between the HSCA conclusion on organized crime and that of Blakey, which he later repeated in his book, I asked Blakey who, specifically, wrote the HSCA Report.
“I wrote the report with the help of Dick Billings, who was with us almost from the beginning. Billings not only had a background as a reporter for Life magazine on true-crime stories and organized crime, but he was a professional writer. A lawyer’s prose [referring to himself] leaves something to be desired with its legalese, and Billings made my writing, and the report, readable.”
“Did the HSCA have to approve of everything you wrote?”
“Yes, the committee [HSCA] had to approve every word in the report. And the report was written by Billings and me with full knowledge of who was on the committee and what their conclusions were. The report was written to express, in our words, their conclusions. So the real author of the report was the committee.”264
There was actually one further reinvestigation of the assassination, one that received virtually no attention in the media since it was conducted, without fanfare, behind the scenes. When the HSCA submitted its final report to the clerk of the House of Representatives on March 29, 1979, it made several recommendations, one of which was that the Department of Justice “review the committee’s findings” on the assassination of President Kennedy and “report its analysis to the Judiciary Committee.”265 By the end of 1983, the department said it had completed “virtually all” of its investigation, but did not issue its formal report at the time because it wanted to review “all public comment responsive” to the National Academy of Science’s review of the acoustical evidence. On March 28, 1988, the Justice Department submitted its formal report to Senator Peter W. Rodino Jr., chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary. The department’s report was a rebuke to the HSCA’s conclusion of conspiracy. The department said that its “attorney and investigative personnel reviewed the entire Select Committee report as well as all relevant Federal Bureau of Investigation reports.” Before it reached its conclusion, the department said it had also asked the FBI “to further investigate any aspect of the assassination which Departmental attorneys felt had even an arguable potential of leading to additional productive information.” The Justice Department concluded that “no persuasive evidence can be identified to support the theory of a conspiracy” in the Kennedy assassination, and that “no further investigation appears to be warranted…unless new information which is sufficient to support additional investigation activity becomes available.”266*
The Warren Commission, coming first, couldn’t comment on the HSCA, but the HSCA had good words to say about its predecessor. Although faulting the Warren Commission for failing “to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President,” the HSCA said the Commission “conducted a thorough and professional investigation into the responsibility of Lee Harvey Oswald for the assassination.” It went on to take note “of the high level of professionalism, dedication, and integrity it found to have characterized the members and staff of the Commission. The committee noted that criticisms leveled at the Commission had often been biased, unfair, and inaccurate. Indeed, the committee believed that the prevailing opinion of the Commission’s performance was undeserved. The competence of the Commission was all the more impressive, in the opinion of the committee, in view of the substantial pressure to elicit findings in only nine months.”267
In general, the official investigations of the assassination of the president were well done. No investigation is ever perfect and it is rare for any major and complex case to come to trial without some problems—discrepancies, slipups, unanswered questions, incompetence, evidence that has been lost, leads not properly followed up, breaks in the chain of custody of evidence, flawed interrogations, and so on. A thousand things can go wrong, and at least some of them inevitably do.
The Dallas police certainly made their mistakes, including their critical lapse of failing to adequately protect Oswald from any possible assassin, resulting in his death. Still, by and large, Dallas homicide captain J. Will Fritz, in his dogged, taciturn way, had, within two days of the assassination, managed to build a very powerful case against Lee Harvey Oswald, a case that has stood the test of time. The principal investigation of the assassination, by the Warren Commission, is, of course, unparalleled in history, not just in the sheer, staggering volume of information collected by the FBI and other federal agencies, but in its monumental thoroughness and attention to detail. Likewise, the House Select Committee’s modern scientific analysis of the hard, physical evidence in the case produced a corroborative foundation of fact that previous investigations couldn’t have hoped to obtain, and thereby contributed appreciably to our knowledge of the case. When taken as a whole, as you’ll soon see, the body of evidence collected by these official investigations leaves absolutely no doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald murdered the president, and no reasonable doubt that he acted alone.
The only doubt that was raised by any of the investigations that Oswald acted alone was the aforementioned bizarre conclusion of the HSCA that Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”268 I say bizarre not because of the conclusion of conspiracy but because of what the conclusion was based on. The committee proceeded through almost all of its inquiry with the conviction that Oswald had acted alone, and in December 13, 1978 (near the very end of its investigation), even wrote a draft of its final report concluding that there was no conspiracy in the assassination.269 But although Dr. Barger had ultimately been unpersuasive, at the eleventh hour two acoustics experts from Queens College in New York, Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy, sold the majority of the committee an incredible bill of goods based on their mathematical computations and a static-filled Dallas police Dictabelt recording (from an open microphone on a police motorcycle presumed to be in Dealey Plaza) on which no one could hear the actual sound of gunshots. They claimed they were able to discern, from “impulse sounds” and “echo pattern predictions,” that there was a “95 percent or better” probability that a fourth shot was fired from the grassy knoll, and hence, a conspiracy.270 It had to be an incorrect conclusion since all the physical evidenc
e showed that all shots were fired from the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, and there was no credible evidence of any gunman firing from the grassy knoll. (See grassy knoll section of book.) But the Warren Commission’s critics and conspiracy theorists were so excited about the HSCA’s conclusion that they were practically levitating.
What brought them crashing down to earth was when the smoke-and-mirrors conclusion of the HSCA was exposed as such in 1982 by a panel of twelve physicists and scientists under the aegis of the National Research Council. Hailing from places like MIT, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at the University of California, and the Bell Telephone Laboratory in New Jersey, and headed by Harvard professor Norman Ramsey, the panel of experts analyzed the subject Dictabelt and heard the same impulse sounds that the two Queens professors did. The only problem was that the “sounds” the Queens professors heard occurred “one minute after the assassination,” when the presidential limousine was long gone down the Stemmons Freeway on its way to Parkland Hospital.271 The HSCA conclusion was blatantly incorrect and unprofessional, an unfortunate, serious blemish on its otherwise excellent effort. (For those who want to read more about this entire acoustics issue, see the very long endnote to this section.)
Reclaiming History Page 72
