Thus, both here and abroad began the cascade of innuendo, supposition, imagination, twisted fact, misunderstanding, faulty analysis and downright fantasy that surrounded the tragic death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
The last paragraph may ironically be the most truthful of them all, if the context is reversed, but Ford actually intended to apply those words to the critics of the Warren Report, who were merely trying to understand the truth of what happened in Dallas. Much of the confusion which Ford—not known to be a particularly articulate man—referred to was caused by this sort of double-talk. It quickly developed that, though Brennan did view the lineup, he never positively identified Oswald or anyone else for that matter despite having proclaimed that he could do so. He even told the FBI that he “‘could not positively identify Oswald as the person he saw fire the rifle’ and this was after Brennan had seen Oswald’s picture on television.”221
Brennan had described the man he saw “from the belt up” as a “slender white male in his early thirties wearing ‘light colored clothing.’” He further said, “I heard what I thought was a backfire. It ran in my mind that it might be someone throwing firecrackers out of the window of the red brick building [the Depository] and I looked up at the building. I then saw this man I have described in the window and he was taking aim with a high-powered rifle. I could see all of the barrel of the gun. I do not know if it had a scope on it or not. I was looking at the man in this window at the time of the last explosion. Then this man let the gun down to his side and stepped out of sight. He did not seem to be in any hurry … I believe I could identify this man if I ever saw him again.”222
Author Marrs then noted that “much later, it was determined that Brennan had poor eyesight and, in fact, a close examination of the Zapruder film shows that Brennan was not looking up at the time of the shooting.” Furthermore, Brennan’s job foreman, Sandy Speaker, told Marrs:223
They took [Brennan] off for about three weeks. I don’t know if they were Secret Service or FBI, but they were federal people. He came back a nervous wreck and within a year his hair had turned snow white. He wouldn’t talk about [the assassination] after that. He was scared to death. They made him say what they wanted him to say.
Jim Marrs also reported that Brennan’s supervisor Sandy Speaker, a combat marine veteran, said that he heard “at least five shots and they came from different locations.”224 Mr. Speaker had not talked about the matter since 1964, until he spoke to Marrs about twenty-five years later; he told Marrs that he had gotten a call early in that year from another coworker, A. J. Millican, who was almost in tears and who told him never to talk about the assassination. Millican said he had just received an anonymous call threatening not only his life but the lives of his wife and her sister. He said the caller told him to also warn Speaker to keep his mouth shut. Mr. Speaker then told Marrs, “That call really shook me up because Millican was a former boxing champ of the Pacific fleet. He was a scrapper, a fighter. But he was obviously scared to death. And I still don’t understand how they got my name because I was never interviewed by the FBI, the Secret Service, the police or anyone. They must be pretty powerful to have found out about me.”225 Of the group of workers that accompanied Mr. Speaker to watch the motorcade during their lunch break, only Brennan claimed to have seen the man he described (but couldn’t identify) alone in the Depository window. That would account for why he was the only one of the group to have been interviewed by the FBI and why they did not want to hear anyone else since they claimed to have either seen more men or heard more shots than the official story being promulgated by the FBI and sanctioned by the Warren Commission.
After noting the tremendous help the commission received from the various federal agencies such as the FBI and Secret Service (the CIA wasn’t mentioned), Ford said in the article, “The full details of Oswald’s nearly three years in the U.S.S.R. will remain covered in mystery until and unless the Soviet government opens its files completely. It has not done so yet.” Almost fifty years later, it is astonishing to read his account, which so clearly sidesteps the facts now known about Oswald’s training by the CIA and ONI preparatory to his trip to the Soviet Union yet blames the Soviets for the lack of knowledge of his life and times in that country. It is an interesting read in the context of everything that has since become known about Oswald (and Ford), and one thing does become clear after reading this material now: Congressman Ford was simply following a script that had been laid out well before the shooting started.
The Rebuttals Begin
The official report of the Warren Commission was immediately subjected to strong criticisms and ridicule by those few who actually read it; their incredulity led many others to discredit the veracity of its conclusions. Although it took fifteen years, Congress eventually conceded that there were most likely at least two gunmen involved in the assassination, possibly more. But it took another twenty years, and the production of an acclaimed movie on the subject, for Congress to decide to make public a mountain of evidence and information which had been heretofore officially sealed for up to seventy-five years by Lyndon Johnson’s edict. By this point, however, there had been so much misinformation—and official disinformation—published that massive public confusion had displaced any meaningful “official version” of the real truth of this defining moment of U.S. history. It appears that this is exactly what Lyndon Johnson, the genius at manipulating people and planning very complex scenarios, had planned all along.
The book Whitewash, originally self-published in 1965 by Harold Weisberg, set the baseline as the first rebuttal of the Warren Report, showing that it utterly failed in its purported mission as the final word on solving the JFK assassination. Forty years later, a student of Weisberg’s, Gerald McKnight, brought his mentor’s arguments up to date with the publication of Breach of Trust—how the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why. Numerous others have added even more dimension to the record of the failures, omissions and fabrications of the Warren Report, which show conclusively its lack of credibility. One such author, Henry Hurt, in Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation into the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1985), concurred that the Warren Report was a whitewash.
