Johnson’s original plan was displaced by a new one after Oswald was murdered and new demands for congressional action put Johnson under pressure to federalize the investigation and prosecution of the crime, despite the absence of technical legal authority to do so. The idea of a presidential commission composed of a “blue-ribbon” panel to investigate Kennedy’s death was first introduced to Johnson by his old columnist friend Joseph Alsop. It was soon augmented by Eugene Rostow and Dean Acheson; the entire group of three has been referred to by many researchers as the “Eastern Establishment” which operated in the background, guiding Johnson’s actions. He may have had some assistance along the way, but the momentum he himself had created was the ultimate guiding force.
He knew from the start that Hoover would be the real kingpin of the cover-up because he could exercise complete control over the direction of the investigation regardless of who conducted the groundwork. Any doubt about that point would have to be reconciled with the fact that the FBI immediately took over the investigation, just as Johnson proceeded to shut down the Dallas investigation. Johnson eventually decided that it would be best to keep it under his and Hoover’s direct control in Washington; as we will see, Hoover’s files came in handy to control some of the distinguished men who served as commissioners.
All of Lyndon Johnson’s expertise in the manipulation of successful men and women—learned early in his boyhood starting with his own father and mother, honed during his college years in San Marcos, and perfected during his early years in Washington—would finally pay off in his creation of the Warren Commission. By ingratiating himself further with these senior and august establishment men, he knew that his influence would be further strengthened now that he was the president. Influence to him meant creating new sources of subtle obligations, indebtedness, and dependencies, in some cases even potential blackmail opportunities. His Johnson treatment was by now his greatest skill; finally perfected and customized for each individual, he knew that by playing off each member’s particular vulnerabilities he would create a primary psychological connection, ideally a sycophantic dependency, with them. Using either “the carrot or the stick” as necessary to influence the outcome of their deliberations, he could assure a successful result in this vital priority. The big carrot he held out for each of them was another star for their own individual legacies.
His appointment of mostly career politicians, not investigators, to the commission ensured that they would handle the job as the management of a political problem rather than a crime requiring rigorous independent investigation and resolution. Thus the final document would not be comprised of objective findings based on provable factual data so much as subjective interpretations of ambiguous data, pragmatically created and artfully worded to reflect consensus answers. All of the commissions’ deliberations would be subject to the effective use of his own powers of persuasion even though they might need filtering through his main connections into the boardroom: Hoover primarily, through Ford, Dulles, and McCloy. (The “Magic Bullet Theory”—despite the continued laughable insistence of Arlen Specter to call it “fact”—would eventually become exhibit A for the “consensus answers” assertion.)
Johnson would eventually claim that he had asked Bobby for the names of two men whom he wanted to serve on the commission. According to the man that RFK himself said was a chronic liar (as documented a number of times previously), Bobby asked Johnson to appoint Allen Dulles and John McCloy. After Bobby was assassinated, ensuring that there would be no rebuttal to his assertion, Johnson began circulating a story that he had only previously divulged to his crony attorney, Abe Fortas. Johnson would then say to the publisher of his memoirs, “I could never understand why Bobby tried to put some CIA people on the Warren Commission.”186 It will never be known whether this disingenuous lie was part of his original plot, the midcourse adjustments to it, or whether the first time he supposedly uttered it—when he allegedly told it to Fortas in 1966—was also the first time he had created it.
Johnson knew that as the newly installed president of the United States—given all of his thirty-plus years of experience in gaining that office and another twenty dreaming of it, together with the help of his friend, neighbor, partner, and mentor J. Edgar Hoover—the ultimate power to control the outcome of the investigation and report would be theirs and theirs alone. He knew that the information to be fed to the commission would be tightly controlled through Hoover and that they would develop a direct channel inside the commission through at least one member, probably several of them. Much of the investigation, and the presentation of its findings to the public including the frequent “leaks,” would be done by sophisticated and erudite men whose credibility was unassailable at the time. He knew that these men would ultimately fall into line because their careers depended upon it; everyone on “the team” would be convinced that convicting Oswald on the president’s schedule was first and foremost the essential objective. (The commission’s record itself, including the individual witnesses ignored and the evidence lost, destroyed, or fabricated would become exhibit A in that assertion). Arlen Specter was typical of the arrogant, aggressive and ambitious young staff who would work single-mindedly toward this purpose.
Finally, he knew also that the members of the commission were very busy men who had pressing schedules of their own and therefore the time they actually spent in commission meetings would be minimal. This meant that the staff members would therefore be under heavy pressure for results on a very short timetable and that they would need to obtain consensus through the normal committee protocol. These constraints would also mean that only select key issues would actually be reviewed in detail at the commission meetings and the overall plot direction would be developed within the purview of staff deliberations.
