Before it was through, the commission heard 552 witnesses, issuing an 888-page final report with twenty-six volumes of transcripts and exhibits.
Present on the first day of the hearings was the entire panel. Its chairman, Earl Warren, had been a Republican state attorney general in California, governor of that state, and vice presidential candidate with Thomas Dewey in 1948. He had been named chief justice of the United States by President Eisenhower. Other commission members were the venerable Richard Russell from Georgia, a Democrat but a conservative; Republican senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky; Democratic congressman Hale Boggs from Louisiana; Republican congressman Gerald Ford of Michigan; former CIA director Allen Dulles; and banker and diplomat John McCloy. There were six assistant counsel under Lee Rankin.
One of the witnesses in 1964 was General Edwin A. Walker. The examining counsel was Wesley J. Liebeler.
After legal preliminaries, Mr. Liebeler asked biographical questions:LIEBELER: Where were you originally born and raised, General?
WALKER: At Center Point, Texas. I was born in 1909, November 10. Center Point is in Kerr County. It is C-E-N-T-E-R P-O-I-N-T, Kerr County, Texas. That is sixty miles west of San Antonio.
Mr. Liebeler asked about the event in Dallas of April 10, 1963. It had been established that the assassin Oswald had shot at General Walker that day. Oswald had lived only forty-seven hours after killing the president, having been shot down at the police station by nightclub operator Jack Ruby.
LIEBELER: Do you have any other information that would indicate any connection between Ruby and Oswald?
WALKER: I think the two boxes in the post office are very interesting.
LIEBELER: Well, are you suggesting that because two men, Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald, both happened to have post office boxes in the same post office, that that suggests there is some connection between them and indicates a conspiracy to assassinate the president?
WALKER: The boxes were rented the same week.
LIEBELER: You think that suggests a conspiracy between Oswald and Ruby to assassinate the president?
WALKER: That suggests a possible relationship. I think the fact that Rubenstein—
LIEBELER: You are referring to Jack Ruby?
WALKER: Rubenstein was his original name. I was saying, that the fact that Rubenstein shot Oswald suggests plenty. I am convinced he couldn’t have shot him except for one basic reason, and maybe many others, but to keep him quiet. That is what shooting people does. I think the whole city of Dallas is very interested in that. I would be interested. I would be interested in information on a Professor Wolf, William T. Wolf.
LIEBELER: Who is he?
WALKER: The first man we found in the newspaper that seemed to have come to a strange death after the attempted shot at me.
LIEBELER: I am not familiar with the circumstances surrounding that. Would you tell me about Dr. Wolf?
WALKER: William T. Wolf is a professor who was supposedly burned up in an apartment fire, which seems impossible to have burned a man up, a normal man with his normal faculties, because the apartment, he couldn’t have been trapped in it on the first floor.
LIEBELER: Did you know Dr. Wolf?
WALKER: Never heard of him until I read about him in the paper, and I believe I read about him eight days after they shot at me.
LIEBELER: You think there is some connection between Dr. Wolf’s death and the shot at you?
WALKER: No; but I think there is some connection with respect to what is going on in Dallas.
LIEBELER: Well, now, does this relate to the possibility of a conspiracy between Oswald and Ruby to assassinate President Kennedy?
WALKER: I think many unusual deaths in the city of Dallas might show some indication of what is going on, to include what happened on the twenty-second of November. And I would refer you to one other, a professor by the name of Deen. His name is George C. Deen.
LIEBELER: What has that got to do with the assassination of President Kennedy? What are the facts about it?
WALKER: It seems rather mysterious that a young doctor of psychiatry at Timberlawn would, so far as I can tell, only show up in the obituary page.
LIEBELER: What happened to this fellow?
WALKER: He was reported died of natural causes, I believe, or certainly nothing more than that, according to the obituary, so far as I can find.
LIEBELER: Er, we . . . General Walker. Are you familiar with the organization known as The Minutemen?
WALKER: In general terms.