Professor McKnight established that the Warren Report was tantamount to a grandiose exercise in public relations—with a worldwide audience—developed to “prove” that Oswald alone assassinated President Kennedy; this was clearly the only objective from the start, even before the Warren Commission was established and functioning. He noted that the commission’s own records—together with thousands of other items it ignored, or had been kept from seeing, or had been fabricated—show that there were two conspiracies: the one that it left still unsolved about the persons and events actually involved in the assassination itself as well as the secondary one into which its very own existence had become an inseparable part—the cover-up.226 Moreover, the research done by McKnight established that the Warren Commission embraced the FBI’s lone-gunman theory from the outset. The FBI repeatedly suppressed or actively ignored any and all evidence not congruent with that presumption. Its implied mantra throughout the perfunctory investigation was to ignore crucial leads, discount contradictory evidence, and select witnesses primarily on the basis of their willingness to cooperate in testifying consistently with the politically correct, preapproved findings; a related objective was to harass and ridicule those witnesses who did not conform to their agenda.227 The inevitable conclusions of this body would be established early on and remain constant until the finish, which were then summarized as follows:
• “The Commission has found no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy.”
• “In its entire investigation the Commission has found no evidence of conspiracy, subversion, or disloyalty to the U.S. Government by any Federal, State or local official.”
Despite its stated additional conclusion, “the Commission has investigated each rumor
and allegation linking Oswald to a conspiracy which has come to its attention, regardless of source,” the fact that it purposely culled its witness list of anyone who claimed that they heard more than three shots, or that they heard shots from the grassy knoll, renders this a specious claim. Though most people assumed that Oswald was involved in some way, possibly as one of the assassins, his lack of a real motive (his enigmatic past notwithstanding), his choice of weapon, and the surfeit of questions surrounding every facet of the investigation all contributed to the public skepticism that grew almost immediately after the commission published its report.
Beyond the detailed instances of incompetence or malfeasance of the FBI’s handling of the investigation, there was even more troubling evidence of subtle conflicts of interest between the FBI and the Secret Service vis-à-vis the commission members and its staff that are addressed by Professor McKnight. Throughout his book are references to the fact that the commission itself and J. Lee Rankin, its general counsel, were beholden to the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover, which caused them to have to be exceedingly deferential to him, lest he become upset and withhold his and/or the FBI’s assistance to the commission.228 Rankin was acutely aware that the commission’s timetable and its mandate (ostensibly to find out the truth of the assassination, but in reality to return a “guilty” verdict for the dead Oswald, with plenty of paper to back it up), required that they have the FBI’s full cooperation. To do so, his first priority was to avoid alienating the cantankerous Hoover. “From March to September 1964, there were many occasions when a deferential Rankin tried to smooth the director’s ruffled feathers. His placatory efforts never mattered in any fundamental way because the director and his agency perceived the commission as an adversary and a threat that had to be contained. When Rankin gushed about the superior quality of FBI testimony before the commission, Hoover dismissed the compliments. ‘They were looking for FBI “gaps,” he huffed, ‘and having found none yet they try to get “syrupy.”’”229
Among the many errors and incongruities of the Warren Report noted by Professor McKnight and numerous others the following few are noted in summary fashion in the interest of brevity and because they are thoroughly analyzed in numerous other books:
• The “magic bullet” theory. This is the single most controversial, widely criticized, and thoroughly discredited “conclusion” of the report. None more clearly divides the Warren Commission supporters (“Lone Nut Theorists”) from the researchers who believe the “Single Bullet Theory” was borne more of a need to fill a vacuum than it was a rational and objective attempt to reconstruct the crime. This conclusion postulates that one shot hit Kennedy near the top of his back (which required a clever parsing of words, with help from Gerald Ford, to move the bullet wound on JFK’s back to a point high enough to be called his shoulder230), which then came out the front of his neck, went through Connally’s back, came out of his chest, smashed his right wrist, and caused a puncture wound in his left thigh. After doing all of this bone-breaking damage, the nearly pristine bullet was supposedly found on a gurney in the hospital, which was not even used to carry either Kennedy or Connally. The many issues regarding the origin and subsequent handling of this bullet renders the conclusions made about it utterly impossible.231
• More bullet controversy. Parkland Personnel Director O. P. Wright stated in 1967 that the bullet he saw on the day of the assassination did not look like the bullet that later became CE-399. This statement directly conflicted with the FBI memo of July 7, 1964, which said that Wright had told an FBI agent that the bullet looked like the one he had inspected on November 22, 1963. By this time, of course, the matter had been officially put to bed.232
• Kennedy’s moving back wound. Dr. Humes, who testified that he stuck his finger in Kennedy’s back wound and found that the path only went one to two inches into his flesh, would lead one to conclude that the actual bullet to Kennedy’s back was a “short” charge not powerful enough to go farther. It certainly didn’t turn upward and exit his throat, or anywhere else, and proceed to then make five more entries and exits in Connally. The shot was in his back, not the back of his neck, despite the best efforts of Arlen Specter and Gerald Ford to move the wound through their attempts to obfuscate the facts. Specter continually referred to this back wound as being “on the lower part of the neck.”* Arlen Specter can be found on a number of internet videos (such as one titled: “FBI Agent, Specter on JFK Back Wound”) continuing, decades later, to say that the wound was on JFK’s “neck”, which is a complete deception. As he also demonstrated on the same referenced video, his own political skills were sharply honed, including such creative, paradoxical idioms, as, “Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction,” probably meant to blur the lines between the two opposites. There are many ways to interpret that particular sentence, but they all depend upon the meaning and context of the word “truth”, as well as whom the speaker is.
