by Jim Newton
The quote is accurate, up to a point. But Williams’s next sentence was “Maybe it was because we were frightened.”132 Lane omitted that sentence. The shortened version seemed to suggest that the men had no good explanation for why they did not apprehend the assassin themselves; the full quote made clear that they had a perfectly understandable reason for avoiding a killer. Lane chose the short version because it supported his account.
There are countless such examples of distortion and selectivity in Lane’s work. Warren would never forgive Lane for his dodging during the hearings or his exploitation of the assassination. The chief justice complained about Lane to friends and colleagues,133 and in his memoirs, treated him with disgust. Refusing even to name him, Warren said he believed most Commission critics were unconvinced by the Commission’s conclusions because Oswald had not received a public trial. Warren sympathized with those critics, but he had no patience for “those who wrote or lectured for money while deliberately using false hypotheses.”134
Lane’s writing preyed on the public thirst for a larger explanation of Kennedy’s death, on those whose great and admired leader was above being murdered by such an insignificant assassin. Others joined him, offering a mélange of theories stubbornly at odds with one another—Communists and anti-Communists, CIA critics and defenders, supporters and opponents of American foreign policy all claiming Oswald was in league with their enemies to kill the president. Addressing as they did that psychological need, the conspiracy buffs had claimed the field from the Warren Commission by the end of the 1960s and they held it for more than thirty years.
That sustained attack on the Commission was greeted with silence from Warren, who insisted that the report stand on its own and who urged that the Commission members not dignify the critics with a reply. Warren held his tongue even when Jim Garrison, a showboating New Orleans district attorney, launched a highly public investigation of what he claimed was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Garrison charged a New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw, in connection with the assassination. There was, Garrison claimed, “an infinitely larger number [of people involved in the conspiracy] than you would dream,”135 among them Texas oilmen, Cubans, the FBI, and the CIA. Before he was through, Garrison would suborn perjury, override the warnings of his top deputies, and intimidate witnesses; he would accuse Bobby Kennedy of impeding his investigation, attempt to bribe at least one witness, and file patently false criminal charges against his critics.
Once, when questioned about the investigation during a trip to Tokyo, Warren ventured cautious skepticism about Garrison’s probe. Garrison leapt to the chance to tangle with Warren and responded in Garrison fashion: “The heavy artillery whistling in from Tokyo means that everything is in place, all the infantry lined up and the lull is over.” Garrison said his staff had reviewed the Warren report and concluded that it was a “gigantic fraud, quite possibly the largest in terms of effort and scope and effect ever perpetuated on the planet.” As if that weren’t enough, Garrison added that the “fairy tale” concealed the true nature of Kennedy’s assassination “for political reasons.”136 The FBI monitored Garrison’s comments and passed them along to Warren, but Warren refused to engage in a running debate with a self-promoting prosecutor. The chief justice, according to the FBI, “wanted to skirt this issue very carefully due to the possibility the case might some day come before the Supreme Court.”137 Garrison never again received the satisfaction of a comment from Warren. It took two years for Garrison to build his public case against Shaw, and the jury took less than an hour to acquit him. Shaw was bank- rupted by the prosecution. He never recovered his fortune or health.138
Garrison’s prosecution was a shameless affront to the truth, and it had profound consequences, not just in the shortened and maligned life of Clay Shaw but also in the development of conspiracy theory. Before it, those inclined to find that Oswald had been helped generally regarded the government inquiry, including the Warren Commission, as incompetent or duped. After it, conspiracy believers would tend to cast the Warren Commission as a participant in the assassination or its cover-up. That was due to Garrison, whose case amounted to nothing and whose pursuit of it damaged not just humans but history as well.