LIEBELER: Do you know of any connection between The Minutemen and the assassination of President Kennedy? WALKER: I do not.
LIEBELER: Do you know of any conspiracy or connection on the part of any so-called right-wing organization and the assassination of President Kennedy?
WALKER: I do not.
LIEBELER: Do you know of any connection between any of the people who associate themselves with and who, shall we say, follow you as a political leader, and the assassination of President Kennedy?
WALKER: No. People that follow me are for constitutional government. This, shooting the president, is absolutely in violation of constitutional government. Very destructive to what we stand for.
LIEBELER: I asked General Watts to bring whatever records you have that would indicate your whereabouts in October and after that in 1963. Particularly, I want to know whether you were at a political rally or meeting that was held immediately prior to the visit of Adlai Stevenson to the city of Dallas in October of 1963.
WALKER: Yes, I was the speaker on the day before Mr. Stevenson appeared in the auditorium. I was the speaker in the same room and the same platform on October 22.
LIEBELER: How many people would you say were there at that rally?
WALKER: The room holds about 1,700 seats, and there were about 1,300 to 1,400 filled.
LIEBELER: Were you aware of the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald claimed to have been at that meeting?
WALKER: No, sir; I wasn’t.
LIEBELER: You didn’t know he was there at the time?
WALKER: I don’t know yet.
LIEBELER: In any event, you didn’t know then?
WALKER: Certainly didn’t.
General Walker testified for three and a half hours.
“This guy thinks I’m a Communist,” Warren said to chief counsel Rankin after looking over the transcript of General Walker’s testimony.
“He had me convinced you were,” Rankin laughed.
Chief Justice Warren pretended he got the joke.
39
MARVIN LIEBMAN’S APARTMENT on East Forty-fourth Street exhibited his current passions. His intense ideological involvement in the cause of a free China had taken him to Taiwan several times. Acquisitive by nature, he came back with artistic souvenirs, which evolved over the months into oriental rugs, tables, chairs, paintings, tapestries, wall decorations, mirrors, and cuisine. His China period meant chopsticks were served to his guests at dinner. But there were knives and forks within reach, which maladroit guests could turn to, and when they did, that was okay by Marvin, who always aimed to please and to be hospitable.
Seeking to indulge a fancy, sometime in 1963 he took to painting oil canvases. He was too restless to persist in the development of his marginal skill, however. He did not exhibit his own work, satisfying himself instead by buying oil paintings, one after another, and hanging them on three walls of his apartment on which they fit so tightly that the blur on first walking into the room was of a single wall-sized canvas by an eclectic artist who would not let his endless canvas close down until he had come up with the kitchen stove; and if you looked hard for it on the east wall of Marvin’s room, there it was: a little oil painting of a stove, done in Florence, the embers illuminating the heating plate. Right over it was the bottom banana of an eight-foot-tall, eight-inch-wide canvas depicting a fruit tree which climbed up Marvin’s wall like a beanstalk, hitting the ceiling with a pineapple, through which Marvin had hand-painted an arrow in order
to give substance to the presumptive skills of the lithe Greek archer whose bow was strung at maximum tension diagonally across at the other end of the room, one of his feet apparently resting on the head of Marvin’s beloved mother, whose portrait Marvin had commissioned with his very first earnings as a lobbyist for Conservative America.
Dressed in a painter’s smock, he welcomed Lee Pound and Woody Raynor and asked if they would like a mai tai. Marvin himself didn’t drink, but he took pleasure in mixing drinks for others. The news was that the Warren Commission would issue its report the next day, and Marvin told a funny story. His friend Oscar Dystel, the head of Bantam Books, had made a boast to his colleagues at a convention of book publishers. He was acclaiming new techniques which had streamlined book production. The Warren Report would be issued at noon on Friday. Dystel’s boast, on behalf of Bantam, was “to have the Warren Report available, to sell, in London at twelve noon on Monday!” Everyone thought him mad. Having lined up every typesetter in the East Coast, pledged to work day and night beginning at noon Friday, he came upon the problem of preprinting the covers. If the report turned out to be 300 to 500 pages long, the preordered cover would be for a book one-half inch thick. If 500 to 750 pages, one inch thick. If over 750 pages, two inches thick.