In his partial defense, Specter’s point of view was not derived from an analysis of any actual photographs of the bullet in Kennedy’s neck, but only of an artist’s (H.A. Rydberg) rendering which (quite inaccurately) showed the wound in the lower neck, so far from the actual entry point that it clearly demonstrates that the artist didn’t see the photograph either, and was drawing it based upon Gerald Ford’s clever parsing of words. It is possible the artist used Dr. Humes’ ambiguous description of the wounds—which were stated four months after the autopsy and also without the benefit of ever reviewing the autopsy photographs. The reason the Commission decided that the actual photographs would be withheld from the view of anyone, including the very witnesses and investigators who were charged with finding the truth, was as a favor to the Kennedy family; it is clear that such a directive could have only come from Earl Warren, or, more likely, the man to whom he reported. Specter’s final words on the subject were included in an April 30, 1964 memo to Lee Rankin: “Some day, someone may compare the films with the artist drawings and find a significant error.”233
• Oswald’s Marksmanship: Two of the three shots attributed to Oswald were perfectly fired, supposedly by an average shooter even in his Marine Corps days who was armed with an extremely poor-quality, antique Italian Army surplus rifle equipped with a defective scope. No one, including the best “master marksmen” in the nation, has ever been able to duplicate the alleged shot-making skills of this man who was never considered, by those who knew him in the Marine Corps, ever interested enough in target practice to even become an expert rifleman.
The many other substantive issues raised by McKnight and others relating to the Warren Report are clear evidence of an extensive effort by the FBI to substitute evidence and create, in behalf of those who were orchestrating the massive cover-up, a set of evidence that conformed to the preestablished objective of finding Oswald guilty of the crime. In reality, the documents produced by the Warren Commission were intended to achieve the objective of satisfying the man who conceived and executed the crime in the first place: Lyndon B. Johnson. The tentacles of Johnson’s and Hoover’s power over other men led the commissioners themselves—and the entire staff, mostly unwittingly—to spin a web of obstruction and obfuscation, which was manifested in the production of a document that was touted as being a “296,000-word report [which] is itself only a summary of two dozen 500-page volumes”234
In the early p art of the Warren Commission’s proceedings, in February 1964, Earl Warren responded to a reporter’s question about when all the testimony would be made public, saying, “Yes, there will come a time. But it might not be in your lifetime.”235 This rather candid response revealed more than Earl Warren probably intended. But now, going on three generations later, it is time that all the testimony and physical evidence—properly labeled as real or fabricated—be made public.
Notes
* To Johnson aide Walter Jenkins two hours after Oswald was murdered by Jack Ruby.
1. PBS: American Experience: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/kennedys/pl
ayer/ (at 1:44:30 of the video) Transcript: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/presidents/35_kennedy/filmmore/filmscript.html
2. Shesol, p. 138.
3. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 654.
4. Lincoln, pp. 198–199.
5. See youtube.com (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z54HP5WdGPY).
6. HSCA, Vol. 11, p. 517.
7. Palamara, Vincent M., Survivor’s Guilt.
8. Ibid., p. 518.
9. Ibid., p. 520.
10. HSCA, Vol. 11, p. 517.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 520.
13. Ibid., p. 521.
14. Twyman, pp. 762–769.
15. Douglass, p. 270 (ref. Manchester, p. 33; Jesse Curry, JFK Assassination File, p. 21).
16. Ibid. (ref. Roger Craig, When They Kill a President, p. 5).
17. Manchester, p. 32.
18. Fetzer, Weldon, Murder in Dealey Plaza, p. 155.
19. See, for example, Palamara, Vincent M., Survivor’s Guilt.
20. Livingstone, Killing the Truth … , pp. 483–487.
21. Brown, M., p. 166 (also, ref. youtube.com: “LBJ’s Mistress Blows Whistle on JFK Assassination”).
22. Sherrill, p. 107.
23. Ibid.
24. Trask, Pictures … p. 417.
25. Zirbel, pp. 190–191.
26. Manchester, p. 82.
27. Ibid., pp. 82–83.
28. Ibid.
29. Douglass, p. 142.
30. WCH 20, p. 489.
31. Hill, p. 113.
32. WCH 7, p. 580–581.
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