Warren encouraged the other members of the Commission not to engage their critics, and though Ford published a book about the investigation—to Warren’s irritation—the Commission and its staff largely followed Warren’s lead.139 Without the Commission there to defend itself, the conspiracy theories continued to prosper. By the mid-1970s, Congress was drawn back into the inquiry, convening a House Select Committee on Assassinations. Established in 1976 and reconstituted the following year, the Select Committee was charged with investigating whether government agencies had provided full disclosure to the Warren Commission; in its final report, the Committee supported the Warren Commission in virtually all its essential findings, but the Select Committee highlighted areas where the FBI and CIA had failed the Commission, and the Committee introduced one new, important allegation that ultimately proved untrue.
Warren Commission members had been aware of one act of FBI cover-up. A page from Oswald’s address book contained the name and number of James Hosty, an FBI agent, but it was not included when the book was forwarded to the Commission in December 1963. Commission staff members discovered the omission and pressed the FBI on it. They were told the FBI had removed the page because the bureau did not consider that page evidence; reprimanded by the Commission staff, the FBI then provided the page.140 Although Redlich and others were annoyed by the clumsy attempt to shield Hosty from embarrassment, it was a blunder without larger implications. It was, the Select Committee concluded, “regrettable,” but “trivial in the context of the entire investigation.”141 The Warren Commission knew all that, but what it did not know was that Hosty had also received a note from Oswald about two weeks prior to the assassination. After Oswald’s murder by Ruby, Hosty destroyed the note at the direction of his supervisor.142 The note reportedly warned Hosty to stay away from interviewing Marina Oswald, but when Oswald was murdered, Hosty’s supervisor suggested tossing the note out, since there could be no trial. Its destruction was a bracing reminder of how far the FBI would go to protect itself, even at the expense of the whole truth.
The CIA’s withholding was of a different sort. After the calamitous failure at the Bay of Pigs, John Kennedy resolved to dispose of Castro’s regime. Jack put his most trusted adviser, Bobby Kennedy, in charge of supervising the secret effort from his post as attorney general. In that capacity, Bobby Kennedy applied his singular talents to developing plans to overthrow Castro, plans that were to be carried out by the CIA and that included assassination as an option. Years later, Lyndon Johnson, then retired, would refer to the CIA’s willingness to entertain assassination as a tool as “Murder Inc.,” and it provided Castro with a motive to do the same to his American counterpart. Those plans were never revealed to the Warren Commission—Kennedy declined Warren’s invitation to appear before the Commission and ducked Warren’s question to him about whether there was additional material that might shed light on the investigation (Kennedy’s reply indicated only that no such material was within the Department of Justice, which Warren had not asked, while not volunteering that such information might be elsewhere). Allen Dulles had been director of Central Intelligence; he never informed the Commission. Ford and Russell had knowledge of CIA covert activities, though perhaps not assassination plans; they, too, remained silent.143 When information regarding the CIA’s role in plotting to kill Castro first came to Rankin’s attention in 1975, he was outraged. “We were assured that they would cooperate fully and give us everything that would have any bearing on the investigation,” Rankin told Committee investigators. “Now apparently they didn’t.”144
That said, the hostility between the Kennedys and Castro was no secret—the Bay of Pigs was an internationally public act. As a result, while the CIA was not as forthcoming as the Commission staff would have liked, its with
holding did not deprive the Commission of any meaningful insight into possible motive by Castro. Anyone inclined to believe that Castro might have been behind the assassination knew from the newspapers that he might want Kennedy dead. The CIA’s reticence thus must be considered in the context of its Cold War mandate. It divulged what it believed to be germane, and it protected its secrets beyond that. Secrecy may not be attractive. In the mindset of the Cold War, however, it was expected.