It surely was not too much to ask of the Warren Commission, About how many pages would the report be? He put in a call to chief counsel Lee Rankin, asking for just that little lead.
“Lee Rankin,” Dystel told Marvin, “is a . . . schmuck! He would not tell me. So? So I have ordered one million covers one-half inch thick, one million covers one inch thick, one million covers two inches thick.” Dystel joked, said Marvin, that if the commission report turned out to be longer than 900 pages, “he will simply edit it down before sending it out.”
They laughed pleasurably and Marvin insisted they have more mai tais. “Chiang Kai-shek gave me the ingredients for these mai tais you’re drinking and had a colonel with dry ice take me to the plane to keep them dry—no, to keep them wet—on the trip home.”
“Really?” said Lee. She was briefly taken in.
“Sounds like altruism to me, Lee.”
“Oh, shut up, Woody.”
“Well, we’ll put that one away,” Marvin said. “I was joking about Chiang Kai-shek—though I did visit the sacred man and one-day liberator of Communist China.”
“We can all drink to that,” Woody said, as Lee raised her glass.
But Marvin said then, “Straighten me out, Lee, on your objectivist objections to altruism. I mean, don’t we all do things for others?”
Lee addressed Marvin rather heatedly. “When I tell people I’m opposed to altruism, they go crazy. They think it means I’m opposed to kindness, charity, benevolence, and respect for the rights of others—and yet altruism means none of those things.”
“So,” Marvin said, “if you do good things for others, then you’re not an altruist?”
“Not unless the sacrifice you make for others means surrendering yourself, abandoning the kind of self-fulfillment that is the key to true liberty.”
“Aw, come on, Lee,” Woodroe broke in. “Let’s look at Marvin. He fought for Zionism in the early days of Israel. He was a smuggler, brought in weapons to Israel on two runs, was so seasick”—Woodroe had been shown a draft of an autobiography Marvin was working on—“he very nearly died. But he did it again. Finally he was sent home, and in Greece, where he was getting the arms for Israel, he ran into the Communists, who were selling—he could see—the same arms to the Palestinians. He quarreled—let me know if I have any of this wrong, Marvin—and decided that what he wanted to fight was the Communists, so he came back here and has been doing that for six years.”
“Eight years.”
“Now he obviously lives well. His various committees pay him to do the work he does. But he didn’t live well when he was tossing his stomach up in a freighter going through stormy weather to Haifa.”
“As long as someone feels he is doing what he wants to do, then he isn’t an altruist.”
Marvin interrupted. “Suppose I don’t want to spend my life on anti-Communist work but I feel—a calling to fight against the Communists on as many fronts as I can. Am I an altruist then?”
“Yes,” Lee said. “And you are contaminating freedom. You’re putting someone else’s interests—the anti-Communist cause—on a higher order than your own. In that way, you are rejecting the moral dimension of liberty.”
“Balls,” Woodroe permitted himself.
She looked around at him. Her eyes blazed. “Look who is offended by definitions he thinks are nothing but . . . balls. Here’s a guy who works for the John Birch Society, whose head—whose ‘Founder’—whose godhead—thinks Eisenhower and Warren are Communist agents. If he’s so allergic to ‘ballish thought,’ why doesn’t he pull out?”
“Lee—Marvin, I’ve told her this before, and you must have heard it. Working for Welch even though he has a crazy idea doesn’t mean that the whole effort isn’t worth it. Like, you’re a Republican and Ike fails to bring effective help to the Hungarians when they strike out for liberty. That doesn’t mean you stop being a Republican, does it? Lee can be an ‘objectivist’ and still believe in sacrifice and—I’d call it altruism—”
“I wouldn’t,” she snapped. “Just like you couldn’t be a Christian and disbelieve that Christ rose from the dead—”
“I believe that,” Marvin said. “But I guess we should change the subject, go back to the Warren Commission.”