Johnson relied on his presidential clout to sell each member on being named to the commission by using the argument that the case against Oswald had already been made so “airtight” that it would not drag on interminably. Ultimately, any resistance that was made melted away when Johnson warned that “forty million* American lives hung in the balance,” and they therefore had a solemn duty to God and country to accept this assignment. His appointment of Senator Richard Russell is a case study of the “Johnson treatment.” Russell had been in the Senate since 1933 and would have succeeded into a leadership capacity by 1950 if he had had a more ambitious streak. Instead, he deferred his support to Johnson who had only been elected to the Senate two years before that. His decision enabled Johnson to become the most powerful man in the Senate in record time. Russell was an old bachelor and the epitome of the personality type that Johnson had long ago targeted for his most special ingratiating treatment. As he had done with Sam Rayburn before him, Johnson had sought Russell out many years before and buried him under such an avalanche of shameless patronizing that he had already effectively neutralized any natural defenses Russell might have had against such an attack. It is sufficient to observe that Russell had spent many weekends—especially Sundays—relaxing with LBJ and Lady Bird, exactly the same way as Sam Rayburn had previously been hosted. He was such a regular visitor that Johnson’s daughters affectionately referred to Russell as “Uncle Dick” (joining “Uncle Sam and “Uncle Edgar”). The recording of Johnson’s discussion with his old friend Senator Russell, who had objected primarily because of his dislike of the liberalism of Chief Justice Earl Warren, revealed the efficacy of the “Johnson treatment”; he simply would not take no for an answer.**
Senator Russell, despite his friendship with Johnson, was troubled early in the proceedings by the direction taken by the commission; on December 5, 1963, he wrote by hand a memo that was later found in his desk and placed in his Memorial Library at the University of Georgia:187
Warren asked about C.I.A. ‘Did they have anything.’ When I told of Mexico & Nicaraguan NOT mentioning sums***—He mentioned 5G [$5,000] as McCone had told me. He [Warren] knew all I did & more about CIA. Something strange is happening—W. [Wa
rren] & [Deputy Attorney General Nicholas] Katzenbach know all about F.B.I. and they are apparently through psychiatrists & others planning to show Oswald only one who even considered—this to me is untenable position—I must insist on outside counsel—‘Remember Warren’s blanket indictment of South.’”
As author Dick Russell shows in On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, Senator Russell so distrusted the FBI investigation that he decided to simultaneously conduct his own private inquiry, which came to the conclusion that Oswald did not do it.188 Representative Boggs would later say that J. Edgar Hoover “lied his eyes out to the Commission—on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it.”189
Ironically, this old friend of and mentor to Lyndon Johnson must have realized, within a few days of the assassination, that the new president was up to something very troubling—and that it was an “untenable position”—which required that he do his own investigation through his assistant, Colonel Philip Corso; Russell instructed Corso to keep no paper records of his investigation, and all briefings were to be oral. This secret information led him to believe there was a conspiracy, and he—with fellow commissioners Boggs and Cooper—demanded a private executive session of the commission to air their concerns. No transcript of this meeting was ever produced; however, the rumors at the time were that the meeting was a “no-holds barred shouting match.”190 Even with the promise that his written dissension would be published with the full report, Senator Russell had to be “arm-twisted” by Johnson into signing the report; he was later shocked to find that his dissent was not published, neither with the report nor any of the thousands of pages of (sometimes arcane) other records and hearings. In fact, the “Russell dissent” disappeared for several decades until someone found it among his papers at the University of Georgia.191 His dissent makes it very clear that he did not believe the “single bullet theory” (which implicitly means that he thought more than three shots had to have been fired and that leads inexorably to the conclusion that a conspiracy existed).
Hoover used his assistant, Cartha DeLoach, to liaise secretly with (future president) Gerald Ford, who provided details of the commission’s secret deliberations. According to another FBI assistant director, William Sullivan, Ford was “our man” on the Warren Commission.192 The reason for Ford’s willingness to cooperate with the FBI, according to LBJ’s former aide Bobby Baker and reported by Anthony Summers, was because “in the year preceding the assassination, he [Baker] and Ford both had access to a ‘hospitality suite’ at Washington’s Sheraton-Carlton Hotel rented by a mutual friend, the lobbyist Fred Black. ‘Like me,’ Baker said, ‘Gerry Ford had a key to the suite. And sometimes Black would tell me not to use the room, because Ford was meeting someone there.’”193 When Black was being investigated, and later prosecuted for income tax evasion, for two months in 1963, bugs were installed in the suite to pick up incriminating evidence against him. The theory advanced by Baker was that these bugs picked up compromising information on Ford, which was passed on to Edgar and from him to Johnson; Lyndon and Edgar thus had the goods on Gerry Ford, and they used it to bring pressure on him into cooperating with them to undermine the Warren Commission,194 even going to the extreme of verbally changing the location of the entry point of the bullet into JFK’s back, making it higher on the shoulder so that it would line up better with the so-called “exit” wound in his throat. This was, arguably, the most egregious case of wordsmanship in the history of the art.195
It was J. Edgar Hoover’s original statement that became the “mission statement” for the Warren Commission: “The thing I am concerned about, and so is Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.”196 Johnson pressed the commission to complete their report as quickly as possible “so as to quiet public suspicions of a conspiracy.” The commission operated in an atmosphere of concern from high government officials, including Johnson, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the CIA, that its report point to Oswald as the sole assassin and refute suggestions that any official in the United States or in any other country had planned Kennedy’s death. When it delivered its findings in September 1964, the commission said just that Oswald and Ruby each acted alone, “‘without advice or assistance,’ and that no conspiracy determined the actions of either man.”197