The deceptions by the FBI, by contrast, were of real consequence. And since the Warren Commission had relied in large measure on the work of that agency, much of the remaining faith in the Warren Commission came tumbling down with those revelations. That process was accelerated by another finding of the Select Committee, albeit a hotly contested one even within the panel itself—namely, that acoustical evidence suggested that there was a fourth shot fired in Dealey Plaza that afternoon. Since Oswald only fired three times (a finding the Select Committee endorsed), that meant a second gunman and thus a de facto conspiracy. At the same time, the Select Committee abandoned the long-held notion in conspiracy circles that Kennedy had been hit by a bullet fired from the grassy knoll. The committee agreed with the Warren Commission that three shots had come from the Book Depository, fired by Oswald, that one missed, one struck Kennedy through the throat and then hit Connally, and one hit Kennedy in the head, killing him. The fourth shot, according to the committee, missed altogether. In the years since, the acoustical evidence for that shot has been repudiated, in part by enhancements to the Zapruder film that strengthen the single-bullet theory and also by subsequent scientific studies of the acoustical evidence itself.145 The Warren Commission findings in that area have only grown stronger.
Lost in much of the response to the Select Committee was the fact that it supported the Warren Commission in nearly every major conclusion. It agreed that Oswald was the gunman, that he fired three shots from the Book Depository, missing once, striking Kennedy and Connally with one bullet, and killing Kennedy with his final shot. It concluded that Oswald also was the murderer of Officer Tippit. The only evidence of conspiracy was that of a fourth shot, a miss, and that evidence would eventually be discredited. Nevertheless, the die was cast for a new generation of conspiracy theorists, as the committee provided government support for the notion of government deception.
The determination to find conspiracy behind Kennedy’s assassination reached its cultural zenith in 1991 with the release of Oliver Stone’s JFK. The movie was a technologically adventurous web of distortions and dramatizations woven together in visually arresting fashion. Stone spliced actual footage of Kennedy and the assassination with dramatic renderings, moving back and forth between them in such a way as to dramatize and deliberately deceive. Along the way, Stone managed to ridicule the scientific evidence supporting the single-bullet theory and insist that Kennedy was shot from the front, notwithstanding proof to the contrary. His principal premise was that the CIA, with the help of Lyndon Johnson, killed Kennedy in order to prevent Kennedy from withdrawing American forces from Vietnam. For Stone, the troubles with that theory might have included the facts that Kennedy was an ardent Cold Warrior, with a proven disinclination to shrink from conflict with Communism, and more important, that not one scintilla of evidence has ever pointed to Johnson as a conspirator. Neither fact was enough to deter the moviemaker. Meanwhile, Jim Garrison, whose shameless prosecution of Clay Shaw had been brought in disregard of Garrison’s duties as a prosecutor, was elevated into a hero. Garrison lived to see this resurrection of his reputation, by then in tatters even within the community of conspiracy theorists. Conscienceless to the end, he appeared in a cameo in the film—in the role of Earl Warren. JFK was the venal work of a self-aggrandizing charlatan, but for those too young or too busy to compare it with the actual record, it substituted for history.
The Stone movie was, in fact, useless as history but helpful in one regard. It provoked Congress to order a further release of theretofore sealed Warren Commission records. With their release came further bolstering for the Commission. Ardent conspiracy theorists refused to be disabused, but their work took on an increasingly frantic or incoherent tone, exemplified by the 1993 publication of Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. In it, author Peter Dale Scott offered the novel notion that the Kennedy assassination was best understood by focusing not on the murder itself but rather on the “structural defects in governance and society that allowed this huge crime to be so badly investigated. . . . In simpler words, how could American institutions harbor and protect such evil?”146 In clearer words, Scott assumed the existence of a conspiracy, then asked why no one found it, then assumed, from the failure to find it, a broader conspiracy.