“No,” Lee said. She paused and looked up. “You say you believe that about Christ?”
“Yes,” said Marvin. “And I’m taking instruction. I’m going to be baptized. And Bill Buckley will be my godfather.”
Dinner was announced by the housekeeper.
Marvin said that he wouldn’t pretend the food had been brought to him directly from Chiang Kai-shek, but it had been brought to him directly by Chiang’s ambassador to the United Nations.
That brought laughter, and at dinner they spoke of the Republican nomination coming up, and the high prospects for Barry Goldwater.
40
IN LATER YEARS, MANY questions would be asked about the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. David Belin, a staff investigator and highly respected lawyer from Des Moines, was severe in his criticisms of evidence withheld from the commission and of leads unpursued.
His criticism had to do with CIA knowledge of Oswald’s doings between the time he returned from the Soviet Union, in June 1962, and the day he shot Kennedy, seventeen months later. CIA Director John McCone’s motives in withholding this information were correctly discerned in later years. It was as simple as that President Johnson—and in this he represented, though without consultation, the thought of senior legislators, Democratic and Republican—did not want to enliven speculation that in shooting Kennedy, Oswald was acting explicitly or implicitly on instructions from Moscow or Havana. If, Lyndon Johnson one day reminisced to a biographer, it had come out in that period that the assassination of President Kennedy had been the work of the Soviet Union, “we’d have had to tear those fuckers apart limb from limb, never mind nuclear war.”
Much later research confirmed that Moscow had no hand in the assassination and that Premier Khrushchev ardently hoped that there would be no evidence of any Communist official’s ties to Oswald of a kind that might engender suspicion.
But angry as he was that Oswald’s past contacts with Communists in Mexico had been papered over, David Belin was adamant that accumulated research absolutely and conclusively established (1) that Oswald had fired the first bullet, which was aimed at Kennedy, and the second bullet, which killed Kennedy; (2) that no other shot had been fired that day in Dallas at noon in that area; and (3) that there was no evidence whatever that anyone other than Oswald was involved in the bane of November 22, 1963.
But the findings of the Warren Commission did not satisfy everyone. Sometime after Oliver Stone’s film JFK
was distributed, nearly thirty years later, a poll reported that 70 percent of the American people believed that someone other than Oswald had been involved in the shooting. The term “grassy knoller” was used to depict those who insisted there had been another assassin, and that he had operated from the elevation of a grassy knoll in the Dealey Plaza green. In order to substantiate the suspicions of the grassy knollers, staff investigator Belin pointed out, it would be necessary to make corollary assumptions. It had to be that the police had suppressed evidence; that perhaps the ballistics experts had erred on the matter of the officiating weapon, the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle; that Oswald’s shooting of Officer Tippit was a part of a larger design; that Ruby had shot Oswald to prevent him from giving evidence that might be incriminating to those who had things to hide; and that the conspiracy to cover up the assassination involved the chief justice of the United States, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the president of the United States, and the autopsic surgeons in Washington to whom the corpse had been turned over.
If indeed it really was the corpse of the president! Some people wondered.
Those were, mostly, suspicions by members of the political Left. On the political Right, suspicions came primarily from John Birch Society spokesmen. Most prominent of these was Professor Revilo Oliver, who wrote of the Warren Report in American Opinion, the official JBS monthly.
Oliver’s was a very long article. He undertook to explain to the membership what the Warren Commission had done and what it had not done. He devoted many thousands of words to a general orientation of what was happening to America, and how to approach any investigation of the assassination.
Woody took up the issue eagerly when it arrived in the mail.
“Lee Harvey Oswald,” the Birch Society article began, “was a young punk who defected to the Soviet [Union], taking with him the operational codes of the Marine Corps and such other secrets as a fledgling traitor had been able to steal while in military service. He was then trained in sabotage, terrorism, and guerrilla warfare (including accurate shooting from ambush) in the well-known school for international criminals near Minsk—”
Getting It Right Page 21