To ensure that the commission would provide only a perfunctory review rather than an exhaustive analysis, Johnson’s continued pressure on them to complete the report was explained as a necessity due to the presidential elections in November; Johnson had originally pressured Earl Warren to conclude the investigation in two months, by February 1964,198 then the deadline became April, allowing for the report to be written, edited, and published in time to present it to Johnson by June 1964.199 By May, the deadline was extended by Rankin to June 1 “so that the final report could be issued by June 30. By June 1, however, only two attorneys had completed a draft and the deadline had to be moved back.”200 On June 17, the commission announced that its hearings were completed; on June 30, it was announced that the final report would not be issued until after the Republican National Convention, which was set to begin July 13 and end July 18, 1964.201 This tactic—of setting unrealistic deadlines and constantly moving them backward—was intended by Johnson to keep the commission, and more importantly, the staff lawyers and investigators, under extreme pressure to finish the report; this pressure would also necessarily keep them on track with the original objective of finding that Oswald acted alone by making it impossible to follow any other more plausible leads. Because of the delays in getting started and the lengthy writing process, the actual investigation lasted five months.202 To the same end, Johnson also knew that the commission members would delegate most of the investigatory legwork and the hard tasks of drafting, collating, editing, and rewriting of the report to the staff. Their own function would be limited to interviewing witnesses in closed session and discussion of the disposition of unresolved issues and agreement to a preordained set of conclusions—including many which are inconsistent and/or incompatible to other conclusions made by the same commission—that point to Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole assassin.203
Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover wasted no time in establishing the first tenet of the commission; it would be strictly subservient and beholden to them. To firmly establish this, no direct liaison to the FBI, Secret Service, or CIA was designated, as was the case with the Justice Department for which a full-time employee had been established. Therefore when they needed FBI input, they had to go directly to J. Edgar Hoover; for example, the question of whether Oswald had been a paid FBI informant complete with monthly stipend and employee number, as had been reported; the commission referred that issue to Hoover, who simply denied it, “and that was that.”204 Undoubtedly, through Lyndon Johnson’s personal instructions to Chairman Earl Warren, at the commission’s first meeting on December 5, 1963, Warren laid the ground rules for the conduct of committee meetings. Most basic was the tenet that the commission would only evaluate available evidence, not gather that evidence. A corollary tenet was that it would rely upon the reports of “the FBI and Secret Service and others that I may not know about the present time.” Finally, he insured the commission would be malleable and completely subservient to the new president and his FBI director by stating that “I believe that the development of the evidence in this way should not call for a staff of investigators.”205 The plan for containment and control of the ensuing investigation was complete.
By the time of that first meeting, Johnson had completely emasculated Chief Justice Earl Warren. The tenets he established above would include a few more: “He went on to say that the hearings should not be held in public. He thought that their report would carry more influence done secretly than if it were done in the open. He even suggested that the Commission hear no witnesses or even have the subpoena power, saying that this would ‘retard rather than help our investigation.’ At this first meeting, Warren was clearly ca
rrying water for President Johnson when he added that one of the primary functions of the Commission was to thwart congressional committees from conducting their own hearings, which was Johnson’s original goal.”206 By the time the commission received the FBI report, it was agreed that it was so poor that they agreed at the second meeting that it could not be relied upon; only then was it decided that they needed subpoena power after all.
Making the commission entirely dependent upon the FBI’s investigators further tightened the connection and compromised their ability to obtain untainted information. This was especially troubling when one considers that J. Edgar Hoover, personally, was the gatekeeper who monitored everything being furnished to the commission. As one researcher noted, “This was a grievous error, for once the FBI had submitted the very first reports, there was no way the stubborn, vain, unchallengeable Hoover would back down from their initial conclusion.”207 Because the FBI and Secret Service were both under fire for their security breaches in Dallas, both agencies were interested in minimizing damage and quickly finishing the commission’s inquiry; likewise, the individual agents working under the collective guilt of having lost the president were interested in protecting themselves and their brother agents against the unpredictable wrath of their boss, J. Edgar Hoover. The multiple redundant conflicts of interest represented throughout this bureaucratic organizational structure are mind-boggling, although it provides at least a partial answer to the question “why was the Warren Commission so completely malleable to LBJ and Hoover?”
Any complications that would not advance the goal of a quick and controlled finish, such as a messy investigation into either a foreign or domestic conspiracy or the involvement of anyone other than the lone nut Oswald, would only prolong the investigation and risk a wholesale housecleaning starting with the top of the FBI and the Secret Service and a complete top-to-bottom reorganization of the CIA, perhaps even to the extent once threatened by JFK himself when he warned, “I will tear it into a thousand pieces and scatter it with the winds.”208 Throughout its life, Lyndon Johnson would pressure it to reach an early conclusion.
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