The new century brought a new entry into the conspiracy field, with the 2005 publication of Breach of Trust, by Gerald D. McKnight. McKnight’s work avoids many of the hyperbolic pitfalls of Lane, Stone, and Scott, none of whom is cited in McKnight’s work or even appears in his bibliography. McKnight’s book builds a case for investigative failings. It is less convincing when it attempts to pin blame on the Commission, however, and it is burdened by small factual errors and more serious lapses of logic. Among the former, House Speaker John McCormack is presented as “McCormick,” and the delegation that visited Warren to ask him to chair the Commission is said to have been headed by Robert Kennedy, when it actually consisted of Nicholas Katzenbach and Archibald Cox. On page 120 of McKnight’s book, the weight of a bullet grain is said to equal the weight of a postage stamp; on page 182 he writes that a postage stamp weighs two grains; by page 222, the same stamp weighs 2.5 grains. Those are trivial errors, but when others err, McKnight sees conspiracy. His own book is a reminder that mistakes often are just mistakes.147
In McKnight’s work, as in so much of that produced by conspiracy theorists, the Commission and those involved in the investigation can do no right: McKnight sees the Commission as beholden to the FBI, but gives it no credit for the single-bullet theory, which defied the FBI analysis and angered Hoover, nor does he acknowledge that one result of the Commission’s work was that it severed a thirty-year relationship between Warren and Hoover—hardly consistent with the idea that the Commission deferred to the FBI. Beyond that, McKnight portrays the Commission as a single-headed representative of the American political elite but brushes away its many internal disagreements and antagonisms; he makes much of Russell’s skepticism of the single-bullet theory but pays little note that Russell’s woeful attendance record meant that he missed much of the evidence that supported it. Throughout, McKnight attributes to individuals the knowledge and motives of their organizations—CIA agents in Mexico are assumed to know all that Washington knows; the FBI’s agents, with the exception of Hosty, are portrayed as in lockstep compliance with Hoover. In real life, the FBI, like any bureaucracy, has its miscreants along with its organizational loyalists, but because acknowledging such complexity would threaten the conclusions of conspiracy theorists, many, McKnight included, simply overlook those complexities. McKnight’s work is a far cry from that of its disreputable predecessors, and he deserves credit for acknowledging that he has produced no “smoking gun,” but in the end he proves only that many people may have wanted Kennedy dead and that the investigation of that crime was not perfect.
To those inclined to think more clearly, the Commission’s initial findings grew more solid over time. Today those findings are beyond reasonable doubt. Lee Harvey Oswald, a lifelong misfit desperate to secure a place for himself in history and preoccupied by the Kennedy administration’s challenges to Cuba, fired three shots from the Texas Book Depository. One missed, one hit Kennedy and Connally, one exploded the president’s skull. The weapon he used was a mail-order Italian military rifle with a four-power scope, purchased using a money order in the amount of $21.45 and delivered to a post office box held under the name A. Hidell, an alias that Oswald used. Oswald’s palm print was found on the rifle; his fingerprints were on the boxes in the Depository window from which t
he shots were fired. After shooting Kennedy and Connally, Oswald left the Book Depository, boarded a bus, then got off when it became stuck in traffic, taking a cab from there to the area near his boardinghouse. He changed clothes and picked up a handgun—ordered to the same post office box—then took off on foot, only to be stopped by Officer Tippit. Eyewitnesses watched Oswald shoot Tippit to death. Oswald took off at a fast walk, breaking into a jog. Police responded to the scene, and Oswald ducked inside a store to avoid them. The manager spotted his suspicious behavior and then watched him enter the Texas Theatre without paying. He informed the ticket taker and they called the police. When the police arrived to search the theater, Oswald pulled the gun on them. They wrestled it from him and arrested him for carrying a concealed weapon. At the station, they discovered that their suspect in the Tippit killing bore the same name as that of a Book Depository employee unaccounted for after the shooting. When he was questioned by police and others on the night of November 22 and the day and night of November 23, Oswald lied repeatedly as the evidence against him mounted.
The rifle recovered in the Book Depository was owned by Lee Harvey Oswald, and it fired the bullets that killed President Kennedy. The gun in Oswald’s hand when he was arrested was his, and it fired the bullets that killed Officer Tippit; handgun shells were still in Oswald’s pocket when he was arrested. Five witnesses picked Oswald out of a police lineup on the evening of November 22 as the man they saw shoot Tippit; a sixth identified him the following day.
